1,951 research outputs found
The Middle Ground of the NDE R&D Spectrum
Our keynote talk today has several objectives: First, we want to call attention, as some of us have before, to the interdisciplinary nature of NDE science and technology and some approaches for fostering R&D in such a situation. Next, we want to describe the objective of the DARPA, Air Force (and now Navy) core program for developing a science base for NDE and how it has evolved during the past two years. Some changes have indeed taken place; we feel that they were both necessary and evolutionary. Many of you are probably familiar with these changes by now but there may be some residual concerns or questions in your minds. Since I was the initiating influence behind most of them, it is appropriate for you to hear me say what they are and what they arenât, and to have an opportunity to question us. Finally and most importantly, we want to enlist your participation in the difficult task of identifying exploratory development programsâand we will try to define this termâwhich will benefit from the growing science base that all of us are helping to develop. We hope to stimulate the interaction between people such as you and the consumers of the evolving NDE technology in order to identify reduction-to-practice possibilities that should be pursued
Enabling a High Throughput Real Time Data Pipeline for a Large Radio Telescope Array with GPUs
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a next-generation radio telescope
currently under construction in the remote Western Australia Outback. Raw data
will be generated continuously at 5GiB/s, grouped into 8s cadences. This high
throughput motivates the development of on-site, real time processing and
reduction in preference to archiving, transport and off-line processing. Each
batch of 8s data must be completely reduced before the next batch arrives.
Maintaining real time operation will require a sustained performance of around
2.5TFLOP/s (including convolutions, FFTs, interpolations and matrix
multiplications). We describe a scalable heterogeneous computing pipeline
implementation, exploiting both the high computing density and FLOP-per-Watt
ratio of modern GPUs. The architecture is highly parallel within and across
nodes, with all major processing elements performed by GPUs. Necessary
scatter-gather operations along the pipeline are loosely synchronized between
the nodes hosting the GPUs. The MWA will be a frontier scientific instrument
and a pathfinder for planned peta- and exascale facilities.Comment: Version accepted by Comp. Phys. Com
A Multiwavelength Study of a Sample of 70 micron Selected Galaxies in the COSMOS Field I: Spectral Energy Distributions and Luminosities
We present a large robust sample of 1503 reliable and unconfused 70microm
selected sources from the multiwavelength data set of the Cosmic Evolution
Survey (COSMOS). Using the Spitzer IRAC and MIPS photometry, we estimate the
total infrared luminosity, L_IR (8--1000 microns), by finding the best fit
template from several different template libraries. The long wavelength 70 and
160 micron data allow us to obtain a reliable estimate of L_IR, accurate to
within 0.2 and 0.05 dex, respectively. The 70 micron data point enables a
significant improvement over the luminosity estimates possible with only a 24
micron detection. The full sample spans a wide range in L_IR, L_IR ~ 10^8-10^14
L_sun, with a median luminosity of 10^11.4 L_sun. We identify a total of 687
luminous, 303 ultraluminous, and 31 hyperluminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs,
ULIRGs, and HyLIRGs) over the redshift range 0.01<z<3.5 with a median redshift
of 0.5. Presented here are the full spectral energy distributions for each of
the sources compiled from the extensive multiwavelength data set from the
ultraviolet (UV) to the far-infrared (FIR). Using SED fits we find possible
evidence for a subset of cooler ultraluminous objects than observed locally.
