Evaluating Storm Sewer Pipe Condition Using Autonomous Drone Technology

The United States Air Force (USAF) owns a total of 30.9 million linear feet (LF) of storm sewer pipes valued at approximately $2.3B in its vast portfolio of built infrastructure. Current inventory records reveal that 78% of the inventory (24.1 million LF) is over 50 years old and will soon exceed its estimated service life. Additionally, the USAF depends on contract support while its business processes undervalue in-service evaluations from long-term funding plans. Ultimately, this disconnect negatively impacts infrastructure performance and overall strategic success, and the USAF risks making uninformed decisions in a fiscally constrained environment. This research presents a proof of concept effort to automate storm sewer evaluations for the USAF using unmanned ground vehicles and computer vision technology for autonomous defect detection. The results conceptually show that a low-cost autonomous system can be developed using commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software to quantify the condition of underground storm sewer pipes with an efficiency of 36%. While the results show that the prototype developed for this research is not sufficient for operational use, it does demonstrate that the USAF can leverage COTS systems in future AM strategies to improve asset visibility at a significantly lower cost.

Water, Women, and Migration: Examining the Interconnections Between Water Scarcity, Environmental Migration, and Women in Bolivia

Water insecurity has received growing attention as climate change is worsening environmental conditions, and research has established how water insecurity has differentiated impacts according to one\u27s gender. In light of both an increasing trend in environmental migration and extreme weather events in Bolivia, this paper sought to establish environmental migration\u27s explicit role in the relationship between water scarcity and gendered effects. To do so, it addressed the question, how does environmental migration influence the relationship between gendered effects and water scarcity? and hypothesized that migration is a more subtle and overlooked contributor to the gendered effects of water scarcity. The research constructed a descriptive case study of Bolivia, highlighting the situation of water scarcity and environmental migration in Bolivia, using sources such as household surveys, videos, and census data. The results created a profile of the situation of these phenomena in Bolivia and confirmed the relationship between water scarcity and gendered effects, as well as the presence of migration in water-scarce regions. After establishing these trends, the paper related the three phenomena, suggesting a direct role of environmental migration in water scarcity\u27s gendered effects. Worsening environmental conditions due to climate change, mismanagement of resources, and inaction to address these issues will exacerbate the situation. Solutions should address ending environmentally harmful practices and improving women\u27s conditions, including incorporation and empowerment of women in decisions surrounding water accessibility. Further research on the topic include the comparative effects on men and women of environmental migration, as well as the study of other vulnerable populations

Tev I Gradient Search Coils: (With Micron Accuracies)

This note summarizes the design and construction techniques used for the Gradient Search Coil

Doubly connected minimal surfaces and extremal harmonic mappings

The concept of a conformal deformation has two natural extensions: quasiconformal and harmonic mappings. Both classes do not preserve the conformal type of the domain, however they cannot change it in an arbitrary way. Doubly connected domains are where one first observes nontrivial conformal invariants. Herbert Groetzsch and Johannes C. C. Nitsche addressed this issue for quasiconformal and harmonic mappings, respectively. Combining these concepts we obtain sharp estimates for quasiconformal harmonic mappings between doubly connected domains. We then apply our results to the Cauchy problem for minimal surfaces, also known as the Bjorling problem. Specifically, we obtain a sharp estimate of the modulus of a doubly connected minimal surface that evolves from its inner boundary with a given initial slope.Comment: 35 pages, 2 figures. Minor edits, references adde

Information integrity and privacy for computerized medical patient records

Sandia National Laboratories and Oceania, Inc. entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) in November 1993 to provide ``Information Integrity and Privacy for Computerized Medical Patient Records`` (CRADA No. SC93/01183). The main objective of the project was to develop information protection methods that are appropriate for databases of patient records in health information systems. This document describes the findings and alternative solutions that resulted from this CRADA

Information integrity and privacy for computerized medical patient records

Sandia National Laboratories and Oceania, Inc. entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) in November 1993 to provide ``Information Integrity and Privacy for Computerized Medical Patient Records`` (CRADA No. SC93/01183). The main objective of the project was to develop information protection methods that are appropriate for databases of patient records in health information systems. This document describes the findings and alternative solutions that resulted from this CRADA

Existence of Integral mm-Varifolds minimizing ∫∣A∣p\int |A|^p and ∫∣H∣p\int |H|^p, p>mp>m, in Riemannian Manifolds

We prove existence and partial regularity of integral rectifiable $m$-dimensional varifolds minimizing functionals of the type $\int |H|^p$ and $\int |A|^p$ in a given Riemannian $n$-dimensional manifold $(N,g)$, $2\leq mm$, under suitable assumptions on $N$ (in the end of the paper we give many examples of such ambient manifolds). To this aim we introduce the following new tools: some monotonicity formulas for varifolds in $\mathbb{R}^S$ involving $\int |H|^p$, to avoid degeneracy of the minimizer, and a sort of isoperimetric inequality to bound the mass in terms of the mentioned functionals.Comment: 33 pages; this second submission corresponds to the published version of the paper, minor typos are fixe