Vernon Newson, Jr., v. The State of Nevada, 139 Nev. Adv. Op. 9 (Mar. 30, 2023)

To determine whether remote testimony by way of video-conferencing satisfies a defendant\u27s constitutional right to confrontation, a district court must find that (1) permitting a witness to testify remotely is necessary to further a compelling public policy interest, and (2) the testimony is otherwise reliable. In this case, the Nevada Supreme Court held that although efforts to curtail the spread of the COVID-19 virus may constitute a compelling public policy interest, a district court must make specific findings as to why permitting a particular witness to testify remotely furthers this interest. Here, the district court erred in not requiring such findings of necessity before allowing two witnesses to testify remotely at appellant’s murder trial. However, because the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, the judgment of conviction was affirmed

Powder towpreg process development

The process for dry powder impregnation of carbon fiber tows being developed at LaRC overcomes many of the difficulties associated with melt, solution, and slurry prepregging. In the process, fluidized powder is deposited on spread tow bundles and fused to the fibers by radiant heating. Impregnated tows have been produced for preform, weaving, and composite materials applications. Design and operating data correlations were developed for scale up of the process to commercial operation. Bench scale single tow experiments at tow speeds up to 50 cm/sec have demonstrated that the process can be controlled to produce weavable towpreg. Samples were woven and molded into preform material of good quality

NASA. Langley Research Center dry powder towpreg system

Dry powder polymer impregnated carbon fiber tows were produced for preform weaving and composite materials molding applications. In the process, fluidized powder is deposited on spread tow bundles and melted on the fibers by radiant heating to adhere the polymer to the fiber. Unit design theory and operating correlations were developed to provide the basis for scale up of the process to commercial operation. Special features of the operation are the pneumatic tow spreader, fluidized bed, resin feeder, and quality control system. Bench scale experiments, at tow speeds up to 50 cm/sec, demonstrated that process variables can be controlled to produce weavable LARC-TPI carbon fiber towpreg. The towpreg made by the dry powder process was formed into unidirectional fiber moldings and was woven and molded into preform material of good quality

Computer Vision Approaches to Liquid-Phase Transmission Electron Microscopy

Electron microscopy (EM) is a technique that exploits the interaction between electron and matter to produce high resolution images down to atomic level. In order to avoid undesired scattering in the electron path, EM samples are conventionally imaged in solid state under vacuum conditions. Recently, this limit has been overcome by the realization of liquid-phase electron microscopy (LP EM), a technique that enables the analysis of samples in their liquid native state. LP EM paired with a high frame rate acquisition direct detection camera allows tracking the motion of particles in liquids, as well as their temporal dynamic processes. In this research work, LP EM is adopted to image the dynamics of particles undergoing Brownian motion, exploiting their natural rotation to access all the particle views, in order to reconstruct their 3D structure via tomographic techniques. However, specific computer vision-based tools were designed around the limitations of LP EM in order to elaborate the results of the imaging process. Consequently, different deblurring and denoising approaches were adopted to improve the quality of the images. Therefore, the processed LP EM images were adopted to reconstruct the 3D model of the imaged samples. This task was performed by developing two different methods: Brownian tomography (BT) and Brownian particle analysis (BPA). The former tracks in time a single particle, capturing its dynamics evolution over time. The latter is an extension in time of the single particle analysis (SPA) technique. Conventionally it is paired to cryo-EM to reconstruct 3D density maps starting from thousands of EM images by capturing hundreds of particles of the same species frozen on a grid. On the contrary, BPA has the ability to process image sequences that may not contain thousands of particles, but instead monitors individual particle views across consecutive frames, rather than across a single frame

Nutrient Composition of Grass- and Grain-Finished Bison

The North American buffalo (Bison bison) has survived near extinction to become a commodity (meat, hides, and hair) in a consumer-driven market. Since this is a growth industry, primarily young bulls are slaughtered for meat, while most females are used to build the herd. Bison meat is highly palatable, and previous research showed that grain-finished bison meat is low in fat and high in protein. However, bison may be grain- or grass-finished. In this study we found few differences in nutrient content of the meat between grain- or grass-finished bison. Grass-finished animals had a little more moisture (75.9 vs. 74.6 %) and less fat (1.7 vs. 2.2%). The largest difference was in fatty acid profiles (expressed as percentages of total fat), with grass-finished bison containing on average 5% more saturated fatty acids, 6% more polyunsaturated fatty acids, and 11% less monosaturated fatty acids than meat from grain-finished bison. Bison meat is low in sodium. It is also an excellent source of phosphorus, zinc, selenium, and vitamin B12, as well as, iron, niacin, vitamin B6, and other minerals and vitamins. In summary, bison meat is a low-fat, low-sodium, nutrient-dense food, making it a nutritious food, whether it is grain- or grass-finished

