Determination of life for a polyimide-epoxy alternator insulation system

Tests were conducted to predict remaining electrical insulation life of a polyimide epoxy insulated 60 KW, 208 volt homopolar inductor alternator, following completion of 23,130 hours of turbo-alternator endurance tests. The sectioned armature winding of this alternator stator was used as means to evaluate and measure end-life at several aging temperatures for development of an Arrhenius plot. A one-half life rate of 11.3 C was established from these data with a predicted remaining life of 60,000 hours at an armature winding temperature of 248 C and a total life, including endurance test time, of 61,645 hours

Prevalence of emotional, physical and sexual abuse of women in three South African provinces.

INTRODUCTION: There is growing recognition in the ranks of the South African government that violence against women is a serious problem facing us all. Until now data on the epidemiology of violence against women in South Africa have been scanty. This report presents the findings of the first major community-based prevalence study. OBJECTIVES: To describe the prevalence of physical, sexual, financial, and emotional abuse of women. METHODS: A cross-sectional study conducted in the Eastern Cape (EC), Mpumalanga (MP) and the Northern Province (NP). The sample included one randomly selected woman aged 18-49 years living in each of 2,232 households. The sample was drawn using stratified, multistage, random methods, and 1,306 questionnaires were completed, giving a 90.3% response rate after adjusting for households without an eligible woman. RESULTS: The prevalences of ever having been physically abused by a current or ex-partner were 26.8% (EC), 28.4% (MP) and 19.1% (NP). The prevalences of abuse in the last year were 10.9% (EC), 11.9% (MP) and 4.5% (NP). The prevalences of rape were 4.5% (EC), 7.2% (MP) and 4.8% (NP). Considerable emotional and financial abuse was also reported, e.g. the prevalences of a partner having boasted about or brought home girlfriends in the previous year were 5.0% (EC), 10.4% (MP) and 7.0% (NP): The prevalences of physical abuse during a pregnancy were 9.1% (EC), 6.7% (MP) and 4.7% (NP). The proportions of abused women who were injured in the year before the survey were 34.5% (EC), 48.0% (MP) and 60.0% (NP). CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first large-scale, community-based prevalence study to be undertaken in South Africa

Effect of heat treatment on mechanical dissipation in Ta2_2O5_5 coatings

Thermal noise arising from mechanical dissipation in dielectric reflective coatings is expected to critically limit the sensitivity of precision measurement systems such as high-resolution optical spectroscopy, optical frequency standards and future generations of interferometric gravitational wave detectors. We present measurements of the effect of post-deposition heat treatment on the temperature dependence of the mechanical dissipation in ion-beam sputtered tantalum pentoxide between 11\,K and 300\,K. We find the temperature dependence of the dissipation is strongly dependent on the temperature at which the heat treatment was carried out, and we have identified three dissipation peaks occurring at different heat treatment temperatures. At temperatures below 200\,K, the magnitude of the loss was found to increase with higher heat treatment temperatures, indicating that heat treatment is a significant factor in determining the level of coating thermal noise.Comment: accepted Classical and Quantum Gravity 201

Charge collection and trapping in low‐temperature silicon detectors

Charge collection efficiency measurements in silicon detectors at low temperature (T \u3c 0.5 K) and low applied electric field (E=0.1–100 V/cm) were performed using a variety of high‐purity, p‐type silicon samples with room‐temperature resistivity in the range 2–40 kΩ cm. Good charge collection under these conditions of low temperature and low electric field is necessary for background suppression, through the simultaneous measurement of phonons and ionization, in a very low event rate dark matter search or neutrino physics experiment. Charge loss due to trapping during drift is present in some samples, but the data suggest that another charge–loss mechanism is also important. We present results which indicate that, for 60 keV energy depositions, a significant fraction of the total charge loss by trapping occurs in the initial electron‐hole cloud near the event location which may briefly act as a shielded, field‐free region. In addition, measurements of the lateral size, transverse to the applied electric field, of the initial electron‐hole cloud indicate large transverse diffusion lengths. At the lowest fields a lateral diameter on the order of 1 mm is found in a detector ∼5 mm thick

Intact implicit processing of facial threat cues in schizophrenia

An emerging body of research suggests that people with schizophrenia retain the ability to implicitly perceive facial affect, despite well-documented difficulty explicitly identifying emotional expressions. It remains unclear, however, whether such functional implicit processing extends beyond emotion to other socially relevant facial cues. Here, we constructed two novel versions of the Affect Misattribution Procedure, a paradigm in which affective responses to primes are projected onto neutral targets. The first version included three face primes previously validated to elicit varying inferences of threat from healthy individuals via emotion-independent structural modification (e.g., nose and eye size). The second version included the threat-relevant emotional primes of angry, neutral, and happy faces. Data from 126 participants with schizophrenia and 84 healthy controls revealed that although performing more poorly on an assessment of explicit emotion recognition, patients showed normative implicit threat processing for both non-emotional and emotional facial cues. Collectively, these results support recent hypotheses postulating that the initial perception of salient facial information remains intact in schizophrenia, but that deficits arise at subsequent stages of contextual integration and appraisal. Such a breakdown in the stream of face processing has important implications for mechanistic models of social cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and treatment strategies aiming to improve functional outcome

Physico-chemical properties and antibacterial drug performance of amoxicillin from streets in Bamenda, Cameroon

Background: The advent of microbial drug resistance creates a concern about the quality of anti-infective drugs. The rise in some microbial resistance to therapy has urged us to investigate physico-chemical properties and antibacterial performance of amoxicillin from streets in Bamenda, Cameroon.Methods: Amoxicillin samples were purchased from street vendors in Bamenda. Cameroon. Visual inspection was done for defects and signs of discoloration, deterioration or other physical disfiguration. Weight uniformity test for each sample of antibiotic tablet was carried out. The time for drug disintegration for each sample of amoxicillin was evaluated. Microbial antibiotic susceptibility tests were done using both the agar disc diffusion and micro well broth dilution methods to check drug performance. Data analysis was done and comparison checked with Student-Newman-Keuls at p<0.05.Results: The mean weight of amoxicillin drugs ranged from 632.00±11.5 to 748.06±17.9 mg. Tablets from Austria had a significant decrease in weight compared to those from Germany and Nigeria. This was similar with the capsules from India and China. Average disintegration varied significantly from as small as 2.2 to 14.4 minutes. All the amoxicillin samples were active against the tested bacteria with mean zones of inhibitions ranging from 8.33±0.57 to 39.33±0.57 mm. The MICs and MBCs values range from 1 to 64 µg/ml. For the same bacterium the growth inhibitory effects of the various drugs were not all similar.Conclusions: Some of the amoxicillin samples studied in this paper showed significant differences in their weights and performances (antibacterial activities). Probably the required amount of API was not respected

Theory of a magnetic microscope with nanometer resolution

We propose a theory for a type of apertureless scanning near field microscopy that is intended to allow the measurement of magnetism on a nanometer length scale. A scanning probe, for example a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip, is used to scan a magnetic substrate while a laser is focused on it. The electric field between the tip and substrate is enhanced in such a way that the circular polarization due to the Kerr effect, which is normally of order 0.1% is increased by up to two orders of magnitude for the case of a Ag or W tip and an Fe sample. Apart from this there is a large background of circular polarization which is non-magnetic in origin. This circular polarization is produced by light scattered from the STM tip and substrate. A detailed retarded calculation for this light-in-light-out experiment is presented.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure