Education and World Peace (Commencement Address)

Commencement address delivered by Thomas J. Watson, President of Internation Business Machines (IBM), on August 10, 1945 in Providence, RI. On this day, Mr. Watson also received an honorary degree from Bryant - Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters (D.H.L.)

Does cognitive ability influence responses to the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale?

It has been suggested that how individuals respond to self-report items relies on cognitive processing. We hypothesized that an individual's level of cognitive ability may influence these processes such that, if there is a hierarchy of items within a particular questionnaire, as demonstrated by Mokken scaling, the strength of that hierarchy will vary according to cognitive ability. Using data on 8,643 men and women from the National Child Development Survey (1958 birth cohort; Power, & Elliott, 2006), we investigated, using Mokken scaling, whether the 14 items that make up the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (Tennant et al., 2007)-completed when the participants were 50 years of age-form a hierarchy and whether that hierarchy varied according to cognitive ability at age 11 years. Among the sample as a whole, we found a moderately strong unidimensional hierarchy of items (Loevinger's coefficient [H] = 0.48). We split participants into 3 groups according to cognitive ability and analyzed the Mokken scaling properties of each group. Only the medium and high cognitive ability groups had acceptable (?0.3) invariant item ordering (assessed using the HT statistic). This pattern was also found when the 3 cognitive ability groups were assessed within men and women separately. Greater attention should be paid to the content validity of questionnaires to ensure they are applicable across the spectrum of mental ability

Annona muricata (graviola): toxic or therapeutic

This paper examines annona muricata (graviola): toxic or therapeutic

Perilous Days-Tempered Solutions: Admiral Raymond A. Spruance Lecture

Admiral Spruance I knew only by reputation, but during the war his exploits in the Pacific were well-known to all of us. I have learned much more about the Admiral in the past few weeks in preparing tonight\u27s talk

A controlled experiment for the empirical evaluation of safety analysis techniques for safety-critical software

Context: Today's safety critical systems are increasingly reliant on software. Software becomes responsible for most of the critical functions of systems. Many different safety analysis techniques have been developed to identify hazards of systems. FTA and FMEA are most commonly used by safety analysts. Recently, STPA has been proposed with the goal to better cope with complex systems including software. Objective: This research aimed at comparing quantitatively these three safety analysis techniques with regard to their effectiveness, applicability, understandability, ease of use and efficiency in identifying software safety requirements at the system level. Method: We conducted a controlled experiment with 21 master and bachelor students applying these three techniques to three safety-critical systems: train door control, anti-lock braking and traffic collision and avoidance. Results: The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference between these techniques in terms of applicability, understandability and ease of use, but a significant difference in terms of effectiveness and efficiency is obtained. Conclusion: We conclude that STPA seems to be an effective method to identify software safety requirements at the system level. In particular, STPA addresses more different software safety requirements than the traditional techniques FTA and FMEA, but STPA needs more time to carry out by safety analysts with little or no prior experience.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE '15). ACM, 201

bepress & SSRN Pilot Presentation

A panel discussion announcing and sharing information about the joint pilot project exploring the integration between bepress and SSRN platforms launched in March 2018

Interact with Speciknee: A Software Tool for Design of Simple Four-bar Prosthesic Knee Joints

This poster and interactive demonstration presents an educational computer design tool which could enable prosthetists and mechanical designers to tailor the motion of low-cost, four-bar prosthetic knees to the sizes and needs of individual amputees. In designing a prosthetic knee joint, it is important to control the position of the lower leg in three angles of flexion and to control its center of rotation in the standing position. In 2010 [1] this problem was analyzed using vector methods, and an algorithm was written which produced curves displaying pivot locations which solve the problem exactly. Since then, a software tool called Speciknee has been developed by building on the core vector computational method and adding a user-friendly operator interface through which a designer could input individual patient needs, select pivot points along the set of curves where prosthetic joint pivots could be placed, and animate the mechanism. [1] Thompson, Thomas J., 2010, Specification of Prosthetic Knee Kinematic Design Parameters Using a Three-position, Instant-center Specification Approach, paper No. IMECE2010-38645, Proceedings of the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, November

Rectal artesunate suppositories for the pre-referral treatment of suspected severe malaria

In this Policy Forum article, James A. Watson and colleagues discuss recent guidelines relating to pre-referral treatment of suspected severe malaria with rectal artesunate suppositories in remote areas

Tensile strength of simulated and welded butt joints in W-Cu composite sheet

The weldability of W-Cu composite sheet was investigated using simulated and welded joints. The welded joints were produced in a vacuum hot press. Tensile test results showed that simulated joints can provide strength and failure mode data which can be used in joint design for actual weldments. Although all of the welded joints had flaws, a number of these joints were as strong as the W-Cu composite base material