Automated Driftmeter Fused with Inertial Navigation

The motivation of this research is to address the use of bearing-only measurements taken by an optical sensor to aid an Inertial Navigation System (INS) whose accelerometers and gyroscopes are subject to drift and bias errors. The concept of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is employed in a bootstrapping manner: the bearing measurements are used to geolocate ground features, following which the bearings taken over time of the said ground features are used to improve the navigation state provided by the INS. In this research the INS aiding action of tracking stationary, but unknown, ground features over time is evaluated. It does not, however, address the critical image registration issue associated with image processing. It is assumed that stationary ground features are able to be detected and tracked as pixel representations by a real-time image processing algorithm. Simulations are performed which indicate the potential of this research. It is shown that during wings level flight at constant speed and fixed altitude, an aircraft that geolocates and tracks ground objects can significantly reduce the error in two of its three dimensions of flight, relative to an Earth-fixed navigation frame. The aiding action of geolocating and tracking ground features, in-line with the direction of flight, with a downward facing camera did not provide improvement in the aircraft\u27s x-position estimate. However, the aircraft\u27s y-position estimate, as well as the altitude estimate, were signicantly improved

The Introduction and Growth of Christianity in Busoga 1890-1940 With Particular Reference to the Roles of the Basoga Clergy, Catechists and Chiefs.

Christianity was first introduced in Busoga by the Baganda and European missionaries in 1891. For the first ten years, the missionaries ran into suspicion and sporadic opposition from the Basoga. However, with the growing awareness that Christianity could be used as a channel to new sources of power and influence, some of the Basoga increasingly embraced the new religion. The missionaries encouraged some of the newly "converted" Basoga to work as abasomesa or catechists. This meant spreading the Gospel in the remote villages where the abasomesa were faced with the various problems of a young and growing Christian Church. The abasomesa - and later the ordained Basoga clergymen - received substantial assistance from the Basoga chiefs who used their political positions and wealth to further the growth and expansion of Christianity, particularly in the areas under their control. With the growing Christian population, the missionary bodies were encouraged to develop an indigenous professional ministry. During the inter-war period, for example, many of the Basoga catechists, hitherto untrained, were given formal training while others were admitted to the holy Orders. This development enabled the Basoga professionals, mainly those of the CMS, to assume more pastoral responsibilities, administer and organize the growing and expanding Busoga Church whose activities were, by the end of this period (1940), spread all over the country

First derivative potentiometric and spectrophotometric determinations of cimetidine in tablets

Cimetidine is an imidazole derivative, which acts as H2-receptor antagonist to inhibit gastric acid secretion and is thereby useful in the treatment of ulcers and other hyperacidity stomach disorders. This study sets out to provide simple, inexpensive and sensitive analytical techniques for the assay of cimetidine in tablet dosage forms using first derivative potentiometric and UV-spectrophotometric techniques, with a view to providing simple, sensitive and cost-effective analytical methods. Ten brands of cimetidine tablets were purchased from pharmacies in Yenagoa and Port Harcourt, Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The samples were assayed by Potentiometric and UV spectrophotometric methods after a Thin Layer Chromatographic (TLC) fingerprint. The potentiometric assay results of the samples ranged from 92-100% of stated amount for 70% of the samples. The coefficient of variation for In-between run, Intra-day run and accuracy of the UV spectrophotometric method was within 3%. The percentage purity of cimetidine from UV determination at 260 nm ranged from 86 - 97%, showing that 50% of the samples conformed to the stated standard – ie: contain 95- 105% of stated amount. The TLC fingerprints of the samples were similar in many respects, including R<sub>f</sub> values which ranged from 0.8 to 0.9 compared to the reference sample with R<sub>f</sub> value of 0.9. The results suggest that either of the two methods can be fine-tuned for assay of cimetidine in tablet formulations.Keywords: Potentiometry, ultraviolet (UV) spectrophotometry, analytical methods, cimetidine, Tablet Formulations, volumetric standard (VS

Ensuring Safe Exploration: Ares Launch Vehicle Integrated Vehicle Ground Vibration Testing

Ground vibration testing has been an integral tool for developing new launch vehicles throughout the space age. Several launch vehicles have been lost due to problems that would have been detected by early vibration testing, including Ariane 5, Delta III, and Falcon 1. NASA will leverage experience and testing hardware developed during the Saturn and Shuttle programs to perform ground vibration testing (GVT) on the Ares I crew launch vehicle and Ares V cargo launch vehicle stacks. NASA performed dynamic vehicle testing (DVT) for Saturn and mated vehicle ground vibration testing (MVGVT) for Shuttle at the Dynamic Test Stand (Test Stand 4550) at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, and is now modifying that facility to support Ares I integrated vehicle ground vibration testing (IVGVT) beginning in 2012. The Ares IVGVT schedule shows most of its work being completed between 2010 and 2014. Integrated 2nd Stage Ares IVGVT will begin in 2012 and IVGVT of the entire Ares launch stack will begin in 2013. The IVGVT data is needed for the human-rated Orion launch vehicle's Design Certification Review (DCR) in early 2015. During the Apollo program, GVT detected several serious design concerns, which NASA was able to address before Saturn V flew, eliminating costly failures and potential losses of mission or crew. During the late 1970s, Test Stand 4550 was modified to support the four-body structure of the Space Shuttle. Vibration testing confirmed that the vehicle's mode shapes and frequencies were better than analytical models suggested, however, the testing also identified challenges with the rate gyro assemblies, which could have created flight instability and possibly resulted in loss of the vehicle. Today, NASA has begun modifying Test Stand 4550 to accommodate Ares I, including removing platforms needed for Shuttle testing and upgrading the dynamic test facilities to characterize the mode shapes and resonant frequencies of the vehicle. The IVGVT team expects to collect important information about the new launch vehicles, greatly increasing astronaut safety as NASA prepares to explore the Moon and beyond

