Design study and evaluation of a hypergolic engine for a space power system, phase 2 Final report, 1 Jul. 1964 - 10 Feb. 1966

Design feasibility of hypergolic engine for space power syste

Corporate Law and the Myth of Efficient Market Control

In recent times, there has been an unprecedented shift in power from managers to shareholders, a shift that realizes the long-held theoretical aspiration of market control of the corporation. This Article subjects the market control paradigm to comprehensive economic examination and finds it wanting. The market control paradigm relies on a narrow economic model that focuses on one problem only: management agency costs. With the rise of shareholder power, we need a wider lens that also takes in market prices, investor incentives, and information asymmetries. General equilibrium (GE) theory provides that lens. Several lessons follow from reference to this higher-order economic theory. First, the presumption that markets can efficiently coordinate the economy is unfounded, unless one relies on heroic assumptions. Second, GE shows that shareholders suffer from misaligned incentives, undercutting any normative program grounded in shareholder empowerment. The third lesson is negative, as there are no economically founded instructions for addressing the trade-offs between agency costs reduction and market inefficiency implied by the new shareholder corporation. Policy implications also follow. Given the lack of a clear normative template, only private ordering can be counted on to address each corporation\u27s specifc tradeoffs between agency costs and market inefficiency. This conclusion leads to an endorsement of Delaware\u27s equitable adjudication system, the flexibility of which is well suited to policing the bargaining process between managers and empowered shareholde

A clash of traditions? An investigation into judicial interpretations of autonomy in ethically-contentious medical cases

The concept of autonomy has acquired paramount status in English medical law, medical ethics and philosophy. Using the methodology of grounded theory, and three iterative cycles of enquiry of the medical law reports and the literature, this thesis investigates how and why judges use and interpret autonomy in ethically-contentious medical law cases. Each cycle of enquiry reveals its internal limitations, prompting further engagement with the data in order to overcome those limitations and deepen the level of understanding and explanation. The first cycle of empirical enquiry describes variation in judicial usage of the autonomy concept in the law reports but gives way to a second cycle of hermeneutical enquiry in order to advance understanding of what judges mean in their use of it. Concurrent analysis of the literature on autonomy reveals a progressive development from a partial view of autonomy as body and mind towards an emerging holistic concept as the identity and capability of the person. The failure of hermeneutical enquiry to explain judicial variations in meaning and interpretation leads to a third cycle of enquiry based on critical realist analysis, examining the underlying social structures and traditions that may influence judicial variations in usage. Using MacIntyre’s concept of tradition, and Brandom’s tools of inferential analysis, the thesis explores whether the law reports reveal the influence on judicial usage of traditions of legal rationality – common law, statute law, and European human rights law – and whether these legal traditions are influenced by wider traditions of moral and political order. The emergent theory of the research, developed through the iterative cycles of enquiry of the data is that judges have developed a community of practice which has over time elaborated a sophisticated ethical language of autonomy to mediate the influence of different legal traditions and, in so doing, has constituted a new practice of medical jurisprudence

A study of atmospheric neutrinos with the IMB detector

A sample of 401 contained neutrino interactions collected in the 3300 metric ton fiducial mass IMB detector was used to study neutrino oscillations, geomagnetic modulation of the flux and to search for point sources. The majority of these events are attributed to neutrino interactions. For the most part, these neutrinos are believed to originate as tertiary products of cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere. The neutrinos are a mixture of v sub e and v sub micron

Gravitational Radiation from Triple Star Systems

We have studied the main features of the gravitational radiation generated by an astrophysical system constituted of three compact objects attracting one another (only via gravitational interaction) in such a manner that stable orbits do exist. We have limited our analysis to systems that can be treated with perturbative methods. We show the profile of the gravitational waves emitted by such systems. These results can be useful within the framework of the new gravitational astronomy which will be made feasible by means of the new generation of gravitational detectors such as LISA in a no longer far future.Comment: 10 pages plus 9 postscript figures; revtex; accepted for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Ultra-Transparent Antarctic Ice as a Supernova Detector

We have simulated the response of a high energy neutrino telescope in deep Antarctic ice to the stream of low energy neutrinos produced by a supernova. The passage of a large flux of MeV-energy neutrinos during a period of seconds will be detected as an excess of single counting rates in all individual optical modules. We update here a previous estimate of the performance of such an instrument taking into account the recent discovery of absorption lengths of several hundred meters for near-UV photons in natural deep ice. The existing AMANDA detector can, even by the most conservative estimates, act as a galactic supernova watch.Comment: 9 pages, Revtex file, no figures. Postscript file also available from http://phenom.physics.wisc.edu/pub/preprints/1995/madph-95-888.ps.Z or from ftp://phenom.physics.wisc.edu/pub/preprints/1995/madph-95-888.ps.

A Simplified Recombinant PSO

Simplified forms of the particle swarm algorithm are very beneficial in contributing to understanding how a particle swarm optimization (PSO) swarm functions. One of these forms, PSO with discrete recombination, is extended and analyzed, demonstrating not just improvements in performance relative to a standard PSO algorithm, but also significantly different behavior, namely, a reduction in bursting patterns due to the removal of stochastic components from the update equations

Examination of Particle Tails

The tail of the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) position distribution at stagnation is shown to be describable by a power law. This tail fattening is attributed to particle bursting on all length scales. The origin of the power law is concluded to lie in multiplicative randomness, previously encountered in the study of first-order stochastic difference equations, and generalised here to second-order equations. It is argued that recombinant PSO, a competitive PSO variant without multiplicative randomness, does not experience tail fattening at stagnation