Carbon fiber plume sampling for large scale fire tests at Dugway Proving Ground

Carbon fiber sampling instruments were developed: passive collectors made of sticky bridal veil mesh, and active instruments using a light emitting diode (LED) source. These instruments measured the number or number rate of carbon fibers released from carbon/graphite composite material when the material was burned in a 10.7 m (35 ft) dia JP-4 pool fire for approximately 20 minutes. The instruments were placed in an array suspended from a 305 m by 305 m (1000 ft by 1000 ft) Jacob's Ladder net held vertically aloft by balloons and oriented crosswind approximately 140 meters downwind of the pool fire. Three tests were conducted during which released carbon fiber data were acquired. These data were reduced and analyzed to obtain the characteristics of the released fibers including their spatial and size distributions and estimates of the number and total mass of fibers released. The results of the data analyses showed that 2.5 to 3.5 x 10 to the 8th power single carbon fibers were released during the 20 minute burn of 30 to 50 kg mass of initial, unburned carbon fiber material. The mass released as single carbon fibers was estimated to be between 0.1 and 0.2% of the initial, unburned fiber mass

Fitting the Means to the Ends: One School’s Experience with Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Curriculum Evaluation During Curriculum Change

Curriculum evaluation plays an important role in substantive curriculum change. The experience of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) with evaluation processes developed for the new Integrated Medical Curriculum (IMC) illustrates how evaluation methods may be chosen to match the goals of the curriculum evaluation process. Quantitative data such as ratings of courses or scores on external exams are useful for comparing courses or assessing whether standards have been met. Qualitative data such as students’ comments about aspects of courses are useful for eliciting explanations of observed phenomena and describing relationships between curriculum features and outcomes. The curriculum evaluation process designed for the IMC used both types of evaluation methods in a complementary fashion. Quantitative and qualitative methods have been used for formative evaluation of the new IMC courses. They are now being incorporated into processes to judge the IMC against its goals and objectives

Chromatin Is Frequently Unknotted at the Megabase Scale.

Knots in the human genome would greatly impact diverse cellular processes ranging from transcription to gene regulation. To date, it has not been possible to directly examine the genome in vivo for the presence of knots. Recently, methods for serial fluorescent in situ hybridization have made it possible to measure the three-dimensional position of dozens of consecutive genomic loci in vivo. However, the determination of whether genomic trajectories are knotted remains challenging because small errors in the localization of a single locus can transform an unknotted trajectory into a highly knotted trajectory and vice versa. Here, we use stochastic closure analysis to determine if a genomic trajectory is knotted in the setting of experimental noise. We analyze 4727 deposited genomic trajectories of a 2-Mb-long chromatin interval from human chromosome 21. For 243 of these trajectories, their knottedness could be reliably determined despite the possibility of localization errors. Strikingly, in each of these 243 cases, the trajectory was unknotted. We note a potential source of bias insofar as knotted contours may be more difficult to reliably resolve. Nevertheless, our data are consistent with a model in which, at the scales probed, the human genome is often free of knots

Riddled-like Basin in Two-Dimensional Map for Bouncing Motion of an Inelastic Particle on a Vibrating Board

Motivated by bouncing motion of an inelastic particle on a vibrating board, a simple two-dimensional map is constructed and its behavior is studied numerically. In addition to the typical route to chaos through a periodic doubling bifurcation, we found peculiar behavior in the parameter region where two stable periodic attractors coexist. A typical orbit in the region goes through chaotic motion for an extended transient period before it converges into one of the two periodic attractors. The basin structure in this parameter region is almost riddling and the fractal dimension of the basin boundary is close to two, {\it i.e.}, the dimension of the phase space.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. (2002

Lower bounds on the blow-up rate of the axisymmetric Navier-Stokes equations II

Consider axisymmetric strong solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in $\R^3$ with non-trivial swirl. Let $z$ denote the axis of symmetry and $r$ measure the distance to the z-axis. Suppose the solution satisfies either $|v (x,t)| \le C_*{|t|^{-1/2}}$ or, for some \e > 0, $|v (x,t)| \le C_* r^{-1+\epsilon} |t|^{-\epsilon /2}$ for $-T_0\le t < 0$ and $0<C_*<\infty$ allowed to be large. We prove that $v$ is regular at time zero.Comment: More explanations and a new appendi

Electron heating by sheaths in radio frequency discharges

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Magpie: towards a semantic web browser

Web browsing involves two tasks: finding the right web page and then making sense of its content. So far, research has focused on supporting the task of finding web resources through ‘standard’ information retrieval mechanisms, or semantics-enhanced search. Much less attention has been paid to the second problem. In this paper we describe Magpie, a tool which supports the interpretation of web pages. Magpie offers complementary knowledge sources, which a reader can call upon to quickly gain access to any background knowledge relevant to a web resource. Magpie automatically associates an ontologybased semantic layer to web resources, allowing relevant services to be invoked within a standard web browser. Hence, Magpie may be seen as a step towards a semantic web browser. The functionality of Magpie is illustrated using examples of how it has been integrated with our lab’s web resources

A remark on an overdetermined problem in Riemannian Geometry

Let $(M,g)$ be a Riemannian manifold with a distinguished point $O$ and assume that the geodesic distance $d$ from $O$ is an isoparametric function. Let $\Omega\subset M$ be a bounded domain, with $O \in \Omega$, and consider the problem $\Delta_p u = -1$ in $\Omega$ with $u=0$ on $\partial \Omega$, where $\Delta_p$ is the $p$-Laplacian of $g$. We prove that if the normal derivative $\partial_{\nu}u$ of $u$ along the boundary of $\Omega$ is a function of $d$ satisfying suitable conditions, then $\Omega$ must be a geodesic ball. In particular, our result applies to open balls of $\mathbb{R}^n$ equipped with a rotationally symmetric metric of the form $g=dt^2+\rho^2(t)\,g_S$, where $g_S$ is the standard metric of the sphere.Comment: 8 pages. This paper has been written for possible publication in a special volume dedicated to the conference "Geometric Properties for Parabolic and Elliptic PDE's. 4th Italian-Japanese Workshop", organized in Palinuro in May 201

Instability of ion kinetic waves in a weakly ionized plasma

The fundamental higher-order Landau plasma modes are known to be generally heavily damped. We show that these modes for the ion component in a weakly ionized plasma can be substantially modified by ion-neutral collisions and a dc electric field driving ion flow so that some of them can become unstable. This instability is expected to naturally occur in presheaths of gas discharges at sufficiently small pressures and thus affect sheaths and discharge structures.Comment: Published in Phys. Rev. E, see http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.02641