Barriers to Investment Abroad as Tools of Payments Policy

The thesis examines the fatigue life of weld ends, where very little usable research previously has been conducted, and often the weld ends are the critical parts of the weld. It is essential knowing the fatigue life of welds to be able to use them most efficiently.The report is divided into two parts; in the first the different calculation methods used today at Toyota Material Handling are examined and compared. Based on the results from the analysis and what is used mostly today, the effective notch approach is the method used in part two.To validate the calculation methods and models used, fatigue testing of the welded test specimens was conducted together with a stress test. New modelling methods of the weld ends that coincide with the test results were made in the finite element software Abaqus. A new way of modelling the weld ends for the effective notch method is also proposed. By using a notch radius of 0.2 mm and rounded weld ends the calculated fatigue life better matches the life of the real weld ends

Bill In Hell

A humorous look at the truth of relationships between varying roles of people and the supremacy love holds

Anything goes with heterogeneous, but not with homogeneous oligopoly

Corchon and Mas-Colell (1996) showed that in heterogeneous (almost) everything is possible. Here it is shown that in order to obtain a similar result for homogeneous oligopoly, the reaction correspondences should fulfill a special condition.

Corrections, clarifications, and additions to the 1996 checklist of the Alticinae of Central America : including Mexico (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae)

In our checklist of the Alticinae of Central America and Mexico (Furth and Savini, 1996), there were some species whose status or generic combination needs clarification. In preparing the 1996 checklist the authors referred to some unpublished notes of Jan Bechyne in order to understand his system of alticine names and to clarify to which genera he considered various species to belong

Outside the Box

Einstein wrote, "you can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created." So we decided to ask diverse groups of randomly selected Arizona citizens to consider health care reform options, rather than continuing to ask health care industry veterans and experts. The ensuing dialogues and their ultimate recommendations are likely to surprise readers as much as they surprised the citizen, civic and business leader participants

Moving Along the Learning Curve: From Values to Public Judgment: Citizen Dialogues on K-12 Education Reform

Based on dialogues with California's public, policy makers, and other stakeholders, assesses the public's priorities for K-12 reform and support for giving districts more authority and resources to meet state standards. Includes implications for leaders

Health Coverage for All Californians: Catching Up With the Public: A Report on Dialogues With the Public and With Business and Civic Leaders

Presents findings on healthcare reforms both employers and the public would support. Assesses the public's support for government-sponsored comprehensive coverage, its concerns about a public health system, and implications for future reform proposals

Dual equilibrium in a finite aspect ratio tokamak

A new approach to high pressure magnetically-confined plasmas is necessary to design efficient fusion devices. This paper presents an equilibrium combining two solutions of the Grad-Shafranov equation, which describes the magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium in toroidal geometry. The outer equilibrium is paramagnetic and confines the inner equilibrium, whose strong diamagnetism permits to balance large pressure gradients. The existence of both equilibria in the same volume yields a dual equilibrium structure. Their combination also improves free-boundary mode stability

Low-Stress Bicycling and Network Connectivity

For a bicycling network to attract the widest possible segment of the population, its most fundamental attribute should be low-stress connectivity, that is, providing routes between people’s origins and destinations that do not require cyclists to use links that exceed their tolerance for traffic stress, and that do not involve an undue level of detour. The objective of this study is to develop measures of low-stress connectivity that can be used to evaluate and guide bicycle network planning. We propose a set of criteria by which road segments can be classified into four levels of traffic stress (LTS). LTS 1 is suitable for children; LTS 2, based on Dutch bikeway design criteria, represents the traffic stress that most adults will tolerate; LTS 3 and 4 represent greater levels of stress. As a case study, every street in San Jose, California, was classified by LTS. Maps in which only bicycle-friendly links are displayed reveal a city divided into islands within which low-stress bicycling is possible, but separated from one another by barriers that can be crossed only by using high-stress links. Two points in the network are said to be connected at a given level of traffic stress if the subnetwork of links that do not exceed the specified level of stress connects them with a path whose length does not exceed a detour criterion (25% longer than the most direct path). For the network as a whole, we demonstrate two measures of connectivity that can be applied for a given level of traffic stress. One is “percent trips connected,” defined as the fraction of trips in the regional trip table that can be made without exceeding a specified level of stress and without excessive detour. This study used the home-to-work trip table, though in principle any trip table, including all trips, could be used. The second is “percent nodes connected,” a cruder measure that does not require a regional trip table, but measures the fraction of nodes in the street network (mostly street intersections) that are connected to each other. Because traffic analysis zones (TAZs) are too coarse a geographic unit for evaluating connectivity by bicycle, we also demonstrate a method of disaggregating the trip table from the TAZ level to census blocks. For any given TAZ, origins in the home-to-work trip table are allocated in proportion to population, while destinations are allocated based on land-use data. In the base case, the fraction of work trips up to six miles long that are connected at LTS 2 is 4.7%, providing a plausible explanation for the city’s low bicycling share. We show that this figure would almost triple if a proposed slate of improvements, totaling 32 miles in length but with strategically placed segments that provide low-stress connectivity across barriers, were implemented