Composite fuselage technology

The overall objective is to identify and understand, via directed experimentation and analysis, the mechanisms which control the structural behavior of fuselages in their response to damage (resistance, tolerance, and arrest). A further objective is to develop straightforward design methodologies which can be employed by structural designers in preliminary design stages to make intelligent choices concerning the material, layup, and structural configuration so that a more efficient structure with structural integrity can be designed and built

Composite fuselage technology (summary of year 2)

The overall objective of this work is to identify and understand, via directed experimentation and analysis, the mechanisms which control the structural behavior of fuselages in their response to damage (resistance, tolerance, and arrest). A further objective is to develop straightforward design methodologies which can be employed by structural designers in preliminary design stages to make intelligent choices concerning the material, layup, and structural configuration so that a more efficient structure with structural integrity can be designed and built

Finding Guide to the Paula Hirsch Foster Collection DRAFT

DRAFT of the Guide to the Paula Hirsch Foster Collection, as of February 2016

Ardhanārīśvara in Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu : a case study

There has been a persistent tendency in the study of religion to emphasize its textual and historical elements, at the expense of ritual, practice, and custom. This trend is evident in the available academic works concerning the androgynous Hindu deity, Ardhanārīśvara. Scholarship largely overlooks Ardhanārīśvara in living context, including information about dedicated sites of worship. To attend to this gap, this project explores Ardhanārīśvara in Tiruchengode, Tamil Nadu, as it is home to a hilltop temple wherein Ardhanārīśvara is the presiding deity. An analysis of my fieldwork observations and impressions yields two types of contributions. The first relates to areas of previous scholastic focus; new information is provided on Ardhanārīśvara iconography, mythological narratives, and regarding interpretations of the figure. The second type of contribution involves unexplored content, including information on the aforementioned site of worship and the place of Ardhanārīśvara in ritual within this context. Additionally, the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this thesis stress understanding observable phenomena as dynamic. This led to astute observations regarding Ardhanārīśvara that also go delineated. These provisions reaffirm the significance of those areas identified as overlooked in the study of religion and provide a more robust treatment of the figure

Optimal unions of scaled copies of domains and Polya's conjecture

Given a bounded Euclidean domain Ω, we consider the sequence of optimisers of the kth Laplacian eigenvalue within the family consisting of all possible disjoint unions of scaled copies of Ω with fixed total volume. We show that this sequence encodes information yielding conditions for Ω to satisfy Pólya’s conjecture with either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. This is an extension of a result by Colbois and El Soufi which applies only to the case where the family of domains consists of all bounded domains. Furthermore, we fully classify the different possible behaviours for such sequences, depending on whether Pólya’s conjecture holds for a given specific domain or not. This approach allows us to recover a stronger version of Pólya’s original results for tiling domains satisfying some dynamical billiard conditions, and a strenghtening of Urakawa’s bound in terms of packing density

A Sense of Proportion: How humans process relative magnitudes in space and time

Humans perceive ratios for different spatial magnitudes such as length, area, and numerosity, and temporal magnitudes such as duration. Previous studies have shown that spatial ratios may be processed by a common ratio processing system. The aim of the current study was to determine whether ratios across spatial and temporal domains may also be processed by a common system. Two hundred and seventy-five participants completed a series of spatial and temporal ratio estimation and magnitude discrimination tasks. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the relationship between ratio processing across domains when controlling for absolute magnitude processing ability. Results showed a significant relationship between spatial and temporal ratio processing. Absolute magnitude processing was also shown to explain a large part of the variance in both spatial and temporal ratio processing factors. These results have implications for theories of general magnitude processing for both absolute and relative magnitudes