Hybrid thermocouple development program

The design and development of a hybrid thermocouple, having a segmented SiGe-PbTe n-leg encapsulated within a hollow cylindrical p-SiGe leg, is described. Hybrid couple efficiency is calculated to be 10% to 15% better than that of a all-SiGe couple. A preliminary design of a planar RTG, employing hybrid couples and a water heat pipe radiator, is described as an example of a possible system application. Hybrid couples, fabricated initially, were characterized by higher than predicted resistance and, in some cases, bond separations. Couples made later in the program, using improved fabrication techniques, exhibited normal resistances, both as-fabricated and after 700 hours of testing. Two flat-plate sections of the reference design thermoelectric converter were fabricated and delivered to NASA Lewis for testing and evaluation

Exploration of an oculometer-based model of pilot workload

Potential relationships between eye behavior and pilot workload are discussed. A Honeywell Mark IIA oculometer was used to obtain the eye data in a fixed base transport aircraft simulation facility. The data were analyzed to determine those parameters of eye behavior which were related to changes in level of task difficulty of the simulated manual approach and landing on instruments. A number of trends and relationships between eye variables and pilot ratings were found. A preliminary equation was written based on the results of a stepwise linear regression. High variability in time spent on various instruments was related to differences in scanning strategy among pilots. A more detailed analysis of individual runs by individual pilots was performed to investigate the source of this variability more closely. Results indicated a high degree of intra-pilot variability in instrument scanning. No consistent workload related trends were found. Pupil diameter which had demonstrated a strong relationship to task difficulty was extensively re-exmained

On the asymptotic normality of persistent Betti numbers

Persistent Betti numbers are a major tool in persistent homology, a subfield of topological data analysis. Many tools in persistent homology rely on the properties of persistent Betti numbers considered as a two-dimensional stochastic process $(r,s) \mapsto n^{-1/2} (\beta^{r,s}_q ( \mathcal{K}(n^{1/d} S_n))-\mathbb{E}[\beta^{r,s}_q ( \mathcal{K}( n^{1/d} S_n))])$. So far, pointwise limit theorems have been established in different set-ups. In particular, the pointwise asymptotic normality of (persistent) Betti numbers has been established for stationary Poisson processes and binomial processes with constant intensity function in the so-called critical (or thermodynamic) regime, see Yogeshwaran et al. [2017] and Hiraoka et al. [2018]. In this contribution, we derive a strong stabilizing property (in the spirit of Penrose and Yukich [2001] of persistent Betti numbers and generalize the existing results on the asymptotic normality to the multivariate case and to a broader class of underlying Poisson and binomial processes. Most importantly, we show that the multivariate asymptotic normality holds for all pairs $(r,s)$, $0\le r\le s<\infty$, and that it is not affected by percolation effects in the underlying random geometric graph