Acoustic positioning and orientation prediction

A method is described for use with an acoustic positioner, which enables a determination of the equilibrium position and orientation which an object assumes in a zero gravity environment, as well as restoring forces and torques of an object in an acoustic standing wave field. An acoustic standing wave field is established in the chamber, and the object is held at several different positions near the expected equilibrium position. While the object is held at each position, the center resonant frequency of the chamber is determined, by noting which frequency results in the greatest pressure of the acoustic field. The object position which results in the lowest center resonant frequency is the equilibrium position. The orientation of a nonspherical object is similarly determined, by holding the object in a plurality of different orientations at its equilibrium position, and noting the center resonant frequency for each orientation. The orientation which results in the lowest center resonant frequency is the equilibrium orientation. Where the acoustic frequency is constant, but the chamber length is variable, the equilibrium position or orientation is that which results in the greatest chamber length at the center resonant frequency

Freelancer

Follow Captain Travers and the crew of the Tireless Nomad, a surplus military exploration ship, on one leg of their voyage through a particularly perilous sector of pirate patrolled space. Everything starts out normally enough, but before long chaos ensues

Unguided Cyber Education Techniques of the Non-Expert

The United States Air Force and Department of Defense continues to rely on its total workforce to provide the first layer of protection against cyber intrusion. Prior research has shown that the workforce is not adequately educated to perform this task. As a result, DoD cybersecurity strategy now includes attempting to improve education and training on cyber-related concepts and technical skills to all users of DoD networks. This paper describes an experiment designed to understand the broad methods that non-expert users may use to educate themselves on how to perform technical tasks. Preliminary results informed subsequent experiments that directly compared frequently utilized, but flawed resources to improved versions of those resources to determine preferable educational methods. This paper provides the protocol and population characteristics for both phases of the experiment, results from phase one, and preliminary results from phase two. In a related effort, the Air Force Institute of Technology is designing and implementing an online learning platform for centralizing a variety of cyber-educational materials. This platform is built-on prior groundbreaking research understanding how people, especially young people, learn best in the modern era. This thesis will assist in informing the design of educational platforms, like AFIT’s, by providing a unique understanding of how participants search for and select cyber-education on their own, and demonstrating which self-instruction resources are the most and least effective. This is the first experiment of its kind to combine human subject provided variables, while attempting to statistically measure those human provided variables in the cyber-education domain

Effect of Malathion on the Microbial Ecology of Activated Sludge

Decontamination activities may cause the release of contaminated washwater into the wastewater that eventually flows into a wastewater treatment facility. This raises concerns about the effect of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) on the microbial consortia that are responsible for cleaning the wastewater. This study investigated the impact of malathion on the microbial ecology of laboratory scale activated sludge communities. The Simpson Reciprocal Index decreased for three bioreactors operated in the absence of malathion, which showed that the microbial assemblage became less diverse during the course of the study. The species identified in the bioreactors belonged to well-known groups of heterotrophic and autotrophic bacteria, and these groups were represented in the presence and absence of malathion. Nitrospira, a key player in autotrophic nitrogen removal, decreased in relative abundance for the bioreactor exposed to 0.1 mg/L of malathion but increased in the bioreactor exposed to 3 mg/L of malathion, possibly due to interactions with heterotrophic groups that suffered inhibition. To the author\u27s knowledge, this study is the first to document the ecological impacts of long term malathion exposure in bioreactors carrying out COD removal and nitrification

Reallocation Problems in Scheduling

In traditional on-line problems, such as scheduling, requests arrive over time, demanding available resources. As each request arrives, some resources may have to be irrevocably committed to servicing that request. In many situations, however, it may be possible or even necessary to reallocate previously allocated resources in order to satisfy a new request. This reallocation has a cost. This paper shows how to service the requests while minimizing the reallocation cost. We focus on the classic problem of scheduling jobs on a multiprocessor system. Each unit-size job has a time window in which it can be executed. Jobs are dynamically added and removed from the system. We provide an algorithm that maintains a valid schedule, as long as a sufficiently feasible schedule exists. The algorithm reschedules only a total number of O(min{log^* n, log^* Delta}) jobs for each job that is inserted or deleted from the system, where n is the number of active jobs and Delta is the size of the largest window.Comment: 9 oages, 1 table; extended abstract version to appear in SPAA 201

On the Privacy Risks of Algorithmic Recourse

As predictive models are increasingly being employed to make consequential decisions, there is a growing emphasis on developing techniques that can provide algorithmic recourse to affected individuals. While such recourses can be immensely beneficial to affected individuals, potential adversaries could also exploit these recourses to compromise privacy. In this work, we make the first attempt at investigating if and how an adversary can leverage recourses to infer private information about the underlying model's training data. To this end, we propose a series of novel membership inference attacks which leverage algorithmic recourse. More specifically, we extend the prior literature on membership inference attacks to the recourse setting by leveraging the distances between data instances and their corresponding counterfactuals output by state-of-the-art recourse methods. Extensive experimentation with real world and synthetic datasets demonstrates significant privacy leakage through recourses. Our work establishes unintended privacy leakage as an important risk in the widespread adoption of recourse methods

Digitizing local zines in public libraries

Has your library considered beginning a local history collection? If so, have you wondered what types of materials to include? This article will take you through the development of the new Community History Archive (CHA) project at Daniel Boone Regional Library (DBRL), a library system in mid-Missouri that serves two counties. The project began with a few small collections of photographs of the library and of a local one-room schoolhouse, but when the opportunity arose to digitize a local zine, we thought that it would be an excellent test for the system while also expanding the scope of the CHA

The Visual–Inertial Canoe Dataset

We present a dataset collected from a canoe along the Sangamon River in Illinois. The canoe was equipped with a stereo camera, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a global positioning system (GPS) device, which provide visual data suitable for stereo or monocular applications, inertial measurements, and position data for ground truth. We recorded a canoe trip up and down the river for 44 minutes covering a 2.7 km round trip. The dataset adds to those previously recorded in unstructured environments and is unique in that it is recorded on a river, which provides its own set of challenges and constraints that are described in this paper. The dataset is stored on the Illinois Data Bank and can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.13012/B2IDB-9342111_V1