Land Grant Application- Watkins, Zachius (Douglas)

Land grant application submitted to the Maine Land Office on behalf of Zachius Watkins for service in the Revolutionary War, by their widow Sarah.https://digitalmaine.com/revolutionary_war_mass/1375/thumbnail.jp

Software Defined Radio for CubeSat Communication

Cube satellites, more commonly referred to as CubeSats, are small satellites that have become increasingly popular for academic, amateur, commercial, and scientific applications over the past five to ten years. These satellites provide a fairly inexpensive and compact platform for deploying many different types of equipment. While CubeSats do not allow for housing large, complex instruments, some organizations have begun to explore the possibility of deploying networks, or clusters, of CubeSats. Satellites in these clusters could theoretically be tied together via radio frequency communications to accomplish more than a single CubeSat could alone. This report summarizes the preliminary design and development of a CubeSat software defined radio system for Harris Corporation. This system aims to facilitate communication between cube satellites using a compact, yet dynamic architecture. It is anticipated that the preliminary design of this project, described in this report, will be continued by future student design teams. The preliminary design of this system has focused on two main components of the radio design. The first component is the electronic and programming design of the actual radio software and components. The second is the mechanical packaging that will encase the radio chip-set and mount within the satellite. The design and development of these components was performed concurrently. Design of the electronic and software components included the design of two main subsystems: a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter subsystem deals with receiving, modulating, and then transmitting incoming data. The receiver system involves demodulation, phase recovery, timing recovery, and error detection to then properly receive transmitted information. For this preliminary design, an image was captured using a camera and was then transmitted and received by the developed software defined radio system to demonstrate functionality. Mechanical components for the radio packaging were developed to meet physical and thermal loading requirements. The mechanical packaging was designed to meet random vibration, shock, and equivalent dynamic loads. The thermal load requirements of the electrical components were taken into account to determine the thermal design needs of the packaging. Expenses for this preliminary design fall well within the sponsor\u27s provided budget of $10,000. Conceptual designs for the electrical and mechanical components of this preliminary design were completed during the first semester. Machining, programming, and testing took place during the second semester of the project

Between Worlds & A Conversation on Fantasy, Portals, and Escape

The primary content of this creative thesis is a portion of a manuscript—the first four chapters of a novel to be called, Between Worlds. This could be considered a work of fantasy and science fiction. Additionally, this thesis contains a critical essay entitled, “A Conversation on Fantasy, Portals, and Escape,” which explores the idea of multiple genres within fantasy and the question of escape versus escapism in fiction. This essay elucidates on the creative work herein, as Between Worlds ventures into both multiple genres and the argument surrounding escapism

Transition Detection at Cryogenic Temperatures Using a Carbon-Based Resistive Heating Layer Coupled with Temperature Sensitive Paint

This paper will highlight the development and application of a carbon-based resistive heating layer for use in transition detection at cryogenic temperatures at the National Transonic Facility (NTF) for full-flight Reynolds number testing. This study builds upon previous work that was successfully demonstrated at the 0.3-m Transonic Cryogenic Tunnel on a smaller-scale airfoil shape of regular geometry. However, the test performed at the NTF involved a semispan wing with complex geometry and significantly larger than previous tests. This required the development of new coatings to provide suitable resistances to provide adequate heating rates for transition detection. Successful implementation of this technology has the ability to greatly enhance transition detection experiments at cryogenic temperatures as well as reducing perturbation in the tunnel caused by more traditional transition detection methods

Analysis of rolling group therapy data using conditionally autoregressive priors

Group therapy is a central treatment modality for behavioral health disorders such as alcohol and other drug use (AOD) and depression. Group therapy is often delivered under a rolling (or open) admissions policy, where new clients are continuously enrolled into a group as space permits. Rolling admissions policies result in a complex correlation structure among client outcomes. Despite the ubiquity of rolling admissions in practice, little guidance on the analysis of such data is available. We discuss the limitations of previously proposed approaches in the context of a study that delivered group cognitive behavioral therapy for depression to clients in residential substance abuse treatment. We improve upon previous rolling group analytic approaches by fully modeling the interrelatedness of client depressive symptom scores using a hierarchical Bayesian model that assumes a conditionally autoregressive prior for session-level random effects. We demonstrate improved performance using our method for estimating the variance of model parameters and the enhanced ability to learn about the complex correlation structure among participants in rolling therapy groups. Our approach broadly applies to any group therapy setting where groups have changing client composition. It will lead to more efficient analyses of client-level data and improve the group therapy research community's ability to understand how the dynamics of rolling groups lead to client outcomes.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS434 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org