TechnoFile: Viscosity

The article focuses on the effect the viscosity of a glaze or slip has on a piece of pottery. The article explains the term and provides tests that can be performed to determine the viscosity of a substance. It goes on to describe how one can manipulate the viscosity of a glaze or slip through the addition of water or other aids and includes step-by-step instructions for making a slip

Chasing the Craze: When the Right Variables are Off-Stage

A smooth white glaze, (Figure 1) with a buttery surface and smooth breaking on edges, just enough change of whiteness in a crevice pooling, seemingly opaque when thicker, but with a certain glow, a slight grey showing through. It crazes slightly, a fine webbing of cracks. Not enough to be decorative crazing, and not enough crazing to make me abandon the glaze, but enough crazing that I would like it to be gone. I prefer a system-oriented testing approach as a kind of universal order. A simple Unity Molecular Formula grid mapping method typically shows a boundary line of crazed and non-crazed surfaces and trends in surface quality. Sounds simple enough. But, as has been said, there is no need to seek the ceramic troubles. They will find you. (excerpt

Techno File: Pyrometric Cones

A pyrometer measures temperature, but pyrometric cones measure heatwork. What is a cone, how does it work, and what does any of this have to do with synchronized swimmers? [excerpt

Techno File: Glaze Unity Formula

There are many approaches to modifying a glaze recipe, and different approaches can meet different needs. Some modifications change the colorant level while others change the colorant type altogether. Some may directly replace one material with another add a few weight unit more (or less) of one of the base ingredients in the recipe, or add an amount of an entirely new ingredient. These strategies we use to alter glazes tent to parallel how we cook and modify recipes in the kitchen, but adjustments to the base glaze using the kitchen method do not always give us the results we want. [excerpt

Performance Analysis of Throughput Efficient Switch-over between FSO and mmW Links

Free Space Optics (FSO) links provide usage of high bandwidth and the flexibility of wireless communication links. However, weather patterns like fog and heavy snow fall limit the availability of FSO. Another technology providing similar properties regarding offered data rates and flexibility of setup is Millimeter Wave Technology (mmW), operating at several tens of GHz. In this case, heavy rain limits mmW link availability. A combination of both technologies had been proved to be very effective to achieve very high availability. Different hybrid architectures of these two links and switch-over techniques had been proposed in the recent years. All of these techniques require redundant transmission on either both transmission links or waste bandwidth of backup link when main FSO link is operational. In this paper, a switch-over between these technologies is proposed, to maintain high availability without the loss of transmission bandwidth. The performance of this switch-over has been simulated for more than one year measured availability data for hybrid network of mmW link and FSO link. The switch over behavior has also been simulated for fog, rain and snow events. It has been shown that the availability with switch-over reaches the redundant link availability but switchover can save more than 90% redundant transmission and increase the hybrid network throughput significantly

syn,syn-15,17-Di-2-naphthyl­hexa­cyclo­[10.2.1.13,10.15,8.02,11.04,9]hepta­decane deuterochloro­form monosolvate

The main molecule of the title compound, C37H36·CDCl3, is a hydro­carbon with two naphthalene segments attached to opposite ends of a rigid norbornylogous spacer with an overall structure that is approximately C-shaped. The dihedral angle between the naphthalene ring planes is 9.27 (7)°. The cleft that exists between the naphthalene rings is large enough that the compound crystallizes with a solvent mol­ecule (CDCl3) in the cleft. The CDCl3 solvent mol­ecule is present in two disordered orientations in a 3:2 ratio, each involving C—D⋯π to C 6 ring centers

Interpretable Subgroup Discovery in Treatment Effect Estimation with Application to Opioid Prescribing Guidelines

The dearth of prescribing guidelines for physicians is one key driver of the current opioid epidemic in the United States. In this work, we analyze medical and pharmaceutical claims data to draw insights on characteristics of patients who are more prone to adverse outcomes after an initial synthetic opioid prescription. Toward this end, we propose a generative model that allows discovery from observational data of subgroups that demonstrate an enhanced or diminished causal effect due to treatment. Our approach models these sub-populations as a mixture distribution, using sparsity to enhance interpretability, while jointly learning nonlinear predictors of the potential outcomes to better adjust for confounding. The approach leads to human-interpretable insights on discovered subgroups, improving the practical utility for decision suppor

Coarse-grained reconfigurable array architectures

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) architectures accelerate the same inner loops that benefit from the high ILP support in VLIW architectures. By executing non-loop code on other cores, however, CGRAs can focus on such loops to execute them more efficiently. This chapter discusses the basic principles of CGRAs, and the wide range of design options available to a CGRA designer, covering a large number of existing CGRA designs. The impact of different options on flexibility, performance, and power-efficiency is discussed, as well as the need for compiler support. The ADRES CGRA design template is studied in more detail as a use case to illustrate the need for design space exploration, for compiler support and for the manual fine-tuning of source code

Russell Lecture: Dark Star Formation and Cooling Instability

Optically thin cooling gas at most temperatures above 30K will make condensations by pressure pushing material into cool dense regions. This works without gravity. Cooling condensations will flatten and become planar/similarity solutions. Most star formation may start from cooling condensations - with gravity only important in the later stages. The idea that some of the dark matter could be pristine white dwarfs that condensed slowly on to planetary sized seeds without firing nuclear reactions is found lacking. However, recent observations indicate fifty times more halo white dwarfs than have been previously acknowledged; enough to make the halo fraction observed as MACHOS. A cosmological census shows that only 1% of the mass of the Universe is of known constitution.Comment: 32 Pages, Latex (uses aastex & natbib), 5 eps figures, submitted to ApJ April 200