Six Lessons We Learned Applying Six Sigma

As Chief Financial Officer of Kennedy Space Center (KSC), I'm not only responsible for financial planning and accounting but also for building strong partnerships with the CFO customers, who include Space Shuttle and International Space Station operations as well all who manage the KSC Spaceport. My never ending goal is to design, manage and continuously improve our core business processes so that they deliver world class products and services to the CFO's customers. I became interested in Six Sigma as Christa Casleton (KSC's first Six Sigma Black belt) applied Six Sigma tools and methods to our Plan and Account for Travel Costs Process. Her analysis was fresh, innovative and thorough but, even more impressive, was her approach to ensure ongoing, continuous process improvement. Encouraged by the results, I launched two more process improvement initiatives aimed at applying Six Sigma principles to CFO processes that not only touch most of my employees but also have direct customer impact. As many of you know, Six Sigma is a measurement scale that compares the output of a process with customer requirements. That's straight forward, but demands that you not only understand your processes but also know your products and the critical customer requirements. The objective is to isolate and eliminate the causes of process variation so that the customer sees consistently high quality

Image analysis of circulating fluidized bed hydrodynamics

The goal of this thesis is to design methods to estimate the local concentration and velocity of particles observed in digital videos of the inner wall of a circulating fluidized bed (CFB) riser. Understanding the dynamics of these rapidly moving particles will allow researchers to design cleaner and more efficient CFB facilities. However, the seemingly random motion exhibited by the particles in three dimensions, coupled with the varying image quality, make it difficult to extract the required information from the images. Given a video sequence, a method for detecting particles and tracking their spatial location is developed. By exploiting the presence of specular reflections, individual particles are first identified along the focal plane by an image filter specifically designed for this purpose. Once the particle locations are known, a local optical flow model is used to approximate the motion field across two images in order to track particles from one frame of the sequence to another. An evaluation of the proposed method indicates its potential to estimate particle count, location, concentration and velocity in an efficient and reliable manner. The method is fully automated and is expected to be an important analysis tool for researchers with the National Energy Technology Laboratory, part of the national laboratory system of the Department of Energy

Privacy and Assurance: On the Right to Be Forgotten

The right to be forgotten enables individuals to remove certain links from search results that appear when their names are entered as search terms. Formulated as a distinct application of the general right to privacy, the right to be forgotten has proven highly controversial, for two reasons. First, it is difficult to see how the specific right to be forgotten can apply to the withdrawal of public information, since the general right to privacy typically covers the disclosure of private information. Second, as a putative right to withdraw information from public reach, the right to be forgotten poses a threat to freedom of speech, which depends on the accessibility of information. By responding to these two objections, this paper develops a novel account of the right to be forgotten, understood as a claim of withdrawal grounded in both privacy and free speech interests

Scott Casleton

There is an immense amount of disagreement about how free speech norms should apply to the internet, particularly to social media platforms and search engines. There are two primary sources of disagreement. The first is that free speech theory itself is highly contested. The second is that internet platforms raise problems that are not easily conceptualized in traditional free speech terms. In this dissertation, I use the resources of normative ethics to conceptualize the problems presented by regulating political speech on social media, sexual content on social media, and personal information on search engines. I argue for specific solutions to these problems, aimed at illuminating a range of our considered judgments about when it is impermissible, permissible, or required for an internet platform to remove or dampen someone’s speech. Resolving these puzzles about regulating speech on the internet, I contend, clarifies the underlying normative structure of free speech as a system of moral claims grounded in people’s interests. Understanding free speech in this way moves us some way towards resolving certain longstanding disagreements about the relationship between free speech and democracy, the threats posed to women by sexual media, and the tension between the public’s interest in access to information and privacy norms

Quantum Electronics

Contains research objectives and summary of research on eight projects in three sections and reports on two research projects.U. S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract F44620-71-C-0051)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-74-C-0630)University of California, Livermore (Subcontract No. 7877409)U. S. Army Research Office - Durham (Contract DAHC04-72-C-0044

