Shock wave interaction with porous compressible foams

Two foams, a polyether (density 32.5 kg/m3) and a polyester (density 38 kg/m3) foam were tested in a shock tube to analyze the interaction of a normal shock wave and a compressible porous material. The foam specimens were placed in the shock tube test section! the foam being bounded by two steel walis, two glass windows and a solid back plate. The compression chamber of the shock tube was pressurized and the diaphragm separating the compression chamber and the expansion chamber was ruptured, thus producing a normal shock wave which travels down the shock tube and strikes the foam. Piezoelectric pressure transducers 'vvera used to record the pressure before, alongside and behind the foam. A complete set of schlieren photographs, recording the interaction of the incident shock wave and the porous material were taken for each foam. A method ,tortracking the path of particles of foam (path photographs) was developed. Combining the information obtained from the pressure records, schlieren photographs and path photographs a complete picture of the shock wave foam interaction was developed. All the gas waves were identified and analyzed, A foam wave (velocity 90 m/s) travelling through the skeleton of the material was discovered. A physical model was developed to explain the high pressure recorded behind the foam. This model is based upon the foam being compressed and forming an almost solid piston, thus forcing the trapped gas into a diminishing volume and creating a high pressure behind the foam. The theoretical analyses of Monti (30), Gel'fand (20) and IBvozdeva (22) were analyz.ed and compared. The general finding was that for the range of incident mach numbers 1.~i1 to 1.46 Monti's analysis under predicts the reflected Mach number by 3 % and Gel'fand's analysis over predicts the reflected Mach number by 6 %. The coefficient of pressure increase (the ratio of the maximum pressure recorded behind the foam to the equivalent pressure recorded during ~he reflection of a shock wave from a solid wall) as predicted iJy Gvoz.deva's ane.lysisfor the polyether foam lies wjthin the scatter of the experimental results. However for the polyester foam Gvozdeva's analysis under predicts the coefficient of pressure increase by 15%.GR 201

Tumbug: A pictorial, universal knowledge representation method

Since the key to artificial general intelligence (AGI) is commonly believed to be commonsense reasoning (CSR) or, roughly equivalently, discovery of a knowledge representation method (KRM) that is particularly suitable for CSR, the author developed a custom KRM for CSR. This novel KRM called Tumbug was designed to be pictorial in nature because there exists increasing evidence that the human brain uses some pictorial type of KRM, and no well-known prior research in AGI has researched this KRM possibility. Tumbug is somewhat similar to Roger Schank's Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory, but Tumbug is pictorial and uses about 30 components based on fundamental concepts from the sciences and human life, in contrast to CD theory, which is textual and uses about 17 components (= 6 Primitive Conceptual Categories + 11 Primitive Acts) based mainly on human-oriented activities. All the Building Blocks of Tumbug were found to generalize to only five Basic Building Blocks that exactly correspond to the three components {O, A, V} of traditional Object-Attribute-Value representation plus two new components {C, S}, which are Change and System. Collectively this set of five components, called "SCOVA," seems to be a universal foundation for all knowledge representation.Comment: 346 pages, 334 figure

Shock wave interaction with porous compressible foams

Two foams, a polyether (density 32.5 kg/m3) and a polyester (density 38 kg/m3) foam were tested in a shock tube to analyze the interaction of a normal shock wave and a compressible porous material. The foam specimens were placed in the shock tube test section! the foam being bounded by two steel walis, two glass windows and a solid back plate. The compression chamber of the shock tube was pressurized and the diaphragm separating the compression chamber and the expansion chamber was ruptured, thus producing a normal shock wave which travels down the shock tube and strikes the foam. Piezoelectric pressure transducers 'vvera used to record the pressure before, alongside and behind the foam. A complete set of schlieren photographs, recording the interaction of the incident shock wave and the porous material were taken for each foam. A method ,tortracking the path of particles of foam (path photographs) was developed. Combining the information obtained from the pressure records, schlieren photographs and path photographs a complete picture of the shock wave foam interaction was developed. All the gas waves were identified and analyzed, A foam wave (velocity 90 m/s) travelling through the skeleton of the material was discovered. A physical model was developed to explain the high pressure recorded behind the foam. This model is based upon the foam being compressed and forming an almost solid piston, thus forcing the trapped gas into a diminishing volume and creating a high pressure behind the foam. The theoretical analyses of Monti (30), Gel'fand (20) and IBvozdeva (22) were analyz.ed and compared. The general finding was that for the range of incident mach numbers 1.~i1 to 1.46 Monti's analysis under predicts the reflected Mach number by 3 % and Gel'fand's analysis over predicts the reflected Mach number by 6 %. The coefficient of pressure increase (the ratio of the maximum pressure recorded behind the foam to the equivalent pressure recorded during ~he reflection of a shock wave from a solid wall) as predicted iJy Gvoz.deva's ane.lysisfor the polyether foam lies wjthin the scatter of the experimental results. However for the polyester foam Gvozdeva's analysis under predicts the coefficient of pressure increase by 15%.GR 201

Junior ministers during the New Labour years tended to enjoy more than just a ‘view from the foothills’

Chris Mullin’s celebrated series of published diaries revolve around his time as a junior minister, and make frequent references to his insignificance in the role, a perspective which has shaped much understanding of the various Ministerial rungs below Cabinet level. Here, Judi Atkins, Kevin Theakston, and Mark Gill argue that though this characterisation is pervasive, it does not tell the whole story, with the New Labour years showing a number of interesting developments in this regard

