Insurance and Punitive Damages - The Public Policy Rationale from an Alternative Viewpoint - Anthony v. Frith

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Sample Acquisition and Instrument Deployment (SAID)

This report details the interim progress for contract NASW-4818, Sample Acquisition and Instrument Deployment (SAID), a robotic system for deploying science instruments and acquiring samples for analysis. The system is a conventional four degree of freedom manipulator 2 meters in length. A baseline design has been achieved through analysis and trade studies. The design considers environmental operating conditions on the surface of Mars, as well as volume constraints on proposed Mars landers. Control issues have also been studied, and simulations of joint and tip movements have been performed. A passively braked shape memory actuator with the ability to measure load has been developed. The wrist also contains a mechanism which locks the lid output to the bucket so that objects can be grasped and released for instrument deployment. The wrist actuator has been tested for operational power and mechanical functionality at Mars environmental conditions. The torque which the actuator can produce has been measured. Also, testing in Mars analogous soils has been performed

Quantum-secured imaging

We have built an imaging system that uses a photon's position or time-of-flight information to image an object, while using the photon's polarization for security. This ability allows us to obtain an image which is secure against an attack in which the object being imaged intercepts and resends the imaging photons with modified information. Popularly known as "jamming," this type of attack is commonly directed at active imaging systems such as radar. In order to jam our imaging system, the object must disturb the delicate quantum state of the imaging photons, thus introducing statistical errors that reveal its activity.Comment: 10 pages (double spaced), 5 figure

Cottontail Rabbit Habitat Use on Delaware Wildlife Area, Ohio

Author Institution: Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of WildlifeA radio telemetry study was performed on cottontail rabbits (Sylvilagus floridanus mearnsii) to quantify cover type use and infer selections with respect to cover type availability, year, sex- and age-class, time of day, and season. This study recorded 16,785 locations for 62 rabbits from 1981-1983. Briars (Rubus spp., Rosa multiflord) and old field were the two most used types of cover, together comprising more than 50% of locations. Relative to cover type availability, the briars type was the most preferred (P < 0.05). Both types were used heavily during day and night throughout the year, although use of briars was higher during day than night (P < 0.05). Rabbits that had survived a winter and spring spent more time in briars (P < 0.05) and less time in old field OP < 0.05) than those that had not. Implications are that wildlife managers must increase their emphasis on providing briars or other dense woody vegetation to maintain rabbit populations. Based on use percentages, rabbit cover type needs would be better met if percentages of area were: briars, herb-shrub, and cropland — each 25-35%; woodland — 0-10%

Financial Metrics In Wide-Moat Firms

According to Morningstar companies with certain structural characteristics enjoy economic moats. Compared to benchmark indices, Morningstar hypothesizes that over a ten-year time frame these firms will evidence superior price appreciation. Based on analysis of 1360 companies, this study supports the thesis of historical performance among wide-moat firms

Characteristics of vertical and lateral tunnel turbulence measured in air in the Langley Transonic Dynamics Tunnel

Preliminary measurements of the vertical and lateral velocity components of tunnel turbulence were obtained in the Langley Transonic Dynamics Tunnel test section using a constant-temperature anemometer equipped with a hot-film X-probe. For these tests air was the test medium. Test conditions included tunnel velocities ranging from 100 to 500 fps at atmospheric pressure. Standard deviations of turbulence velocities were determined and power spectra were computed. Unconstrained optimization was employed to determine parameter values of a general spectral model of a form similar to that used to describe atmospheric turbulence. These parameters, and others (notably break frequency and integral scale length), were determined at each test condition and compared with those of Dryden and Von Karman atmospheric turbulence spectra. When the data were discovered to be aliased, the spectral model was modified to account for and 'eliminate' the aliasing

Wide-bandwidth, tunable, multiple-pulse-width optical delays using slow light in cesium vapor

We demonstrate an all-optical delay line in hot cesium vapor that tunably delays 275 ps input pulses up to 6.8 ns and 740 input ps pulses up to 59 ns (group index of approximately 200) with little pulse distortion. The delay is made tunable with a fast reconfiguration time (hundreds of ns) by optically pumping out of the atomic ground states.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Compressive Object Tracking using Entangled Photons

We present a compressive sensing protocol that tracks a moving object by removing static components from a scene. The implementation is carried out on a ghost imaging scheme to minimize both the number of photons and the number of measurements required to form a quantum image of the tracked object. This procedure tracks an object at low light levels with fewer than 3% of the measurements required for a raster scan, permitting us to more effectively use the information content in each photon.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

On-chip spectroscopy with thermally-tuned high-Q photonic crystal cavities

Spectroscopic methods are a sensitive way to determine the chemical composition of potentially hazardous materials. Here, we demonstrate that thermally-tuned high-Q photonic crystal cavities can be used as a compact high-resolution on-chip spectrometer. We have used such a chip-scale spectrometer to measure the absorption spectra of both acetylene and hydrogen cyanide in the 1550 nm spectral band, and show that we can discriminate between the two chemical species even though the two materials have spectral features in the same spectral region. Our results pave the way for the development of chip-size chemical sensors that can detect toxic substances