A local structure graph model for network analysis

The statistical analysis of networks is a popular research topic with ever widening applications. In this work, we introduce a new class of models for network analysis, called local structure graph models (LSGMs). The approach specifies a network model through local features and allows for an interpretable and controllable local dependence structure. In particular, LSGMs are formulated by a set of full conditional distributions for each network edge, e.g., the probability of edge presence/absence, which depend functionally on neighborhoods or subcollections of other network edges. Hence, LSGMs correspond to a type of Markov Random Field (MRF) model applied to graph edges. The modeling features and interpretation of LSGMs are demonstrated through several numerical studies and illustrated through a network data example involving tornado occurrences. LSGMs are also shown to provide an alternate specification of another popular class of models for random graphs, belonging to exponential random graph models (ERGMs), which specify a model through a joint distribution on the entire collection of graph edges. An ERGM induces conditional distributions and neighborhoods, rather than explicitly defining them as in the LSGM approach. As one consequence of its conditional specification, LSGMs have the advantage of allowing direct control and separate interpretation of parameters influencing large-scale (e.g., marginal means) and small-scale (i.e., dependence) structures in a graph model. This is possible with LSGMs through so-called centered parameterizations of MRF models, which ERGMs are shown to lack. The centered parameterization and conditional specification of LSGMs further provide important advantages in graph modeling when incorporating covariate information from nodes, as illustrated with two further network data examples. However, the centered parameterization was developed for MRFs under an assumption of pairwise-only dependence, meaning that dependence is modeled between pairs of dependent edges only. This particular dependence structure may be inappropriate for modeling network data that exhibit transitivity or a prevalence of triangles within the network, which has been identified as an important feature of various networks. Consequently, the centered parameterization for MRFs is extended to account for triples of dependent edges in LSGMs. This extension then allows for the explicit modeling of transitivity in LSGMs, while retaining the same interpretable separation and control of large- and small-scale effects in a graph model and facilitating the use of covariate information. At the same time, the ability to model transitivity does not imply that this model feature should be commonly used or applied without cautious model diagnostics, which are currently lacking for graph models and for ERGMs in particular. By developing simulation-based model assessments for random graphs, we provide in-depth examinations and analyses of two commonly-used example networks, demonstrating that real network data may not, in fact, support the inclusion of transitivity in a graph model

Grotius Contra Carneades: Natural Law and the Problem of Self-Interest

In the Prolegomena to De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Hugo Grotius expounds his theory of natural law by way of reply to a skeptical challenge from the Greek Academic Carneades. Though this dialectical context is undeniably important for understanding Grotian natural law, commentators disagree about the substance of Carneades’s challenge. This paper aims to give a definitive reading of Carneades’s skeptical argument, and, by reconstructing Grotius’s reply, to settle some longstanding debates about Grotius’s conception of natural law. I argue that Grotius held a Stoic view of natural law, endorsing both the doctrine of eudaimonism and the claim that moral obligations are natural, not grounded in divine command. Consequently, Grotius’s view of natural law has more continuity with pre-modern, indeed ancient, morality than is usually supposed. However, I argue that we can still understand Grotius as a founder of modern moral philosophy

Low Emissions Combustor Test and Research Facility

The Morgantown Energy Technology Center (METC) recently built and began operation of a Low Emissions Combustor Test and Research (LECTR) facility with the primary objective of providing test facilities and engineering support to METC customers through programs such as the Advanced Turbine Systems (ATS) University-Industry Consortium and through CRADA participation with industrial partners. The LECTR is a versatile test facility with capabilities for evaluating a variety of low emissions combustion concepts at temperatures and pressures representative of gas turbine applications. The LECTR design incorporates a set of flanged sections or modules including an inlet plelnum, combustor test sections, a gas sampling section, and a quench section. The high pressure and mass flow capabilities of the LECTR facility make it uniquely suited for evaluation of advanced combustion concepts at combustion scales up to 3 MW (10 MMBtu/h)

Effects of Propane/Natural Gas Blended Fuels on Gas Turbine Pollutant Emissions

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports to the U.S. are expected to grow significantly over the next 10-15 years. Likewise, it is expected that changes to the domestic gas supply may also introduce changes in natural gas composition. As a result of these anticipated changes, the composition of fuel sources may vary significantly from conventional domestic natural gas supplies. This paper will examine the effects of fuel variability on pollutant emissions for premixed gas turbine conditions. The experimental data presented in this paper have been collected from a pressurized single injector combustion test rig at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). The tests are conducted at 7.5 atm with a 588 K air preheat. A propane blending facility is used to vary the Wobbe Index of the site natural gas. The results indicate that propane addition of about five (vol.) percent does not lead to a significant change in the observed NOx or CO emissions. These results are different from data collected on some engine applications and potential reasons for these differences will be described

Materials and Component Development for Advanced Turbine Systems

Hydrogen-fired and oxy-fueled land-based gas turbines currently target inlet operating temperatures of ∼1425-1760°C (∼2600-3200°F). In view of natural gas or syngas-fired engines, advancements in both materials, as well as aerothermal cooling configurations are anticipated prior to commercial operation. This paper reviews recent technical accomplishments resulting from NETL’s collaborative research efforts with the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University for future land-based gas turbine applications