Study of Apollo water impact. Volume 11 - User's manual for unsymmetric shell of revolution analysis Final report

Users manual on static and dynamic computer programs on linear elastic thin shell theory - Apollo command module water impac

Comparing Dynamic Hand Rehabilitation Gestures in Leap Motion Using Multi dimensional Dynamic Time Warping

We propose and evaluate the use of Multi-dimensional Dynamic Time Warping (MDTW) for comparing dynamic hand rehabilitation gestures that would be performed by a patient (query) relative to hand gestures prepared by a physiotherapist (reference). MDTW enables us to determine how similar or different a query dynamic hand gesture is to a reference one whilst filtering out unwanted sources of error resulting from positional, rotational or speed differences between the query and the reference actions. It produces a minimum-distance value of a warp path after aligning a query dynamic hand gesture with a reference one. A low minimum-distance value implies the two gestures being compared are similar and high minimum-distance value implies the two gestures vary to a greater extent. When we deliberately compare a specific hand gesture with itself, we obtain a minimum-distance value of 0° indicating the similarity is 100%. Furthermore, when we compare two closely similar hand gestures i.e. gesture 1 and gesture 4, a minimum-distance value of 35.9° is obtained. However, when we compare two quite different gestures i.e. gesture 2 and gesture 3, a minimum-distance value of 248.5° is obtained. Therefore, a physiotherapist can establish whether a patient performs hand rehabilitation gestures satisfactorily or an adjustment is required based on the minimum-distance values of the warp paths

Glueball Regge trajectories from gauge/string duality and the Pomeron

The spectrum of light baryons and mesons has been reproduced recently by Brodsky and Teramond from a holographic dual to QCD inspired in the AdS/CFT correspondence. They associate fluctuations about the AdS geometry with four dimensional angular momenta of the dual QCD states. We use a similar approach to estimate masses of glueball states with different spins and their excitations. We consider Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions and find approximate linear Regge trajectories for these glueballs. In particular the Neumann case is consistent with the Pomeron trajectory.Comment: In this revised version we made some additional remarks on the text. We also included 2 more references. The glueball spectrum and Regge trajectories are unchanged. 10 pages, 2 eps figure

Satellite laser ranging work at the Goddard Space Flight Center

Laser ranging systems, their range and accuracy capabilities, and planned improvements for future systems are discussed, the systems include one fixed and two mobile lasers ranging systems. They have demonstrated better than 10 cm accuracy both on a carefully surveyed ground range and in regular satellite ranging operations. They are capable of ranging to all currently launched retroreflector equipped satellites with the exception of Timation III. A third mobile system is discussed which will be accurate to better than 5 cm and will be capable of ranging to distant satellites such as Timation III and LAGEOS

The genetics of situs inversus without primary ciliary dyskinesia

Situs inversus (SI), a left-right mirror reversal of the visceral organs, can occur with recessive Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD). However, most people with SI do not have PCD, and the etiology of their condition remains poorly studied. We sequenced the genomes of 15 people with SI, of which six had PCD, as well as 15 controls. Subjects with non-PCD SI in this sample had an elevated rate of left-handedness (five out of nine), which suggested possible developmental mechanisms linking brain and body laterality. The six SI subjects with PCD all had likely recessive mutations in genes already known to cause PCD. Two non-PCD SI cases also had recessive mutations in known PCD genes, suggesting reduced penetrance for PCD in some SI cases. One non-PCD SI case had recessive mutations in PKD1L1, and another in CFAP52 (also known as WDR16). Both of these genes have previously been linked to SI without PCD. However, five of the nine non-PCD SI cases, including three of the left-handers in this dataset, had no obvious monogenic basis for their condition. Environmental influences, or possible random effects in early development, must be considered

Archipelago-Wide Island Restoration in the Galápagos Islands: Reducing Costs of Invasive Mammal Eradication Programs and Reinvasion Risk

Invasive alien mammals are the major driver of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation on islands. Over the past three decades, invasive mammal eradication from islands has become one of society's most powerful tools for preventing extinction of insular endemics and restoring insular ecosystems. As practitioners tackle larger islands for restoration, three factors will heavily influence success and outcomes: the degree of local support, the ability to mitigate for non-target impacts, and the ability to eradicate non-native species more cost-effectively. Investments in removing invasive species, however, must be weighed against the risk of reintroduction. One way to reduce reintroduction risks is to eradicate the target invasive species from an entire archipelago, and thus eliminate readily available sources. We illustrate the costs and benefits of this approach with the efforts to remove invasive goats from the Galápagos Islands. Project Isabela, the world's largest island restoration effort to date, removed >140,000 goats from >500,000 ha for a cost of US$10.5 million. Leveraging the capacity built during Project Isabela, and given that goat reintroductions have been common over the past decade, we implemented an archipelago-wide goat eradication strategy. Feral goats remain on three islands in the archipelago, and removal efforts are underway. Efforts on the Galápagos Islands demonstrate that for some species, island size is no longer the limiting factor with respect to eradication. Rather, bureaucratic processes, financing, political will, and stakeholder approval appear to be the new challenges. Eradication efforts have delivered a suite of biodiversity benefits that are in the process of revealing themselves. The costs of rectifying intentional reintroductions are high in terms of financial and human resources. Reducing the archipelago-wide goat density to low levels is a technical approach to reducing reintroduction risk in the short-term, and is being complemented with a longer-term social approach focused on education and governance

An experimental study of fog and cloud computing in CEP-based Real-Time IoT applications

Internet of Things (IoT) has posed new requirements to the underlying processing architecture, specially for real-time applications, such as event-detection services. Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines provide a powerful tool to implement these services. Fog computing has raised as a solution to support IoT real-time applications, in contrast to the Cloud-based approach. This work is aimed at analysing a CEP-based Fog architecture for real-time IoT applications that uses a publish-subscribe protocol. A testbed has been developed with low-cost and local resources to verify the suitability of CEP-engines to low-cost computing resources. To assess performance we have analysed the effectiveness and cost of the proposal in terms of latency and resource usage, respectively. Results show that the fog computing architecture reduces event-detection latencies up to 35%, while the available computing resources are being used more efficiently, when compared to a Cloud deployment. Performance evaluation also identifies the communication between the CEP-engine and the final users as the most time consuming component of latency. Moreover, the latency analysis concludes that the time required by CEP-engine is related to the compute resources, but is nonlinear dependent of the number of things connected

Constrained generalized supersymmetries and superparticles with tensorial central charges. A classification

We classify the admissible types of constraint (hermitian, holomorphic, with reality conditions on the bosonic sectors, etc.) for generalized supersymmetries in the presence of complex spinors. We further point out which constrained generalized supersymmetries admit a dual formulation. For both real and complex spinors generalized supersymmetries are constructed and classified as dimensional reductions of supersymmetries from {\em oxidized} space-times (i.e. the maximal space-times associated to $n$-component Clifford irreps). We apply these results to sistematically construct a class of models describing superparticles in presence of bosonic tensorial central charges, deriving the consistency conditions for the existence of the action, as well as the constrained equations of motion. Examples of these models (which, in their twistorial formulation, describe towers of higher-spin particles) were first introduced by Rudychev and Sezgin (for real spinors) and later by Bandos and Lukierski (for complex spinors).Comment: 32 pages, LaTe