Page turning system

A device for holding reading materials for use by readers without arm mobility is presented. The device is adapted to hold the reading materials in position for reading with the pages displayed to enable turning by use of a rubber tipped stick that is held in the mouth and has a pair of rectangular frames. The frames are for holding and positioning the reading materials opened in reading posture with the pages displayed at a substantially unobstructed sighting position for reading. The pair of rectangular frames are connected to one another by a hinge so the angle between the frames may be varied thereby varying the inclination of the reading material. A pair of bent spring mounted wires for holding opposing pages of the reading material open for reading without substantial visual interference of the pages is mounted to the base. The wires are also adjustable to the thickness of the reading material and have a variable friction adjustment. This enables the force of the wires against the pages to be varied and permits the reader to manipulate the pages with the stick

User friendly joystick

A joystick control device having a lower U-shaped bracket, an upper U-shaped bracket, a handle attached to the upper U-shaped bracket, with the upper U-shaped bracket connected to the lower U-shaped bracket by a compliant joint allowing six degrees of freedom for the joystick. The compliant joint consists of at least one cable segment affixed between the lower U-shaped bracket and the upper U-shaped bracket. At least one input device is located between the lower U-shaped bracket and the upper U-shaped bracket

Compliant joint

A compliant joint is provided for prosthetic and robotic devices which permits rotation in three different planes. The joint provides for the controlled use of cable under motion. Perpendicular outer mounting frames are joined by swaged cables that interlock at a center block. Ball bearings allow for the free rotation of the second mounting frame relative to the first mounting frame within a predetermined angular rotation that is controlled by two stop devices. The cables allow for compliance at the stops and the cables allow for compliance in six degrees of freedom enabling the duplication or simulation of the rotational movement and flexibility of a natural hip or knee joint, as well as the simulation of a joint designed for a specific robotic component for predetermined design parameters

Compliant walker

A compliant walker is provided for humans having limited use of their legs and lower back. It includes an upright wheel frame which at least partially surrounds an upright user wearing a partial body harness. It is attached to the frame by means of cable compliant apparatus consisting of sets of cable segments and angle bracket members connected between opposite side members of the frame and adjacent side portions of the harness. Novelty is believed to exist in the combination of a wheeled frame including a side support structure, a body harness, and compliance means connecting the body harness to the side support structure for flexibility holding and supporting a person in a substantially upright position when the user sags in the frame when taking weight off the lower extremities

Ranking the importance of nuclear reactions for activation and transmutation events

Pathways-reduced analysis is one of the techniques used by the Fispact-II nuclear activation and transmutation software to study the sensitivity of the computed inventories to uncertainties in reaction cross-sections. Although deciding which pathways are most important is very helpful in for example determining which nuclear data would benefit from further refinement, pathways-reduced analysis need not necessarily define the most critical reaction, since one reaction may contribute to several different pathways. This work examines three different techniques for ranking reactions in their order of importance in determining the final inventory, comparing the pathways based metric (PBM), the direct method and one based on the Pearson correlation coefficient. Reasons why the PBM is to be preferred are presented.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure

Delayed Recombination

Under the standard model for recombination of the primeval plasma, and the cold dark matter model for structure formation, recent measurements of the first peak in the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature indicate the spatial geometry of the universe is nearly flat. If sources of Lya resonance radiation, such as stars or active galactic nuclei, were present at z ~ 1000 they would delay recombination, shifting the first peak to larger angular scales, and producing a positive bias in this measure of space curvature. It can be distinguished from space curvature by its suppression of the secondary peaks in the spectrum.Comment: submitted to ApJ

An investigation of networking techniques for the ASRM facility

This report is based on the early design concepts for a communications network for the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) facility being built at Yellow Creek near Iuka, MS. The investigators have participated in the early design concepts and in the evaluation of the initial concepts. The continuing system design effort and any modification of the plan will require a careful evaluation of the required bandwidth of the network, the capabilities of the protocol, and the requirements of the controllers and computers on the network. The overall network, which is heterogeneous in protocol and bandwidth, is being modeled, analyzed, simulated, and tested to obtain some degree of confidence in its performance capabilities and in its performance under nominal and heavy loads. The results of the proposed work should have an impact on the design and operation of the ASRM facility

A unifying explanation of complex frequency spectra of gamma Dor, SPB and Be stars: combination frequencies and highly non-sinusoidal light curves

There are many Slowly Pulsating B (SPB) stars and γ Dor stars in the Kepler mission data set. The light curves of these pulsating stars have been classified phenomenologically into stars with symmetric light curves and with asymmetric light curves. In the same effective temperature ranges as the γ Dor and SPB stars, there are variable stars with downward light curves that have been conjectured to be caused by spots. Among these phenomenological classes of stars, some show ‘frequency groups’ in their amplitude spectra that have not previously been understood. While it has been recognized that non-linear pulsation gives rise to combination frequencies in a Fourier description of the light curves of these stars, such combination frequencies have been considered to be a only a minor constituent of the amplitude spectra. In this paper, we unify the Fourier description of the light curves of these groups of stars, showing that many of them can be understood in terms of only a few base frequencies, which we attribute to g-mode pulsations, and combination frequencies, where sometimes a very large number of combination frequencies dominate the amplitude spectra. The frequency groups seen in these stars are thus tremendously simplified. We show observationally that the combination frequencies can have amplitudes greater than the base frequency amplitudes, and we show theoretically how this arises. Thus for some γ Dor and SPB stars, combination frequencies can have the highest observed amplitudes. Among the B stars are pulsating Be stars that show emission lines in their spectra from occasional ejection of material into a circumstellar disc. Our analysis gives strong support to the understanding of these pulsating Be stars as rapidly rotating SPB stars, explained entirely by g-mode pulsations

Cellular mRNAs access second ORFs using a novel amino acid sequence-dependent coupled translation termination-reinitiation mechanism

Polycistronic transcripts are considered rare in the human genome. Initiation of translation of internal ORFs of eukaryotic genes has been shown to use either leaky scanning or highly structured IRES regions to access initiation codons. Studies on mammalian viruses identified a mechanism of coupled translation termination-reinitiation that allows translation of an additional ORF. Here, the ribosome terminating translation of ORF-1 translocates upstream to reinitiate translation of ORF-2. We have devised an algorithm to identify mRNAs in the human transcriptome in which the major ORF-1 overlaps a second ORF capable of encoding a product of at least 50 aa in length. This identified 4368 transcripts representing 2214 genes. We investigated 24 transcripts, 22 of which were shown to express a protein from ORF-2 highlighting that 3' UTRs contain protein-coding potential more frequently than previously suspected. Five transcripts accessed ORF-2 using a process of coupled translation termination-reinitiation. Analysis of one transcript, encoding the CASQ2 protein, showed that the mechanism by which the coupling process of the cellular mRNAs was achieved was novel. This process was not directed by the mRNA sequence but required an aspartate-rich repeat region at the carboxyl terminus of the terminating ORF-1 protein. Introduction of wobble mutations for the aspartate codon had no effect, whereas replacing aspartate for glutamate repeats eliminated translational coupling. This is the first description of a coordinated expression of two proteins from cellular mRNAs using a coupled translation termination-reinitiation process and is the first example of such a process being determined at the amino acid level