Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop: Spacecraft Analysis and Design

This document contains papers presented at the Eighth Annual Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop (TFAWS) on Spacecraft Analysis and Design hosted by the NASA/Johnson Space Center (JSC) on September 8-11, 1997, and held at the University of Houston - Clear Lake (UHCL) in the Bayou Building. The Workshop was sponsored by NASA/JSC. Seminars were hosted and technical papers were provided in fluid and thermal dynamics. Seminars were given in GASP, SINDA, SINAPS Plus, TSS, and PHOENICS. Seventeen papers were presented

Writing in the Disciplines Workshop

A workshop for Xavier faculty to learn about best practices for teaching discipline-specific writing. Participants explored the diversity of writing tasks expected of students in different disciplines and began to develop a writing assignment

Bold course into the future or lost at sea a critical evaluation of the United States Navy's ongoing transformation

Throughout its existence, the U.S. Navy has labored under the continuous scrutiny and skepticism of critics who have either questioned its strategic relevance or its cost. Most recently, this historic debate has centered on the various merits, limitations, benefits and difficulties of littoral or shallow-water combat capabilities, amphibious assault operations, long range precision strike operations, and the role of carrier battle groups. Ever rising costs of procurement combined with reductions in the overall end-strength of the U.S. military have further shaped this debate, especially in terms of how to collate force structure with strategic success. This thesis seeks to evaluate how well the U.S. Navy has demonstrated itself to be in terms of identifying, designing, and procuring the platforms it needs to successfully achieve its missions in the current and future threat environments.http://archive.org/details/boldcourseintofu109451749Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Age is in the Eye of the Beholder: Examining the Cues Employed to Construct the Illusion of Youth in Teen Pornography

Past research has identified a subgenre of mainstream pornography that attempts to create the illusion for consumers that sex is occurring between an adult and a minor (i.e., a child or young adolescent under the age of 18). This illusion is established through various textual, verbal, visual, and behavioural cues. Although the construction of adult–minor relationships in pornography has received some scholarly attention, there has been no attempt to investigate this phenomenon within pornographic videos available via the Internet. The current study addressed this omission by analyzing for content 150 of the most popular “teen” pornography videos available on three pornography websites. We coded for textual, visual, verbal, and behavioural content that connoted sexual activity between an adult and a minor. Results indicated that a small number of videos (28, 18.7 % of the sample) contained a disproportionate percentage of cues (54.2 %), with the remaining videos containing little or no youth sexualized content. We conclude that only a subsample of videos clearly attempted to portray adult–minor relationships. The prevalence of various cues within the sample was quantified and discussed, as were limitations associated with this study and directions for future research

The Impact of Study Strategies on Knowledge Growth and Summative Exam Performance in the First Year of Medical School

Although the distinction between deep and surface processing strategies, their potential to differentially impact learning, and data supporting the superiority of deep processing strategies on summative exam scores are well supported by the literature, more work is needed to understand: (1) how medical students combine study strategies into learning practices, and (2) the effectiveness of these learning practices in facilitating knowledge gains as measured by standardized test scores

A Candidate Sub-Parsec Supermassive Binary Black Hole System

We identify SDSS J153636.22+044127.0, a QSO discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, as a promising candidate for a binary black hole system. This QSO has two broad-line emission systems separated by 3500 km/sec. The redder system at z=0.3889 also has a typical set of narrow forbidden lines. The bluer system (z=0.3727) shows only broad Balmer lines and UV Fe II emission, making it highly unusual in its lack of narrow lines. A third system, which includes only unresolved absorption lines, is seen at a redshift, z=0.3878, intermediate between the two emission-line systems. While the observational signatures of binary nuclear black holes remain unclear, J1536+0441 is unique among all QSOs known in having two broad-line regions, indicative of two separate black holes presently accreting gas. The interpretation of this as a bound binary system of two black holes having masses of 10^8.9 and 10^7.3 solar masses, yields a separation of ~ 0.1 parsec and an orbital period of ~100 years. The separation implies that the two black holes are orbiting within a single narrow-line region, consistent with the characteristics of the spectrum. This object was identified as an extreme outlier of a Karhunen-Loeve Transform of 17,500 z < 0.7 QSO spectra from the SDSS. The probability of the spectrum resulting from a chance superposition of two QSOs with similar redshifts is estimated at 2X10^-7, leading to the expectation of 0.003 such objects in the sample studied; however, even in this case, the spectrum of the lower redshift QSO remains highly unusual.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Nature in pres