Prospects for a civil/military transport aircraft

The similarities and disparities between commercial and military payloads, design features, missions, and transport aircraft are enumerated. Two matrices of civil/military transport aircraft designs were evaluated to determine the most cost effective payloads for a projected commercial route structure and air freight market. The probability of this market developing and the prospects for alternate route structures and freight markets are evaluated along with the possible impact on the aircraft designs. Proposals to stimulate the market and increase the viability of the common aircraft concept are reviewed and the possible impact of higher cargo demand on prospects for common civil/military freighters is postulated. The implications of planned advanced technology developments on the aircraft performance and cost are also considered

From the Individual to the Collective: Community in August Wilson and Tony Kushner

My study examines the playwrights August Wilson and Tony Kushner as "political" artists whose work, while positing very different definitions of "community," offers a similar critique of an American tendency toward a kind of misguided, dangerous individualism that precludes "interconnection." I begin with a look at how "community" is defined by each author through interviews and personal statements. My approach to the plays which follow is thematic as opposed to chronological. The organization, in fact, mirrors a pattern often found in the plays themselves: I begin with individuals who are cut off from their respective communities, turn to individuals who "reconnect" through encounters with communal history and memory, and conclude by examining various "successful" visions of community and examples of communities in crisis and decay. My work is informed especially by Pierre Nora's definitions of "history" and "memory" and his thoughts on "collective memory" as embodied in particular sites, lieux de memoires. Studies of ghosts and "cultural haunting" by Avery Gordon, Kathleen Brogan, and David Savran are used throughout to illuminate Wilson's and Kushner's use of the "supernatural" to illustrate the necessity of "communal memory." Both Wilson and Kushner view "community" as a source of collective strength, a tool for change, and I conclude by arguing for the necessity of a more interconnected community of politically-minded playwrights

Adolescent Knowledge, Attitudes, and Beliefs toward Vaccination

Vaccination, one of public health’s greatest disease prevention tools, is broadening to focus on adolescents. Now that there are more vaccines targeted specifically for adolescents, it is time to give more focus to vaccine delivery in this population. This research will increase the knowledge base to support informed changes in adolescent vaccine delivery by identifying knowledge and attitudes of adolescents toward vaccination within the context of barriers and solutions. Perceived susceptibility to disease, benefits and barriers to vaccination and other constructs were collected through a survey to 1368 high school students. In this population, a scheduled adolescent healthcare visit is feasible, vaccine education can diminishes health misconceptions, and vaccination mandates are ways to reach some students

Giving New Meaning to ‘Watch What You Eat’: An Argument for FTC Regulation of Television Junk Food Advertising Targeting Children

Article published in the Michigan State University School of Law Student Scholarship Collection

Unfelt

Unfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of Unfelt—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, Noggle's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing inspiration from contemporary affect theory, Noggle charts how feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other, identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful: the potential, the incipient, the emergent, the virtual

A comparative evaluation of heuristics used to improve convergence rates of the back-propagation algorithm

Artificial neural networks exhibit important classification capabilities in a variety of pattern recognition applications, due in large part to their ability to adapt to a changing environment without requiring either a complex set of programmed steps or underlying sample distribution information. Their adaptive learning capability may allow them to be successfully applied to problems in such areas as speech and pattern recognition [Lippmann 87]. Multi-layer feed-forward neural networks classifiers require a training rule for adjusting weights in internal laxers. One such training rule, the back-propagation of error algorithm, also known as the generalized delta rule [Rumelhart 86a], has become one of the most widely used training algorithms for neural networks. However, it suffers from two major drawbacks: slow convergence rates and convergence to non-optimal solutions, or local minima. The objective of this research was to investigate the effect different heuristics have on the performance of the standard back-propagation (BP) algorithm. The methods that were studied included modification of both learning rate and momentum parameters, several adaptive techniques (e.g. the Delta-Bar-Delta and Extended Delta-Bar-Delta algorithms) for dynamically adjusting these parameters, modification of the sigmoid function, and replacement of the random initial weights with values which pre-partition the inputs into separate decision regions. Results from the use of these heuristics were compared in terms of both their overall impact on convergence rates and their effect on convergence to local minima. These heuristics were implemented and tested on three benchmark problems, each with different characteristics which presented varying levels o{ difficulty to the neural network. The three problem types used to test and compare the algorithms were the XOR (parity), multiplexer, and encoder/decoder problems. After benchmarking performance on small problem sets, problem size was increased to examine the effect of scaling on the different heuristics. The adaptive algorithms were shown to achieve reduced convergence times compared to BP on all problem types and sizes. The improvement was more pronounced for the larger problems. The Delta-Bar-Delta algorithm often produced the best results of any of the heuristics using only three additional inputs. The large number of parameters required by the Extended Delta-Bar-Delta algorithm made it difficult to tune. In order to converge to solutions on scaled-up problem sizes, the BP algorithm was shown to require normalization of the weight update value, as well as an individual per-pattern error criterion in place of the sum of squared error criterion. Computational requirements were shown to increase exponentially with additional input lines for the XOR/Parity and multiplexer problems, and polynomially for the encoder/decoder problem