When More Democracy Means More Inequality: A Path Analysis

Path analysis is used to examine an observed positive relationship between inequality and democracy. Specifically, the impact of democracy and corruption on inequality and per capita income is assessed based on a cross-sectional data set covering 125 countries. We show high inequality democracies are associated with elevated corruption, lower per capita income, and a ceiling on democratic achievement. We argue that democracy increasing in tandem with inequality is consistent with authoritarian leadership attempting to grow an economy for self-enrichment. We propose measures of democracy need to account for democratic policies whose actual aim may be the enrichment of elites

DefGoalNet: Contextual Goal Learning from Demonstrations For Deformable Object Manipulation

Shape servoing, a robotic task dedicated to controlling objects to desired goal shapes, is a promising approach to deformable object manipulation. An issue arises, however, with the reliance on the specification of a goal shape. This goal has been obtained either by a laborious domain knowledge engineering process or by manually manipulating the object into the desired shape and capturing the goal shape at that specific moment, both of which are impractical in various robotic applications. In this paper, we solve this problem by developing a novel neural network DefGoalNet, which learns deformable object goal shapes directly from a small number of human demonstrations. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness on various robotic tasks, both in simulation and on a physical robot. Notably, in the surgical retraction task, even when trained with as few as 10 demonstrations, our method achieves a median success percentage of nearly 90%. These results mark a substantial advancement in enabling shape servoing methods to bring deformable object manipulation closer to practical, real-world applications.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024. 8 pages, 11 figure

Compaction Grouting for Seismic Mitigation of Sensitive Urban Sites

For moderately loaded structures founded on liquefiable soils, spread footings on improved ground can provide considerable cost savings over deep foundation options. Liquefaction mitigation by ground improvement must be properly designed and executed; and should include a field verification program. Although densification is the most effective method of achieving verifiable mitigation of liquefaction susceptible soils, vibro-densification methods are often disregarded for urban sites due to concern for adjacent structures and utilities. An alternative to vibratory methods is compaction grouting, which can achieve densification of cohesionless materials while avoiding excessive vibration of adjacent structures. Recently, compaction grouting was successfully applied to densify a thick loose sand layer (up to 40 feet) for a large development site in an urban environment. This densification significantly increased the factor of safety against liquefaction and reduced potential liquefaction-induced settlement to under 0.5 inch. The compaction grouting program included automated data acquisition and processing and three-dimensional visualization components to ensure quality control and assurance. In addition, the site improvement program was fully verifiable, as the ground improvement program included a comparison of cone penetrometer tests (CPT) conducted prior to and following treatment. Although compaction grouting has been well utilized for several years, the potential for liquefaction mitigation in urban environments is not well established. However, ground improvement through compaction grouting can be a cost-effective alternative to drilled shafts or driven piles on liquefiable sites. This paper includes a description of the site conditions, the compaction grouting program (including automated data acquisition instrumentation and visualization), site instrumentation, post-treatment evaluation of the mitigation procedures, and analysis of the response of adjacent structures

Robust array configuration for a microwave interferometric radiometer: application to the geoSTAR project

The Geostationary Synthetic Thinned Array Radiometer represents a promising new approach to microwave atmospheric sounding from geostationary orbit based on passive interferometry. One of the major concerns about the feasibility of this new concept is related to the ability of the sensor to cope with the failure of one or several of its single receivers/antennas. This letter shows that the inclusion of a small percentage of additional antennas significantly reduces the degradation of radiometric resolution caused by such receiver failure. Impact of antenna failure is analyzed, taking into account two test images with very different spatial harmonic content. A tradeoff analysis of several array topologies is performed so as to minimize the number of additional antennas while keeping worst case radiometric error within a reasonable level.Peer Reviewe

Design and Performance of a High-Stability Water Vapor Radiometer

[1] The design of two new high-stability microwave water vapor radiometers is presented along with a performance evaluation. The radiometers operate next to a spacecraft tracking station at NASA's Goldstone facility in California, where they will be used to calibrate tropospheric path delay fluctuations during an upcoming gravity-wave search experiment (GWE) involving the Cassini spacecraft. Observing frequencies of the radiometers are 22.2, 23.8, and 31.4 GHz, and the antenna beam width is 1°. The instruments are room temperature Dicke radiometers with additive noise injection for gain calibration. Design highlights include: (1) a practical temperature control system capable of stabilizing the entire receiver to a few millikelvin from day to night; (2) redundant noise diode injection circuits with 30 ppm RF power stability; and (3) a voice coil actuated waveguide vane attenuator which is used as a high-performance Dicke switch. Performance of the radiometers is evaluated from intercomparisons of the two radiometers and from continuous tip curve calibrations spanning nearly 1 year. Structure function analysis of the intercomparison data indicates that the brightness temperature stability of these radiometers is better than 0.01 K on 1000-10,000 s timescales. Analysis of tip curve calibrations indicates RMS errors of $0.05 K on 30-day timescales and 0.15 K on 1-year timescales

Accurate Coordinates and 2MASS Cross-IDs for (Almost) All Gliese Catalog Stars

We provide precise J2000, epoch 2000 coordinates and cross-identifications to sources in the 2MASS point source catalog for nearly all stars in the Gliese, Gliese and Jahreiss, and Woolley catalogs of nearby stars. The only Gliese objects where we were not successful are two Gliese sources that are actually QSOs, two proposed companions to brighter stars which we believe do not exist, four stars included in one of the catalogs but identified there as only optical companions, one probable plate flaw, and two stars which simply remain un-recovered. For the 4251 recovered stars, 2693 have coordinates based on Hipparcos positions, 1549 have coordinates based on 2MASS data, and 9 have positions from other astrometric sources. All positions have been calculated at epoch 2000 using proper motions from the literature, which are also given here.Comment: accepted to PASP, Full version of Table 1 available electronicall