Keynote Address

Biography: Nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate, Michael Griffin began his duties as the 11th Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on April 14, 2005. As Administrator, he leads the NASA team and manages its resources to advance the U.S. Vision for Space Exploration. Prior to being nominated as NASA Administrator, Griffin was serving as Space Department Head at Johns Hopkins University\u27s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. He was previously President and Chief Operating Officer of In-Q-Tel, Inc., and also served in several positions within Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va., including Chief Executive Officer of Orbital\u27s Magellan Systems division and General Manager of the Space Systems Group. Earlier in his career, Griffin served as chief engineer and as associate administrator for Exploration at NASA, and as deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. He has been an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and George Washington University, where he taught courses in spacecraft design, applied mathematics, guidance and navigation, compressible flow, computational fluid dynamics, spacecraft attitude control, astrodynamics and introductory aerospace engineering. He is the lead author of more than two dozen technical papers, as well as the textbook, Space Vehicle Design

An Unsupervised Learning Perspective on the Dynamic Contribution to Extreme Precipitation Changes

Despite the importance of quantifying how the spatial patterns of extreme precipitation will change with warming, we lack tools to objectively analyze the storm-scale outputs of modern climate models. To address this gap, we develop an unsupervised machine learning framework to quantify how storm dynamics affect precipitation extremes and their changes without sacrificing spatial information. Over a wide range of precipitation quantiles, we find that the spatial patterns of extreme precipitation changes are dominated by spatial shifts in storm regimes rather than intrinsic changes in how these storm regimes produce precipitation.Comment: 14 Pages, 9 Figures, Accepted to "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: workshop at NeurIPS 2022". arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.1184

Toray End-board Loading Station

As part of the University of Rhode Island’s senior capstone design program, Toray Plastics (America) Inc. has proposed a design challenge which involves creating an end-board loading station to be used in conjunction with their new automated packaging facility. This report details the design challenges, objectives, and processes which were used to arrive at final design for the end-board loading mechanism for Toray Plastics (America) Inc. This report also analyzes and proves the validity of the solution from all perspectives. Toray Plastics located in North Kingstown, RI, is a producer of plastics prominently used in the food industry for packaging. The plastic packing materials are shipped out on large rolls and recently Toray has been building a fully automated packaging facility to expedite the shipping process. Toray ships these rolls of material on a large coil with end-boards on the sides to support the coil. The new packaging facility has robots which will remove the end-boards from a designated cart and place them onto the ends of the rolls. The challenge which Toray has presented is to design something to assist operators remove the end-boards from the shipping pallets and place them onto the designated carts in the correct orientation. The solution that has been developed by Team 1 is device which will help an operator move 15 of the end-boards at once. The proposed solution uses an internal gripping mechanism which will be lowered into the center of the end-boards and expand outwards gripping the inner diameter. The device will be lifted by an electric hoist and attached to a trolley system to lift and maneuver the end-boards. The internal gripping mechanism will require no external force and it relies on gravity and the weight of the end-boards to secure and grip the end-boards. Only when the end-boards are placed on the ground and no longer being lifted is it possible for the gripping device to be detached. The proposed solution satisfies all design requirements and removes the lifting requirements from the operators which dramatically improves ergonomics and safety. This solution also has the potential to significantly increase the rate of production by allowing for the handling of many end-boards instead of one end-board at a time. This solution was the final result of months of discussion and deliberation and this report details the process taken to arrive at this final design. With guidance from Toray Plastics the design team has arrived at this solution and proved the concept’s strength through thorough cost, safety, ergonomic, and engineering analysis

