Interrelationships between tracking performance measures, control dynamics, and the effects of incentives

Interrelationships between tracking performance measures, control dynamics, and effects of incentive

EVA assembly of large space structure element

The results of a test program to assess the potential of manned extravehicular activity (EVA) assembly of erectable space trusses are described. Seventeen tests were conducted in which six "space-weight" columns were assembled into a regular tetrahedral cell by a team of two "space"-suited test subjects. This cell represents the fundamental "element" of a tetrahedral truss structure. The tests were conducted under simulated zero-gravity conditions. Both manual and simulated remote manipulator system modes were evaluated. Articulation limits of the pressure suit and zero gravity could be accommodated by work stations with foot restraints. The results of this study have confirmed that astronaut EVA assembly of large, erectable space structures is well within man's capabilities

Institutional Effects of Term Limits In Missouri1

Missouri adopted term limits in 1992 but the limits did not take full effect until 2003 in the House and will take full effect in the Senate in 2005. Missouri's limit is a lifetime limit of eight years in each chamber, for a total of sixteen years. Initially the limit applied to partial terms for those elected in a special election but the amendment was revised in 2002 to exclude from the circulation service of less then one-half a term (i.e. one year in the House or two years in the Senate). The amendment can be found in article III, section 8 of the Missouri Constitution. In January 2003, no member of the House had served more than six consecutive years and in January 2005, no member of the Senate will have served more than six consecutive years. Those who have written about term limits do not agree about the probable effects and researchers have found that the effects of term limits vary significantly from state to state (see attached bibliography). This report draws on legislative data compiled by the Missouri Secretary of State, a legislative survey, and interviews to examine the impact of term limits on legislative leaders, new member learning and specialization, the role of legislative staff, and evolving lobbyingstrategies.Includes bibliographical reference

Comprehensive Child Welfare Conference An Evaluation of Interagency Learning

In Missouri, 9,833 reports of child abuse and neglect were substantiated in fiscal year 2004 and 8,725 children were under the care of the Department of Social Services, Children's Services Division. Each time a child enters the social service system, state law requires a team of professionals, including the Children's Services Division, judges, juvenile officers, court appointed special advocates (CASA), and guardian ad litems, to work together. These teams investigate the abuse / neglect issues and determine what steps should be taken in the best interest of the child. The wide impact of the new law (House Bill 1453, 2004) required a new approach, a multidisciplinary approach, that would allow circuits to work as a team to devise methods to implement the provisions. In an effort to improve the coordination and problem solving abilities of these teams at the local level, the Department of Social Services and the Office of State Courts Administrator funded, developed, and implemented a series of regional conferences in Spring 2005. The Comprehensive Child Welfare Conference (CCWC) brought together over 600 professionals from each of the judicial circuits in Missouri. The regional conferences were held in Cape Girardeau, Columbia, Kansas City, St. Louis and Springfield. Each circuit was represented by a team of twelve to twenty-five individuals and tended to be well balanced between court staff (judges, clerks, juvenile officers), Children's Division employees, attorneys (for parents and for children), and special advocates (CASA). Each regional conference provided education on House Bill 1453 and addressed other issues related to child welfare cases through plenary sessions and concurrent workshops. Further, each conference provided the opportunity for representatives of multiple perspectives within each circuit to discuss how changes can and should be made to child welfare case processing. Regional conferences are expensive and time-consuming undertakings. If the objectives of the conference - education and enhanced circuit level problem solving - were not achieved, new educational approaches would be necessary in the future. With this in mind, the Institute of Public Policy worked with OSCA to develop an evaluation plan that would, in part, determine successes and identify improvements for the future. The first step of this evaluation process was to identify the goals of the regional conferences. Through a series of meetings with the organizers, goals were identifi ed and linked to the assessment forms to be completed by attendees during the conference

Seat Belt Use by Missouri Teens*

In 2006, the Institute of Public Policy conducted 12 focus groups with Missouri teens on behalf of the Missouri Department of Transportation to:1) understand how teenagers make decisions on seatbelt use; and 2) determine what outreach methods could influence teens' decisions regarding seatbelt use and traffic safety. The study found that teens' seatbelt use is set well before they begin driving, that the lack of use of seatbelts among parents is especially influential, and that teens are not well informed about the consequences of accidents when drivers or passengers are not wearing seatbelts. This report summarizes studies of seatbelt use in Missouri as compared to other states and describes teens' attitudes about seatbelt usage. Finally, it recommends that the Department continue its teen- focused informational campaign and that the state enact primary enforcement of the seatbelt law.Includes bibliographical reference

Structural and wetting properties of nature\u27s finest silks (order Embioptera)

Insects from the order Embioptera (webspinners) spin silk fibres which are less than 200 nm in diameter. In this work, we characterized and compared the diameters of single silk fibres from nine species—Antipaluria urichi, Pararhagadochir trinitatis, Saussurembia calypso, Diradius vandykei, Aposthonia ceylonica, Haploembia solieri, H. tarsalis, Oligotoma nigra and O. saundersii. Silk from seven of these species have not been previously quantified. Our studies cover five of the 10 named taxonomic families and represent about one third of the known taxonomic family-level diversity in the order Embioptera. Naturally spun silk varied in diameter from 43.6 ± 1.7 nm for D. vandykei to 122.4 ± 3.2 nm for An. urichi. Mean fibre diameter did not correlate with adult female body length. Fibre diameter is more similar in closely related species than in more distantly related species. Field observations indicated that silk appears shiny and smooth when exposed to rainwater. We therefore measured contact angles to learn more about interactions between silk and water. Higher contact angles were measured for silks with wider fibre diameter and higher quantity of hydrophobic amino acids. High static contact angles (ranging up to 122° ± 3° for An. urichi) indicated that silken sheets spun by four arboreal, webspinner species were hydrophobic. A second contact angle measurement made on a previously wetted patch of silk resulted in a lower contact angle (average difference was greater than 27°) for all four species. Our studies suggest that silk fibres which had been previously exposed to water exhibited irreversible changes in hydrophobicity and water adhesion properties. Our results are in alignment with the ‘super-pinning’ site hypothesis by Yarger and co-workers to describe the hydrophobic, yet water adhesive, properties exhibited by webspinner silk fibres. The physical and chemical insights gained here may inform the synthesis and development of smaller diameter silk fibres with unique water adhesion properties

