Antenna induced range smearing in MST radars

There is considerable interest in developing stratosphere troposphere (ST) and mesosphere stratosphere troposphere (MST) radars for higher resolution to study small-scale turbulent structures and waves. At present most ST and MST radars have resolutions of 150 meters or larger, and are not able to distinguish the thin (40 - 100 m) turbulent layers that are known to occur in the troposphere and stratosphere, and possibly in the mesosphere. However the antenna beam width and sidelobe level become important considerations for radars with superior height resolution. The objective of this paper is to point out that for radars with range resolutions of about 150 meters or less, there may be significant range smearing of the signals from mesospheric altitudes due to the finite beam width of the radar antenna. At both stratospheric and mesospheric heights the antenna sidelobe level for lear equally spaced phased arrays may also produce range aliased signals. To illustrate this effect the range smearing functions for two vertically directed antennas have been calculated, (1) an array of 32 coaxial-collinear strings each with 48 elements that simulates the vertical beam of the Poker Flat, Glaska, MST radar; and (2) a similar, but smaller, array of 16 coaxial-collinear strings each with 24 elements

How to Collect your Water Sample and Interpret the Results for the Poultry Analytical Package

Rapidly growing birds may consume up to twice as much water as feed (Scantling and Watkins 2013), which means a plentiful supply of clean water is crucial for poultry health and productivity. To determine the quality of your poultry’s water resources, periodic sampling and analysis is needed. Analyzing water supplies can also be a crucial tool in identifying existing or potential challenges. The Arkansas Water Resources Center (AWRC) in cooperation with the UA Cooperative Extension Service offers several analytical packages to assess the quality of your water resources. This document is intended to provide guidance to poultry producers on collecting water samples for analysis and understanding the “Poultry Water Report Form” provided by the AWRC’s Water Quality Laboratory (Lab). The information contained within this fact sheet should be used as general guidance, and the reader is encouraged to seek advice from Extension specialists regarding the interpretation of individual reports and water testing results that may be of concern

Analysis of rolling group therapy data using conditionally autoregressive priors

Group therapy is a central treatment modality for behavioral health disorders such as alcohol and other drug use (AOD) and depression. Group therapy is often delivered under a rolling (or open) admissions policy, where new clients are continuously enrolled into a group as space permits. Rolling admissions policies result in a complex correlation structure among client outcomes. Despite the ubiquity of rolling admissions in practice, little guidance on the analysis of such data is available. We discuss the limitations of previously proposed approaches in the context of a study that delivered group cognitive behavioral therapy for depression to clients in residential substance abuse treatment. We improve upon previous rolling group analytic approaches by fully modeling the interrelatedness of client depressive symptom scores using a hierarchical Bayesian model that assumes a conditionally autoregressive prior for session-level random effects. We demonstrate improved performance using our method for estimating the variance of model parameters and the enhanced ability to learn about the complex correlation structure among participants in rolling therapy groups. Our approach broadly applies to any group therapy setting where groups have changing client composition. It will lead to more efficient analyses of client-level data and improve the group therapy research community's ability to understand how the dynamics of rolling groups lead to client outcomes.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS434 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Automated Retrieval of Non-Engineering Domain Solutions to Engineering Problems

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityBiological inspiration for engineering design has occurred through a variety of techniques such as creation and use of databases, keyword searches of biological information in natural-language format, prior knowledge of biology, and chance observations of nature. This research focuses on utilizing the reconciled Functional Basis function and flow terms to identify suitable biological inspiration for function based design. The organized search provides two levels of results: (1) associated with verb function only and (2) narrowed results associated with verb-noun (function-flow). A set of heuristics has been complied to promote efficient searching using this technique. An example for creating smart flooring is also presented and discussed.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

The Impatient May Use Limited Optimism to Minimize Regret

Discounted-sum games provide a formal model for the study of reinforcement learning, where the agent is enticed to get rewards early since later rewards are discounted. When the agent interacts with the environment, she may regret her actions, realizing that a previous choice was suboptimal given the behavior of the environment. The main contribution of this paper is a PSPACE algorithm for computing the minimum possible regret of a given game. To this end, several results of independent interest are shown. (1) We identify a class of regret-minimizing and admissible strategies that first assume that the environment is collaborating, then assume it is adversarial---the precise timing of the switch is key here. (2) Disregarding the computational cost of numerical analysis, we provide an NP algorithm that checks that the regret entailed by a given time-switching strategy exceeds a given value. (3) We show that determining whether a strategy minimizes regret is decidable in PSPACE