Affective Outcomes of Group versus Lone Green Exercise Participation

‘Green exercise’ (being physically active within a natural environment) research has examined the influence of environmental setting on health and wellbeing-related exercise outcomes. However, it is not known whether social exercise settings influence green exercise-associated changes in mood, self-esteem, and connection to nature. This study directly compared outcomes of participating in green exercise alone compared to in a group. Using repeated measures, counterbalanced and randomized-crossover design, participants (n = 40) completed two 3 km runs around sports fields. These fields had a relatively flat grass terrain, predominant view of trees, and open grassland. On one occasion participants ran alone and on the other they ran in a group of 4–5 participants. Questionnaire measures of mood, self-esteem, and connection to nature were completed immediately pre- and post-run. Across all of the measures, two-way mixed ANOVAs found that there were statistically significant effects for time but not for time-by-condition interactions. The simplest interpretation of this finding is that social setting does not influence individuals’ attainment of the psychological outcomes of green exercise participation. However, we discuss the possibility that more complex processes might underpin this finding

Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension (BOLE) for Space Launch System (SLS): Empowering Deep Space Missions

No abstract availabl

Comparing Storm Resolving Models and Climates via Unsupervised Machine Learning

Storm-resolving models (SRMs) have gained widespread interest because of the unprecedented detail with which they resolve the global climate. However, it remains difficult to quantify objective differences in how SRMs resolve complex atmospheric formations. This lack of appropriate tools for comparing model similarities is a problem in many disparate fields that involve simulation tools for complex data. To address this challenge we develop methods to estimate distributional distances based on both nonlinear dimensionality reduction and vector quantization. Our approach automatically learns appropriate notions of similarity from low-dimensional latent data representations that the different models produce. This enables an intercomparison of nine SRMs based on their high-dimensional simulation data and reveals that only six are similar in their representation of atmospheric dynamics. Furthermore, we uncover signatures of the convective response to global warming in a fully unsupervised way. Our study provides a path toward evaluating future high-resolution simulation data more objectively.Comment: 22 pages, 19 figures. Submitted to journal for consideratio

Grazing reduces bee abundance and diversity in saltmarshes by suppressing flowering of key plant species

Global declines in pollinator populations and associated services make it imperative to identify and sensitively manage valuable habitats. Coastal habitats such as saltmarshes can support extensive flowering meadows, but their importance for pollinators, and how this varies with land-use intensity, is poorly understood. We hypothesised that saltmarshes provide important bee foraging habitat, and that livestock grazing either suppresses or enhances its value by reducing the abundance - or increasing the diversity - of flowering plants. To test these hypotheses, we surveyed 11 saltmarshes in Wales (UK) under varying grazing management (long-term ungrazed, extensively grazed, intensively grazed) over three summers and investigated causal pathways linking grazing intensity with bee abundance and diversity using a series of linear mixed models. We also compared observed bee abundances to 11 common terrestrial habitats using national survey data. Grazing reduced bee abundance and richness via reductions in the flower cover of the two key food plants: sea aster Tripolium pannonicum and sea lavender Limonium spp. Grazing also increased flowering plant richness, but the positive effects of flower richness did not compensate for the negative effects of reduced flower cover on bees. Bee abundances were approximately halved in extensively grazed marshes (relative to ungrazed) and halved again in intensively grazed marshes. Saltmarsh flowers were primarily visited by honeybees Apis mellifera and bumblebees Bombus spp. in mid and late summer. Compared to other broad habitat types in Wales, ungrazed saltmarshes ranked highly for honeybees and bumblebees in July-August, but were relatively unimportant for solitary bees. Intensively grazed saltmarshes were amongst the least valuable habitats for all bee types. Under appropriate grazing management, saltmarshes provide a valuable and previously overlooked foraging habitat for bees. The strong effects of livestock grazing identified here are likely to extend geographically given that both livestock grazing and key grazing-sensitive plants are widespread in European saltmarshes. We recommend that long-term ungrazed saltmarshes are protected from grazing, and that grazing is maintained at extensive levels on grazed marshes. In this way, saltmarshes can provide forage for wild and managed bee populations and support ecosystem services

Altitude Icing Testing of Jet Engines to Begin at NASA Glenn Research Center Propulsion Systems Laboratory

No abstract availabl

Television news and the symbolic criminalisation of young people

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 9(1), 75 - 90, 2008, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14616700701768105.This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Five's Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.Arts and Humanities Research Counci