Survey, analysis and evaluation test on high voltage/current pulse transmission cables

A survey, analysis, and testing of available cable connector configurations were carried out in connection with transmission of high voltage/current to an exploding wire bridge. Transmission was desired at high efficiency with maximum cable flexibility, at minimum weight and size of the cable connector, with maximum cable length while maintaining applicable voltage/current pulse characteristics, and with due consideration to environmental parameters

No Graphic Design Will Contain You

let this book serve as an archive of my tender uncoiling; a thesis in that the work has begun, though no problems will be solved here. a search for ripe language; an opening; a threshold

Recent Evaluative Research on Jury Trial Innovations

During the past decade, state jury reform commissions, many individual federal and state judges, and jury scholars have advocated the adoption of a variety of innovative trial procedures to assist jurors in trials. Many jury trial reforms reflect growing awareness of best practices in education and communication as well as research documenting that jurors take an active rather than a passive approach to their decision-making task. Traditional adversary jury trial procedures often appear to assume that jurors are blank slates, who will passively wait until the end of the trial and the start of jury deliberations to form opinions about the evidence. However, we now know that jurors quite actively engage in evidence evaluation, developing their opinions as the trial progresses. It makes sense to revise trial procedures so they take advantage of jurors’ decision-making tendencies and strengths. Although reform groups have endorsed many of these innovations, until recently there was only modest evidence about their impact in the courtroom. Now, substantial research on the effects of most of the reforms on juror comprehension and juror satisfaction with the trial has been completed and reported. Data are now available to judges and others seeking reliable empirical support for the changes to the traditional jury trial. This article will describe the methods used to study juries and jury trials and present recent data now available for each of the major proposed innovations. We also draw on new findings from our own recent research testing the comparative advantages of jury innovations for understanding complex scientific evidence

Can Jury Trial Innovations Improve Juror Understanding of DNA Evidence?

A single spot of blood on a pink windowsill will tell investigators who broke a windowpane, turned a lock, and kidnapped 2-year-old Molly Evans from her bedroom in the middle of the night. An expert witness will testify that the DNA profile of the blood evidence recovered from the windowsill was entered into CODIS, an electronic database of DNA profiles. That process yielded a “hit,” identifying the defendant as the most likely source of the blood inside Molly’s room. But will jurors be able to understand the expert’s intricate analysis and use it to reach a verdict? And what—if any—steps can be taken to increase jurors’ comprehension of complex DNA evidence? Questions such as these prompted an NIJ-funded study on the impact of jury trial innovations upon mock jurors’ understanding of contested mitochondrial DNA (mtNDA) evidence. By examining how jurors in different experimental conditions performed on a Juror Comprehension Scale both before and after deliberations, researchers were able to assess whether four specific innovations improved jurors’ understanding of this complex evidence and identify which innovations worked best

Rlpy: A Value-Function-Based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Education and Research

RLPy is an object-oriented reinforcement learning software package with a focus on valuefunction-based methods using linear function approximation and discrete actions. The framework was designed for both educational and research purposes. It provides a rich library of fine-grained, easily exchangeable components for learning agents (e.g., policies or representations of value functions), facilitating recently increased specialization in reinforcement learning. RLPy is written in Python to allow fast prototyping, but is also suitable for large-scale experiments through its built-in support for optimized numerical libraries and parallelization. Code profiling, domain visualizations, and data analysis are integrated in a self-contained package available under the Modified BSD License at http://github.com/rlpy/rlpy. All of these properties allow users to compare various reinforcement learning algorithms with little effort

Teachers' classroom feedback: still trying to get it right

This article examines feedback traditionally given by teachers in schools. Such feedback tends to focus on children's acquisition and retrieval of externally prescribed knowledge which is then assessed against mandated tests. It suggests that, from a sociocultural learning perspective, feedback directed towards such objectives may limit children's social development. In this article, I draw on observation and interview data gathered from a group of 27 9- to 10-year olds in a UK primary school. These data illustrate the children's perceived need to conform to, rather than negotiate, the teacher's feedback comments. They highlight the children's sense that the teacher's feedback relates to school learning but not to their own interests. The article also includes alternative examples of feedback which draw on children's own inquiries and which relate to the social contexts within which, and for whom, they act. It concludes by suggesting that instead of looking for the right answer to the question of what makes teachers' feedback effective in our current classrooms, a more productive question might be how a negotiation can be opened up among teachers and learners themselves, about how teachers' feedback could support children's learning most appropriately

The Relationship Between the Parameters of the Electric and the Acoustic Signal with the Destruction of Concrete Under Cyclic Freeze-Thaw

The paper presents the research results of the effect of formation crack process on the parameters of the electric and acoustic response to impact excitation. The physical basis of mechanoelectric transformations is described. It was found that with increasing number of freeze-thaw cycles observed increase of the attenuation coefficient of energy of the electric and acoustic response by a linear relationship. Differences in the dynamics of change of attenuation coefficient of energy of the electric and acoustic response associated with differences in formation and registration of electric and acoustic response

Large-area submillimeter resolution CdZnTe strip detector for astronomy

We report the first performance measurements of a sub-millimeter CdZnTe strip detector developed as a prototype for space-borne astronomical instruments. Strip detector arrays can be used to provide two-dimensional position resolution with fewer electronic channels than pixellated arrays. Arrays of this type and other candidate technologies are under investigation for the position-sensitive backplane detector for a coded-aperture telescope operating in the range of 30 - 300 keV. The prototype is a 1.4 mm thick, 64 multiplied by 64 stripe CdZnTe array of 0.375 mm pitch in both dimensions, approximately one square inch of sensitive area. Pulse height spectra in both single and orthogonal stripe coincidence mode were recorded at several energies. The results are compared to slab- and pixel-geometry detector spectra. The room-temperature energy resolution is less than 10 keV (FWHM) for 122 keV photons with a peak-to-valley ratio greater than 5:1. The response to photons with energies up to 662 keV appears to be considerably improved relative to that of previously reported slab and pixel detectors. We also show that strip detectors can yield spatial and energy resolutions similar to those of pixellated arrays with the same dimensions. Electrostatic effects on the pulse heights, read-out circuit complexity, and issues related to design of space borne instruments are also discussed