An application of interactive computer graphics technology to the design of dispersal mechanisms

Interactive computer graphics technology is combined with a general purpose mechanisms computer code to study the operational behavior of three guided bomb dispersal mechanism designs. These studies illustrate the use of computer graphics techniques to discover operational anomalies, to assess the effectiveness of design improvements, to reduce the time and cost of the modeling effort, and to provide the mechanism designer with a visual understanding of the physical operation of such systems

Implications of skeletal muscle loss for public health nutrition messages:a brief report

Age-related skeletal muscle loss, sarcopenia, cachexia and wider malnutrition (under nutrition) are complex in aetiology with interaction of clinical, social and economic factors. Weight loss and loss of skeletal muscle mass in older people are associated with increased morbidity and mortality with implications for increasing health and social care costs. There is insufficient evidence to identify the ideal treatment options. However, preventing weight loss and loss of skeletal muscle in older age will be keys to reducing morbidity and mortality. This will require all those coming into contact with older people to identify and address weight loss early, including through diet, improving physical activity and increasing social interaction. Public health messages on diet should, in the main, continue to focus on older people achieving current UK dietary recommendations for their age as visually depicted in the eatwell plate together with associated messages regarding dietary supplements where appropriate

Processing irrelevant location information: practice and transfer effects in a Simon task.

How humans produce cognitively driven fine motor movements is a question of fundamental importance in how we interact with the world around us. For example, we are exposed to a constant stream of information and we must select the information that is most relevant by which to guide our actions. In the present study, we employed a well-known behavioral assay called the Simon task to better understand how humans are able to learn to filter out irrelevant information. We trained subjects for four days with a visual stimulus presented, alternately, in central and lateral locations. Subjects responded with one hand moving a joystick in either the left or right direction. They were instructed to ignore the irrelevant location information and respond based on color (e.g. red to the right and green to the left). On the fifth day, an additional testing session was conducted where the task changed and the subjects had to respond by shape (e.g. triangle to the right and rectangle to the left). They were instructed to ignore the color and location, and respond based solely on the task relevant shape. We found that the magnitude of the Simon effect decreases with training, however it returns in the first few trials after a break. Furthermore, task-defined associations between response direction and color did not significantly affect the Simon effect based on shape, and no significant associative learning from the specific stimulus-response features was found for the centrally located stimuli. We discuss how these results are consistent with a model involving route suppression/gating of the irrelevant location information. Much of the learning seems to be driven by subjects learning to suppress irrelevant location information, however, this seems to be an active inhibition process that requires a few trials of experience to engage

TRIDENT 1 third stage motor separation system

The third stage engine separation system has shown through test and analysis that it can effectively and reliably perform its function. The weight of the hardware associated with this system is well within the targeted value

Radiation trapping in coherent media

We show that the effective decay rate of Zeeman coherence, generated in a Rb87 vapor by linearly polarized laser light, increases significantly with the atomic density. We explain this phenomenon as the result of radiation trapping. Our study shows that radiation trapping must be taken into account to fully understand many electromagnetically induced transparency experiments with optically thick media

'Anti-Benthamism': Utilitarianism and the French Liberal Tradition

Governmen

Carbon dioxide tolerance studies

Human tolerance to exposure of carbon dioxide environmen

Adapting to variable prismatic displacement

In each of two studies, subjects were exposed to a continuously changing prismatic displacement with a mean value of 19 prism diopters (variable displacement) and to a fixed 19-diopter displacement (fixed displacement). In Experiment 1, significant adaptation (post-pre shifts in hand-eye coordination) was found for fixed, but not for variable, displacement. Experiment 2 demonstrated that adaptation was obtained for variable displacement, but it was very fragile and is lost if the measures of adaptation are preceded by even a very brief exposure of the hand to normal or near-normal vision. Contrary to the results of some previous studies, an increase in within-S dispersion was not found of target pointing responses as a result of exposure to variable displacement