Investigations for the improvement of space shuttle main engine electron beam welding equipment

Progress made in the testing, evaluation, and correction of MSFC's 7.5 kW electron beam welder in support of space shuttle main engine component welding is summarized. The objective of this project was to locate and correct the deficiencies in the welder. Some 17 areas were deficient in the 7.5 kW ERI welding system and the associated corrective action was taken to improve its operational performance. An overall improvement of 20 times the original reliability was obtained at full rated capacity after the modifications were made

The Decoupling of Marriage and Parenthood? Trends in the Timing of Marital First Births, 1945–2002

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106837/1/jomf12114.pd

Development of targeted messages to promote smoking cessation among construction trade workers

Blue-collar workers, particularly those in the construction trades, are more likely to smoke and have less success in quitting when compared with white-collar workers. Little is known about health communication strategies that might influence this priority population. This article describes our formative work to develop targeted messages to increase participation in an existing smoking cessation program among construction workers. Using an iterative and sequential mixed-methods approach, we explored the culture, health attitudes and smoking behaviors of unionized construction workers. We used focus group and survey data to inform message development, and applied audience segmentation methods to identify potential subgroups. Among 144 current smokers, 65% reported wanting to quit smoking in the next 6 months and only 15% had heard of a union-sponsored smoking cessation program, despite widespread advertising. We tested 12 message concepts and 26 images with the target audience to evaluate perceived relevance and effectiveness. Participants responded most favorably to messages and images that emphasized family and work, although responses varied by audience segments based on age and parental status. This study is an important step towards integrating the culture of a high-risk group into targeted messages to increase participation in smoking cessation activities

Peacebuilding for faith-based development organisations: Informing theory and practice

Abstract Faith leaders and their congregations have been recognised as holding the potential to engage positively in peacebuilding activities in a post-conflict context. Alongside this, faith-based development organisations (FBDOs) have the ability to engage with these constituencies to increase the peacebuilding impact of their activities. This paper presents a framework of faith engagement for FBDOs to work with local faith leaders and people of faith to develop the peacebuilding impact of development activities. A reworking of Anderson's "Do No Harm", it encompasses the areas that FBDOs need to address in order to be effective peacebuilding actors in a faith context

Fertility, Living Arrangements, Care and Mobility

There are four main interconnecting themes around which the contributions in this book are based. This introductory chapter aims to establish the broad context for the chapters that follow by discussing each of the themes. It does so by setting these themes within the overarching demographic challenge of the twenty-first century – demographic ageing. Each chapter is introduced in the context of the specific theme to which it primarily relates and there is a summary of the data sets used by the contributors to illustrate the wide range of cross-sectional and longitudinal data analysed

Critical Casimir forces and adsorption profiles in the presence of a chemically structured substrate

Motivated by recent experiments with confined binary liquid mixtures near demixing, we study the universal critical properties of a system, which belongs to the Ising universality class, in the film geometry. We employ periodic boundary conditions in the two lateral directions and fixed boundary conditions on the two confining surfaces, such that one of them has a spatially homogeneous adsorption preference while the other one exhibits a laterally alternating adsorption preference, resembling locally a single chemical step. By means of Monte Carlo simulations of an improved Hamiltonian, so that the leading scaling corrections are suppressed, numerical integration, and finite-size scaling analysis we determine the critical Casimir force and its universal scaling function for various values of the aspect ratio of the film. In the limit of a vanishing aspect ratio the critical Casimir force of this system reduces to the mean value of the critical Casimir force for laterally homogeneous ++ and +- boundary conditions, corresponding to the surface spins on the two surfaces being fixed to equal and opposite values, respectively. We show that the universal scaling function of the critical Casimir force for small but finite aspect ratios displays a linear dependence on the aspect ratio which is solely due to the presence of the lateral inhomogeneity. We also analyze the order-parameter profiles at criticality and their universal scaling function which allows us to probe theoretical predictions and to compare with experimental data.Comment: revised version, section 5.2 expanded; 53 pages, 12 figures, iopart clas

What We Would Have Done Differently Now That It Is Too Late

We might as well begin on a note of candor by admitting the worst error we ever made, for of all the things that we would have done differently this surely heads the list. On the errata page of volume 8 appears the note: Volume 4, p. 309, n. 1. The man wrongly identified as Robert Brown Elliott [a black man] was actually William Elliott, a white man. The letter to BTW, Apr. 25,1898, was from Rev. G. M. Elliott of Beaufort, S.C. Not only had we confused a black man with a white man and another black man, but in a display of erudition we gratuitously had mentioned a letter that Elliott-the wrong Elliott-wrote to Booker T. Washington fourteen years after our own annotation indicated his death date. And they say that dead men tell no tales. At least there were no errata in our erratum. Such a compounding of errors could only have been achieved by a committee. For most of our annotations, we are able to trace back responsibility by checking the raw data notes, but in this case these had mysteriously disappeared. It all reminds us of the famous Nast cartoon about the Tweed ring. It shows a circle of bloated politicians. The caption reads, Who Stole the People\u27s Money? Each man is pointing his finger at the man on his left. That is our worst error yet, but we still have to do the cumulative index with its infinite possibilities. Without trying to explain away an error that gross, we can only say that it is the kind of error that occurred only once, and occurred in spite of our editorial method rather than because of it. Most of the other outright errors were less egregious: misspelled names; failure to annotate at first mention-we now have a system for that; and attributing to the A. M. E. Church what should properly be credited to the A. M. E. Zion Church-there is a man in Atlanta who reads our volumes apparently for no other purpose than to catch any slighting of his church

The Demography of Families: A Review of Patterns and Change

The authors review demographic trends and research on families in the United States, with a special focus on the past decade. They consider the following several topics: (a) marriage and remarriage, (b) divorce, (c) cohabitation, (d) fertility, (e) same‐gender unions, (f) immigrant families, and (g) children’s living arrangements. Throughout, the authors review both overall trends and patterns as well as those by social class and race–ethnicity. The authors discuss major strands of recent research, emphasizing emerging themes and promising directions. They close with a summary of central patterns and trends and conclude that recent trends are not as uniform as they tended to be in earlier decades, making the description of family change increasingly complex.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152984/1/jomf12612.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152984/2/jomf12612_am.pd