On the Foundation of Circular-Saw Stability Theory

The buckling and critical speed saw stability theories for predicting the flatness of a circular saw are discussed. Laboratory experiments were performed for evaluation of the stability concepts. The experiments include accurate measurement of the saw-disc natural frequencies or frequency spectrum and the measurement and inclusion of thermal effects in saw-disc stability analysis

Assessment of the impact of medPlan®, a medication reminder mobile application, in glaucoma patients in Benin City, Nigeria

Purpose: To assess the impact of medPlan®, a medication reminder mobile application in glaucoma patients in Benin City, Nigeria.Methods: In a randomized control trial with 2 months follow-up period, 200 patients receiving drug therapy for glaucoma were  randomized into either into a control or study group. The study group comprised participants who made use of a medication reminder mobile application, medPlan®, while the control group consisted of those patients who did not use the application. Adherence to medication was measured for all the patients in both groups. Data was collected using a carefully designed questionnaire and statistically analyzed.Results: This study recorded 100 % response rate from the participants. In the study group, 56 % were very adherent while 18 % were moderately adherent, and 26 % were non-adherent respondents as against 45 % very adherent, 13 % moderately adherent and 42 % non-adherent respondents from the control group. In addition, 78 % of those in the study group agreed that there was improvement in their medication adherence since they started using the medication reminder application. This showed a significant positive impact of the medication reminder application (p = 0.0110) on adherence to medication.Conclusion: Medication adherence was improved in glaucoma patients who used medPlan®, a smartphone medication reminder application. This study lays a foundation for further research on medication reminder mobile applications. Keywords: Glaucoma, Smartphone, Medication adherence, Impact, Medication reminder, medPlan

Disposal of Household Wastewater in Soils of High Stone Content (1981-1983)

Four experimental filter fields were constructed with built-in monitoring equipment in Nixa soils. These soils contain many chert fragments and a fragipan about 60 cm below the soil surface. The fragipan restricts downward movement of water and is the designlimitingfeature. The four filter fields were: 1. A standard filter field, 76 cm deep. The bottom of the trench was in the fragipan. 2. A modified standard filter field, 30 cm deep. The bottom of the trench was above the fragipan. 3. A modified pressure filter field, 40 cm deep. The bottom of the trench was above the fragipan. In addition, a pressure-distribution system was used to insure uniform distribution of effluent in the trench. Inadvertently, this field was installed in a different soil, and the results cannot be compared directly with the other three. 4. Another modified pressure filter field with the bottom of the trench only 6 cm below the soil surface. Observation of these systems confirms that placing filter fields higher in the soil above the hydraulically limiting horizon results in improved hydraulic performance. The presence of the fragipan amplified the adverse effects attributable to climatic stress. The seepage beds which are higher in the soil profile are able to handle the effluent load and climate load with less danger of surfacing

Multi-Pig Part Detection and Association with a Fully-Convolutional Network

Computer vision systems have the potential to provide automated, non-invasive monitoring of livestock animals, however, the lack of public datasets with well-defined targets and evaluation metrics presents a significant challenge for researchers. Consequently, existing solutions often focus on achieving task-specific objectives using relatively small, private datasets. This work introduces a new dataset and method for instance-level detection of multiple pigs in group-housed environments. The method uses a single fully-convolutional neural network to detect the location and orientation of each animal, where both body part locations and pairwise associations are represented in the image space. Accompanying this method is a new dataset containing 2000 annotated images with 24,842 individually annotated pigs from 17 different locations. The proposed method achieves over 99% precision and over 96% recall when detecting pigs in environments previously seen by the network during training. To evaluate the robustness of the trained network, it is also tested on environments and lighting conditions unseen in the training set, where it achieves 91% precision and 67% recall. The dataset is publicly available for download

Disposal of Household Wastewater in Soils of High Stone Content (1977-1980)

Two experimental septic tank filter fields were constructed with built-in monitoring equipment in Nixa soils. These soils contain many chert fragments and a fragipan about 60 cm deep which restricts downward water movement and is the design-limiting feature. The standard filter field (76 cm deep) was built into the fragipan and the modified standard filter field (30 cm deep) was placed above it. During 30 months\u27 observation, the modified standard performed better than the standard filter field. Maximum rise of effluent in the standard and modified standard came within 11 and 19 cm of the soil surface, respectively. Performance of these systems indicates filter fields should be designed to function during climatic stresses, i.e. when the soil has a maximum hydraulic load and surfacing may occur. Filter fields should be designed to withstand a stress period of specified intensity. The filter fields in this study were observed under less than normal stress. Therefore, their long range performance is less clear. Our observations indicate that filter field performance is related more to rates of water movement than to stone content. Major influences on filter field performance are rates and directions of water movement, stress period intensity, designs, and construction techniques

Review article: Towards strongly coupled ensemble data assimilation with additional improvements from machine learning

