Developing controls software for hydraulic motor test stand

Two hydraulic motors were tested to gather data for the development of a prognostics system to detect the early stages of bearing failures. A controls system is required to operate the test motors at the desired speed, pressure, and displacement. Along with controlling the test motors, an electric drive motor, the pump stack, and cooling fans needed to be controlled and monitored

Very large π-conjugation despite strong nonplanarity : a path for designing new semiconducting polymers

When two π-conjugated fragments are connected by a bond between two sp2 carbon atoms, a torsion around this bond is expected to break the overall π-conjugation. We show that for specially selected monomers, the π-conjugation is insensitive to torsions around a C–C bond up to about 60°. We provide a number of examples for this very unexpected phenomenon and a simple explanation. We propose that this feature can be incorporated into conjugated polymers to generate semiconducting materials that are extremely insensitive to structural disorder

Abortion, Informed Consent, and Regulatory Spillover

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right. This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other decisions that have approved abortion-specific informed-consent requirements have failed to account for this interstate dynamic. In recent years, fourteen states, led by South Dakota, have enacted statutes that direct doctors to warn patients, as part of an informed-consent dialogue, that abor-tion might cause depression and even suicide ideation and actual suicide. Although there is broad medical consensus that such warnings are unnecessary, courts have nonetheless concluded that the Supreme Court’s Casey decision shields them from constitutional challenge. This may have implications not just in the states that man-date such warnings, but nationwide. Because doctors’ informed-consent obligations incorporate medical information and practices from other jurisdictions, a doctor’s failure to warn a patient about postabortion depression may expose her to liability for medical malpractice—even where her own state does not mandate such a warn-ing statutorily. Eliminating this risk by warning a patient that abortion might lead to depression costs the doctor much less than the penalties she might incur for with-holding that information. This dynamic—which we term the “South Dakota effect”—threatens to transform informed-consent practices across the country, with profound consequences for women’s willingness to elect abortion and for the experiences of women who choose to go forward with abortion procedures. More broadly, it highlights the need to re-think the abortion-federalism nexus

The utility of scoring systems in critically ill cirrhotic patients admitted to a general intensive care unit

Purpose: This study aimed to establish which prognostic scoring tool provides the greatest discriminative ability when assessing critically ill cirrhotic patients in a general intensive care unit (ICU) setting.<p></p> Methods: This was a 12-month, single-centered prospective cohort study performed in a general, nontransplant ICU. Forty clinical and demographic variables were collected on admission to calculate 8 prospective scoring tools. Patients were followed up to obtain ICU and inhospital mortality. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to determine the discriminative ability of the scores. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to identify any independent predictors of mortality in these patients. The incorporation of any significant variables into the scoring tools was assessed.<p></p> Results: Fifty-nine cirrhotic patients were admitted over the study period, with an ICU mortality of 31%. All scores other than the renal-specific Acute Kidney Injury Network score had similar discriminative abilities, producing area under the curves of between 0.70 and 0.76. None reached the clinically applicable level of 0.8. The Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score was the best performing score. Lactate and ascites were individual predictors of ICU mortality with statistically significant odds ratios of 1.69 and 5.91, respectively. When lactate was incorporated into the Child-Pugh score, its prognostic accuracy increased to a clinically applicable level (area under the curve, 0.86).<p></p> Conclusions: This investigation suggests that established prognostic scoring systems should be used with caution when applied to the general, nontransplant ICU as compared to specialist centers. Our data suggest that serum arterial lactate may improve the prognostic ability of these scores

Validation of Oxygen-16 Iron-56 Copper-63 and Copper-65 ENDF/B-VIII.0 Cross Section Performance in Criticality Safety Benchmarks

The ENDF/B-VII.1 nuclear data library is one of the most popular libraries used for criticality safety applications. With the 2018 release of the ENDF/B-VIII.0 revisions, performance and validation of the new library relative to ENDF/B-VII.1 is desired to determine the effects of new data on the discrepancies between calculated Monte Carlo criticality eigenvalues and documented high quality experimental criticality data from the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project. For validation, oxygen iron and copper cross sections were selected for performance validation, due to copper's dramatic cross section changes at intermediate and fast energies, and oxygen and iron's inclusion in the Collaborative International Evaluated Library Organization project. Benchmarked critical experiments were selected based on a high total cross section energy-integrated sensitivity, a quantitative measure of the criticality impact due to a change in cross section values. In total, 102 benchmarked configurations were selected; 63 exhibiting sensitivity to Oxygen-16, 25 to Iron-56, and 32 to copper isotopes. Benchmarks were modeled in the CSAS Monte Carlo sequence of the SCALE 6.2.3 code system, using the full ENDF/B-VII.1 library, the ENDF/B-VII.1 library with ENDF/B-VIII.0 substitutions for individual isotopes of interest, and the full ENDF/B-VIII.0 library.M.S

A Theory of Tagged Objects

Foundational models of object-oriented constructs typically model objects as records with a structural type. However, many object-oriented languages are class-based; statically-typed formal models of these languages tend to sacrifice the foundational nature of the record-based models, and in addition cannot express dynamic class loading or creation. In this paper, we explore how to model statically-typed object-oriented languages that support dynamic class creation using foundational constructs of type theory. We start with an extensible tag construct motivated by type theory, and adapt it to support static reasoning about class hierarchy and the tags supported by each object. The result is a model that better explains the relationship between object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, suggests a useful enhancement to functional programming languages, and paves the way for more expressive statically typed object-oriented languages. In that vein, we describe the design and implementation of the Wyvern language, which leverages our theory

Integration of a Cognitive Assessment Task into Exergame Gameplay Elements

Lack of exercise is related to a variety of health issues, including cognitive decline in older adults. Tools for encouraging regular exercise such as exergames are a useful preventative measure, but regular screening for impairment is still important. However, standard cognitive screening methods can be both time-consuming and tedious. Integrating these screening methods into a frequently played exergame is one way to enable regular screening, but requires that the integration is not obtrusive and does not interfere with the gameplay. We present an exergame in which a standard cognitive screening tool, the AX-Continuous Performance Task, is integrated into the game in a non-obstrusive fashion. As an starting step in assessing this approach, we validate the comparability of the measurement capacity of this integrated tool by assessing user performance in the test with non-impaired adults. Our results indicate that the test is comparable to the traditional form of the test when conducted within the context of a game, and is not clearly perceived as a test rather than a gameplay element by the users. However, increasing task complexity through additional gameplay elements does interfere with task performance