The weld-brazing metal joining process

Superior mechanical properties were obtained in metal joints weld-brazed between faying surfaces. Weld-braze applications and advantages are listed

Venturing into schools : locating mental health initiatives in complex environments

Schools provide viable settings for mental health promotion initiatives, such as programs to develop students’ social and emotional capabilities (SEC). Complexity in the school environments into which initiatives are introduced, such as diverse student capabilities, school structures, and teachers’ knowledge and confidence, will play an integral role in the success of those initiatives. This paper investigates the environments of schools about to receive the KidsMatter mental heath promotion, prevention and early intervention initiative in Australia, using information sourced from questionnaires about 2598 students and their teachers in 50 Australian primary schools. The focus of the report is on the status of the schools’ work in one of the key focus areas for the intervention, namely students’ SEC. Analysis showed relatively high levels of students’ SEC across the whole sample, but with sub-group differences. Teachers’ attitudes towards SEC learning were highly positive. Teachers’ self-rated knowledge and approaches in dealing with SEC were moderate, and point to requirements for additional pre-service and professional development. The extent of regular and sustained delivery of SEC programs and mental health initiatives in general showed variability, suggesting the need to attend to school systems and structural supports. Implications of these areas of diversity in school environments on the selection and methods of delivery of mental health promotion programs in schools are discussed.peer-reviewe

Comparing Conceptions of Social Ontology: Emergent Social Entities and/or Institutional Facts?

It is commonplace, if erroneous, to suppose that worldviews (or ontological conceptions) that underpin, or are presupposed by, substantive analyses and/or methodological stances are somehow beyond interrogation2. This is thought to be especially so regarding social ontological orientations (see discussion in Lawson 2014). To the contrary ontological conceptions, including those relating to the social realm, are easily shown to be subject to empirical assessment in both absolute terms (see e.g. Lawson 2003 chapter 2; Lawson 2014) and in comparison to the explanatory power of competing accounts (see e.g., Lawson 2014,2015a)

Activities of \gamma-ray emitting isotopes in rainwater from Greater Sudbury, Canada following the Fukushima incident

We report the activity measured in rainwater samples collected in the Greater Sudbury area of eastern Canada on 3, 16, 20, and 26 April 2011. The samples were gamma-ray counted in a germanium detector and the isotopes 131I and 137Cs, produced by the fission of 235U, and 134Cs, produced by neutron capture on 133Cs, were observed at elevated levels compared to a reference sample of ice-water. These elevated activities are ascribed to the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor complex in Japan that followed the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. The activity levels observed at no time presented health concerns.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figure

Neutral Kaon Production From One-prong Tau Decays

The branching ratio for the decay of the tau lepton into at least one neutral kaon meson was measured from a sample of 201850 tau decays recorded by the OPAL detector from 1991 to 1995. The selection yielded 305 t-→X- K0 Lnt candidates (the charge conjugate is implied for all reactions), where X- is any charged hadron possibly accompanied by a neutral particle, giving a branching ratio of B&parl0;t-→X- K 0Lnt&parr0;=&parl0; 10.01±0.79±0.64&parr0;×10- 3, where the first error is statistical and the second is systematic. From the sample of t-→X- K0 Lnt decays, three exclusive decay modes were identified and their branching ratios were measured to be B&parl0;t-→p- K0nt&parr0; =9.1±0.9± 0.6×10-3, B&parl0;t-→p- K0≥1p0n t&parr0;=3.6± 1.3±1.0×10-3, B&parl0;t-→K- K 0≥0p0nt&parr0; =3.3±0.9±0.7 ×10-3, where the first error is statistical and the second is systematic. The t- →K*892 -nt branching ratio was determined to be 0.0140 ± 0.0013 using the t- →p-K 0nt branching ratio and assuming isospin conservation. Finally, the ratio of the non-strange decay constant fr to the strange decay constant fK* was measured to be 0.93 ± 0.05

Insect populations across an urban-to-suburban land use gradient.

Insect populations, especially those of pollinators, have been steadily declining across the globe in recent decades, a trend that is intensified in cities. Since the conservation of pollinators is crucial for maintaining ecosystems and ecological processes, new approaches are being promoted beyond those of conserving large natural areas. Urban native plant gardens could potentially offset some of these losses locally. This research attempts to set a local baseline for the insect diversity in urban gardens in Louisville and determine whether differences exist in garden insects in cities versus suburbs in Jefferson County, Kentucky. To address the land-use question we established 23 collection sites across the county ranging in degree of “urbanness”, with four being established in local parks to serve as natural reference sites. We also addressed a methodological question concerning the abundance and types of insects caught using different colored bowls set at two different heights. Each collection site consisted of 6 bowls filled with detergent-water. Three were 100-cm above the ground and three were 15-cm above the ground. At each height we set up a blue, white and yellow bowl filled with detergent-water to capture insects. We collected insects caught over a 24-hour period at the end of June and again at the end of July in 2017. Identification was performed to taxonomic order, with additional subcategories below order for certain groupings. The impact of bowl color, bowl height, time period of capture, and degree of “urbanness” (measured by % Impervious Surface) on abundance and diversity of insects captured were assessed. We found little difference in insect abundance at the taxonomic order level among the native plant gardens and between gardens and the meadow reference sites. However, we did find evidence in July that bee abundance was lower in urban vs. suburban and meadow locations. We also found that yellow bowls captured the most insects, while height also played a significant role, with the high bowls capturing more than low bowls. More insects were captured in July than June. Our findings suggest that the creation of more native plant gardens in cities and suburbs may well be a viable conservation strategy for supporting insects, including pollinators

Modeling Adaptive Middleware and Its Applications to Military Tactical Datalinks

Open systems solutions and techniques have become the de facto standard for achieving interoperability between disparate, large-scale, legacy software systems. A key technology among open systems solutions and techniques is middleware. Middleware, in general, is used to isolate applications from dependencies introduced by hardware, operating systems, and other low-level aspects of system architectures. While middleware approaches are or will be integrated into operational military systems, many open questions exist about the appropriate areas to applying middleware. Adaptive middleware is middleware that provides an application with a run-time adaptation strategy, based upon system-level interfaces and properties. Adaptive middleware is an example of an active applied research area. Adaptive middleware is being developed and applied to meet the ever-increasing challenges set forth by the next generation of mission-critical distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. The driving force behind many next-generation DRE systems is the establishment of QoS requirements typically associated with workloads that vary dynamically. The Weapon System Open Architecture (WSOA), an adaptive middleware platform developed by Boeing, is modeled as a part of this research to determine the scalability of the architecture. The WSOA adaptive middleware was previously flight-tested with one tactical node, and the test results represent the performance baseline the architecture. The WSOA adaptive middleware is modeled with 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 tactical nodes. The results of the modeling and simulation is that the WSOA adaptive middleware can achieve the performance baseline achieved during the original flight-test, in the cases of 1, 2, and 4 tactical nodes. In addition, the results of the modeling and simulation also demonstrate that the WSOA adaptive middleware cannot achiev

Dirac lattice

We study the emergence of Dirac fermionic field in the low energy description of non-relativistic dynamical models on graphs admitting continuum limit. The Dirac fermionic field appears as the effective field describing the excitations above point-like Fermi surface. Together with the Dirac fermionic field an effective space-time metric is also emerging. We analyze the conditions for such Fermi points to appear in general, paying special attention to the cases of two and three spacial dimensions.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures; typo and grammatical corrections, new reference(s) added, version accepted for publicatio