Flow field at open-channel contractions: insights from a two-dimensional numerical model

2017 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.A depth averaged, two-dimensional numerical model was used to investigate the hydraulics of flow passing through open-channel contractions. The investigation focused on the magnitude and location(s) of maximum velocity of flow entering a contraction. The effective flow width at the entrance of the contraction and the maximum lateral velocity at the contraction entrance were also investigated. The responses of these flow characteristics were studied as values of contraction ratio, channel roughness, bed slope, and transition geometry were varied. The numerical model produced significant new insights. The factors affecting the values and distribution of velocity in a contraction include: channel slope, bed roughness, and contraction shape. The magnitude and location of maximum velocity in the contraction varies with contraction ratio. For contraction ratios milder than approximately 0.5 the velocity maximum occurs at two locations, and at one location for tighter contractions. At a contraction ratio of 0.5 lateral velocity reached a maximum and effective flow width a minimum. Channel slope and bed roughness affect the values and distribution of velocity in a contraction, as did contraction shape. These findings have engineering significance for explaining and estimating scour of alluvial channels in contractions, such as at bridge waterways

"Rescuing some youthful minds" : benevolent women and the rise of the orphan asylum as civic household in early Republic Natchez

textIn 1816 a group of white, affluent women in Natchez, Mississippi founded the Female Charitable Society, one of many ladies' associations in the early republic devoted to the care of poor and orphaned children. Born during a pervasive evangelical awakening, the Society established a charity school then, after a few years, constructed an orphan asylum. In doing so, benevolent women created not only a shelter for parentless boys and girls but a "civic household" of which they served as a collective head. Supported by charitable contributions rather than tax revenue, the orphan asylum functioned as a model environment, one that would rear prepubescent white children to be moral and industrious in trades that befit their born condition. The asylum also represented an opportunity for personal spiritual renewal on the part of donors as well as a landmark of municipal refinement. By promoting themselves as the natural caretakers of poor young children and fostering a culture of sympathy for them, benevolent women challenged the primacy of the statutory system of juvenile relief, which dated back to the earliest days of colonial settlement. Gradually, the Female Charitable Society raised the standard of relief for prepubescent indigent minors, diverted them from bound apprenticeship, wrested jurisdiction over them from male county officials, and gathered them into the household. The female-run orphan asylum largely supplanted apprenticeship as the preferred system of juvenile relief in Natchez, mirroring developments in other cities around the country. This study investigates why and how the orphan asylum emerged as a prominent form of juvenile relief in the United States. Using Natchez as a case study, this work underscores the role of benevolent women in effecting concrete transformations within the community as well as the impact of changes in domestic familial relations on child welfare. This study also expands the notion of "republican motherhood" to include "civic motherhood," that is, the public cultivation of maternal authority over poor children. Members of the Natchez Female Charitable Society positioned themselves as the rightful guardians of white, indigent boys and girls and was eventually granted legal authority over them by the State of Mississippi.Histor

An Exact Algorithm for the Steiner Forest Problem

The Steiner forest problem asks for a minimum weight forest that spans a given number of terminal sets. The problem has famous linear programming based 2-approximations [Agrawal et al., 1995; Goemans and Williamson, 1995; Jain, 2001] whose bottleneck is the fact that the most natural formulation of the problem as an integer linear program (ILP) has an integrality gap of 2. We propose new cut-based ILP formulations for the problem along with exact branch-and-bound based algorithms. While our new formulations cannot improve the integrality gap, we can prove that one of them yields stronger linear programming bounds than the two previous strongest formulations: The directed cut formulation [Balakrishnan et al., 1989; Chopra and Rao, 1994] and the advanced flow-based formulation by Magnanti and Raghavan [Magnanti and Raghavan, 2005]. In an experimental evaluation, we show that the linear programming bounds of the new formulations are indeed strong on practical instances and that our new branch-and-bound algorithms outperform branch-and-bound algorithms based on the previous formulations. Our formulations can be seen as a cut-based analogon to [Magnanti and Raghavan, 2005], whose existence was an open problem