Social Responsibility as a Driver for Local Sustainable Development

The increased interconnection among local and global players induced by globalization, as well as the need for a complete application of the “subsidiarity principle”, calls for a re-thinking of the “corporate social responsibility” concept. This new concept broadens the perspective of the single company interacting with its own stakeholders in relation to specific social and environmental impacts, to a network of organizations, with different aims and natures, collaborating on relevant sustainability issues. In this paper, the authors will provide a definition of “Territorial Social Responsibility”, sustaining the multi-stakeholder approach as a driver toward local sustainable development. Firstly, theoretical approaches to sustainable development at the territorial level will be examined, identifying the most innovative ideas about governance, network relation and development theories. The idea of development focuses not only on the economic aspects, but on the structural and institutional factors. The existence of cooperative territorial networks is essential to fulfil the creation of tangible and intangible assets at the local level. At the same time, the effectiveness of the decision-making and rules’ system can stimulate and empower territorial networks to tackle sustainable development. An analytical framework, scheme-shaped, will be set in order to identify the main aspects, indicators and practices characterizing the territorial social responsibility concept. It will represent a first attempt to create a feasible instrument aimed at understanding how cooperative social responsible actors, operating in the same territory, could direct the path toward sustainable development.Local Sustainable Development, Territorial Social Responsibility, Participation, Local Governance, Accountability, Sustainability Reporting, Multi-Stakeholder Approach, Networks

Process for application of powder particles to filamentary materials

This invention is a process for the uniform application of polymer powder particles to a filamentary material in a continuous manner to form a uniform composite prepreg material. A tow of the filamentary material is fed under carefully controlled tension into a spreading unit, where it is spread pneumatically into an even band. The spread filamentary tow is then coated with polymer particles from a fluidized bed, after which the coated filamentary tow is fused before take-up on a package for subsequent utilization. This process produces a composite prepreg uniformly without imposing severe stress on the filamentary material, and without requiring long, high temperature residence times for the polymer

Le principe de surprise annoncée : grammaticalisation et pragmaticalisation de cependant

mis en ligne le 02 avril 2008http://discours.revues.org/index68.htmlDans cet article, nous étudions l'émergence de l'adverbe cependant et ses divers changements de sens (de temporel en ancien français : « pendant ce temps » à concessif en français moderne) et d'emploi, ainsi que le développement de la préposition pendant. Nous constatons que l'évolution du marqueur de discours est conforme à l'une des chaînes d'évolution sémantique bien repérées dans la grammaticalisation : du temporel (concomitance) au concessif, par l'intermédiaire d'une opposition inférée. La valeur concessive commence à concurrencer la valeur temporelle au début du xve siècle avant de devenir majoritaire courant xvie siècle

Review of \u3ci\u3eFertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900 - 1940\u3c/i\u3e By Rebecca Sharpless

The examination of farm women\u27s experiences offers new perspectives on American agricultural communities. Rebecca Sharpless adds to our knowledge with this book on the women who worked the cotton fields of the east Texas Blackland Prairies in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The six chapters about family relations, housekeeping, food production, field work, communities, and the decline of the rural population spare no detail of poverty, racial discrimination, or the hopeful but constant and unrewarding migration of tenant families. Written with warmth, Sharpless\u27s account is not at all romantic or sentimental. The organization suggests patterns that framed the lives of farm women everywhere, but the rich detail drawn from oral histories and personal interviews creates a clear picture of cotton farm life and women\u27s roles distinct from those of women in other types of agricultural economies. The appeal of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices nearly obscures some flaws. Sharpless tries to include the perspectives of white landowners and white, African American, and Hispanic tenants, but it becomes evident quickly that the resources do not adequately address the history of African American tenant families; and Hispanic tenant families are nearly invisible. Though landownership makes a great difference for these women, the stories of landowning women are entwined with those of the tenants, resulting in the blurring of class and race distinctions that were not only more visible, but often painful to the women of the tenant classes. Sharpless\u27s chapter on women\u27s field labor is her best. Here she demonstrates that women\u27s field work enabled tenant families to make a living, unveiling as she does so the ways women justified field work and violations of the gender concepts of their own race and class. This labor is portrayed in an apparently static economy, however. The reader with a general understanding of agricultural history will ask how a fluctuating farm economy and changing agricultural technology affected women\u27s lives on cotton farms, a matter raised only briefly in the final chapter. Detailing relationships among women of varying social groups, Sharpless reveals the bonds formed between women who could seldom count on finding the same neighbors down the road from year to year as well as the racial and class barriers that prevented women from offering friendship to one another. This perhaps is the characteristic that distinguishes cotton farm culture in the Blackland Prairies from other farming groups: multiple layers of division along lines of race and class in spite of ties of gender in a common economy and community. Sharpless concludes with an assessment of migration to towns and cities. The children of tenant farmers and landowners found city life and paychecks more appealing. Their parents often moved to town at retirement as well. In spite of new opportunities to earn money, there was also a sense of loss, which Sharpless mentions but does not elaborate. She seems to favor the move to the city as relief from the hardships of cotton farming and the crop-lien system, but gives little consideration to the difficulties of urban life and work