Linear or Rotary Actuator Using Electromagnetic Driven Hammer as Prime Mover

We claim a hammer driven actuator that uses the fast-motion, low-force characteristics of an electro-magnetic or similar prime mover to develop kinetic energy that can be transformed via a friction interface to produce a higher-force, lower-speed linear or rotary actuator by using a hammering process to produce a series of individual steps. Such a system can be implemented using a voice-coil, electro-mechanical solenoid or similar prime mover. Where a typical actuator provides limited range of motion or low force, the range of motion of a linear or rotary impact driven motor can be configured to provide large displacements which are not limited by the characteristic dimensions of the prime mover

Nurses\u27 Alumnae Association Bulletin, May 1960

Accreditation of Programs in Nursing Alumnae Meetings, 1959 Committee Reports Greetings from the President Highlights from first issue of Alumnae Bulletin Living in the new nurses residence Lost Members Marriages Necrology New Arrivals Notices Personal Items of Interest Report of the School of Nursing and Nursing Services Staff Nurses Association Student Activities Year of tremendous growth and expansio

Human rights and public education

This article attempts a contrast to the contribution by Hugh Starkey. Rather than his account of the inexorable rise of human rights discourse, and of the implementation of human rights standards, human rights are here presented as always and necessarily scandalous and highly contested. First, I explain why the UK has lagged so far behind its European neighbours in implementing citizenship education. Second, a comparison with France shows that the latest UK reforms bring us up to 1789. Third, the twentieth-century second-generation social and economic rights are still anathema in the UK. Fourth, the failure to come to terms with Empire and especially the slave trade means that the UK’s attitude to third-generation rights, especially the right of peoples to self-determination, is heavily compromised. Taking into account the points I raise, citizenship education in the UK might look very different

Doing more with less: Teacher professional learning communities in resource-constrained primary schools in rural China.

Teacher professional learning communities provide environments in which teachers engage in regular research and collaboration. They have been found effective as a means for connecting professional learning to the day-to-day realities faced by teachers in the classroom. In this article, the authors draw on survey data collected in primary schools serving 71 villages in rural Gansu Province as well as transcripts from in-depth interviews with 30 teachers. Findings indicate that professional learning communities penetrate to some of China’s most resource-constrained schools but that their nature and development are shaped by institutional supports, principal leadership, and teachers’ own initiative

Analytical solution of a model for complex food webs

We investigate numerically and analytically a recently proposed model for food webs [Nature {\bf 404}, 180 (2000)] in the limit of large web sizes and sparse interaction matrices. We obtain analytical expressions for several quantities with ecological interest, in particular the probability distributions for the number of prey and the number of predators. We find that these distributions have fast-decaying exponential and Gaussian tails, respectively. We also find that our analytical expressions are robust to changes in the details of the model.Comment: 4 pages (RevTeX). Final versio

Recent Developments in Boron-Phosphorus Ring and Cage Chemistry

The chemical and structural diversity of compounds containing Groups 13/15 element combinations continues to expand at a rapid pace. In this paper we outline some recent results from our groups that illustrate the continued evolution of boronphosphorus ring and cage constructs. 15

The dusty AGB star RS CrB: first mid-infrared interferometric observations with the Keck Telescopes

We report interferometric observations of the semi-regular variable star RS CrB, a red giant with strong silicate emission features. The data were among the first long baseline mid-infrared stellar fringes obtained between the Keck telescopes, using parts of the new nulling beam combiner. The light was dispersed by a low-resolution spectrometer, allowing simultaneous measurement of the source visibility and intensity spectra from 8 to 12 microns. The interferometric observations allow a non-ambiguous determination of the dust shell spatial scale and relative flux contribution. Using a simple spherically-symmetric model, in which a geometrically thin shell surrounds the stellar photosphere, we find that ~30% to ~70% of the overall mid-infrared flux - depending on the wavelength - originates from 7-8 stellar radii. The derived shell opacity profile shows a broad peak around 11 microns (tau ~ 0.06), characteristic of Mg-rich silicate dust particles.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Genetic and morphological divergence between Littorina fabalis ecotypes in Northern Europe

Low dispersal marine intertidal species facing strong divergent selective pressures associated with steep environmental gradients have a great potential to inform us about local adaptation and reproductive isolation. Among these, gastropods of the genus Littorina offer a unique system to study parallel phenotypic divergence resulting from adaptation to different habitats related with wave exposure. In this study, we focused on two Littorina fabalis ecotypes from Northern European shores and compared patterns of habitat-related phenotypic and genetic divergence across three different geographic levels (local, regional and global). Geometric morphometric analyses revealed that individuals from habitats moderately exposed to waves usually present a larger shell size with a wider aperture than those from sheltered habitats. The phenotypic clustering of L. fabalis by habitat across most locations (mainly in terms of shell size) support an important role of ecology in morphological divergence. A genome scan based on amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs) revealed a heterogeneous pattern of differentiation across the genome between populations from the two different habitats, suggesting ecotype divergence in the presence of gene flow. The contrasting patterns of genetic structure between nonoutlier and outlier loci, and the decreased sharing of outlier loci with geographic distance among locations are compatible with parallel evolution of phenotypic divergence, with an important contribution of gene flow and/or ancestral variation. In the future, model-based inference studies based on sequence data across the entire genome will help unravelling these evolutionary hypotheses, improving our knowledge about adaptation and its influence on diversification within the marine realm.Peer reviewe

An elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian distribution

We define a distribution on the unit sphere Sd−1 called the elliptically symmetric angular Gaussian distribution. This distribution, which to our knowledge has not been studied before, is a subfamily of the angular Gaussian distribution closely analogous to the Kent subfamily of the general Fisher–Bingham distribution. Like the Kent distribution, it has elliptical contours, enabling modelling of rotational asymmetry about the mean direction, but it has the additional advantages of being simple and fast to simulate from, and having a density and hence likelihood that is easy and very quick to compute exactly. These advantages are especially beneficial for computationally intensive statistical methods, one example of which is a parametric bootstrap procedure for inference for the directional mean that we describe