System Safety Approach to Collision Reduction

Metro Transit is the main public transportation provider in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. It operates buses, light rail and commuter rail within a region of 2.9 million residents. Its bus fleet includes 686 40-foot buses, 166 articulated buses and 36 coaches. Average weekday bus boardings are 230,000 at more than 12,000 bus stops in a service area of 907 square miles. Of its nearly 2,800 employees, more than half (1,452) are bus operators. Metro Transit’s primary focus has always been on providing safe, reliable transportation options. Its safety record for National Transit Database reportable collisions for 2008-2011 is far below those for the top 30 U.S. transit agencies, its peer agencies and those of comparable bus operations within several larger providers. However, in 2009, following two fatal buspedestrian collisions, the agency’s Bus Safety and Bus Transportation departments began collaborating on several initiatives to reduce collisions and enhance overall safety performance. This document illustrates how a comprehensive framework of education and outreach created in 2009 and 2010 has led to improvements in customer perceptions of safety, a 6.5 percent annual reduction in collisions and a $582,282 annual savings in risk management claim payments

Development of an Adjustable Spiral-shaped Evaporator

The cooling of high heat flux is becoming increasingly important in technical applications. This is on the one hand due to the fact that the available installation space is becoming smaller and smaller due to progressive miniaturization, on the other hand to the ever-increasing performance, which has to be taken away in technically demanding processes such as Inconel machining. In order to meet this challenge, a new type of evaporator, the swirl evaporator, was developed. The swirl evaporator is a screw-shaped cylindrical evaporator with an internal diameter between 1 – 3 mm, which is inserted as a blind hole in components with high heat generation. The refrigerant is fed into the blind hole via a concentrically oriented capillary, deflected by 180° in the drilling base and flows out of the evaporator again in a helical way (twist flow) against the inflow direction. The evaporator\u27s design allows a compact size to be achieved, making it suitable for a wide range of technical applications. To enable a design for industrial needs, a 1-D simulation of the process had been conducted. The simulations showed ideal results for a hydraulic diameter of 2.05 mm and an evaporator length of 15 – 20 mm. According to the simulations an improvement of the energy efficiency of up to 19 % is possible when the mass flow is kept constant for R32. Based on the results of these simulations a design of the test-rig had been developed which allows different screw inserts to be tested with a variable length. Former experimental studies with R404A show that the average critical heat flux density of spot evaporators with a twist geometry increases by up to 33 % compared with spot evaporators without twist generation. The spot evaporators with swirl flow generation have a distinct, stable overheating zone with high heat flux (Humpfer, 2013)

Hydraulic Characterization of a Adjustable Spiral-shaped Evaporator

To ensure reliability in miniaturized devices or processes with increased heat fluxes, decreasing available cooling surfaces have to be met by novel cooling methods. In order to meet this challenge, a new type of evaporator, the swirl evaporator, was developed. The swirl evaporator is a screw-shaped cylindrical evaporator with an internal diameter between 1 – 3 mm, which is inserted as a blind hole in components with high heat generation. The refrigerant is fed into the blind hole via a capillary, deflected by 180° in the drilling base and flows out of the evaporator again in a helical way (twist flow) against the inflow direction. The refrigerant is pressed against the hot wall by centrifugal forces. This results in an increased critical heat flux. The evaporator\u27s design allows a compact size, making it suitable for a wide range of technical applications. To enable its design for industrial needs, a test stand has been developed. The hydraulic characterization was performed by varying the evaporator length. First experimental results show a linear relationship between swirl evaporator length and pressure loss

Plaquette Ordering in SU(4) Antiferromagnets

We use fermion mean field theory to study possible plaquette ordering in the antiferromagnetic SU(4) Heisenberg model. We find the ground state for both the square and triangular lattices to be the disconnected plaquette state. Our mean field theory gives a first order transition for plaquette ordering for the triangular lattice. Our results suggest a large number of low lying states.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Ground State and Excitations of Spin Chain with Orbital Degeneracy

The one dimensional Heisenberg model in the presence of orbital degeneracy is studied at the SU(4) symmetric viewpoint by means of Bethe ansatz. Following Sutherland's previous work on an equivalent model, we discuss the ground state and the low-lying excitations more extensively in connection to the spin systems with orbital degeneracy. We show explicitly that the ground state is a SU(4) singlet. We study the degeneracies of the elementary excitations and the spectra of the generalized magnons consisting of these excitations. We also discuss the complex 2-strings in the context of the Bethe ansatz solutions.Comment: Revtex, 9 pages, 3 figures; typos correcte

