Psychological and physiological correlates of stress: Performance on a cooperative task

The relationship of personality dimensions to performance was investigated. The personality measure used to select subjects, the Barratt impulsiveness scale, is hypothesized to be related to a style of behavior which should affect the trend of choices which various subjects will make. Personality dimensions were specifically examined during performance of a cooperative task, the Prisoner's Dilemma

A study of structural concepts for ultralightweight spacecraft

Structural concepts for ultralightweight spacecraft were studied. Concepts for ultralightweight space structures were identified and the validity of heir potential application in advanced spacecraft was assessed. The following topics were investigated: (1) membrane wrinkling under pretensioning; (2) load-carrying capability of pressurized tubes; (3) equilibrium of a precompressed rim; (4) design of an inflated reflector spacecraft; (5) general instability of a rim; and (6) structural analysis of a pressurized isotensoid column. The design approaches for a paraboloidal reflector spacecraft included a spin-stiffened design, both inflated and truss central columns, and to include both deep truss and rim-stiffened geodesic designs. The spinning spacecraft analysis is included, and the two truss designs are covered. The performances of four different approaches to the structural design of a paraboloidal reflector spacecraft are compared. The spinning and inflated configurations result in very low total masses and some concerns about their performance due to unresolved questions about dynamic stability and lifetimes, respectively

Conceptual design studies for large free-flying solar-reflector spacecraft

The 1 km diameter reflecting film surface is supported by a lightweight structure which may be automatically deployed after launch in the Space Shuttle. A twin rotor, control moment gyroscope, with deployable rotors, is included as a primary control actuator. The vehicle has a total specific mass of less than 12 g/sq m including allowances for all required subsystems. The structural elements were sized to accommodate the loads of a typical SOLARES type mission where a swam of these free flying satellites is employed to concentrate sunlight on a number of energy conversion stations on the ground

Performance of a centrifugal pump running in inverse mode

This paper presents the functional characterization of a centrifugal pump used as a turbine. It shows the characteristics of the machine involved at several rotational speeds, comparing the respective flows and heads. In this way, it is possible to observe the influence of the rotational speed on efficiency, as well as obtaining the characteristics at constant head and runaway speed. Also, the forces actuating on the impeller were studied. An uncertainty analysis was made to assess the accuracy of the results. The research results indicate that the turbine characteristics can be predicted to some extent from the pump characteristics, that water flows out of the runner free of swirl flow at the best efficiency point, and that radial stresses are lower than in pump mode

Body Language Without a Body: Nonverbal Communication in Technology Mediated Settings

Humans are wired for face-to-face interaction because this was the only possible and available setting during the long evolutionary process that has led to Homo Sapiens. At the moment an increasingly significant fraction of our interactions take place in technology mediated settings, it is important to investigate how such a wiring - mainly corresponding to neural processes - reacts and adapts to them. This talk focuses in particular on how nonverbal communication - one of the main channels through which people convey socially and psychologically relevant information - plays a role in settings where natural nonverbal cues (facial expressions, vocalizations, gestures, etc.) are no longer available. Such an issue is important not only from a technological point of view (it can help to design interaction and communication technologies that better address human needs), but also from a societal one (it can help to understand major phenomena such as cyberbullyism and virality)

Considerations in the design of large space structures

Several analytical studies of topics relevant to the design of large space structures are presented. Topics covered are: the types and quantitative evaluation of the disturbances to which large Earth-oriented microwave reflectors would be subjected and the resulting attitude errors of such spacecraft; the influence of errors in the structural geometry of the performance of radiofrequency antennas; the effect of creasing on the flatness of tensioned reflector membrane surface; and an analysis of the statistics of damage to truss-type structures due to meteoroids

A Broad Search for Counterrotating Gas and Stars: Evidence for Mergers and Accretion

We measure the frequency of bulk gas-stellar counterrotation in a sample of 67 galaxies drawn from the Nearby Field Galaxy Survey, a broadly representative survey of the local galaxy population down to M_B-15. We detect 4 counterrotators among 17 E/S0's with extended gas emission (24% +8 -6). In contrast, we find no clear examples of bulk counterrotation among 38 Sa-Sbc spirals, although one Sa does show peculiar gas kinematics. This result implies that, at 95% confidence, no more than 8% of Sa-Sbc spirals are bulk counterrotators. Among types Sc and later, we identify only one possible counterrotator, a Magellanic irregular. We use these results together with the physical properties of the counterrotators to constrain possible origins for this phenomenon.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, AJ, accepte

Parameters for Twisted Representations

The study of Hermitian forms on a real reductive group $G$ gives rise, in the unequal rank case, to a new class of Kazhdan-Lusztig-Vogan polynomials. These are associated with an outer automorphism $\delta$ of $G$, and are related to representations of the extended group $$. These polynomials were defined geometrically by Lusztig and Vogan in "Quasisplit Hecke Algebras and Symmetric Spaces", Duke Math. J. 163 (2014), 983--1034. In order to use their results to compute the polynomials, one needs to describe explicitly the extension of representations to the extended group. This paper analyzes these extensions, and thereby gives a complete algorithm for computing the polynomials. This algorithm is being implemented in the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations software