Meghan Howey, Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology, travels to Uganda

Professor Howey travelled to Uganda in summer 2012 to conduct archaeological and paleoecological research in the Ndali crater lakes and swamps.In June 2012, with support from the Center for International Education, I furthered my involvement in a research program focused on the deep history of human-environment interaction in the Ndali crater lake landscape of western Uganda. The Ndali crater lake landscape is a beautiful and complex series of crater lakes and in-filled crater swamps east of the Rwenzori Mountains which forms a particularly distinct setting in the Albertine Rift. Exponential population growth and unchecked land conversion have made the Albertine Rift one of the world’s most threatened biodiversity hotspots. Our research aims use deep history to inform present and future trajectories of landscape change in the Albertine Rift. To build towards that goal, we need to first test whether linkages can be established between local archaeological and paleoecological records

Climate Change, Sea-Level Rise, and the Vulnerable Cultural Heritage of Coastal New Hampshire

In this brief, author Meghan Howey examines the impact of climate change and sea-level rise on the vulnerable cultural heritage of coastal New Hampshire. Coastal New Hampshire has been identified by scientists and recognized by policy makers as an area experiencing many of the effects of climate change, including increasing temperatures and rising sea levels. The continued trajectory of such change places the seacoast region at a very high risk of coastal flooding today and of coastal land submersions within the next 50 to 100 years. Coastal New Hampshire stands to lose 14 percent of its known prehistoric and historic cultural heritage sites, including twelve sites on the National Register of Historic Places, to sea-level rise. These losses would negatively impact the region’s robust tourist economy. More than 80 known historic cemeteries are at risk of damage or complete destruction by sea-level rise. The potential damage to unknown, yet-to-be discovered burial grounds is also of concern. Communities across the region face difficult questions about what they are willing to lose and what efforts they are able and willing to make to protect vulnerable cultural heritage sites and graveyards from sea-level rise. Given the significance of these cultural heritage sites in coastal New Hampshire and the disproportionate contributions they make to the state’s revenue, these questions must addressed head-on, and continued analyses, discussions, and policy development will be important for addressing the vulnerability of the region’s cultural heritage

Sustaining Cultural Heritage at UNH

Building a new road? A cell phone tower? A pipeline? A new government building? Building anything with federal funds or on federal property requires that one must conduct a review of the impact of the project on tangible cultural resources, which includes archaeological sites and historic buildings, under section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA). But building a new student center, a new dorm, or a new business school on your land-grant university campus? More often than not, no cultural resource review is required.i What responsibility do land-grant universities have to the tangible cultural heritage on their land when section 106 is not mandated? As a land-grant institution and one that takes sustainability seriously, what should UNH’s role be in managing its cultural heritage

Critical Autobiography and Painting Practice

In 2000 I completed a PhD in Creative practice (painting) which had a contextualising thesis as part of the submission. My paintings at this time were based upon issues of memory and the text presented a narrative of the construction of the work but also examined how I was constructed by the work (both through the painting and writing). The tension between the past and what we make of it was central to my argument about the creative self in painting and so the title of this conference is very apt to the issues I was (and still am) dealing with both in my painting and writing. This writing also arose out of a feminist desire to unearth, in the words of Janet Wolff, ‘buried selves’ and to render visible the threads which connect experience and biography with intellectual work (Wolff, 1994, p.15). In this paper I will seek to address what theoretical and methodological issues I adopted in my Creative Practice PhD. In my thesis I established a triangulated research model of Self/Painting Practice/Social Practice. The first part of this paper will set out the model and the second part will develop it in relation to the production, intentions and form of the paintings themselves. A version of this paper was published in the Journal of Visual Art Practice Vol.1, No.3

Validating plans with continuous effects

A critical element in the use of PDDL2.1, the modelling language developed for the International Planning Competition series, has been the common understanding of the semantics of the language. The fact that this has been implemented in plan validation software was vital to the progress of the competition. However, the validation of plans using actions with continuous effects presents new challenges (that precede the challenges presented by planning with those effects). In this paper we review the need for continuous effects, their semantics and the problems that arise in validation of plans that include them. We report our progress in implementing the semantics in an extended version of the plan validation software