Program assessment : industrial hygiene and safety sciences

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 7, 2011).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Sandy Hutchinson.Vita.Ed. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2010.Program assessment has long been a critical element for academic programs to ensure continuous quality improvement of their programs. More recently, occupational safety, health and environmental programs have embraced assessment by external groups as well. The University of Central Missouri, a mid-sized school in Western Missouri has produced 400 alumni with master's degrees in industrial hygiene. The program is accredited by ABET. To assess what alumni of the program think of their preparation by the Department, as well as their views on what courses and topics and skills and knowledge entry level industrial hygienists should have, a comprehensive assessment of the program was conducted. Assessment instruments used in this research study included an on-line survey and a review of historical documents. The results revealed that alumni overwhelmingly believe their preparation by the Department for their careers in industrial hygiene was above average. The skills and knowledge and courses and topics selected by alumni as essential for industrial hygiene graduate students included those in the practitioner category. The majority if alumni believed their preparation by the Department for their career in industrial hygiene was above average or excellent. Very few believed their preparation was poor. The methodologies used in this research are applicable for use by faculty from other academic departments.Includes bibliographical reference

Co-constructing a Liberated / Decolonised Arts Curriculum

This article presents a case study of liberating reading lists through a staff-student collaboration in a UK arts university. It characterizes reading lists as a familiar but under researched feature of academic life and discusses their practical and symbolic role in maintaining Western / Eurocentric / White disciplinary canons, and how they inform what it means to be ‘well read’ in a discipline. The collaborative project, which was initiated as Liberate the Curriculum work, brought together students, academic staff and librarians to audit and review reading lists, and reimagine them to represent multiple narratives, reflecting the diverse and international student population of the university. The article explores the challenges of auditing reading lists and identifying more diverse resources, and the complex relationships between identity and knowledge production. The authors use Critical Race Theory to comment on the relationship between race, colonialism and the arts, and how racism is reproduced within the academic environment. The project methodology is described, with an evaluation of the project as a student staff collaboration, and the learning and impact within the institution

An Exact Algorithm for the Steiner Forest Problem

The Steiner forest problem asks for a minimum weight forest that spans a given number of terminal sets. The problem has famous linear programming based 2-approximations [Agrawal et al., 1995; Goemans and Williamson, 1995; Jain, 2001] whose bottleneck is the fact that the most natural formulation of the problem as an integer linear program (ILP) has an integrality gap of 2. We propose new cut-based ILP formulations for the problem along with exact branch-and-bound based algorithms. While our new formulations cannot improve the integrality gap, we can prove that one of them yields stronger linear programming bounds than the two previous strongest formulations: The directed cut formulation [Balakrishnan et al., 1989; Chopra and Rao, 1994] and the advanced flow-based formulation by Magnanti and Raghavan [Magnanti and Raghavan, 2005]. In an experimental evaluation, we show that the linear programming bounds of the new formulations are indeed strong on practical instances and that our new branch-and-bound algorithms outperform branch-and-bound algorithms based on the previous formulations. Our formulations can be seen as a cut-based analogon to [Magnanti and Raghavan, 2005], whose existence was an open problem

Poverty, Educational Attainment and Health Among America’s Children: Current and Future Effects of Population Diversification and Associated Socioeconomic Change

A complex of interrelated factors including minority status, poverty, education, health status, and other factors determine the general welfare of children in America, particularly in heavily diverse states such as Texas. Although racial/ethnic status is clearly only a concomitant factor in that determination it is a factor for which future projections are available and for which the relationships with the other factors in the complex can be assessed. After examining the nature of the interrelationships between these factors we utilize direct standardization techniques to examine how the future diversification of the United States and Texas will affect the number of children in poverty, the educational status of the householders in households in which children in poverty live and the health status of children in 2040 assuming that the current relationships between minority status and these socioeconomic factors continue into the future. In the results of the analyses, data are compared with the total population of the United States and Texas in 2040 assumed in the first simulation scenario, to have the race/ethnicity characteristics of 2008 and in the second those projected for 2040 by the U.S. Census Bureau for the nation and by the Texas State Data Center for Texas in 2040. The results show that the diversification of the population could increase the number of children in poverty in the United States by nearly 1.8 million more than would occur with the lower levels of diversification evident in 2008. In addition, poverty would become increasingly concentrated among minority children with minority children accounting for 76.2 percent of all children in poverty by 2040 and with Hispanic children accounting for nearly half of the children in poverty by 2040. Results for educational attainment show an increasing concentration of minority children in households with householders with very low levels of education such that by 2040, 85.2 percent of the increase in the number of children in poverty would be in households with a householder with less than a high school level of education. Finally, the results related to several health status factors show that children in poverty will have a higher prevalence of nearly all health conditions. For example, the number of children with untreated dental conditions could increase to more than 4 million in the United States and to nearly 500,000 in Texas. The results clearly show that improving the welfare of children in America will require concerted efforts to change the poverty, educational, and health status characteristics associated with minority status and particularly Hispanic status. Failing to do so will lead to a future in which America’s children are increasingly impoverished, more poorly educated, and less healthy and which, as a result, is an America with a more tentative future