A Class III Semaphorin (Sema3e) Inhibits Mouse Osteoblast Migration and Decreases Osteoclast Formation In Vitro

Originally identified as axonal guidance cues, semaphorins are expressed throughout many different tissues and regulate numerous non-neuronal processes. We demonstrate that most class III semaphorins are expressed in mouse osteoblasts and are differentially regulated by cell growth and differentiation: Sema3d expression is increased and Sema3e expression decreased during proliferation in culture, while expression of Sema3a is unaffected by cell density but increases in cultures of mineralizing osteoblasts. Expression of Sema3a, -3e, and -3d is also differentially regulated by osteogenic stimuli; inhibition of GSK3β decreased expression of Sema3a and -3e, while 1,25-(OH)2D3 increased expression of Sema3e. Parathyroid hormone had no effect on expression of Sema3a, -3b, or -3d. Osteoblasts, macrophages, and osteoclasts express the Sema3e receptor PlexinD1, suggesting an autocrine and paracrine role for Sema3e. No effects of recombinant Sema3e on osteoblast proliferation, differentiation, or mineralization were observed; but Sema3e did inhibit the migration of osteoblasts in a wound-healing assay. The formation of multinucleated, tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase–positive osteoclasts was decreased by 81% in cultures of mouse bone marrow macrophages incubated with 200 ng/mL Sema3e. Correspondingly, decreased expression of osteoclast markers (Itgb3, Acp5, Cd51, Nfatc1, CalcR, and Ctsk) was observed by qPCR in macrophage cultures differentiated in the presence of Sema3e. Our results demonstrate that class III semaphorins are expressed by osteoblasts and differentially regulated by differentiation, mineralization, and osteogenic stimuli. Sema3e is a novel inhibitor of osteoclast formation in vitro and may play a role in maintaining local bone homeostasis, potentially acting as a coupling factor between osteoclasts and osteoblasts

Analysis of the African coelacanth genome sheds light on tetrapod evolution

It was a zoological sensation when a living specimen of the coelacanth was first discovered in 1938, as this lineage of lobe-finned fish was thought to have gone extinct 70 million years ago. The modern coelacanth looks remarkably similar to many of its ancient relatives, and its evolutionary proximity to our own fish ancestors provides a glimpse of the fish that first walked on land. Here we report the genome sequence of the African coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae. Through a phylogenomic analysis, we conclude that the lungfish, and not the coelacanth, is the closest living relative of tetrapods. Coelacanth protein-coding genes are significantly more slowly evolving than those of tetrapods, unlike other genomic features . Analyses of changes in genes and regulatory elements during the vertebrate adaptation to land highlight genes involved in immunity, nitrogen excretion and the development of fins, tail, ear, eye, brain, and olfaction. Functional assays of enhancers involved in the fin-to-limb transition and in the emergence of extra-embryonic tissues demonstrate the importance of the coelacanth genome as a blueprint for understanding tetrapod evolution

Morphological diversity of single neurons in molecularly defined cell types.

Dendritic and axonal morphology reflects the input and output of neurons and is a defining feature of neuronal types1,2, yet our knowledge of its diversity remains limited. Here, to systematically examine complete single-neuron morphologies on a brain-wide scale, we established a pipeline encompassing sparse labelling, whole-brain imaging, reconstruction, registration and analysis. We fully reconstructed 1,741 neurons from cortex, claustrum, thalamus, striatum and other brain regions in mice. We identified 11 major projection neuron types with distinct morphological features and corresponding transcriptomic identities. Extensive projectional diversity was found within each of these major types, on the basis of which some types were clustered into more refined subtypes. This diversity follows a set of generalizable principles that govern long-range axonal projections at different levels, including molecular correspondence, divergent or convergent projection, axon termination pattern, regional specificity, topography, and individual cell variability. Although clear concordance with transcriptomic profiles is evident at the level of major projection type, fine-grained morphological diversity often does not readily correlate with transcriptomic subtypes derived from unsupervised clustering, highlighting the need for single-cell cross-modality studies. Overall, our study demonstrates the crucial need for quantitative description of complete single-cell anatomy in cell-type classification, as single-cell morphological diversity reveals a plethora of ways in which different cell types and their individual members may contribute to the configuration and function of their respective circuits