Representing Time: The Language of (un)Certainty in Post-Cold-War Los Alamos

Based on ongoing ethnographic research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, this paper explores a shift in constructions of time among nuclear weapons experts. It frames the Laboratory’s weapons experts as members of a community of practice organized around the production of confidence in the American nuclear stockpile. Throughout the Cold War, this community’s activities were patterned by several interlocking cycles, including the arms race, cycles of weapons acquisition, and most immediately, a local experimental cycle in which the community designed, engineered, and tested prototype nuclear devices. This local experimental cycle also served as a site for renewing the community and its knowledge, as novice experts acquired skills and abilities and seniors reinscribed understandings about how weapons work. However, these cyclical rhythms broke apart as the Cold War ended, leaving the weapons community without the design-and-test cycle as a central point of social organization. This paper argues that in the wake of these changes, local references to time emphasize a shift from cyclical rhythms of renewal to a more linear understanding of time, in which time has become a force for aging and decay

Investigation of the limits of nanoscale filopodial interactions

Mesenchymal stem cells are sensitive to changes in feature height, order and spacing. We had previously noted that there was an inverse relationship between osteoinductive potential and feature height on 15-, 55- and 90 nm-high titania nanopillars, with 15 nm-high pillars being the most effective substrate at inducing osteogenesis of human mesenchymal stem cells. The osteoinductive effect was somewhat diminished by decreasing the feature height to 8 nm, however, which suggested that there was a cut-off point, potentially associated with a change in cell–nanofeature interactions. To investigate this further, in this study, a scanning electron microscopy/three-dimensional scanning electron microscopy approach was used to examine the interactions between mesenchymal stem cells and the 8 and 15 nm nanopillared surfaces. As expected, the cells adopted a predominantly filopodial mode of interaction with the 15 nm-high pillars. Interestingly, fine nanoscale membrane projections, which we have termed ‘nanopodia,’ were also employed by the cells on the 8 nm pillars, and it seems that this is analogous to the cells ‘clinging on with their fingertips’ to this scale of features

Linguistic Signatures of Cognitive Processes during Writing

The relationship between working memory capacity andwriting ability was examined via a linguistic analysis ofstudent essays. Undergraduate students (n = 108) wrotetimed, prompt-based essays and completed a battery ofcognitive assessments. The surface- and discourse-levellinguistic features of students’ essays were then analyzedusing natural language processing tools. The results indicatedthat WM capacity was related to surface-level, but notdiscourse-level features of student essays. Additionally, theresults suggest that these relationships were attenuated forstudents with high inferencing skills, as opposed to those withlower inferencing skill

Labour efficiency on-farm

End of project reportImprovements in milking efficiency have a greater influence than any other aspect of the dairy farmers work on overall farm labour inputs (Whipp, 1992). In order to facilitate the examination of milking process labour inputs, the milking process may be divided into the following three components: herding pre and post milking (transfer of cows to and from the milking parlour); milking (milking tasks / work routines within the parlour); and washing (washing of milking machine and yard). Meanwhile, within milking specifically, the number of cows milked per operator per hour is the best measure of both the performance of the operator and the milking installation (Clough, 1978). This is affected by the following three factors: the milking times of the cows, the number and arrangement of the milking units, and the operator’s work routine (Whipp, 1992). The addition of extra milking units will only increase milking performance if the operator has idle time during milking (Hansen, 1999)

Brief Note: Characterization of Hydrophobic Stream Bacteria Based on Adhesion to n-Octane

Author Institution: Department of Biological Sciences, Kent State UniversityThe purpose of this study was to characterize stream bacterial communities based on cell surface hydrophobicity. Because hydrophobicity is related to adhesion we hypothesized that more hydrophobic bacteria would be found on solid surfaces than in water. Water, rock, and sediment from two northeastern Ohio streams were sampled and bacteria were plated on modified nutrient agar. Hydrophobicity was determined by measuring adherence to n-octane. No difference was found in the proportion of hydrophobic bacteria among habitats. Two hydrophobic isolates were identified as Sphingomonas paucimobilis and Chryseomonas luteola. A large proportion of hydrophobic bacteria were gram positive and urease positive; none were gelatinase positive. More hydrophobic than hydrophilic bacteria were able to grow using manatose or malatose as the only carbon source. These physiological differences indicate that hydrophobic bacteria may be able to utilize resources not available to hydrophilic bacteria

Molecular and cellular analysis of topography-induced mechanotransduction

Edited Abstract: Mechanotransduction is the process by which cells convert mechanical stimuli into an adaptive gene- and protein-level response, via signalling cascades or direct physical effects of the cytoskeleton on the nucleus, and appropriate mechanosignalling is crucial for tissue development and function. Most techniques currently used to study cellular mechanoresponses are relatively damaging to the cells. In contrast, topographically structured substrates, such as microgrooves, have great potential for use as non-invasive mechanostimuli. In this study, quartz microgrooved substrata (2 μm depth x 25 μm pitch) were used as platforms for the confinement and alignment of cells. A multi-layered approach was adopted to begin to integrate the changes induced by the topographical mechanostimulus at the chromosome, small RNA, transcript, protein and structural levels. Together, the results provide insight into multiple facets of topography-induced mechanotransduction, which should contribute to understanding of mechanotransduction and cell-material interactions

Cohesive Features of Deep Text Comprehension Processes

This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers’thought processes while reading texts when they areinstructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associatedwith deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1,college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphraseor self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was characterizedby greater cohesion in terms of lexical overlap whereas self-explanation included greater lexical diversity and moreconnectives to specify relations between ideas. In Study 2,adolescent students (n = 84) were provided with instructionand practice in self-explanation and reading strategies across8 sessions. Self-explanations increased in lexical diversity butbecame more causally and semantically cohesive over time.Together, these results suggest that cohesive featuresexpressed in think alouds are indicative of the depth ofstudents’ comprehension processes

Critical perspectives on writing analytics

Writing Analytics focuses on the measurement and analysis of written texts for the purpose of understanding writing processes and products, in their educational contexts, and improving the teaching and learning of writing. This workshop adopts a critical, holistic perspective in which the definition of "the system" and "success" is not restricted to IR metrics such as precision and recall, but recognizes the many wider issues that aid or obstruct analytics adoption in educational settings, such as theoretical and pedagogical grounding, usability, user experience, stakeholder design engagement, practitioner development, organizational infrastructure, policy and ethics

Document Cohesion Flow: Striving towards Coherence

Text cohesion is an important element of discourseprocessing. This paper presents a new approach to modeling,quantifying, and visualizing text cohesion using automatedcohesion flow indices that capture semantic links amongparagraphs. Cohesion flow is calculated by applyingCohesion Network Analysis, a combination of semanticdistances, Latent Semantic Analysis, and Latent DirichletAllocation, as well as Social Network Analysis. Experimentsperformed on 315 timed essays indicated that cohesion flowindices are significantly correlated with human ratings of textcoherence and essay quality. Visualizations of the globalcohesion indices are also included to support a more facileunderstanding of how cohesion flow impacts coherence interms of semantic dependencies between paragraphs