33,545 research outputs found
Tube joint leak repair coupling
Tube joint leak repair coupling consists of 2 split seals, 1 male split nut, 1 female split nut, and two aligning pins. Each split nut consists of 2 half-shell sections which, when engaged, are held together by a dovetail joint and an aligning pin
Creating a Culture of Philanthropy in Nonprofit Arts Organizations
This paper explores a growing theory known as a culture of philanthropy through the lens of a nonprofit arts organization. A culture of philanthropy refers to an organization’s attitude toward philanthropy, fund development, and the effort to create a community of donor inclusion which can have a lasting effect on the organization and the community well beyond financial growth. Arts organizations are exploring radical innovative methods in order to create a culture of funders, continuous patronage, and community engagement.
This paper also discusses the concept of venture philanthropy and its efforts to change the relationship between funders and grantees from dependency to partnership, and how this affects funding for arts organizations. With shifts in funding, the growing competition for grants and private donors, and the declining funds for the arts from the private sector, it is more important than ever for arts organizations to prove their positive impact on the community to the new entrepreneurial, results-oriented philanthropists. Creating a culture of philanthropy is one way to promote positive change and growth within an organization as well as the greater community
Formal Context Generation using Dirichlet Distributions
We suggest an improved way to randomly generate formal contexts based on
Dirichlet distributions. For this purpose we investigate the predominant way to
generate formal contexts, a coin-tossing model, recapitulate some of its
shortcomings and examine its stochastic model. Building up on this we propose
our Dirichlet model and develop an algorithm employing this idea. By comparing
our generation model to a coin-tossing model we show that our approach is a
significant improvement with respect to the variety of contexts generated.
Finally, we outline a possible application in null model generation for formal
contexts.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure
Sound Source Localization in a Multipath Environment Using Convolutional Neural Networks
The propagation of sound in a shallow water environment is characterized by
boundary reflections from the sea surface and sea floor. These reflections
result in multiple (indirect) sound propagation paths, which can degrade the
performance of passive sound source localization methods. This paper proposes
the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the localization of sources
of broadband acoustic radiated noise (such as motor vessels) in shallow water
multipath environments. It is shown that CNNs operating on cepstrogram and
generalized cross-correlogram inputs are able to more reliably estimate the
instantaneous range and bearing of transiting motor vessels when the source
localization performance of conventional passive ranging methods is degraded.
The ensuing improvement in source localization performance is demonstrated
using real data collected during an at-sea experiment.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, Final draft of paper submitted to 2018 IEEE
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
15-20 April 2018 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:1612.0350
Impulse distributions in dense granular flows: signatures of large-scale spatial structures
In this paper we report the results of simulations of a 2D gravity driven,
dissipative granular flow through a hopper system. Measurements of impulse
distributions P(I) on the simulated system show flow-velocity-invariant
behavior of the distribution for impulses larger than the average impulse .
For small impulses, however, P(I) decreases significantly with flow velocity, a
phenomenon which can be attributed exclusively to collisions between grains
undergoing frequent collisions. Visualizations of the system also show that
these frequently colliding particles tend to form increasingly large linear
clusters as the flow velocity decreases. A model is proposed for the form of
P(I), given distributions of cluster size and velocity, which accurately
predicts the observed form of the distribution. Thus the impulse distribution
provides some insight into the formation and properties of these ``dynamic''
force chains.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
REDD comes into fashion in Madagascar
As the Copenhagen negotiations on the form of post Kyoto
mechanisms to tackle climate change approach, firmly on the agenda are proposals to include Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). REDD could
potentially generate tens of millions of dollars annually for
Madagascar, bringing a huge potential to deliver forest conservation and improved livelihoods for the rural Malagasy. Efforts are underway in Madagascar to access REDD finance through a national working group and implementation of five REDD pilot projects. Many areas where the lowering of rates of deforestation is hoped to take place are part of the new generation of protected areas following the 2003 Durban Declaration. These new protected areas are frequently based on federations or grouping of community managed forests, which the literature and experience has shown to be highly problematic and which are rarely fully operational. If REDD is to prove to be an effective conservation tool, as well as an equitable mechanism to promote rural development several issues need to be addressed: More resources allocated to provide direct incentives to communities and to build local management capacity within their forest management
associations. More serious efforts are needed to increase forest
plantations and to improve management of existing plantations
and natural forests, so as to meet the forest product needs of
the whole Malagasy population. Basic human rights to have
secure tenure of ancestral forest lands, and to derive a decent
living from these needs to be recognised and empowered. The
risk of ‘elite capture’ of the revenues generated by REDD should
be avoided by the establishment of a transparent and independent scrutiny facility. Finally, it is proposed that improved dialogue between the social critics of conservation in Madagascar and the conservation movement itself should be encouraged
Findings of the Joint Workshop on Evaluation of Impacts of Space Station Freedom Ground Configurations
At the workshop, experts from the plasma interactions community evaluated the impacts of environmental interactions on the Space Station Freedom (SSF) under each of the proposed grounding schemes. The grounding scheme chosen for the SSF power system was found to have serious implications for SSF design. Interactions of the SSF power system and structure with the low Earth orbit (LEO) plasma differ significantly between different proposed grounding schemes. Environmental constraints will require modification of current SSF designs under any grounding scheme. Maintaining the present negative-grounding scheme compromises SSF safety, structural integrity, and electromagnetic compatibility. It also will increase contamination rates over alternative grounding schemes. One alternative, positive grounding of the array, requires redesign of the primary power system in work package four. Floating the array reduces the number of circuit changes to work package four but adds new hardware. Maintaining the current design will affect all work packages; however, no impacts were identified on work packages one, two, or three by positively grounding or floating the array, with the possible exception of extra corona protection in multi-wire connectors
- …