Nuclear Families for the Nuclear Age: Disney\u27s Part in Creating Gender Roles in the 1950s

The 1950s was a revolutionary period for American youth culture. The Walt Disney Company played an important role in forming and conveying a new image and set of ideals associated with childhood. My paper examines the Disney Company’s messages about growing up, in particular, the gendered expectations surrounding love that revolutionized the way Americans viewed family life. For both ideological and business reasons, Disney promoted an idealized concept of the nuclear family to children. My paper pays close attention to the conversation occurring between Disney and the American public by analyzing both 1950s Disney storylines, disseminated in multiple mediums such as movies, toys, and books, and the public’s reactions to them. My paper presents its findings in three main sections: parenting, growing up, and building a family. In each section, I look at the marketing strategies and public’s reactions. Previous scholarship about Disney has tended to focus only on Disney movies. By comparing multiple media for their message, my paper allows for a greater understanding of the reciprocal impact of Disney and the American public. And, as anyone with children, or who was one in the twenty-first century knows, the conversation between Disney and the American public is still going strong

Evaluation of an Outer Loop Retrofit Architecture for Intelligent Turbofan Engine Thrust Control

The thrust control capability of a retrofit architecture for intelligent turbofan engine control and diagnostics is evaluated. The focus of the study is on the portion of the hierarchical architecture that performs thrust estimation and outer loop thrust control. The inner loop controls fan speed so the outer loop automatically adjusts the engine's fan speed command to maintain thrust at the desired level, based on pilot input, even as the engine deteriorates with use. The thrust estimation accuracy is assessed under nominal and deteriorated conditions at multiple operating points, and the closed loop thrust control performance is studied, all in a complex real-time nonlinear turbofan engine simulation test bed. The estimation capability, thrust response, and robustness to uncertainty in the form of engine degradation are evaluated

Nonparametric Multi-Level Clustering of Human Epilepsy Seizures

Understanding neuronal activity in the human brain is an extremely difficult problem both in terms of measurement and statistical modeling. We address a particular research question in this area: the analysis of human intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) recordings of epileptic seizures from a collection of patients. In these data, each seizure of each patient is defined by the activities of many individual recording channels. The modeling of epileptic seizures is challenging due the large amount of heterogeneity in iEEG signal between channels within a particular seizure, between seizures within an individual, and across individuals. We develop a new nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian model that simultaneously addresses these multiple levels of heterogeneity in our epilepsy data. Our approach, which we call a multi-level clustering hierarchical Dirichlet process (MLC-HDP), clusters over channel activities within a seizure, over seizures of a patient and over patients. We demonstrate the advantages of our methodology over alternative approaches in human EEG seizure data and show that its seizure clustering is close to manual clustering by a physician expert. We also address important clinical questions like “to which seizures of other patients is this seizure similar?

A Retro-Fit Control Architecture to Maintain Engine Performance With Usage

An outer loop retrofit engine control architecture is presented which modifies fan speed command to obtain a desired thrust based on throttle position. This maintains the throttle-to-thrust relationship in the presence of engine degradation, which has the effect of changing the engine s thrust output for a given fan speed. Such an approach can minimize thrust asymmetry in multi-engine aircraft, and reduce pilot workload. The outer loop control is demonstrated under various levels of engine deterioration using a standard deterioration profile as well as an atypical profile. It is evaluated across various transients covering a wide operating range. The modified fan speed command still utilizes the standard engine control logic so all original life and operability limits remain in place. In all cases it is shown that with the outer loop thrust control in place, the deteriorated engine is able to match the thrust performance of a new engine up to the limits the controller will allow

Disrupted seasonal clockwork in the population dynamics of a freshwater copepod by climate warming