We assessed different coupled data assimilation strategies with a hierarchy of coupled models, ranging from a simple coupled Lorenz model to the state-of-the-art coupled general circulation model CFSv2 (Climate Forecast System version 2). With the coupled Lorenz model, we assessed the analysis accuracy by strongly coupled ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and 4D-Variational (4D-Var) methods with varying assimilation window lengths. The analysis accuracy of the strongly coupled EnKF with a short assimilation window is comparable to that of 4D-Var with a long assimilation window. For 4D-Var, the strongly coupled approach with the coupled model produces more accurate ocean analysis than the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO)-like approach using the uncoupled ocean model. Experiments with the coupled quasi-geostrophic model conclude that the strongly coupled approach outperforms the weakly coupled and uncoupled approaches for both the full-rank EnKF and 4D-Var, with the strongly coupled EnKF and 4D-Var showing a similar level of accuracy higher than other coupled data assimilation approaches such as outer-loop coupling. A strongly coupled EnKF software framework is developed and applied to the intermediate-complexity coupled model SPEEDY-NEMO and the state-of-the-art operational coupled model CFSv2. Experiments assimilating synthetic or real atmospheric observations into the ocean through strongly coupled EnKF show that the strongly coupled approach improves the analysis of the atmosphere and upper ocean but degrades observation fits in the deep ocean, probably due to the unreliable error correlation estimated by a small ensemble. The correlation-cutoff method is developed to reduce the unreliable error correlations between physically irrelevant model states and observations. Experiments with the coupled Lorenz model demonstrate that strongly coupled EnKF informed by the correlation-cutoff method produces more accurate coupled analyses than the weakly coupled and plain strongly coupled EnKF regardless of the ensemble size. To extend the correlation-cutoff method to operational coupled models, a neural network approach is proposed to systematically acquire the observation localization functions for all pairs between the model state and observation types. The following strongly coupled EnKF experiments with an intermediate-complexity coupled model show promising results with this method.</p

Selection for Intramuscular Fat in Duroc Swine – An Update

Long-term progress or improvement in many economically important traits is ultimately the responsibility of the seedstock supplier. If selection progress is to be made in traits of economic importance, the trait must: 1) be accurately measurable, 2) show sufficient heritability, and 3) display an adequate level of variation. For such reasons, tremendous progress has been made in the swine industry toward increasing lean meat percentage over the past quarter century. However, in more recent years, meat quality traits have received more attention and have become more important in breeding programs as producers and processors try to meet consumer demands for high quality, nutritious products

Atmospheric drivers of Greenland surface melt revealed by self-organizing maps

Recent acceleration in surface melt on the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) has occurred concurrently with a rapidly warming Arctic and has been connected to persistent, anomalous atmospheric circulation patterns over Greenland. To identify synoptic setups favoring enhanced GrIS surface melt and their decadal changes, we develop a summer Arctic synoptic climatology by employing self-organizing maps. These are applied to daily 500 hPa geopotential height fields obtained from the Modern Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications reanalysis, 1979–2014. Particular circulation regimes are related to meteorological conditions and GrIS surface melt estimated with outputs from the Modèle Atmosphérique Régional. Our results demonstrate that the largest positive melt anomalies occur in concert with positive height anomalies near Greenland associated with wind, temperature, and humidity patterns indicative of strong meridional transport of heat and moisture. We find an increased frequency in a 500 hPa ridge over Greenland coinciding with a 63% increase in GrIS melt between the 1979–1988 and 2005–2014 periods, with 75.0% of surface melt changes attributed to thermodynamics, 17% to dynamics, and 8.0% to a combination. We also confirm that the 2007–2012 time period has the largest dynamic forcing relative of any period but also demonstrate that increased surface energy fluxes, temperature, and moisture separate from dynamic changes contributed more to melt even during this period. This implies that GrIS surface melt is likely to continue to increase in response to an ever warmer future Arctic, regardless of future atmospheric circulation patterns

GCIP water and energy budget synthesis (WEBS)

As part of the World Climate Research Program\u27s (WCRPs) Global Energy and Water-Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Continental-scale International Project (GCIP), a preliminary water and energy budget synthesis (WEBS) was developed for the period 1996–1999 from the “best available” observations and models. Besides this summary paper, a companion CD-ROM with more extensive discussion, figures, tables, and raw data is available to the interested researcher from the GEWEX project office, the GAPP project office, or the first author. An updated online version of the CD-ROM is also available at http://ecpc.ucsd.edu/gcip/webs.htm/. Observations cannot adequately characterize or “close” budgets since too many fundamental processes are missing. Models that properly represent the many complicated atmospheric and near-surface interactions are also required. This preliminary synthesis therefore included a representative global general circulation model, regional climate model, and a macroscale hydrologic model as well as a global reanalysis and a regional analysis. By the qualitative agreement among the models and available observations, it did appear that we now qualitatively understand water and energy budgets of the Mississippi River Basin. However, there is still much quantitative uncertainty. In that regard, there did appear to be a clear advantage to using a regional analysis over a global analysis or a regional simulation over a global simulation to describe the Mississippi River Basin water and energy budgets. There also appeared to be some advantage to using a macroscale hydrologic model for at least the surface water budgets