The role of automaticity and attention in neural processes underlying empathy for happiness, sadness, and anxiety.

Although many studies have examined the neural basis of empathy, relatively little is known about how empathic processes are affected by different attentional conditions. Thus, we examined whether instructions to empathize might amplify responses in empathy-related regions and whether cognitive load would diminish the involvement of these regions. Thirty-two participants completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging session assessing empathic responses to individuals experiencing happy, sad, and anxious events. Stimuli were presented under three conditions: watching naturally, actively empathizing, and under cognitive load. Across analyses, we found evidence for a core set of neural regions that support empathic processes (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, DMPFC; medial prefrontal cortex, MPFC; temporoparietal junction, TPJ; amygdala; ventral anterior insula, AI; and septal area, SA). Two key regions-the ventral AI and SA-were consistently active across all attentional conditions, suggesting that they are automatically engaged during empathy. In addition, watching vs. empathizing with targets was not markedly different and instead led to similar subjective and neural responses to others' emotional experiences. In contrast, cognitive load reduced the subjective experience of empathy and diminished neural responses in several regions related to empathy and social cognition (DMPFC, MPFC, TPJ, and amygdala). The results reveal how attention impacts empathic processes and provides insight into how empathy may unfold in everyday interactions

Investigation of heatless desorption technology for carbon dioxide control in manned spacecraft

Heatless desorption technology for carbon dioxide control in manned spacecraf

Air pollution monitoring instrumentation A survey

Air pollution monitoring instrumentation developed for aerospace uses surveyed for industrial application

Design and assembly considerations for Redox cells and stacks

Individual redox flow cells are arranged electrically in series and hydraulically in parallel to form a single assembly called a stack. The hardware currently being tested in the laboratory has an active electrode area of either 310 sq cm or 929 sq cm. Four 310 sq cm stacks, each consisting of 39 active cells, were incorporated into a 1.0 kW preprototype system. The physical design of the stack is very critical to the performance and efficiency of the redox storage sytem. This report will discuss the mechanical aspects of the cell and stack design for the current Redox hardware, with regard to sealing the stack internally as well as externally, minimizing shunt currents and minimizing the electrical resistance of the stack

Thermal design study of an air-cooled plug-nozzle system for a supersonic cruise aircraft

A heat-transfer design analysis has been made of an air-cooled plug-nozzle system for a supersonic-cruise aircraft engine. The proposed 10deg half-angle conical plug is sting supported from the turbine frame. Plug cooling is accomplished by convection and film cooling. The flight profile studied includes maximum afterburning from takeoff to Mach 2.7 and supersonic cruise at Mach 2.7 with a low afterburner setting. The calculations indicate that, for maximum afterburning, about 2 percent of the engine primary flow, removed after the second stage of the nine-stage compressor, will adequately cool the plug and sting support. Ram air may be used for cooling during supersonic-cruise operations, however. Therefore, the cycle efficiency penalty paid for air cooling the plug and sting support should be low

Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation

Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the benefits of programmable systems. In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called Sketch-n-Sketch that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired relationships rested entirely on the user. In this paper, we design and implement new features for Sketch-n-Sketch that assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation systems, our extended Sketch-n-Sketch now provides GUI-based tools for drawing shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create high-level, reusable abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.Comment: In 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2016

The Environment as an Argument

Context-awareness as defined in the setting of Ubiquitous Computing [3] is all about expressing the dependency of a specific computation upon some implicit piece of information. The manipulation and expression of such dependencies may thus be neatly encapsulated in a language where computations are first-class values. Perhaps surprisingly however, context-aware programming has not been explored in a functional setting, where first-class computations and higher-order functions are commonplace. In this paper we present an embedded domain-specific language (EDSL) for constructing context-aware applications in the functional programming language Haskell. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

The Balancing Act: Ecological Interventions and Decision Tradeoffs to Preserve Wilderness Character

Global climate change, land use intensification and increasing development are impacting federal wildernesses in new and unprecedented ways. Ecological restoration is one tool that that wilderness managers are using to combat degradation, though the decision to intervene in wilderness is complicated by the Wilderness Act’s legal mandate to preserve wilderness character and demonstrate managerial restraint. The purpose of this study is to document a baseline of ecological interventions that have occurred in the NWPS over the last five years, and to understand how wilderness managers make decisions related to ecological interventions. I sent a quantitative survey to over five hundred wilderness units to understand the type and degree of interventions taken, and used semi-structured interviews with twelve managers to understand intervention decision-making processes. This is the first study to document the breadth and depth of ecological interventions currently being implemented across the NWPS, and to reveal details about specific intervention proposals including the factors that influenced the decision, the efficacy of the intervention, and the proposer of the project. Results show that wilderness managers are tentative and conflicted about intervening in wilderness, yet management inertia leads to the acceptance of intervention as a wilderness preservation tool. Ecological interventions occurred in 37% of the wilderness units sampled, with the greatest proportion of interventions by agency from the National Park Service. This research highlights a need for consistent approaches to vetting ecological intervention proposals, and for greater agency accountability in documenting interventions. A publically-accessible collection of case studies could create a community of practice for wilderness stewards, while emphasizing best practices for interventions in wilderness

A framework for systematic promoter motif discovery and expression profiling from high dimensional brain transcriptome data

Understanding the regulatory logic of genes across discrete brain substructures can elucidate the basis for neural network connectivity and the cause of disease. Promoter motifs, in particular, that govern high or low expression gene networks present an important fulcrum for phenotypic behavior. Using the Allen Institute Brain Atlas we took various clustering approaches to find closely regulated genes, and generated substructure specific expression profiles to run through FIRE, a motif discovery algorithm and iPAGE, a functional ontology algorithm. Notably, we found a single large cluster of genes that had tightly coordinated behavior across hundreds of brain substructures, as well as a unique upstream promoter signature, yet highly diverse ontological characteristics. We also present a BRain EXpression Profile ASSembly script (BEXPASS) whose output is customized for FIRE and iPAGE input. Lastly we look at language processing and speech control areas of the brain and put forward recommendations for promoters that can serve as part of DNA constructs for optogenetic research an emerging neuroscientific research method that uses bacterial light-gated ion channel protein, channelrhodopsin (ChR1 or ChR2), as an activity control tool to activate neural pathway signaling