Test apparatus for locating shorts during assembly of electrical buses

A test apparatus is described for locating electrical shorts that is especially suited for use while an electrical circuit is being fabricated or assembled. A ring counter derives input pulses from a square wave oscillator. The outputs of the counter are fed through transistors to an array of light emitting diodes. Each diode is connected to an electrical conductor, such as a bus bar, that is to be tested. In the absence of a short between the electrical conductors the diodes are sequentially illuminated. When a short occurs, a comparator/multivibrator circuit triggers an alarm and stops the oscillator and the sequential energization of the diodes. The two diodes that remain illuminated identify the electrical conductors that are shorted

Breaking the prejudice habit: Mechanisms, timecourse, and longevity

The prejudice habit-breaking intervention (Devine et al., 2012) and its offshoots (e.g., Carnes et al., 2012) have shown promise in effecting long-term change in key outcomes related to intergroup bias, including increases in awareness, concern about discrimination, and, in one study, long-term decreases in implicit bias. This intervention is based on the premise that unintentional bias is like a habit that can be broken with sufficient motivation, awareness, and effort. We conducted replication of the original habit-breaking intervention experiment in a sample more than three times the size of the original (N = 292). We also measured all outcomes every other day for 14 days and measured potential mechanisms for the intervention’s effects. Consistent with previous results, the habit-breaking intervention produced a change in concern that endured two weeks post-intervention. These effects were associated with increased sensitivity to the biases of others and an increased tendency to label biases as wrong. Contrasting with the original work, both control and intervention participants decreased in implicit bias, and the effects of the habit-breaking intervention on awareness declined in the second week of the study. In a subsample recruited two years later, intervention participants were more likely than control participants to object on a public online forum to an essay endorsing racial stereotyping. Our results suggest that the habit-breaking intervention produces enduring changes in peoples’ knowledge of and beliefs about race-related issues, and we argue that these changes are even more important for promoting long-term behavioral change than are changes in implicit bias

Cavitation-induced ignition of cryogenic hydrogen-oxygen fluids

The Challenger disaster and purposeful experiments with liquid hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (Ox) tanks demonstrated that cryogenic H2/Ox fluids always self-ignite in the process of their mixing. Here we propose a cavitation-induced self-ignition mechanism that may be realized under these conditions. In one possible scenario, self-ignition is caused by the strong shock waves generated by the collapse of pure Ox vapor bubble near the surface of the Ox liquid that may initiate detonation of the gaseous H2/Ox mixture adjacent to the gas-liquid interface. This effect is further enhanced by H2/Ox combustion inside the collapsing bubble in the presence of admixed H2 gas

MRI and Neuropsychological Correlates of Carbon Monoxide Exposure: A Case Report

A 45-year-old woman experienced long-term, chronic exposure to carbon monoxide in the restaurant kitchen where she was employed as a cook. After returning to the restaurant after 5 days off work, she noticed that her symptoms returned immediately; she then aired out the room and called the gas company. Approximately 6 hr after a leak was detected, the patient went to the hospital, where her carboxyhemoglobin was found to be within normal limits and results of a neurologic examination were described as normal. Based on her symptoms, the patient believed she had been exposed to CO for at least 1 year before the leak was discovered. Initially, she experienced flu-like symptoms, which eventually resolved. At the time of her first neuropsychological evaluation (17 months after the exposure was identified), her persisting complaints included difficulties in reading, writing, speaking and word retrieval. The test results were consistent with secondary frontal lobe dysfunction associated with subcortical disorders such as those seen after CO exposure. Results of a subsequent neuropsychological examination (29 months postexposure) showed slight improvement in performance, but her performance was still consistent with mild frontal/subcortical dysfunction. Although the initial screening of a brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) performed 15 months after the exposure was interpreted as being within normal limits, two subsequent blind reviews of the same scans identified multiple bilateral lesions in the basal ganglia, which were consistent with chronic CO exposure. We present this case as an example of the utility of MRI and neuropsychological examinations in detecting central nervous system dysfunction secondary to CO exposure

National Survey of Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experience Programs

Objective: The objective of this study was to identify commonalities and provide a descriptive overview of key program elements and oversight of U.S. introductory pharmacy practice experience (IPPE) programs. Methods: A Web-based questionnaire, consisting of 40 questions, was sent to 91 schools of pharmacy. The questionnaire addressed the following IPPE program topics, in addition to school demographics: program oversight, experience site selection, program structure, relationship to didactic curriculum, and quality assurance issues. Results: Forty-six schools of pharmacy responded resulting in a response rate of 50.5%. Results identified commonalities in each of the key areas, as well as identifying multiple discrepancies in interpretation of the 2007 Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) Standards and Guidelines (Standards 2007) for IPPEs. Only 21 of 42 respondents indicated they believed their IPPE program was currently in compliance with Standards 2007. Conclusion: The survey results demonstrate a need for clarification by ACPE stakeholders in several areas addressed within the Standards 2007. No other previous research surveys were found addressing the key issues identified in this survey, revealing the need for additional research on IPPE programs within pharmacy school curricula

