Dialoging A Successful Pedagogy for Embedded Tutors

Over the past three years, Rider University’s Student Success Center Writing Lab has implemented an embedded tutor program for composition courses. Tutors attend class, participate in class discussions, facilitate writing workshops in class, and hold drop-in hours for students (in addition to tutors’ Writing Lab hours). The Embedded Tutor (ET) program, facilitated by Jenny Scudder (who is also the Writing Lab Director), has been successful in helping students complete skills-based courses and connect to academic support services. Initial assessment of the ET program supports the inclusion of the tutor in a skills-based course. While an ET’s training is similar to a tutor who works solely in the Writing Lab, there are key additions that are vital to the tutors’—and the program’s—succesUniversity Writing Cente

Photovoltaic refrigeration application: Assessment of the near-term market

This foreign and domestic market assessment was performed as part of the Tests and Applications Project being conducted by NASA-LeRC as part of the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Photovoltaic Program. One of the objectives of that program was to stimulate the demand for photovoltaic power systems so that appropriate markets would be developed in concert with the increasing photovoltaic production capacity. The refrigeration application represented a possible market for photovoltaics; hence, a brief survey of potential applications was conducted. Both refrigerators and refrigeration systems were considered in the assessment although the primary emphasis is on refrigerators of 9 cu ft of less. Three user sectors were examined: (1) government, (2) commercial/institutional, and (3) general public

Photovoltaic highway applications: Assessment of the near-term market

A preliminary assessment of the near-term market for photovoltaic highway applications is presented. Among the potential users, two market sectors are considered: government and commercial. Within these sectors, two possible application areas, signs and motorist aids, are discussed. Based on judgemental information, obtained by a brief survey of representatives of the two user sectors, the government sector appears more amenable to the introduction of photovoltaic power sources for highway applications in the near-term. However, considerable interest and potential opportunities were also found to exist in the commercial sector. Further studies to quantify the market for highway applications appear warranted

Photovoltaic remote instrument applications: Assessment of the near-term market

A preliminary assessment of the near term market for photovoltaic remote instrument applications is presented. Among the potential users, two market sectors are considered: government and private. However, the majority of the remote systems studied are operated by or for the federal, state, or local governments. Environmental monitoring and surveillance remote instrument systems are discussed. Based on information obtained in this preliminary market survey, a domestic, civilian market of at least 1.3 MW sub pk is forecast for remote instrument systems. This estimate is exclusive of several potentially large scale markets for remote instruments which are identified but for which no hard data is available

Tunisia Renewable Energy Project systems description report

In 1979, the Agency for International Development (AID) initiated a renewable energy project with the Government of Tunisia to develop an institutional capability to plan and institute renewable energy technologies in a rural area. The specific objective of the district energy applications subproject was to demonstrate solar and wind energy systems in a rural village setting. The NASA Lewis Research Center was asked by the AID Near East Bureau to manage and implement this subproject. This report describes the project and gives detailed desciptions of the various systems

Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation

We introduce a new loss function for the weakly-supervised training of semantic image segmentation models based on three guiding principles: to seed with weak localization cues, to expand objects based on the information about which classes can occur in an image, and to constrain the segmentations to coincide with object boundaries. We show experimentally that training a deep convolutional neural network using the proposed loss function leads to substantially better segmentations than previous state-of-the-art methods on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. We furthermore give insight into the working mechanism of our method by a detailed experimental study that illustrates how the segmentation quality is affected by each term of the proposed loss function as well as their combinations.Comment: ECCV 201

Reception of laser generated ultrasound from a CFRP plate by an air matched piezoelectric composite transducer

Laser generated ultrasound is being investigated [1,2] for testing structures made of both conventional metals and carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP). Laser interferometers are widely used in such work to detect the normal surface motion caused by ultrasonic pulses. Interferometers offer non-contact, remote and high-fidelity detection, together with a potential to cover large areas rapidly by optical scanning. However their cost is high and only in testing large and/or expensive structures may the cost be justified. A lower cost alternative, but with some compromise on the virtues of an interferometer, would be to use an air transducer as a receiver