The Unlikely Milliner & The Magician of Threadneedle-Street [Article]

Susanna Clarke uses the tarot in her novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell much as she uses history: twisting it to open up spaces for magic and playfulness. She offers modifications on the traditional Tarot de Marseille that accurately predict the narrative events, yet deftly obscures the outcomes by leading the readers (and the characters) to jump to the wrong conclusions. Laity’s analysis of the Tarot readings performed by Childermas and Vinculus shows that Strange and Norrell enjoy mastery in magic, only to find that that mastery brings great suffering to others and also isolates them from the world as they once knew it

The Montage Image Mosaic Service: Custom Image Mosaics On-Demand

The Montage software suite has proven extremely useful as a general engine for reprojecting, background matching, and mosaicking astronomical image data from a wide variety of sources. The processing algorithms support all common World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and have been shown to be both astrometrically accurate and flux conserving. The background ‘matching’ algorithm does not remove background flux but rather finds the best compromise background based on all the input and matches the individual images to that. The Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, has now wrapped the Montage software as a CGI service and provided a compute and request management infrastructure capable of producing approximately 2 TBytes / day of image mosaic output (e.g. from 2MASS and SDSS data). Besides the basic Montage engine, this service makes use of a 16-node LINUX cluster (dual processor, dual core) and the ROME request management software developed by the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). ROME uses EJB/database technology to manage user requests, queue processing and load balance between users, and managing job monitoring and user notification. The Montage service will be extended to process userdefined data collections, including private data uploads

The influence of metal ions on native silk rheology

Whilst flow is the basis for silk fibre formation, subtle changes in a silk feedstocks’ chemical environment may serve to increase both energetic efficiency and control hierarchical structure development during spinning. Despite the role of pH being largely understood, the influence of metal ions is not, only being inferred by correlative work and observations. Through a combination of rheology and microscopy, we provide a causative study of how the most abundant metal ions in the silk feedstock, Ca2+ and K+, affect its flow properties and structure. Our results show that Ca2+ ions increase viscosity and prevent molecular alignment and aggregation, providing ideal storage conditions for unspun silk. In contrast, the addition of K+ ions promotes molecular alignment and aggregation and therefore seems to transfer the silk feedstock into a spinning state which confirms recent ‘sticky reptation’ modelling hypotheses. Additionally, we characterised the influence of the ubiquitous kosmotropic agent Li+, used to prepare regenerated silk solutions, and find that it promotes molecular alignment and prevents aggregation which may permit a range of interesting artificial silk processing techniques to be developed. In summary, our results provide a clearer picture of how metal ions co-ordinate, control and thus contribute towards silk protein self-assembly which in turn can inspire structuring approaches in other biopolymer systems

A conceptual framework to assess the impact of training on equipment cost and availability in the military context

Designing military support is challenging and current practices need to be reviewed and improved. This paper gives an overview of the Industry current practices in designing military support under Ministry of Defence/Industry agreements (in particular for Contracting for Availability (CfA)), and identifies challenges and opportunities for improvement. E.g. training delivery was identified as an important opportunity for improving the CfA in-service phase. Thus, an innovative conceptual framework is presented to assess the impact of training on the equipment availability and cost. Additionally, guidelines for improving the current training delivery strategies are presented, which can also be applied to other Industry contexts

La prevención de la obesidad: un comportamiento cultural y un tema de responsabilidad social empresarial

La obesidad representa un flagelo, producto en gran medida de los estilos de vida contemporáneos, especialmente en lo que tiene que ver con el consumo de alimentos y el sedentarismo. Así que hoy existe una mayor vulnerabilidad con respecto a factores de riesgo que se relacionan con los anteriores aspectos. En ello, cuenta la producción empresarial y el compromiso que han adquirido las empresas bajo el Programa de Responsabilidad Social Empresarial-RSE. El presente documento presenta los resultados de un estudio exploratorio sobre el tema. Se realiza a partir de una encuesta virtual diseñada sobre la relación RSE, estilos de vida y obesidad. Se trabajan tres ejes temáticos:1) el reconocimiento del concepto de RSE dentro de los trabajadores; 2) los hábitos de vida saludable, y 3) la relación entre RSE y las acciones de la empresa con los hábitos saludables. Los resultados muestran una relación significativa entre la información personal sobre hábitos saludables y las políticas de prevención de la obesidad. Frente a ello, se considera que las empresas deben incluirlas en sus políticas empresariales de RSE

The Design and Operation of The Keck Observatory Archive

The Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and the W. M. Keck Observatory (WMKO) operate an archive for the Keck Observatory. At the end of 2013, KOA completed the ingestion of data from all eight active observatory instruments. KOA will continue to ingest all newly obtained observations, at an anticipated volume of 4 TB per year. The data are transmitted electronically from WMKO to IPAC for storage and curation. Access to data is governed by a data use policy, and approximately two-thirds of the data in the archive are public.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figs, 4 tables. Presented at Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014. June 2014, Montreal, Canad

Montage: a grid portal and software toolkit for science-grade astronomical image mosaicking

Montage is a portable software toolkit for constructing custom, science-grade mosaics by composing multiple astronomical images. The mosaics constructed by Montage preserve the astrometry (position) and photometry (intensity) of the sources in the input images. The mosaic to be constructed is specified by the user in terms of a set of parameters, including dataset and wavelength to be used, location and size on the sky, coordinate system and projection, and spatial sampling rate. Many astronomical datasets are massive, and are stored in distributed archives that are, in most cases, remote with respect to the available computational resources. Montage can be run on both single- and multi-processor computers, including clusters and grids. Standard grid tools are used to run Montage in the case where the data or computers used to construct a mosaic are located remotely on the Internet. This paper describes the architecture, algorithms, and usage of Montage as both a software toolkit and as a grid portal. Timing results are provided to show how Montage performance scales with number of processors on a cluster computer. In addition, we compare the performance of two methods of running Montage in parallel on a grid.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Extensional flow behaviour and spinnability of native silk

Silk fibres are assembled via flow. While changes in the physiological environment of the gland as well as the shear rheology of silk are largely understood, the effect of extensional flow fields on native silk proteins is almost completely unknown. Here we demonstrate that filament stretching on a conventional tensile tester is a suitable technique to assess silk's extensional flow properties and its ability to form fibres under extensional conditions characteristic of natural spinning. We report that native Bombyx mori silk responds differently to extensional flow fields when compared to synthetic linear polymers, as evidenced by a higher Trouton ratio which we attribute to silk's increased interchain interactions. Finally, we show that native silk proteins can only be spun into stable fibres at low extension rates as a result of dehydration, suggesting that extensional fields alone are unable to induce natural fibre formation