School violence, school differences and school discourses

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violenceresilient school. In six inner-city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association between the patterns of behaviour and school practices was found: schools with a wider range of wellconnected practices seemed to have less difficult behaviour. Interviews also showed that the different schools had different organisational discourses for construing school violence, its possible causes and the possible solutions. Differences in practices are best understood in connection with differences in these discourses. Some of the features of school discourses are outlined, including their range, their core metaphor and their silences. We suggest that organisational discourse is an important concept in explaining school effects and school differences, and that improvement attempts could have clearer regard to this concept

In situ Rheo-GISANS of triblock copolymers : gelation and shear effects on quasi-crystalline structures at interfaces

The behaviour of polymeric systems at surfaces and under flow is extremely important in many applications, ranging from drug delivery to lubrication. We have studied a model triblock copolymer in deuterated water combining in situ rheology and grazing incidence small angle neutron scattering. Several thermotropic phases appear as a function of the temperature, including a bicontinuous phase not present in the bulk. Moreover, gelation can occur following a different route depending on the concentration. We show that shearing can be used to monitor the structural integrity of the micellar systems and in some cases as a tool for modifying the thermotropic phases: an fcc (face centred cubic) phase is sheared into a hcp (hexagonally close packed) phase, and is then recovered by cycling the temperature

Structure and distribution of the slope fish community in the vicinity of the sub-Antarctic Prince Edward Archipelago

Demersal fish community structure, distribution and trophic relationships on the slope (depth range 200–1500 m) of the sub-Antarctic Prince Edward Islands and surrounding sea rises were investigated during a pilot survey conducted in April 2001 onboard fishing vessel MV Iris. A total of 56 fish taxa were collected during the survey, of which 44 were identified to the species level, seven to the genus level and five to the family level. Among the identified taxa, 36 constituted new records for the area investigated. Total catch per unit effort (cpue) during the survey ranged from 1•1 to 241•2 individuals h 1. Both average fish diversity and total cpue positively correlated with trawling depth. Overall, mean sampling depth and near-bottom temperature explained 56% of total fish cpue. Hierarchal cluster analysis identified three distinct fish assemblages with pronounced dominant species. Major shifts in fish community composition occurred at 500–600 m and 800–900 m depth strata and could probably be a result of physical and biological vertical zonation. Analysis of the diet of selected fish species showed that they were generalist feeders, consuming predominantly pelagic, including epipelagic, meso- and benthopelagic, prey. Diets of six species and nitrogen stable isotope signatures of 22 species revealed that with a few exceptions most fishes occupied the fourth trophic level and were tertiary consumers. Wide variability in carbon isotopic signatures is discussed with respect to alternative, e.g. possible importance of high Antarctic and chemoautotrophic v. photoautotrophic sub-Antarctic primary production, organic matter sources at the base of deep-sea food webs

Nonthermal Supermassive Dark Matter

We discuss several cosmological production mechanisms for nonthermal supermassive dark matter and argue that dark matter may be elementary particles of mass much greater than the weak scale. Searches for dark matter should not be limited to weakly interacting particles with mass of the order of the weak scale, but should extend into the supermassive range as well.Comment: 11 page LaTeX file. No major changes. Version accepted by PR

The Formation of Brown Dwarfs as Ejected Stellar Embryos

We conjecture that brown dwarfs are substellar objects because they have been ejected from small newborn multiple systems which have decayed in dynamical interactions. In this view, brown dwarfs are stellar embryos for which the star formation process was aborted before the hydrostatic cores could build up enough mass to eventually start hydrogen burning. The disintegration of a small multiple system is a stochastic process, which can be described only in terms of the half-life of the decay. A stellar embryo competes with its siblings in order to accrete infalling matter, and the one that grows slowest is most likely to be ejected. With better luck, a brown dwarf would therefore have become a normal star. This interpretation of brown dwarfs readily explains the rarity of brown dwarfs as companions to normal stars (aka the ``brown dwarf desert''), the absence of wide brown dwarf binaries, and the flattening of the low mass end of the initial mass function. Possible observational tests of this scenario include statistics of brown dwarfs near Class 0 sources, and the kinematics of brown dwarfs in star forming regions while they still retain a kinematic signature of their expulsion. Because the ejection process limits the amount of gas brought along in a disk, it is predicted that substellar equivalents to the classical T Tauri stars should be very rare.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, Accepted by the Astronomical Journa