The automatic validation tool for PDDL2.1

The 3rd International Planning Competition [1] was a great success and a cornerstone to this success was the initial definition of a semantics for the language used in the competition, PDDL2.1. This created a general understanding of the semantics of the domains defined using this language and therefore a general understanding of what constitutes a valid plan. With this consensus on what a valid plan is it was possible to implement an automatic plan validator, VAL. This tool conveys what is a valid plan in PDDL2.1 to anyone developing a planner using this language, as well as providing extra information in a L ATEX report featuring graphs of changing numerical values and a Gantt chart (see figure 2). Actions With Continuous Effects A numerical quantity that can be changed, a function in PDDL, is called a primitive numerical expression (PNE). These PNEs can have continuous change initiated with changes made to the values of their (time) derivatives by durative actions. The effect starts at the beginning of the durative action and ends at the end of the durative action. The introduction of continuous change creates two further complications to the discrete temporal model: 1) Continuous changes can interact with one another, and 2) Invariant conditions may depend on values that are continuously changing. The key extension to the discrete temporal model is that interactin

Air-Gap Convection in a Switched Reluctance Machine

Switched reluctance machines (SRMs) have recently become popular in the automotive market as they are a good alternative to the permanent magnet machines commonly employed for an electric powertrain. Lumped parameter thermal networks are usually used for thermal analysis of motors due to their low computational cost and relatively accurate results. A critical aspect to be modelled is the rotor-stator air-gap heat transfer, and this is particularly challenging in an SRM due to the salient pole geometry. This work presents firstly a review of the literature including the most relevant correlations for this geometry, and secondly, numerical CFD simulations of air-gap heat transfer for a typical configuration. A new correlation has been derived: $\mathbf{Nu=0.181\ Ta_m^{0.207}}$Comment: 2015 Tenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER), 10 figures, 7 page

Plan validation and mixed-initiative planning in space operations

Bringing artificial intelligence planning and scheduling applications into the real world is a hard task that is receiving more attention every day by researchers and practitioners from many fields. In many cases, it requires the integration of several underlying techniques like planning, scheduling, constraint satisfaction, mixed-initiative planning and scheduling, temporal reasoning, knowledge representation, formal models and languages, and technological issues. Most papers included in this book are clear examples on how to integrate several of these techniques. Furthermore, the book also covers many interesting approaches in application areas ranging from industrial job shop to electronic tourism, environmental problems, virtual teaching or space missions. This book also provides powerful techniques that allow to build fully deployable applications to solve real problems and an updated review of many of the most interesting areas of application of these technologies, showing how powerful these technologies are to overcome the expresiveness and efficiency problems of real world problems

Validating plans with exogenous events

We are concerned with the problem of deciding the validity of a complex plan involving interacting continuous activity. In these situations there is a need to model and reason about the continuous processes and events that arise as a consequence of the behaviour of the physical world in which the plan is expected to execute. In this paper we describe how events, which occur as the outcome of uncontrolled physical processes, can be taken into account in determining whether a plan is valid with respect to the domain model. We do not consider plan generation issues in this paper but focus instead on issues in domain modelling and plan validation

Thermal design of air-cooled axial flux permanent magnet machines

Accurate thermal analysis of axial flux permanent magnet (AFPM) machines is crucial in predicting maximum power output, and a number of heat transfer paths exist making it difficult to undertake a general analysis. Stator convective heat transfer is one of the most important and least investigated heat transfer mechanisms and therefore is the focus of the present work. Experimental measurements were undertaken using a thin-film electrical heating method based on a printed circuit board heater array, providing radially resolved steady state heat transfer data from an experimental rotor-stator system designed as a geometric mockup of a through-flow ventilated AFPM machine. Using a flat rotor, local Nusselt numbers Nu(r) = hR/k were measured across 0.6<r/R< 1, as a function of non-dimensional gap ratio 0.0106 < G < 0.0467 and rotational Reynolds number 3.7e4 < Re [Theta]1e6 where G = g/R and Re [Theta] = [omega]R2/[Nu]. Averaged results Nu were correlated with a power law and it was found that Nu [is approximately equal to] ARe0.7 [Theta] in the fully turbulent regime (Re [Theta] > 3e5), with A being a function of G. In the laminar regime, stator Nu was found to be similar to that of the free rotor. Transition at the stator occurred at Re [Theta] = 3e5 for all G and is particularly marked at G < 0.02. Increased Nusselt numbers at the periphery were always observed because of the ingress of ambient air along the stator due to the rotor pumping effect. A slotted rotor was also tested, and was found to improve stator heat transfer compared with a flat rotor. The measurements were compared with computational fluid dynamics simulations. These were found to give a conservative estimate of heat transfer, with inaccuracies near the edge (r/R > 0.85) and in the transitional flow regime. Predicted stator heat transfer was found to be relatively insensitive to the choice of turbulence model and the two-equation SST model was used for most of the simulations