A fluffy friend can chase stress away

With final exams looming, VCU students could play with friendly dogs at “Paws for Stress” events held by the Center for Human-Animal Interaction and University Counseling services. CHAI is studying whether interacting with therapy dogs really can lower your stress levels

Metal tube reducer is inexpensive and simple to operate

Low-cost metal tube reducer accepts tubing up to 1 inch outer diameter and can reduce this diameter to less than 1/2 inch with controlled wall thickness. This device can reduce all of the tube without waste. It produces extremely good surface finishes

Hydraulic fluid serves as mandrel for small diameter refractory tube drawing

Sealing hydraulic fluid within a tube and passing the tube through a reducing die produces high quality small diameter refractory metal tubing. The encased fluid eliminates the need for mandrel or ductile core removal and drawing can proceed with less handling operations

Work distribution of an expanding gas and transverse energy production in relativistic heavy ion collisions

The work distribution of an expanding extreme relativistic gas is shown to be a gamma distribution with a different shape parameter as compared with its non-relativistic counterpart. This implies that the shape of the transverse energy distribution in relativistic heavy ion collisions depends on the particle contents during the evolution of the hot and dense matter. Therefore, transverse energy fluctuations provide additional insights into the Quark-Gluon Plasma produced in these collisions.Comment: Added discussions in Section 3, improved introductions to Eqs. (4) and (15), corrected typos, updated reference

A study of mapping exogenous knowledge representations into CONFIG

Qualitative reasoning is reasoning with a small set of qualitative values that is an abstraction of a larger and perhaps infinite set of quantitative values. The use of qualitative and quantitative reasoning together holds great promise for performance improvement in applications that suffer from large and/or imprecise knowledge domains. Included among these applications are the modeling, simulation, analysis, and fault diagnosis of physical systems. Several research groups continue to discover and experiment with new qualitative representations and reasoning techniques. However, due to the diversity of these techniques, it is difficult for the programs produced to exchange system models easily. The availability of mappings to transform knowledge from the form used by one of these programs to that used by another would open the doors for comparative analysis of these programs in areas such as completeness, correctness, and performance. A group at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) is working to develop CONFIG, a prototype qualitative modeling, simulation, and analysis tool for fault diagnosis applications in the U.S. space program. The availability of knowledge mappings from the programs produced by other research groups to CONFIG may provide savings in CONFIG's development costs and time, and may improve CONFIG's performance. The study of such mappings is the purpose of the research described in this paper. Two other research groups that have worked with the JSC group in the past are the Northwest University Group and the University of Texas at Austin Group. The former has produced a qualitative reasoning tool named SIMGEN, and the latter has produced one named QSIM. Another program produced by the Austin group is CC, a preprocessor that permits users to develop input for eventual use by QSIM, but in a more natural format. CONFIG and CC are both based on a component-connection ontology, so a mapping from CC's knowledge representation to CONFIG's knowledge representation was chosen as the focus of this study. A mapping from CC to CONFIG was developed. Due to differences between the two programs, however, the mapping transforms some of the CC knowledge to CONFIG as documentation rather than as knowledge in a form useful to computation. The study suggests that it may be worthwhile to pursue the mappings further. By implementing the mapping as a program, actual comparisons of computational efficiency and quality of results can be made between the QSIM and CONFIG programs. A secondary study may reveal that the results of the two programs augment one another, contradict one another, or differ only slightly. If the latter, the qualitative reasoning techniques may be compared in other areas, such as computational efficiency

Retirement and Medical Benefits: Who Has Both?

[Excerpt] Employee compensation packages commonly include both wages and benefits. For decades, employee benefits have been used as part of the total compensation package to attract and retain highly qualified workers. Just as workers in various occupations receive different levels of pay, they also receive access to different types and combinations of employee benefits. This article uses March 2012 National Compensation Survey (NCS) data to examine private industry workers’ access to medical benefits, retirement benefits, and combinations of the two benefits, by major occupation group, wage category, part-time and full-time status, union and nonunion status, and establishment size. The study finds notable differences in the patterns of access to medical and retirement benefits—separately, and in combination—among the various worker groups

Analyzing the Feasibility of Prairie Dog Hunting in the Northern Texas Panhandle

Prairie dogs are burrowing rodents located throughout the United States. The black-tailed prairie dog is a common species that primarily inhabits the Great Plains region, with a large population in Texas. While these animals continue to thrive in many locations, there has been a significant reduction in numbers over the past one hundred years. Several conservation efforts have attempted to remedy this situation. The Black-tailed Prairie Dog Conservation and Management Plan is a long-term monitoring program between the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and cooperating landowners. This plan’s purpose is to develop a strategy that conserves the species while simultaneously protecting property rights. One of the plan’s recommended methods for keeping populations at manageable levels is recreational hunting. This practice provides several landowner benefits, including species control and economic returns. The following study explores three land use scenarios related to implementing a prairie dog hunting operation. It provides a ten-year financial impact and risk assessment for a typical Texas Panhandle producer.Prairie Dogs, Texas Ranching, Risk Management, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Land Economics/Use,

The distribution of maximum temperatures of coronal active region loops

The emission measure distribution across the range 4.5 log T 6.5 was derived for several coronal active regions by combining EUV line fluxes with broadband X-ray fluxes. The distributions of the maximum temperature was then derived using a numerical model. It is shown that the emission measure distribution can be represented over the full range 5.6 log Tm 6.5 by the superposition of simple loop models, if the models incorporate a substantial rise in their individual emission measure distributions near the maximum temperature. The unresolved loops may have substantial area ratios, since it is this ratio that fixes the extent of the rise in the emission measure distribution. Since the bulk of the emission measure is then contributed from the loop tops, the distribution of maximum temperatures has approximately the same shape as does the integrated emission measure distributions. The EUV and X-ray data used were obtained by from two separate experiments on ATM/Skylab

Ductile mandrel and parting compound facilitate tube drawing

Refractory tubing is warm drawn over a solid ductile mandrel with a powder parting compound packed between mandrel and the tubes inner surface. This method applies also to the coextrusion of a billet and a ductile mandrel