Relativistic three-body bound states and the reduction from four to three dimensions

Beginning with an effective field theory based upon meson exchange, the Bethe-Salpeter equation for the three-particle propagator (six-point function) is obtained. Using the one-boson-exchange form of the kernel, this equation is then analyzed using time-ordered perturbation theory, and a three-dimensional equation for the propagator is developed. The propagator consists of a pre-factor in which the relative energies are fixed by the initial state of the particles, an intermediate part in which only global propagation of the particles occurs, and a post-factor in which relative energies are fixed by the final state of the particles. The pre- and post-factors are necessary in order to account for the transition from states where particles are off their mass shell to states described by the global propagator with all of the particle energies on shell. The pole structure of the intermediate part of the propagator is used to determine the equation for the three-body bound state: a Schr{\"o}dinger-like relativistic equation with a single, global Green's function. The role of the pre- and post-factors in the relativistic dynamics is to incorporate the poles of the breakup channels in the initial and final states. The derivation of this equation by integrating over the relative times rather than via a constraint on relative momenta allows the inclusion of retardation and dynamical boost corrections without introducing unphysical singularities.Comment: REVTeX, 21 pages, 4 figures, epsf.st

Electron-deuteron scattering in a current-conserving description of relativistic bound states: formalism and impulse approximation calculations

The electromagnetic interactions of a relativistic two-body bound state are formulated in three dimensions using an equal-time (ET) formalism. This involves a systematic reduction of four-dimensional dynamics to a three-dimensional form by integrating out the time components of relative momenta. A conserved electromagnetic current is developed for the ET formalism. It is shown that consistent truncations of the electromagnetic current and the $NN$ interaction kernel may be made, order-by-order in the coupling constants, such that appropriate Ward-Takahashi identities are satisfied. A meson-exchange model of the $NN$ interaction is used to calculate deuteron vertex functions. Calculations of electromagnetic form factors for elastic scattering of electrons by deuterium are performed using an impulse-approximation current. Negative-energy components of the deuteron's vertex function and retardation effects in the meson-exchange interaction are found to have only minor effects on the deuteron form factors.Comment: 42 pages, RevTe

Millimeter imaging of HD 163296: probing the disk structure and kinematics

We present new multi-wavelength millimeter interferometric observations of the Herbig Ae star HD 163296 obtained with the IRAM/PBI, SMA and VLA arrays both in continuum and in the 12CO, 13CO and C18O emission lines. Gas and dust properties have been obtained comparing the observations with self-consistent disk models for the dust and CO emission. The circumstellar disk is resolved both in the continuum and in CO. We find strong evidence that the circumstellar material is in Keplerian rotation around a central star of 2.6 Msun. The disk inclination with respect to the line of sight is 46+-4 deg with a position angle of 128+-4 deg. The slope of the dust opacity measured between 0.87 and 7 mm (beta=1) confirms the presence of mm/cm-size grains in the disk midplane. The dust continuum emission is asymmetric and confined inside a radius of 200 AU while the CO emission extends up to 540 AU. The comparison between dust and CO temperature indicates that CO is present only in the disk interior. Finally, we obtain an increasing depletion of CO isotopomers from 12CO to 13CO and C18O. We argue that these results support the idea that the disk of HD 163296 is strongly evolved. In particular, we suggest that there is a strong depletion of dust relative to gas outside 200 AU; this may be due to the inward migration of large bodies that form in the outer disk or to clearing of a large gap in the dust distribution by a low mass companion.Comment: Accepted for publication on A&A, 16 page

Confidential Boosting with Random Linear Classifiers for Outsourced User-generated Data

User-generated data is crucial to predictive modeling in many applications. With a web/mobile/wearable interface, a data owner can continuously record data generated by distributed users and build various predictive models from the data to improve their operations, services, and revenue. Due to the large size and evolving nature of users data, data owners may rely on public cloud service providers (Cloud) for storage and computation scalability. Exposing sensitive user-generated data and advanced analytic models to Cloud raises privacy concerns. We present a confidential learning framework, SecureBoost, for data owners that want to learn predictive models from aggregated user-generated data but offload the storage and computational burden to Cloud without having to worry about protecting the sensitive data. SecureBoost allows users to submit encrypted or randomly masked data to designated Cloud directly. Our framework utilizes random linear classifiers (RLCs) as the base classifiers in the boosting framework to dramatically simplify the design of the proposed confidential boosting protocols, yet still preserve the model quality. A Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) is used to assist the Cloud's processing, reducing the complexity of the protocol constructions. We present two constructions of SecureBoost: HE+GC and SecSh+GC, using combinations of homomorphic encryption, garbled circuits, and random masking to achieve both security and efficiency. For a boosted model, Cloud learns only the RLCs and the CSP learns only the weights of the RLCs. Finally, the data owner collects the two parts to get the complete model. We conduct extensive experiments to understand the quality of the RLC-based boosting and the cost distribution of the constructions. Our results show that SecureBoost can efficiently learn high-quality boosting models from protected user-generated data