Radar bibliography for geoscientists

Bibliography on geological, agricultural, geographical, and related applications of side-looking airborne radar imager

Super Staph in the Community: Is It Evolving?

Staphylococcus aureus infections are a common cause of disease, particularly in colonized people. They frequently cause staph infections and are often dubbed “Super Staph” because they are virulent and multidrug resistant. Recently, a series of published articles have reported that community-acquired methicillin-resistant S. aureus (CA-MRSA) strains are evolving and becoming more prevalent in households. In contrast, health care acquired MRSA (HA-MRSA) is declining in the United States. The changing “Superbugs” have often been used as an example of “evolution in action.” Although MRSA infections have become more prevalent in the community, studies of college students carrying S. aureus and MRSA colonization are lacking. In early studies at Liberty University, we have found that students in microbiology classes who have more contact with individuals in a healthcare setting are more likely to carry MRSA in their body. The classes that had the highest rate of HA-MRSA carriage were those primarily populated by nursing students. Nursing students typically have greater exposure to clinical settings and nursing homes than students in other fields of study. However, in research collected this past year, 2014–2015, we observed a shift to students of many majors now carrying CA-MRSA. At Liberty University, we sampled 544 students and had up to 20%+ MRSA rates common among clinically oriented students, five to ten times the national average. We have seen a changing profile from HA-MRSA to CA-MRSA; this change has the potential to be dangerous, since the new strains are more virulent and aggressive. CA-MRSA is somewhat difficult to define, but is mostly associated with antibiotic profile, toxin genes, and place of acquisition. There is a variation of S. aureusstrains, but most change is found in tightly knit groups: households, dorms, and other close living quarters. The bacteria are “ping-ponging” around among students, changing as they go. This change is real and clearly indicates an emergence of new MRSA variants that some may call microevolution. It is, however, not Darwinian upward-onward evolution but clearly adaptive changes within a species: variants on a theme. MRSA strains are acquiring more genes as they “ping-pong” from one person to another. They change their virulence as they pick up more foreign genes (via phage or plasmids) and vary as they go. The purpose of this article is to provide a reasonable explanation for the genesis, emergence, and the new dominance of Community-associated (CA) MRSA. It also addresses the issue of whether this phenomenon is “evolution in action.” Microbiology research based on the creation paradigm appears to provide some answers to these puzzling questions regarding the new variants of Staphylococcus aureus and its emerging dominance in the United States

Efficient solutions to the Euler equations for supersonic flow with embedded subsonic regions

A line Gauss-Seidel (LGS) relaxation algorithm in conjunction with a one-parameter family of upwind discretizations of the Euler equations in two dimensions is described. Convergence of the basic algorithm to the steady state is quadratic for fully supersonic flows and is linear for other flows. This is in contrast to the block alternating direction implicit methods (either central or upwind differenced) and the upwind biased relaxation schemes, all of which converge linearly, independent of the flow regime. Moreover, the algorithm presented herein is easily coupled with methods to detect regions of subsonic flow embedded in supersonic flow. This allows marching by lines in the supersonic regions, converging each line quadratically, and iterating in the subsonic regions, and yields a very efficient iteration strategy. Numerical results are presented for two-dimensional supersonic and transonic flows containing oblique and normal shock waves which confirm the efficiency of the iteration strategy

An autonomous fault detection, isolation, and recovery system for a 20-kHz electric power distribution test bed

Future space explorations will require long term human presence in space. Space environments that provide working and living quarters for manned missions are becoming increasingly larger and more sophisticated. Monitor and control of the space environment subsystems by expert system software, which emulate human reasoning processes, could maintain the health of the subsystems and help reduce the human workload. The autonomous power expert (APEX) system was developed to emulate a human expert's reasoning processes used to diagnose fault conditions in the domain of space power distribution. APEX is a fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) system, capable of autonomous monitoring and control of the power distribution system. APEX consists of a knowledge base, a data base, an inference engine, and various support and interface software. APEX provides the user with an easy-to-use interactive interface. When a fault is detected, APEX will inform the user of the detection. The user can direct APEX to isolate the probable cause of the fault. Once a fault has been isolated, the user can ask APEX to justify its fault isolation and to recommend actions to correct the fault. APEX implementation and capabilities are discussed

Some path-following techniques for solution of nonlinear equations and comparison with parametric differentiation

Some path-following techniques are described and compared with other methods. Use of multipurpose techniques that can be used at more than one stage of the path-following computation results in a system that is relatively simple to understand, program, and use. Comparison of path-following methods with the method of parametric differentiation reveals definite advantages for the path-following methods. The fact that parametric differentiation has found a broader range of applications indicates that path-following methods have been underutilized

The impact of peoples' personal dispositions and personalities on their trust of robots in an emergency scenario

Humans should be able to trust that they can safely interact with their home companion robot. However, robots can exhibit occasional mechanical, programming or functional errors. We hypothesise that the severity of the consequences and the timing of a robot's different types of erroneous behaviours during an interaction may have different impacts on users' attitudes towards a domestic robot. First, we investigated human users' perceptions of the severity of various categories of potential errors that are likely to be exhibited by a domestic robot. Second, we used an interactive storyboard to evaluate participants' degree of trust in the robot after it performed tasks either correctly, or with 'small' or 'big' errors. Finally, we analysed the correlation between participants' responses regarding their personality, predisposition to trust other humans, their perceptions of robots, and their interaction with the robot. We conclude that there is correlation between the magnitude of an error performed by a robot and the corresponding loss of trust by the human towards the robot. Moreover we observed that some traits of participants' personalities (conscientiousness and agreeableness) and their disposition of trusting other humans (benevolence) significantly increased their tendency to trust a robot more during an emergency scenario.Peer reviewe

The compositional construction of Markov processes II

In an earlier paper we introduced a notion of Markov automaton, together with parallel operations which permit the compositional description of Markov processes. We illustrated by showing how to describe a system of n dining philosophers, and we observed that Perron-Frobenius theory yields a proof that the probability of reaching deadlock tends to one as the number of steps goes to infinity. In this paper we add sequential operations to the algebra (and the necessary structure to support them). The extra operations permit the description of hierarchical systems, and ones with evolving geometry