A Community Education and Intervention Program for Level Crossing Risk Management in Australia

This project aims to design, implement and evaluate a community road safety program using an intervention and control community methodology. It is a 3-year national project funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Railway Engineering and Technologies in Australia. With level crossing accidents constituting a significant proportion of death and injury associated with rail operations the need to conduct research in level crossing safety is warranted. To date, there has been little research conducted in Australia that evaluates community road safety programs targeting level crossing safety as well as identifying impediments towards the development of safe level crossing behaviour

The GPRIME approach to finite element modeling

GPRIME, an interactive modeling system, runs on the CDC 6000 computers and the DEC VAX 11/780 minicomputer. This system includes three components: (1) GPRIME, a user friendly geometric language and a processor to translate that language into geometric entities, (2) GGEN, an interactive data generator for 2-D models; and (3) SOLIDGEN, a 3-D solid modeling program. Each component has a computer user interface of an extensive command set. All of these programs make use of a comprehensive B-spline mathematics subroutine library, which can be used for a wide variety of interpolation problems and other geometric calculations. Many other user aids, such as automatic saving of the geometric and finite element data bases and hidden line removal, are available. This interactive finite element modeling capability can produce a complete finite element model, producing an output file of grid and element data

Adiabatic and Non-Adiabatic Contributions to the Free Energy from the Electron-Phonon Interaction for Na, K, Al, and Pb

We calculate the adiabatic contributions to the free energy due to the electron--phonon interaction at intermediate temperatures, $0 \leqslant k_{B} T < \epsilon_{F}$ for the elemental metals Na, K, Al, and Pb. Using our previously published results for the nonadiabatic contributions we show that the adiabatic contribution, which is proportional to $T^{2}$ at low temperatures and goes as $T^{3}$ at high temperatures, dominates the nonadiabatic contribution for temperatures above a cross--over temperature, $T_{c}$, which is between 0.5 and 0.8 $T_{m}$, where $T_{m}$ is the melting temperature of the metal. The nonadiabatic contribution falls as $T^{-1}$ for temperatures roughly above the average phonon frequency.Comment: Updated versio

Observation of Single Transits in Supercooled Monatomic Liquids

A transit is the motion of a system from one many-particle potential energy valley to another. We report the observation of transits in molecular dynamics (MD) calculations of supercooled liquid argon and sodium. Each transit is a correlated simultaneous shift in the equilibrium positions of a small local group of particles, as revealed in the fluctuating graphs of the particle coordinates versus time. This is the first reported direct observation of transit motion in a monatomic liquid in thermal equilibrium. We found transits involving 2 to 11 particles, having mean shift in equilibrium position on the order of 0.4 R_1 in argon and 0.25 R_1 in sodium, where R_1 is the nearest neighbor distance. The time it takes for a transit to occur is approximately one mean vibrational period, confirming that transits are fast.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Can Everett be Interpreted Without Extravaganza?

Everett's relative states interpretation of quantum mechanics has met with problems related to probability, the preferred basis, and multiplicity. The third theme, I argue, is the most important one. It has led to developments of the original approach into many-worlds, many-minds, and decoherence-based approaches. The latter especially have been advocated in recent years, in an effort to understand multiplicity without resorting to what is often perceived as extravagant constructions. Drawing from and adding to arguments of others, I show that proponents of decoherence-based approaches have not yet succeeded in making their ontology clear.Comment: Succinct analysis forthcoming in Found. Phy

Low-energy interaction of composite spin-half systems with scalar and vector fields

We consider a composite spin-half particle moving in spatially-varying scalar and vector fields. The vector field is assumed to couple to a conserved charge, but no assumption is made about either the structure of the composite or its coupling to the scalar field. A general form for the piece of the spin-orbit interaction of the composite with the scalar and vector fields which is first-order in momentum transfer ${\bf Q}$ and second-order in the fields is derived.Comment: 10 pages, RevTe