A Pattern of Possibility: Maxine Hong Kingston\u27s Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the many contemporary American novelists of non-European ethnicities and one of many women novelists who have found in mythology and folklore both stories and images which can transform the genre by providing novel patterns of order and meronymic language. These inclusive patterns and words help expand our perspective as they encompass both the linear and cyclical stories of the individual within the context of communal and social, mythic and historic, truths. In The Woman Warrior, the complex frog knot of her female heritage is untied for us not only to open up women\u27s possible stories but also to offer her readers the variety which keeps us sane, freeing us from a dominant discourse which convincingly describes the inevitable tragedy of our common death but often fails to remind us of the simultaneous richness of our uncommon lives

Resilient clamp holds fuel cell stack through resilient clamp holds fuel cell stack through thermal cycle

Resilient clamping device holds a stack of fuel cells during thermal expansion and contraction periods. The clamp has torsion bar action which maintains seal integrity over a wide stress range

Comparison of predicted and experimental real-gas pressure distributions on space shuttle orbiter nose for shuttle entry air data system

An experimental investigation of inviscid real-gas effects on the pressure distribution along the Space Shuttle Orbiter nose center line up to an angle of attack of 32 deg was performed in support of the Shuttle Entry Air Data System (SEADS). Free-stream velocities from 4.8 to 6.6 kn/s were generated at hypersonic conditions with helium, air, and CO2, resulting in normal-shock density ratios from 3.7 to 18.4. The experimental results for pressure distribution agreed closely with numerical results. Modified Newtonian theory deviates from both experiment and the numerical results as angle of attack increases or shock density ratio decreases. An evaluation of the use of modified Newtonian theory for predicting SEADS pressure distributions in actual flight conditions was made through comparison with numerical predictions

Space Chicken: A Historical Look at How the Critical Path Changes over a Missions Development

The critical path in schedule analysis defines the series of tasks that have no schedule slack leading to the delivery of a system. The critical path for NASA science missions, which typically runs through a spacecraft subsystem or a scientific instrument, is dynamic and changes over the development lifetime of a project. Often the critical path at the start of preliminary design will be through a specific spacecraft subsystem while the final, delivered critical path item is often a scientific instrument that is delivered late. The research for this paper looks at the postulated critical path at different milestones, and the actual critical path item at final delivery, for a variety of NASA science missions to understand what elements are impacting the delivery schedule the most. Recommendations are made based on these quantitative results relative to what elements should potentially be considered more often in early development schedules to more robustly plan for development issues

Binaural Cues for Distance and Direction of Nearby Sound Sources

To a first-order approximation, binaural localization cues are ambiguous: a number of source locations give rise to nearly the same interaural differences. For sources more than a meter from the listener, binaural localization cues are approximately equal for any source on a cone centered on the interaural axis (i.e., the well-known "cones of confusion"). The current paper analyzes simple geometric approximations of a listener's head to gain insight into localization performance for sources near the listener. In particular, if the head is treated as a rigid, perfect sphere, interaural intensity differences (IIDs) can be broken down into two main components. One component is constant along the cone of confusion (and thus co varies with the interaural time difference, or ITD). The other component is roughly constant for a sphere centered on the interaural axis and depends only on the relative pathlengths from the source to the two ears. This second factor is only large enough to be perceptible when sources are within one or two meters of the listener. These results are not dramatically different if one assumes that the ears are separated by 160 degrees along the surface of the sphere (rather than diametrically opposite one another). Thus, for sources within a meter of the listener, binaural information should allow listeners to locate sources within a volume around a circle centered on the interaural axis, on a "doughnut of confusion." The volume of the doughnut of confusion increases dramatically with angle between source and the interaural axis, degenerating to the entire median plane in the limit.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-98-1-0108