Cruise Report 73-KB-12: Diving Safety Board

(1p.

Learning for design reuse

Over the past decade 'design assistance', i.e. where the computer is viewed as an Intelligent Design Assistant (IDA) [MacCallum-etal85], has emerged in knowledge based design support and has formed the basic research strategy for the CAD Centre, University of Strathclyde, since the mid-80s. Within this philosophy, an IDA would act as a colleague to a designer, providing guidance, learning from past design experiences, carrying out semi and fully automated tasks, explaining its reasoning and in essence complementing the designer's own natural skills, and thus leaving the ultimate decision making, control and responsibility with the designer

The status of the California spiny lobster resource

California spiny lobsters, Panulirus interruptus, are the object of intense fisheries prosecuted by both commercial and sport fishermen in California. Recent evidence indicates that the resource may be declining, and an investigation of the population dynamics is needed. It is recommended that the investigation assess the magnitude of the fishery, identify population units and investigate the adequacy of existing gear regulations. (14pp.

Cruise Report 72-KB-23: Inshore fisheries habitat evaluation and monitoring program

Document has 1 page

Internet Auctions with Artificial Adaptive Agents: A Study on Market Design

Many internet auction sites implement ascending-bid, second-price auctions. Empirically, lastminute or “late” bidding is frequently observed in “hard-close” but not in “soft-close” versions of these auctions. In this paper, we introduce an independent private-value repeated internet auction model to explain this observed difference in bidding behavior. We use finite automata to model the repeated auction strategies. We report results from simulations involving populations of artificial bidders who update their strategies via a genetic algorithm. We show that our model can deliver late or early bidding behavior, depending on the auction closing rule in accordance with the empirical evidence. As an interesting result, we observe that hard-close auctions raise less revenue than soft-close auctions. We also investigate interesting properties of the evolving strategies and arrive at some conclusions regarding both auction designs from a market design point of view.

Training Community-Based Professionals to Implement an Empirically Supported Parenting Program

Professionals representing 14 community-based organizations were trained at three different sites serving urban and rural families to implement an empirically supported parenting program for families of young children with challenging behaviors. Of the 44 practitioners trained, 23 successfully completed the program, which involved passing a knowledge test and facilitating the entire 10session program with a family. A total of 28, primarily low-income families completed the program. The family outcomes obtained by the facilitators, based on multiple pre-program and post-program measures, were comparable with those reported previously in the literature for facilitators trained in university settings. The challenges inherent in efforts to increase the community’s capacity to implement empirically supported programs are addressed

Design reuse research : a computational perspective

This paper gives an overview of some computer based systems that focus on supporting engineering design reuse. Design reuse is considered here to reflect the utilisation of any knowledge gained from a design activity and not just past designs of artefacts. A design reuse process model, containing three main processes and six knowledge components, is used as a basis to identify the main areas of contribution from the systems. From this it can be concluded that while reuse libraries and design by reuse has received most attention, design for reuse, domain exploration and five of the other knowledge components lack research effort

Reliability analysis of structural ceramic components using a three-parameter Weibull distribution

Described here are nonlinear regression estimators for the three-Weibull distribution. Issues relating to the bias and invariance associated with these estimators are examined numerically using Monte Carlo simulation methods. The estimators were used to extract parameters from sintered silicon nitride failure data. A reliability analysis was performed on a turbopump blade utilizing the three-parameter Weibull distribution and the estimates from the sintered silicon nitride data

Particle Acceleration in Gamma-Ray Burst Jets

Gradual shear acceleration of energetic particles in gamma-ray burst (GRB) jets is considered. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of universal structured jets, and characteristic acceleration timescales are determined for a power-law and a Gaussian evolution of the bulk flow Lorentz factor $\gamma_b$ with angle $\phi$ from the jet axis. The results suggest that local power-law particle distributions may be generated and that higher energy particles are generally concentrated closer to the jet axis. Taking several constraints into account we show that efficient electron acceleration in gradual shear flows, with maximum particle energy successively decreasing with time, may be possible on scales larger than $r \sim 10^{15}$ cm, provided the jet magnetic field becomes sufficiently weak and/or decreases rapidly enough with distance, while efficient acceleration of protons to ultra-high energies $> 10^{20}$ eV may be possible under a wide range of conditions.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures; ApJ Letters accepted; final version: small typos corrected in order to match published versio