Feasibility study of the solar scientific instruments for Spacelab/Orbiter

The feasibility and economics of mounting and operating a set of solar scientific instruments in the backup Skylab Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) hardware was evaluated. The instruments used as the study test payload and integrated into the ATM were: the Solar EUV Telescope/Spectrometer; the Solar Active Region Observing Telescope; and the Lyman Alpha White Light Coronagraph. The backup ATM hardware consists of a central cruciform structure, called the "SPAR', a "Sun End Canister' and a "Multiple Docking Adapter End Canister'. Basically, the ATM hardware and software provides a structural interface for the instruments; a closely controlled thermal environment; and a very accurate attitude and pointing control capability. The hardware is an identical set to the hardware that flow on Skylab

Development and Composition of the Warty Layer in Balsam Fir. I. Development

The deposition and ultrastructure of the warty layer in developing tracheids of balsam fir [Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.] were studied by means of transmission electron microscopy. The wart structure gradually was developed external to the plasma membrane after secondary wall deposition and the greater part of lignification were complete. Warts were synthesized first in the cell corners and pit cavities and then on the remainder of the cell walls. No cytoplasmic organelle was found to be associated specifically with wart formation. After the warty layer was elaborated, the cytoplasm disappeared from the cell, leaving no discernible trace of disorganized residue. The bulk of the wart structure exhibited staining properties similar to those of lignin. However, the basal portions of individual warts were sometimes less darkly stained than the outer portions, indicating possible heterogeneous composition

Development and Composition of the Warty Layer in Balsam Fir. II. Composition

From its response to various chemical, physical, fungal, and enzymatic treatments, it was concluded that the warty layer in balsam fir consisted largely of a ligninlike material that was visibly more resistant to extraction than a large fraction of other lignin in the fiber cell wall. Since the warts were the cell-wall component most accessible to the treatment solutions, it is probable that the material in the warty layer was more concentrated and condensed than lignin in other parts of the wall. Vacuum drying at 105 C appeared to condense the wart structure still further, making it even more resistant to most treatments. Gel filtration indicated that the warty layer was extracted as a high molecular weight material by certain treatments. The warty layer may act as a barrier that slows the penetration of liquids into the cell wall and thereby may cause different rates of delignification for different wood species. The basal component of individual warts and some of the accompanying encrustant on the inner surface of the cell wall were found to contain an amorphous carbohydrate, probably a pentosan or a pectic substance. Attempts at physical isolation of the warts were largely unsuccessful

Sparsifiner: Learning Sparse Instance-Dependent Attention for Efficient Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown their competitive advantages performance-wise compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) though they often come with high computational costs. To this end, previous methods explore different attention patterns by limiting a fixed number of spatially nearby tokens to accelerate the ViT's multi-head self-attention (MHSA) operations. However, such structured attention patterns limit the token-to-token connections to their spatial relevance, which disregards learned semantic connections from a full attention mask. In this work, we propose a novel approach to learn instance-dependent attention patterns, by devising a lightweight connectivity predictor module to estimate the connectivity score of each pair of tokens. Intuitively, two tokens have high connectivity scores if the features are considered relevant either spatially or semantically. As each token only attends to a small number of other tokens, the binarized connectivity masks are often very sparse by nature and therefore provide the opportunity to accelerate the network via sparse computations. Equipped with the learned unstructured attention pattern, sparse attention ViT (Sparsifiner) produces a superior Pareto-optimal trade-off between FLOPs and top-1 accuracy on ImageNet compared to token sparsity. Our method reduces 48% to 69% FLOPs of MHSA while the accuracy drop is within 0.4%. We also show that combining attention and token sparsity reduces ViT FLOPs by over 60%.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 202

Arkansas Cooperative Beef Bull Performance Test 1991

Performance testing of beef bulls was initiated to improve productivity of Arkansas beef cattle through breeding. This cooperative testing program provides cattlemen with reliable information for identifying animals with superior breeding value for the traits of production measured in the test. By using the information as a basis for herd sire selection, a breeder can greatly increase the chances of obtaining a bull that will sire rapid-gaining, more efficient, highquality calves. Such calves can increase profits for both the breeder and the feeder. This testing program provides information that is useful to financial institutes in arranging their lending programs and to companies in developing their educational, promotional and marketing programs

Parasympathetic functions in children with sensory processing disorder.

The overall goal of this study was to determine if parasympathetic nervous system (PsNS) activity is a significant biomarker of sensory processing difficulties in children. Several studies have demonstrated that PsNS activity is an important regulator of reactivity in children, and thus, it is of interest to study whether PsNS activity is related to sensory reactivity in children who have a type of condition associated with sensory processing disorders termed sensory modulation dysfunction (SMD). If so, this will have important implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying sensory processing problems of children and for developing intervention strategies to address them. The primary aims of this project were: (1) to evaluate PsNS activity in children with SMD compared to typically developing (TYP) children, and (2) to determine if PsNS activity is a significant predictor of sensory behaviors and adaptive functions among children with SMD. We examine PsNS activity during the Sensory Challenge Protocol; which includes baseline, the administration of eight sequential stimuli in five sensory domains, recovery, and also evaluate response to a prolonged auditory stimulus. As a secondary aim we examined whether subgroups of children with specific physiological and behavioral sensory reactivity profiles can be identified. Results indicate that as a total group the children with severe SMD demonstrated a trend for low baseline PsNS activity, compared to TYP children, suggesting this may be a biomarker for SMD. In addition, children with SMD as a total group demonstrated significantly poorer adaptive behavior in the communication and daily living subdomains and in the overall Adaptive Behavior Composite of the Vineland than TYP children. Using latent class analysis, the subjects were grouped by severity and the severe SMD group had significantly lower PsNS activity at baseline, tones and prolonged auditory. These results provide preliminary evidence that children who demonstrate severe SMD may have physiological activity that is different from children without SMD, and that these physiological and behavioral manifestations of SMD may affect a child\u27s ability to engage in everyday social, communication, and daily living skills

Repeated Calm Handling Can Lead to More Docile Cattle

Changes in temperament in heifers when handled either frequently or infrequently were evaluated subjectively based on their behavior when restrained in (chute score) and exiting from (exit score) a squeeze chute. Chute scores decreased over time–a favorable direction–with more dramatic declines in heifers handled more frequently. Heifers with higher chute scores on the first day of handling had the largest reduction in score. Exit scores changed less over time. Chute score therefore may be more indicative of acclimation to a novel environment than exit score. Both scores appear to offer a fast, easy and inexpensive way to quantify docility in cattle. Heifers became calmer with repeated gentle handling. Producers therefore may benefit from allowing cattle a few days to acclimate to new working facilities before assessing docility