Strategic Facilities Planning: A Focus On Health Care

Turbulent market conditions have forced the health care sector to re-examine its business and operational practices.  Health care has become increasingly complex as decisions and planning are reframed in light of the current lagging economy, an increased demand for services, new global competition, and impending legislation reform.  The stress is felt most keenly within the nation’s hospitals and consortia of health care facilities.  Facility planning decisions are no exception.  Hospital administrators are abandoning the once commonplace rules governing aging infrastructure renovations.  Instead, administrators are basing decisions within their respective strategic context and are attempting to align buildings, services, personnel, and technology to an overall plan that looks at markets, operations, and finances as resources for competitive advantage.  This paper reviews the strategic facilities planning literature and applies those best practices which support this organizational alignment for health care.  An application in the mid-Atlantic demonstrates that hospital facilities, by design, need to support the current and future needs of health care delivery systems, while dated structures impede industry advances.  Health care infrastructure improvements must proactively address technological, regulatory, and financial changes facing the sector

Machine Learning Enhanced Hankel Dynamic-Mode Decomposition

While the acquisition of time series has become more straightforward, developing dynamical models from time series is still a challenging and evolving problem domain. Within the last several years, to address this problem, there has been a merging of machine learning tools with what is called the dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). This general approach has been shown to be an especially promising avenue for accurate model development. Building on this prior body of work, we develop a deep learning DMD based method which makes use of the fundamental insight of Takens' Embedding Theorem to build an adaptive learning scheme that better approximates higher dimensional and chaotic dynamics. We call this method the Deep Learning Hankel DMD (DLHDMD). We likewise explore how our method learns mappings which tend, after successful training, to significantly change the mutual information between dimensions in the dynamics. This appears to be a key feature in enhancing the DMD overall, and it should help provide further insight for developing other deep learning methods for time series analysis and model generation

Organizational Mortality of Small Firms: The Effects of Entrepreneurial Age and Human Capital

This paper addresses the issue of internal determination of organizational outcomes. It is argued that in small and simply structured organizations a considerable proportion of the variance in organizational activities and outcomes is associated with individuals. In particular, the paper uses human capital theory to derive hypotheses about individual determinants of organizational mortality. These hypotheses are tested with event-history data of firm registrations and de-registrations in a West German region. The hypotheses are corroborated by the data, but the effects may nonetheless be due to processes linking individual characteristics with organizational performance other than those suggested by the human capital approach

Mechanochemical action of the dynamin protein

Dynamin is a ubiquitous GTPase that tubulates lipid bilayers and is implicated in many membrane severing processes in eukaryotic cells. Setting the grounds for a better understanding of this biological function, we develop a generalized hydrodynamics description of the conformational change of large dynamin-membrane tubes taking into account GTP consumption as a free energy source. On observable time scales, dissipation is dominated by an effective dynamin/membrane friction and the deformation field of the tube has a simple diffusive behavior, which could be tested experimentally. A more involved, semi-microscopic model yields complete predictions for the dynamics of the tube and possibly accounts for contradictory experimental results concerning its change of conformation as well as for plectonemic supercoiling.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures; typos corrected, reference adde

Ultraminiature Broadband Light Source and Method of Manufacturing Same

An ultraminiature light source using a double-spiral shaped tungsten filament includes end contact portions which are separated to allow for radial and length-wise unwinding of the spiral. The double-spiral filament is spaced relatively far apart at the end portions thereof so that contact between portions of the filament upon expansion is avoided. The light ource is made by fabricating a double-spiral ultraminiature tungsten filament from tungsten foil and housing the filament in a ceramic package having a reflective bottom and a well wherein the filament is suspended. A vacuum furnace brazing process attaches the filament to contacts of the ceramic package. Finally, a cover with a transparent window is attached onto the top of the ceramic package by solder reflow in a second vacuum furnace process to form a complete hermetically sealed package

Ultraminiature broadband light source with spiral shaped filament

An ultraminiature light source using a double-spiral shaped tungsten filament includes end contact portions which are separated to allow for radial and length-wise unwinding of the spiral. The double-spiral filament is spaced relatively far apart at the end portions thereof so that contact between portions of the filament upon expansion is avoided. The light source is made by fabricating a double-spiral ultraminiature tungsten filament from tungsten foil and housing the filament in a ceramic package having a reflective bottom and a well wherein the filament is suspended. A vacuum furnace brazing process attaches the filament to contacts of the ceramic package. Finally, a cover with a transparent window is attached onto the top of the ceramic package by solder reflow in a second vacuum furnace process to form a complete hermetically sealed package