Fuel Saving Methods for the Commercial Fishing Fleet

The Oil Embargo of 1973 emphasized not only how oil dependent the fishing industry has become but that the days of inexpensive energy had ended. Oil prices have risen dramatically, but so have the price tags on new technologies, labor, vessel renovation, new construction and the cost of procuring capital for making improvements. However, one must focus on the long range picture versus the short term snap shot. This can be accomplished by looking at two aspects of the problem. First, as costs increase so does the price of fish in the marketplace. There is a point however where the consumer will substitute another good which is less expensive and/or perceived to be a better buy. Therefore, there is a ceiling price above which the fisherman cannot sell his product. To remain competitive in the market place he must be cost conscious. Second, dollars, though expensive today, would be well spent if used to significantly reduce the dependency upon a cost item whose price continually increases. As the price of the cost item goes up, the real dollar cost of the money borrowed goes down. Therefore it would be to the fisherman\u27s advantage to spend on innovations that will conserve on cost items providing his operation is financially sound enough to borrow the capital required

Functional Determinants in Quantum Field Theory

Functional determinants of differential operators play a prominent role in theoretical and mathematical physics, and in particular in quantum field theory. They are, however, difficult to compute in non-trivial cases. For one dimensional problems, a classical result of Gel'fand and Yaglom dramatically simplifies the problem so that the functional determinant can be computed without computing the spectrum of eigenvalues. Here I report recent progress in extending this approach to higher dimensions (i.e., functional determinants of partial differential operators), with applications in quantum field theory.Comment: Plenary talk at QTS5 (Quantum Theory and Symmetries); 16 pp, 2 fig

Simplified Vacuum Energy Expressions for Radial Backgrounds and Domain Walls

We extend our previous results of simplified expressions for functional determinants for radial Schr\"odinger operators to the computation of vacuum energy, or mass corrections, for static but spatially radial backgrounds, and for domain wall configurations. Our method is based on the zeta function approach to the Gel'fand-Yaglom theorem, suitably extended to higher dimensional systems on separable manifolds. We find new expressions that are easy to implement numerically, for both zero and nonzero temperature.Comment: 30 page

Functional determinants for radial operators

We derive simple new expressions, in various dimensions, for the functional determinant of a radially separable partial differential operator, thereby generalizing the one-dimensional result of Gel'fand and Yaglom to higher dimensions. We use the zeta function formalism, and the results agree with what one would obtain using the angular momentum cutoff method based on radial WKB. The final expression is numerically equal to an alternative expression derived in a Feynman diagrammatic approach, but is considerably simpler.Comment: 21 pages, uses axodraw.st

An analysis of identical single-nucleotide polymorphisms genotyped by two different platforms

The overlap of 94 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) among the 4,720 and 11,120 SNPs contained in the linkage panels of Illumina and Affymetrix, respectively, allows an assessment of the discrepancy rate produced by these two platforms. Although the no-call rate for the Affymetrix platform is approximately 8.6 times greater than for the Illumina platform, when both platforms make a genotypic call, the agreement is an impressive 99.85%. To determine if disputed genotypes can be resolved without sequencing, we studied recombination in the region of the discrepancy for the most discrepant SNP rs958883 (typed by Illumina) and tsc02060848 (typed by Affymetrix). We find that the number of inferred recombinants is substantially higher for the Affymetrix genotypes compared to the Illumina genotypes. We illustrate this with pedigree 10043, in which 3 of 7 versus 0 of 7 offspring must be double recombinants using the genotypes from the Affymetrix and the Illumina platforms, respectively. Of the 36 SNPs with one or more discrepancies, we identified a subset that appears to cluster in families. Some of this clustering may be due to the presence of a second segregating SNP that obliterates a XbaI site (the restriction enzyme used in the Affymetrix platform), resulting in a fragment too long (>1,000 bp) to be amplified

An experimental decomposition of nonlinear forces on a surface-piercing column: Stokes-type expansions of the force harmonics

Wave loading on marine structures is the major external force to be considered in the design of such structures. The accurate prediction of the nonlinear high-order components of the wave loading has been an unresolved challenging problem. In this paper, the nonlinear harmonic components of hydrodynamic forces on a bottom-mounted vertical cylinder are investigated experimentally. A large number of experiments were conducted in the Danish Hydraulic Institute shallow water wave basin on the cylinder, both on a flat bed and a sloping bed, as part of a European collaborative research project. High-quality data sets for focused wave groups have been collected for a wide range of wave conditions. The high-order harmonic force components are separated by applying the ‘phase-inversion’ method to the measured force time histories for a crest focused wave group and the same wave group inverted. This separation method is found to work well even for locally violent nearly-breaking waves formed from bidirectional wave pairs. It is also found that the $n$th-harmonic force scales with the $n$th power of the envelope of both the linear undisturbed free-surface elevation and the linear force component in both time variation and amplitude. This allows estimation of the higher-order harmonic shapes and time histories from knowledge of the linear component alone. The experiments also show that the harmonic structure of the wave loading on the cylinder is virtually unaltered by the introduction of a sloping bed, depending only on the local wave properties at the cylinder. Furthermore, our new experimental results reveal that for certain wave cases the linear loading is actually less than 40 % of the total wave loading and the high-order harmonics contribute more than 60 % of the loading. The significance of this striking new result is that it reveals the importance of high-order nonlinear wave loading on offshore structures and means that such loading should be considered in their design.</jats:p

Multi-directional dynamic model for traumatic brain injury detection

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex injury that is hard to predict and diagnose, with many studies focused on associating head kinematics to brain injury risk. Recently, there has been a push towards using computationally expensive finite element (FE) models of the brain to create tissue deformation metrics of brain injury. Here, we developed a 3 degree-of-freedom lumped-parameter brain model, built based on the measured natural frequencies of a FE brain model simulated with live human impact data, to be used to rapidly estimate peak brain strains experienced during head rotational accelerations. On our dataset, the simplified model correlates with peak principal FE strain by an R2 of 0.80. Further, coronal and axial model displacement correlated with fiber-oriented peak strain in the corpus callosum with an R2 of 0.77. Using the maximum displacement predicted by our brain model, we propose an injury criteria and compare it against a number of existing rotational and translational kinematic injury metrics on a dataset of head kinematics from 27 clinically diagnosed injuries and 887 non-injuries. We found that our proposed metric performed comparably to peak angular acceleration, linear acceleration, and angular velocity in classifying injury and non-injury events. Metrics which separated time traces into their directional components had improved deviance to those which combined components into a single time trace magnitude. Our brain model can be used in future work as a computationally efficient alternative to FE models for classifying injuries over a wide range of loading conditions.Comment: 10 figures, 3 table

Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe

Stable isotope and trace element status of subsistence-hunted bowhead and beluga whales in Alaska and gray whales

Abstract Tissues of bowhead, beluga, and gray whales were analyzed for Ag, Cd, Cu, Se, Zn, THg and MeHg (belugas only). d 15 N and d 13 C in muscle were used to estimate trophic position and feeding habitat, respectively. Trace element concentrations in tissues were significantly different among whale species. Hepatic Ag was higher in belugas than bowheads and gray whales. Gray whales had lower Cd concentrations in liver and kidney than bowhead and belugas and a sigmoid correlation of Cd with length was noted for all whales. Renal and hepatic Se and THg were higher in belugas than in baleen whales. The hepatic molar ratio of Se:THg exceeded 1:1 in all species and was negatively correlated to body length. Hepatic and renal Zn in subsistence-harvested gray whales was lower than concentrations for stranded whales. Se:THg molar ratios and tissue concentrations of Zn may show promise as potential indicators of immune status and animal health