NASA Contributions to Development of Special-Purpose Thermocouples. A Survey

The thermocouple has been used for measuring temperatures for more than a century, but new materials, probe designs, and techniques are continually being developed. Numerous contributions have been made by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its contractors in the aerospace program. These contributions have been collected by Midwest Research Institute and reported in this publication to enable American industrial engineers to study them and adapt them to their own problem areas. Potential applications are suggested to stimulate ideas on how these contributions can be used

Development of Industrial Energy Management Programs

Energy management is a term which has only recently been entered in the business management lexicon. Until recently business managers, even the most successful ones, devoted only casual thought to the need to manage their use of fuels and electricity. Energy was cheap and plentiful. Economic sense dictated that if labor could be replaced by more energy-intense processes or equipment, the smart manager did so. Local and national policy, industrial process design, consumer habits--all these and more encouraged massive energy consumption

A quantum interpretation of the thermal radiation properties of metals

Ph.D.S. P. Kezio

Funding Resilient Infrastructure in New Jersey: Attitudes Following a Natural Disaster

Recent major natural disasters in New Jersey have demonstrated the need to increase the resilience of transportation infrastructure. This research examines public attitudes toward revenue sources that can be dedicated to protecting vulnerable areas, most notably the transportation linkages on which the state depends. A statewide survey was conducted to gather data approximately four months following Superstorm Sandy, the costliest natural disaster in the state’s history. The authors’ objective was to sample public attitudes while the impacts of the disaster were still fresh. They found little support for temporary tax increases to improve resiliency, with the most positive support for taxing visitors (i.e., a hotel and recreational tax) and for a 30-year bond measure (i.e., taxing the future). This observation seemingly contradicts broad support for investing in new infrastructure, as well as maintaining and protecting existing infrastructure. Multivariate analysis to understand the underlying attitudes toward raising revenue found that more left-leaning or communitarian attitudes are associated with more support for gasoline, income, or sales taxes devoted to mitigating vulnerability. Those who supported investment in transit and protecting infrastructure also were more likely to support these taxes. There was no parallel finding of factors associated with taxing visitors or issuing bonds

Adaptation by introgression

Both selective and random processes can affect the outcome of natural hybridization. A recent analysis in BMC Evolutionary Biology of natural hybridization between an introduced and a native salamander reveals the mosaic nature of introgression, which is probably caused by a combination of selection and demography

Annual Survey of Virginia Law: Antitrust and Trade Regulation Law

This year witnessed the advance of a wide variety of antitrust and trade regulation theories, most of which met with little success. Of the antitrust cases, Continental Airlines waged a successful battle to eliminate carry-on baggage restrictions at Dulles Airport. Additionally, Maryland\u27s price-setting scheme for liquor was not accorded state action immunity. On the other side of the ledger, another antitrust litigant failed to overcome the requirement that efforts to petition the government must be objectively baseless in order to meet the sham exception to the Noerr-Pennington doctrine. Difficulties in proving an antitrust injury and the intent element of a section conspiracy to monopolize claim ended another long-pitched battle over limited vermiculite resources. The Fourth Circuit treated an exclusive supply case with the same sort of back-of-the-hand treatment accorded most vertical restraint cases over the past ten years. Likewise, regardless of the statutory or regulatory scheme, dealership and franchise termination cases met with little success. Finally, while the malice requirement in the Virginia Business Conspiracy Act (the Act ) has become ingrained in Virginia jurisprudence as the legal malice standard, courts are finding other ways to dispose of these claims. In doing so, courts have enunciated a clear and convincing evidence standard for cases under the Act

Estimating trip generation of the elderly and disabled: an analysis of London data

The aging of populations has implications for trip-making behaviour and the demand for special transport services. The London Area Travel Survey 2001 is analysed to establish the trip-making characteristics of elderly and disabled people. Ordinal probit models are fitted for all trips and trips by four purposes (work, shopping, personal business and recreational), taking daily trip frequency as the latent variable. A loglinear model is used to analyse trip length. A distinction must be made between the young disabled, the younger elderly and the older elderly. Retired people initially tend to make more trips, but as they get older and disabilities intervene, trip-making tails off. Household structure, income, car ownership, possession of a drivers license, difficulty walking and other disabilities are found to affect trip frequency and length to a greater or lesser extent

Mode choice of older and disabled people: a case study of shopping trips in London

This paper attempts to understand mode choice decisions among older and disabled people in London, with the objective of determining what policies can best meet their mobility and activity needs. A literature review is followed by a description of the data sets and modelling methods used in this analysis. Two assumptions are made on the marginal costs of car usage and it is shown that large investments (car, travelcards) are not amortized in the mode choice decisions made, but that marginal costs need to be appropriately specified. Age and disability interactions are shown to influence public transport use with those with disabilities preferring not to use public transport, although if healthy, older people will use buses and trams. The preference for taxis also increases with age when there is a disability. Public transport accessibility measures were also found to be associated with increased public transport use

Theory and Evaluation of a Bayesian Music Structure Extractor

We introduce a new model for extracting end points of music structure segments, such as intro, verse, chorus, break and so forth, from recorded music. Our methods are applied to the problem of grouping audio features into continuous structural segments with start and end times corresponding as closely as possible to a ground truth of independent human structure judgements. Our work extends previous work on automatic summarization and structure extraction by providing a model for segment end-points posed in a Bayesian framework. Methods to infer parameters to the model using Expectation Maximization and Maximum Likelihood methods are discussed. The model identifies all the segments in a song, not just the chorus or longest segment. We discuss the theory and implementation of the model and evaluate the model in an automatic structure segmentation experiment against a ground truth of human judgements. Our results shows a segment boundary intersection rate break-even point of approximately 80%