Life history responses are expected to accompany climate warming, yet little is known how long-term effects of climate and environmental change affect the seasonal dynamics of planktonic organisms. We used an historical data set from Lake Washington (U.S.A.) to quantify population responses of a calanoid copepod (Leptodiaptomus ashlandi) to long-term changes in temperature and resource availability and explore potential mechanisms for the responses. Increasing water temperatures (annual mean increase of 1.5 degrees C in the upper 10-m water volume) and longer stratification periods (about 4 weeks) were observed between 1962 and 2005, coincident with a pronounced decline in Leptodiaptomus densities. However, production was maintained because of an increase in the production to biomass ratio and a life cycle shift in Leptodiaptomus from an annual to a 6-month cycle. Cross-wavelet analyses demonstrated that the annual thermal forcing of copepod recruitment observed during the first two decades of the study weakened substantially, leading to more stochastic population dynamics during the past two decades. This shift from one to two generations per year was most likely produced by a longer and warmer growing period combined with changing fluctuations in resource (phytoplankton) availability. Climate change can lead to higher-frequency voltinism in ectothermic organisms and to temporal reorganization of their population dynamics

Use of Camera Collars to Reassess the Foraging Strategies of Bears in Yellowstone National Park

Black bears and grizzly bears are opportunistic omnivores that consume a seasonally dynamic diet that varies over time and space. Changes in climate may influence the abundance and distribution of foods consumed by bears, which may place bears in closer proximity to humans and increase human-bear interactions. Therefore, reliable data on bear diets will remain important information for managers. Previous studies of bear foraging relied on visiting locations from GPS collars and documenting bear activity, but evidence of activity or foraging was observed at only 30–50% of locations. Emerging technologies, such as GPS camera collars, can provide new insights into the ecology of cryptic animals, including bears, and could be used to better understand the dynamic nature of their diets. During 2014–2016, we deployed GPS camera collars on 3 grizzly bears and 3 black bears in Yellowstone National Park as a pilot study to gain insights about the nutritional ecology of these species. Field crews observed sign of bear activity at ~52% of the GPS locations searched, which is comparable to other studies. However, when we compared the sign found by field crews to videos recorded by the collars at the same locations, the two methods matched only 18.6% of the time. This low congruence demonstrates a need to improve methods to understand foraging activities. Inference may be improved by matching rich datasets from GPS-tracking devices (i.e., location information and accelerometer data) with video documentation to predict bear foraging behaviors

Fingerprints of biocomplexity: Taxon‐specific growth of phytoplankton in relation to environmental factors

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110012/1/lno2004494part21446.pd

A Sensitivity Study of Commercial Aircraft Engine Response for Emergency Situations

This paper contains the details of a sensitivity study in which the variation in a commercial aircraft engine's outputs is observed for perturbations in its operating condition inputs or control parameters. This study seeks to determine the extent to which various controller limits can be modified to improve engine performance, while capturing the increased risk that results from the changes. In an emergency, the engine may be required to produce additional thrust, respond faster, or both, to improve the survivability of the aircraft. The objective of this paper is to propose changes to the engine controller and determine the costs and benefits of the additional capabilities produced by the engine. This study indicates that the aircraft engine is capable of producing additional thrust, but at the cost of an increased risk of an engine failure due to higher turbine temperatures and rotor speeds. The engine can also respond more quickly to transient commands, but this action reduces the remaining stall margin to possibly dangerous levels. To improve transient response in landing scenarios, a control mode known as High Speed Idle is proposed that increases the responsiveness of the engine and conserves stall margi

Identifying Priority Health Conditions, Environmental Data, and Infrastructure Needs: A Synopsis of the Pew Environmental Health Tracking Project

In this article we describe the methodologic approaches of the Pew Environmental Health Commission at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health used to identify priority environmental health conditions and develop recommendations to establish a national environmental public health tracking network. We present the results of a survey of public health and environmental practitioners to uncover state and local health tracking needs and priorities. We describe the steps that combined the findings from the state and local health tracking survey and a review of the state of the science on environmental impacts on health to identify priority health end points. Through an examination of national health and health care databases, we then describe trends and public health effects of those diseases that may be linked to the environment. Based on this analysis, respiratory diseases and neurologic diseases are recommended as priorities for tracking. Specific end points recommended for tracking include asthma and chronic respiratory diseases, and chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Based on trends in reported prevalence, consideration should also be given to developmental disabilities, reproductive disorders, and endocrine/metabolic disorders. Strengthening of current efforts to track cancer and birth defects should also be included as components of a nationwide health tracking network. Finally, we present the recommendations for environmental public health tracking. These recommendations provided the groundwork for the development of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Environmental Public Health Tracking Progam that now includes 21 states, three cities, and three academic centers throughout the nation