Docking mechanism for spacecraft

A system is presented for docking a space vehicle to a space station where a connecting tunnel for in-flight transfer of personnel is required. Cooperable coupling mechanisms include docking rings on the space vehicle and space station. The space station is provided with a tunnel structure, a retraction mechanism, and a docking ring. The vehicle coupling mechanism is designed to capture the station coupling mechanism, arrest relative spacecraft motions while limiting loads to acceptable levels, and then realign the spacecraft for final docking and tunnel interconnection. The docking ring of the space vehicle coupling mechanism is supported by linear attentuator actuator devices, each of which is controlled by a control system which receives loading information signals and attenuator stroke information signals from each device and supplies output signals for controlling its linear actuation to attenuate impact loading or to realign the spacecraft for final docking and tunnel interconnection. The retraction mechanism is used to draw the spacecraft together after initial contact and coupling. Tunnel trunnions, cooperative with the latches on the space vehicle constitute the primary structural tie between the spacecraft in final docked configuration

Avian Influenza: A Global Challenge

Livestock Production/Industries,

Report from Oakland: The Art of Insurrection

At the end of May, the third month of a shelter-in-place order in the counties of the San Francisco Bay Area, protests erupted daily in Oakland (California) following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. After a spree of early looting, the businesses along Oakland’s main corridors—many still closed to the public today, in November—had boarded up their windows leaving a ready canvas for a host of street artists and muralists to make their mark. The protest works that emerged are both beautiful and politically fraught, exposing some of the most sensitive social and economic divisions in the US. With the Black Lives Matter movement gaining steam in mainstream politics and the public awaiting restrictions to be lifted, artists and activists filled the street with a new kind of historical painting, in which history is not depicted so much as made. The murals of Oakland in 2020 testify to a vibrant visual explosion of political and social ideas. Like historical paintings of the nineteenth century that depicted contemporary history in mythic terms, there are moral lessons to be learned here. The country, and the world, need to listen. This photo essay is intended as a dialectic between language and image, society and culture. We, photographer and critic, socialists and theorists, aim to weave these disruptions into our fabric of urban lore. These images and the movement that they reflect, like so many others in cities around the world, challenge us to contain the multiple layers of social life, radical imagination and human tragedy in the time of COVID-19 and civil insurrection of 2020. The theories of urban experience are countless, from Baudelaire to Benjamin to Baldwin, so this engagement will of course be selective. The idea to pair image and idea erupted in the early years of the twentieth century with Constructivist and Dada collage. A hundred years later and faced with wreckage piled upon wreckage, like the angel of history we are caught in the wind blowing us into the future with our back turned toward it. The storm propelling us is no longer progress as Benjamin named it in the early twentieth century. As destructive as he found the march of progress to be, we now encounter a politics of regress, whose goal is to unmake the accomplishments of past and current generations and to cast doubt on any truth we know. This dangerous political game—and the deaths it has casually effected—gave way to an outburst of fury in the streets in the summer of 2020, and the civil unrest has not yet abated. So, the words and theories we use to pry open the import of these resulting images aim to salvage a shred of human dignity and a sense of mutual care amidst our current epiphany of darkness. We hope these images may reveal some of the truths so ruthlessly denied by political leaders, so that the reader may see, and our words are an elegy connecting a vision of loss to consciousness of purpose for ourselves and our demos

Fast Genome-Wide QTL Association Mapping on Pedigree and Population Data

Since most analysis software for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) currently exploit only unrelated individuals, there is a need for efficient applications that can handle general pedigree data or mixtures of both population and pedigree data. Even data sets thought to consist of only unrelated individuals may include cryptic relationships that can lead to false positives if not discovered and controlled for. In addition, family designs possess compelling advantages. They are better equipped to detect rare variants, control for population stratification, and facilitate the study of parent-of-origin effects. Pedigrees selected for extreme trait values often segregate a single gene with strong effect. Finally, many pedigrees are available as an important legacy from the era of linkage analysis. Unfortunately, pedigree likelihoods are notoriously hard to compute. In this paper we re-examine the computational bottlenecks and implement ultra-fast pedigree-based GWAS analysis. Kinship coefficients can either be based on explicitly provided pedigrees or automatically estimated from dense markers. Our strategy (a) works for random sample data, pedigree data, or a mix of both; (b) entails no loss of power; (c) allows for any number of covariate adjustments, including correction for population stratification; (d) allows for testing SNPs under additive, dominant, and recessive models; and (e) accommodates both univariate and multivariate quantitative traits. On a typical personal computer (6 CPU cores at 2.67 GHz), analyzing a univariate HDL (high-density lipoprotein) trait from the San Antonio Family Heart Study (935,392 SNPs on 1357 individuals in 124 pedigrees) takes less than 2 minutes and 1.5 GB of memory. Complete multivariate QTL analysis of the three time-points of the longitudinal HDL multivariate trait takes less than 5 minutes and 1.5 GB of memory

Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Charity: Evidence from a Field Experiment

This study develops theory and uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to explore the economics of charity. We approached nearly 5000 households, randomly divided into four experimental treatments, to shed light on key issues on the demand side of charitable fundraising. Empirical results are in line with our theory: in gross terms, our lottery treatments raised considerably more money than our voluntary contributions treatments. Interestingly, we find that a one standard deviation increase in female solicitor physical attractiveness is similar to that of the lottery incentive¡ªthe magnitude of the estimated difference in gifts is roughly equivalent to the treatment effect of moving from our theoretically most attractive approach (lotteries) to our least attractive approach (voluntary contributions).