Commercial Low-Altitude UAS Operations in Population Centers

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76932/1/AIAA-2009-7070-515.pd

Computational Psychotherapy Research: Scaling up the Evaluation of Patient–Provider Interactions

In psychotherapy, the patient-provider interaction contains the treatment's active ingredients. However, the technology for analyzing the content of this interaction has not fundamentally changed in decades, limiting both the scale and specificity of psychotherapy research. New methods are required to "scale up" to larger evaluation tasks and "drill down" into the raw linguistic data of patient-therapist interactions. In the current article, we demonstrate the utility of statistical text analysis models called topic models for discovering the underlying linguistic structure in psychotherapy. Topic models identify semantic themes (or topics) in a collection of documents (here, transcripts). We used topic models to summarize and visualize 1,553 psychotherapy and drug therapy (i.e., medication management) transcripts. Results showed that topic models identified clinically relevant content, including affective, relational, and intervention related topics. In addition, topic models learned to identify specific types of therapist statements associated with treatment-related codes (e.g., different treatment approaches, patient-therapist discussions about the therapeutic relationship). Visualizations of semantic similarity across sessions indicate that topic models identify content that discriminates between broad classes of therapy (e.g., cognitive-behavioral therapy vs. psychodynamic therapy). Finally, predictive modeling demonstrated that topic model-derived features can classify therapy type with a high degree of accuracy. Computational psychotherapy research has the potential to scale up the study of psychotherapy to thousands of sessions at a time. We conclude by discussing the implications of computational methods such as topic models for the future of psychotherapy research and practice

The child, the family and the GP: tensions and conflicts of interest for GPs in safeguarding children May 2006-October 2008 Executive summary May 2009 and Research Brief March 2010

This Executive Summary and Research Brief provide an overview of a research project (full report available on the repository) exploring the key role identified for GPs in safeguarding children. The initial focus of this research was to investigate potential ‘conflicts of interest’ where parents and children were both patients of the GP and to identify strategies for managing these conflicts. In response to initial feedback from the piloting of research tools, the focus of the research was broadened to explore and understand the range of conflicts, interests and tensions that might constrain the participation and engagement of GPs in safeguarding children and child protection processes, and the complexity of relationships between GPs, parents and children, and other professionals. A summary of the study methods, strengths and limitations and key findings is provided, together with messages for policy, research and practice

A molecular phylogeny of Southeast Asian Cyrtandra (Gesneriaceae) supports an emerging paradigm for Malesian plant biogeography

The islands of Southeast Asia comprise one of the most geologically and biogeographically complex areas in the world and are a centre of exceptional floristic diversity, harbouring 45,000 species of flowering plants. Cyrtandra, with over 800 species of herbs and shrubs, is the largest genus in the family Gesneriaceae and is one of the most emblematic and species-rich genera of the Malesian rainforest understorey. The high number of species and tendency to narrow endemism make Cyrtandra an ideal genus for examining biogeographic patterns. We sampled 128 Cyrtandra taxa from key localities across Southeast Asia to evaluate the geo-temporal patterns and evolutionary dynamics of this clade. One nuclear and four chloroplast regions were used for phylogenetic reconstruction, molecular dating, and ancestral range estimation. Results from the dating analysis suggest that the great diversity of Cyrtandra seen in the Malesian region results from a recent radiation, with most speciation taking place in the last five million years. Borneo was recovered as the most likely ancestral range of the genus, with the current distribution of species resulting from a west to east migration across Malesia that corresponds with island emergence and mountain building. Lastly, our investigation into the biogeographic history of the genus indicates high levels of floristic exchange between the islands on the Sunda shelf and the important role of the Philippines as a stepping stone to Wallacea and New Guinea. These patterns underlie much of the plant diversity in the region and form an emerging paradigm in Southeast Asian plant biogeography

Within-host dynamics shape antibiotic resistance in commensal bacteria

The spread of antibiotic resistance, a major threat to human health, is poorly understood. Simple population-level models of bacterial transmission predict that above a certain rate of antibiotic consumption in a population, resistant bacteria should completely eliminate non-resistant strains, while below this threshold they should be unable to persist at all. This prediction stands at odds with empirical evidence showing that resistant and non-resistant strains coexist stably over a wide range of antibiotic consumption rates. Not knowing what drives this long-term coexistence is a barrier to developing evidence-based strategies for managing the spread of resistance. Here, we argue that competition between resistant and sensitive pathogens within individual hosts gives resistant pathogens a relative fitness benefit when they are rare, promoting coexistence between strains at the population level. To test this hypothesis, we embed mechanistically explicit within-host dynamics in a structurally neutral pathogen transmission model. Doing so allows us to reproduce patterns of resistance observed in the opportunistic pathogens Escherichia coli and Streptococcus pneumoniae across European countries and to identify factors that may shape resistance evolution in bacteria by modulating the intensity and outcomes of within-host competition

A quantum mechanical model of the upper bounds of the cascading contribution to the second hyperpolarizability

Microscopic cascading of second-order nonlinearities between two molecules has been proposed to yield an enhanced third-order molecular nonlinear-optical response. In this contribution, we investigate the two-molecule cascaded second hyperpolarizability and show that it will never exceed the fundamental limit of a single molecule with the same number of electrons as the two-molecule system. We show the apparent divergence behavior of the cascading contribution to the second hyperpolarizability vanishes when properly taking into account the intermolecular interactions. Although cascading can never lead to a larger nonlinear-optical response than a single molecule, it provides alternative molecular design configurations for creating materials with large third-order susceptibilities that may be difficult to design into a single molecule.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl