A fluffy friend can chase stress away

With final exams looming, VCU students could play with friendly dogs at “Paws for Stress” events held by the Center for Human-Animal Interaction and University Counseling services. CHAI is studying whether interacting with therapy dogs really can lower your stress levels

Metal tube reducer is inexpensive and simple to operate

Low-cost metal tube reducer accepts tubing up to 1 inch outer diameter and can reduce this diameter to less than 1/2 inch with controlled wall thickness. This device can reduce all of the tube without waste. It produces extremely good surface finishes

A study of mapping exogenous knowledge representations into CONFIG

Qualitative reasoning is reasoning with a small set of qualitative values that is an abstraction of a larger and perhaps infinite set of quantitative values. The use of qualitative and quantitative reasoning together holds great promise for performance improvement in applications that suffer from large and/or imprecise knowledge domains. Included among these applications are the modeling, simulation, analysis, and fault diagnosis of physical systems. Several research groups continue to discover and experiment with new qualitative representations and reasoning techniques. However, due to the diversity of these techniques, it is difficult for the programs produced to exchange system models easily. The availability of mappings to transform knowledge from the form used by one of these programs to that used by another would open the doors for comparative analysis of these programs in areas such as completeness, correctness, and performance. A group at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) is working to develop CONFIG, a prototype qualitative modeling, simulation, and analysis tool for fault diagnosis applications in the U.S. space program. The availability of knowledge mappings from the programs produced by other research groups to CONFIG may provide savings in CONFIG's development costs and time, and may improve CONFIG's performance. The study of such mappings is the purpose of the research described in this paper. Two other research groups that have worked with the JSC group in the past are the Northwest University Group and the University of Texas at Austin Group. The former has produced a qualitative reasoning tool named SIMGEN, and the latter has produced one named QSIM. Another program produced by the Austin group is CC, a preprocessor that permits users to develop input for eventual use by QSIM, but in a more natural format. CONFIG and CC are both based on a component-connection ontology, so a mapping from CC's knowledge representation to CONFIG's knowledge representation was chosen as the focus of this study. A mapping from CC to CONFIG was developed. Due to differences between the two programs, however, the mapping transforms some of the CC knowledge to CONFIG as documentation rather than as knowledge in a form useful to computation. The study suggests that it may be worthwhile to pursue the mappings further. By implementing the mapping as a program, actual comparisons of computational efficiency and quality of results can be made between the QSIM and CONFIG programs. A secondary study may reveal that the results of the two programs augment one another, contradict one another, or differ only slightly. If the latter, the qualitative reasoning techniques may be compared in other areas, such as computational efficiency

Retirement and Medical Benefits: Who Has Both?

[Excerpt] Employee compensation packages commonly include both wages and benefits. For decades, employee benefits have been used as part of the total compensation package to attract and retain highly qualified workers. Just as workers in various occupations receive different levels of pay, they also receive access to different types and combinations of employee benefits. This article uses March 2012 National Compensation Survey (NCS) data to examine private industry workers’ access to medical benefits, retirement benefits, and combinations of the two benefits, by major occupation group, wage category, part-time and full-time status, union and nonunion status, and establishment size. The study finds notable differences in the patterns of access to medical and retirement benefits—separately, and in combination—among the various worker groups

Hydraulic fluid serves as mandrel for small diameter refractory tube drawing

Sealing hydraulic fluid within a tube and passing the tube through a reducing die produces high quality small diameter refractory metal tubing. The encased fluid eliminates the need for mandrel or ductile core removal and drawing can proceed with less handling operations

True and False Foodplants of \u3ci\u3eCallosamia Promethea\u3c/i\u3e (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae) in Southern Michigan

A survey in 1980 of the associations of over 400 cocoons of Callosamia promethea Drury in vegetation along and adjacent to southern Michigan roadsides gave evidence for seven species of true larval foodplants (not including two others known in the area from other studies) and 17 species of false foodplants, the latter determined by the (1) rarity of their association with cocoons, (2) only one or two cocoons per plant, and (3) their proximity to a well known true foodplant. Three species, sassafras, black cherry, and buttonbush, are evidently the most important true foodplants in this area. Comparisons are made of the foodplants in terms of past literature, geography, and taxonomic relationships

Ductile mandrel and parting compound facilitate tube drawing

Refractory tubing is warm drawn over a solid ductile mandrel with a powder parting compound packed between mandrel and the tubes inner surface. This method applies also to the coextrusion of a billet and a ductile mandrel

A Place Just Right: Effects of Place Attachment on Preference for Restorative Environments

The present study was designed to test whether natural environments are perceived as most restorative by all people regardless of background or whether preference for type of potentially restorative setting varies according to the type of settlement and the level of nature in the place one is most attached to. Accordingly, participants were asked to imagine themselves in a fatigued state of mind and then rate a series of 15 images on how restorative they would find the settings depicted. Participants were also asked to identify the place they felt most strongly attached to and to classify this place as rural, suburban/small town, or urban. Results revealed a main effect of Image Type where rural images were consistently rated as most restorative across conditions. More importantly, results revealed an interaction of Image Type X Setting of Place Attachment, wherein the preference for rural images was highest for those who were most strongly attached to a rural setting, less for those who were most strongly attached to a suburban setting, and non-existent for those who were most strongly attached to an urban setting. This suggests that while settings high in levels of nature are restorative across the board, urban settings can also be as restorative as rural settings for those who are most strongly attached to them and that preference for type of restorative setting varies by the setting of the place attachment

Analyzing the Feasibility of Prairie Dog Hunting in the Northern Texas Panhandle

Prairie dogs are burrowing rodents located throughout the United States. The black-tailed prairie dog is a common species that primarily inhabits the Great Plains region, with a large population in Texas. While these animals continue to thrive in many locations, there has been a significant reduction in numbers over the past one hundred years. Several conservation efforts have attempted to remedy this situation. The Black-tailed Prairie Dog Conservation and Management Plan is a long-term monitoring program between the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and cooperating landowners. This plan’s purpose is to develop a strategy that conserves the species while simultaneously protecting property rights. One of the plan’s recommended methods for keeping populations at manageable levels is recreational hunting. This practice provides several landowner benefits, including species control and economic returns. The following study explores three land use scenarios related to implementing a prairie dog hunting operation. It provides a ten-year financial impact and risk assessment for a typical Texas Panhandle producer.Prairie Dogs, Texas Ranching, Risk Management, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Land Economics/Use,