However, until direct observations at longer wavelengths are obtained, the peak
of emission and the dust temperature cannot be well constrained. We use these
SEDs, along with the deep radio and X-ray coverage of the field, to identify a
large sample of candidate active galactic nuclei (AGN). We find that the
fraction of AGN increases strongly with L_IR, as it does in the local universe,
and that nearly 70% of ULIRGs and all HyLIRGs likely host a powerful AGN.Comment: 31 pages including 31 figures and 6 tables. Accepted for publication
in ApJ. The full resolution version is available here:
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~jeyhan/paperI/Kartaltepe_70mic_PaperI.pd
The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi
This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the âfunctional theoryâ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's âevolutionary socialismâ and charts his âdouble movementâ vis-Ă -vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ârevisionâ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation
Evolution of the infrared luminosity density and star formation history up to z~1: preliminary results from MIPS
Using deep observations of the Chandra Deep Field South obtained with MIPS at
24mic, we present our preliminary estimates on the evolution of the infrared
(IR) luminosity density of the Universe from z=0 to z~1. We find that a pure
density evolution of the IR luminosity function is clearly excluded by the
data. The characteristic luminosity L_IR* evolves at least by (1+z)^3.5 with
lookback time, but our monochromatic approach does not allow us to break the
degeneracy between a pure evolution in luminosity or an evolution in both
density and luminosity. Our results imply that IR luminous systems (L_IR >
10^11 L_sol) become the dominant population contributing to the comoving IR
energy density beyond z~0.5-0.6. The uncertainties affecting our measurements
are largely dominated by the poor constraints on the spectral energy
distributions that are used to translate the observed 24mic flux into
luminosities.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To be published in "Starbursts: From 30 Doradus
to Lyman Break Galaxies", held in Cambridge, 6-10 September 2004, Ed. R. de
Grijs & R. M. Gonzalez Delgad
Poverty and mental health: the work of the female sanitary inspectors in Bradford (c. 1901â1912)
This is the final version of the article. Available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this record.Although there are many excellent studies of the work of pioneer women
public health officers, few accounts dwell on mental health issues or discuss any relationship
that such staff might have understood to exist between poverty and mental health in the early
twentieth century. This is a remarkable omission considering that social and feminist historians
have highlighted the problems created by the way early practitioners sought to
manage poverty and arguably the poor. Drawing on records created by Female Sanitary
Inspectors (FSIs) in Bradford, this study chronicles distressing economic and social conditions
but also reveals encounters between the staff and people experiencing mental health problems
and mental health crises. The ways in which the FSIs chose to both make and deny
links between the abject poverty witnessed in the slum districts and cases of mental disorder
forms an important strand to the analysis that follows. Interestingly, it is the well-being of the
staff that emerges as a persistent and even over-riding concern.This work was generously supported by Wellcome Trust Grant 074999. This was a personal fellowship entitled 'The Medical Officer of Health and the Organisation of Health Visiting as a Comprehensive Community Health Service, 1906-1974'
Cubic-spline interpolation to estimate effects of inbreeding on milk yield in first lactation Holstein cows
Milk yield records (305d, 2X, actual milk yield) of 123,639 registered first lactation Holstein cows were used to compare linear regression (y = ÎČ0 + ÎČ1X + e), quadratic regression, (y = ÎČ0 + ÎČ1X + ÎČ2X2 + e) cubic regression (y = ÎČ0 + ÎČ1X + ÎČ2X2 + ÎČ3X3 +e) and fixed factor models, with cubic-spline interpolation models, for estimating the effects of inbreeding on milk yield. Ten animal models, all with herd-year-season of calving as fixed effect, were compared using the Akaike corrected-Information Criterion (AICc). The cubic-spline interpolation model with seven knots had the lowest AICc, whereas for all those labeled as âtraditionalâ, AICc was higher than the best model. Results from fitting inbreeding using a cubic-spline with seven knots were compared to results from fitting inbreeding as a linear covariate or as a fixed factor with seven levels. Estimates of inbreeding effects were not significantly different between the cubic-spline model and the fixed factor model, but were significantly different from the linear regression model. Milk yield decreased significantly at inbreeding levels greater than 9%. Variance component estimates were similar for the three models. Ranking of the top 100 sires with daughter records remained unaffected by the model used
Weather and our food supply
The steep rate of increase in yield of grain crops in the United States since the mid-1950\u27s has resulted in the use of the term explosion in technology. Surplus grains piled up to such proportions after the 1960 · harvest that acreage control appeared. to be in order. But despite substantial reductions in acreages after 1960 the increased output per acre has just about compensated for acreage reductions. During this period of rapid increase in output per acre there has been a growing tendency to believe that technology has reduced the influence of weather on grain production so that we no longer need to fear shortages due to unfavorable weather.
There is also a popular belief that acreage control$ fail to achieve the objective of production control, and that public funds are being wasted in storing surplus grains which we don\u27t need.
There is increasing evidence, however, that a period of favorable weather interacted with technology to produce our recent high yields, and that perhaps half of the increase in yield per acre since 1950 has been due to a change to more favorable weather for grain crops.
These findings have important implications in continued support for research in production technology and in the way in which we look at our surplus stocks of feed and food grains. If a period of favorable weather has been responsible for half of the increase in yields since 19501 then what can we expect if the weather trend reverses itself for a few years? Do we have periodicity in weather, and have we just passed through a run of favorable years that might be followed by a run of unfavorable years? Should we treat our surplus grains as reserves? How does our rate of growth in grain output compare with the needs of a growing world population? And of course I in the background of these questions is one big question -- how much of our recent high yields is really due to weather?
To answer these important questions the Center for Agriculture and Economic Development invited outstanding authorities to present their ideas under three main headings: (1) Techniques for Evaluation of Weather Variables in Agricultural Production I (2) Periodicity in Weather Patterns: Implications in Agriculture I and (3) Weather Considerations in Agricultural Policy. The papers have been assembled in the order of their presentation under the general outline above.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/card_reports/1021/thumbnail.jp
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