Turbopump thermodynamic cooling

System for cooling turbopumps used in cryogenic fluid storage facilities is described. Technique uses thermodynamic propellant vent to intercept pump heat at desired conditions. Cooling system uses hydrogen from outside source or residual hydrogen from cryogenic storage tank

Space shuttle low pressure auxiliary propulsion subsystem design definition Subtask B report

Space shuttle low pressure, hydrogen oxygen auxiliary propulsion subsystem preliminary desig

Identification of the Microlens in Event MACHO-LMC-20

We report on the identification of the lens responsible for microlensing event MACHO-LMC-20. As part of a \textit{Spitzer}/IRAC program conducting mid-infrared follow-up of the MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud microlensing fields, we discovered a significant flux excess at the position of the source star for this event. These data, in combination with high resolution near-infrared \textit{Magellan}/PANIC data has allowed us to classify the lens as an early M dwarf in the thick disk of the Milky Way, at a distance of $\sim 2$ kpc. This is only the second microlens to have been identified, the first also being a M dwarf star in the disk. Together, these two events are still consistent with the expected frequency of nearby stars in the Milky Way thin and thick disks acting as lenses.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ApJ Letter

It Takes Two: A Basic Interpretive Study on the Role of Intercultural Communication on Career Development

Organizations are encountering a more diverse workforce as the world experiences an increase in immigration and globalization. Some of these employees are immigrants from Caribbean islands such as the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica. These employees speak English with an accent different from the American standard and oftentimes find themselves at a disadvantage when seeking career development opportunities. Current studies on intercultural communication tend to examine the Asian, European, and African American accent in relation to education, business, and career development. There are no studies that explore the role of intercultural communication, specifically the English-speaking Caribbean accent, on career development. The purpose of this basic interpretive qualitative study is to describe the personal experiences of employees from various cultures with non-native accents and explore how their accents have been linked to their career development. This study used Super’s (1950) Career Development theory and Giles’ (1973) Communication Accommodation theory to explore the role of accent on career development. Super’s Career Development theory discusses the three frameworks (self-concept, life-space, and life-span) that influence a person’s career development, while Giles’ Communication Accommodation theory discusses the reasons why a person may adjust their accent, speech, and dialect. Structured interviews were used to obtain information from ten participants with Caribbean backgrounds. The participants shared their experiences as employees who speak English with a Caribbean accent. The information was analyzed using McCracken’s (1998) five-stage interpretive process, and Miles and Huberman (1994) analytical method. Employees with non-native accents believe that their accents influence their colleagues’ perception of their abilities, and that their accents prevent them from getting jobs and being promoted. Employees also believe that they are discriminated against because of their Caribbean accents. Because of this perception, employees who speak with accented English adjust their accents so that they are more acceptable in the workplace

Monte Carlo planning for active object classification

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York. Classifying objects in complex unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics and is fundamental in many applications. Modern sensors and sophisticated perception algorithms extract rich 3D textured information, but are limited to the data that are collected from a given location or path. We are interested in closing the loop around perception and planning, in particular to plan paths for better perceptual data, and focus on the problem of planning scanning sequences to improve object classification from range data. We formulate a novel time-constrained active classification problem and propose solution algorithms that employ a variation of Monte Carlo tree search to plan non-myopically. Our algorithms use a particle filter combined with Gaussian process regression to estimate joint distributions of object class and pose. This estimator is used in planning to generate a probabilistic belief about the state of objects in a scene, and also to generate beliefs for predicted sensor observations from future viewpoints. These predictions consider occlusions arising from predicted object positions and shapes. We evaluate our algorithms in simulation, in comparison to passive and greedy strategies. We also describe similar experiments where the algorithms are implemented online, using a mobile ground robot in a farm environment. Results indicate that our non-myopic approach outperforms both passive and myopic strategies, and clearly show the benefit of active perception for outdoor object classification

DGCM-Net: Dense Geometrical Correspondence Matching Network for Incremental Experience-Based Robotic Grasping.

This article presents a method for grasping novel objects by learning from experience. Successful attempts are remembered and then used to guide future grasps such that more reliable grasping is achieved over time. To transfer the learned experience to unseen objects, we introduce the dense geometric correspondence matching network (DGCM-Net). This applies metric learning to encode objects with similar geometry nearby in feature space. Retrieving relevant experience for an unseen object is thus a nearest neighbor search with the encoded feature maps. DGCM-Net also reconstructs 3D-3D correspondences using the view-dependent normalized object coordinate space to transform grasp configurations from retrieved samples to unseen objects. In comparison to baseline methods, our approach achieves an equivalent grasp success rate. However, the baselines are significantly improved when fusing the knowledge from experience with their grasp proposal strategy. Offline experiments with a grasping dataset highlight the capability to transfer grasps to new instances as well as to improve success rate over time from increasing experience. Lastly, by learning task-relevant grasps, our approach can prioritize grasp configurations that enable the functional use of objects

Unmet need for the treatment of depression in Atlantic Canada

Objective: Most people with depression do not receive treatment, even though effective interventions are available. Population-based data can assist health service planners to improve access to mental health services. This study aimed to examine the determinants of untreated depression in Canada's Atlantic provinces