IgE-Mediated Hypersensitivity Reactions to Cannabis in Laboratory Personnel

Background: There have been sporadic reports of hypersensitivity reactions to plants of the Cannabinaceae family (hemp and hops), but it has remained unclear whether these reactions are immunologic or nonimmunologic in nature. Objective: We examined the IgE-binding and histamine-releasing properties of hashish and marijuana extracts by CAP-FEIA and a basophil histamine release test. Methods: Two workers at a forensic laboratory suffered from nasal congestion, rbinitis, sneezing and asthmatic symptoms upon occupational contact with hashish or marijuana, which they had handled frequently for 25 and 16 years, respectively. Neither patient had a history of atopic disease. Serum was analyzed for specific IgE antibodies to hashish or marijuana extract by research prototype ImmunoCAP, and histamine release from basophils upon exposure to hashish or marijuana extracts was assessed. Results were matched to those of 4 nonatopic and 10 atopic control subjects with no known history of recreational or occupational exposure to marijuana or hashish. Results: Patient 1 had specific IgE to both hashish and marijuana (CAP class 2), and patient 2 to marijuana only (CAP class 2). Controls proved negative for specific IgE except for 2 atopic individuals with CAP class 1 to marijuana and 1 other atopic individual with CAP class 1 to hashish. Stimulation of basophils with hashish or marijuana extracts elicited histamine release from basophils of both patients and 4 atopic control subjects. Conclusions: Our results suggest an IgE-related pathomechanism for hypersensitivity reactions to marijuana or hashish. Copyright (C) 2011 S. Karger AG, Base

Improving Enforcement of Protection Orders in Domestic Violence Situations

Domestic violence is increasingly recognized as a serious social problem in Missouri. Protection orders are designed to offer individuals some level of safety, but nationally it is estimated that a quarter of such orders are not followed and enforcement is inconsistent. Noncompliant batterers typically increase the level of threats, coercive tactics and violence, and often the victims must relocate to hide from the abuser. These relocated victims need protection in new communities, but frequently they run into difficulties because of different legal jurisdictions across county and state lines. The Full Faith and Credit provisions of the Federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994 offer remedies to this problem, but states (including Missouri) have experienced considerable difficulties in implementation of the provisions of this act. Such problems include lack of coordination among jurisdictions, low levels of understanding about the law, scarce government resources for addressing impediments, and failure to enforce protection orders

Scaled free energies, power-law potentials, strain pseudospins and quasi-universality for first-order structural transitions

We consider ferroelastic first-order phase transitions with $N_{OP}$ order-parameter strains entering Landau free energies as invariant polynomials, that have $N_V$ structural-variant Landau minima. The total free energy includes (seemingly innocuous) harmonic terms, in the $n = 6 -N_{OP}$ {\it non}-order-parameter strains. Four 3D transitions are considered, tetragonal/orthorhombic, cubic/tetragonal, cubic/trigonal and cubic/orthorhombic unit-cell distortions, with respectively, $N_{OP} = 1, 2, 3$ and 2; and $N_V = 2, 3, 4$ and 6. Five 2D transitions are also considered, as simpler examples. Following Barsch and Krumhansl, we scale the free energy to absorb most material-dependent elastic coefficients into an overall prefactor, by scaling in an overall elastic energy density; a dimensionless temperature variable; and the spontaneous-strain magnitude at transition $\lambda <<1$. To leading order in $\lambda$ the scaled Landau minima become material-independent, in a kind of 'quasi-universality'. The scaled minima in $N_{OP}$-dimensional order-parameter space, fall at the centre and at the $N_V$ corners, of a transition-specific polyhedron inscribed in a sphere, whose radius is unity at transition. The `polyhedra' for the four 3D transitions are respectively, a line, a triangle, a tetrahedron, and a hexagon. We minimize the $n$ terms harmonic in the non-order-parameter strains, by substituting solutions of the 'no dislocation' St Venant compatibility constraints, and explicitly obtain powerlaw anisotropic, order-parameter interactions, for all transitions. In a reduced discrete-variable description, the competing minima of the Landau free energies induce unit-magnitude pseudospin vectors, with $N_V +1$ values, pointing to the polyhedra corners and the (zero-value) center.Comment: submitted to PR

Electromigration-Induced Propagation of Nonlinear Surface Waves

Due to the effects of surface electromigration, waves can propagate over the free surface of a current-carrying metallic or semiconducting film of thickness h_0. In this paper, waves of finite amplitude, and slow modulations of these waves, are studied. Periodic wave trains of finite amplitude are found, as well as their dispersion relation. If the film material is isotropic, a wave train with wavelength lambda is unstable if lambda/h_0 < 3.9027..., and is otherwise marginally stable. The equation of motion for slow modulations of a finite amplitude, periodic wave train is shown to be the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. As a result, envelope solitons can travel over the film's surface.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.