Evaluation of coupled finite element/meshfree method for a robust full-scale crashworthiness simulation of railway vehicles

The crashworthiness of a railway vehicle relates to its passive safety performance. Due to mesh distortion and difficulty in controlling the hourglass energy, conventional finite element methods face great challenges in crashworthiness simulation of large-scale complex railway vehicle models. Meshfree methods such as element-free Galerkin method offer an alternative approach to overcome those limitations but have proved time-consuming. In this article, a coupled finite element/meshfree method is proposed to study the crashworthiness of railway vehicles. A representative scenario, in which the leading vehicle of a high-speed train impacts to a rigid wall, is simulated with the coupled finite element/element-free Galerkin method in LS-DYNA. We have compared the conventional finite element method and the coupled finite element/element-free Galerkin method with the simulation results of different levels of discretization. Our work showed that coupled finite element/element-free Galerkin method is a suitable alternative of finite element method to handle the nonlinear deformation in full-size railway vehicle crashworthiness simulation. The coupled method can reduce the hourglass energy in finite element simulation, to produce robust simulation

Sport, War and Democracy in Classical Athens

This article concerns the paradox of athletics in classical Athens. Democracy may have opened up politics to every class of Athenian but it had little impact on sporting participation. The city’s athletes continued to drawn predominantly from the upper class. It comes as a surprise then that lower-class Athenians actually esteemed athletes above every other group in the public eye, honoured them very generously when they won, and directed a great deal of public and private money to sporting competitions and facilities. In addition athletics escaped the otherwise persistent criticism of upper-class activities in the popular culture of the democracy. The research of social scientists on sport and aggression suggests this paradox may have been due to the cultural overlap between athletics and war under the Athenian democracy. The article concludes that the practical and ideological democratization of war by classical Athens legitimized and supported upper-class sport

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Groups, organizations, families and movements: The sociology of social systems between interaction and society

Kühl S. Groups, organizations, families and movements: The sociology of social systems between interaction and society. Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 2020;37(3):496-515.In enhancing a proposal by Luhmann, this contribution shows that it is possible to locate different types of systems between ‘face‐to‐face‐interaction’ and ‘society’: groups, organizations, families and protest movements. The common ground of these is that they use membership to attribute persons to the system or not. However, they differ fundamentally in regard to how they understand membership. In contrast to Luhmann's differentiation between interaction, organization and society, it is not only possible to imagine different types of interlocking systems but also coequal combinations of and transitions between the different types of social systems

Genesis and development of an interfluvial peatland in the central Congo Basin since the Late Pleistocene

The central Congo Basin contains the largest known peatland complex in the tropics. Here we present a detailed multi-proxy record from a peat core, CEN-17.4, from the centre of a 45 km wide interfluvial peatland (Ekolongouma), the first record of its kind from the central Congo peatlands. We use pollen, charcoal, sedimentological and geochemical data to reconstruct the site's history from the late Pleistocene to the present day. Peat began accumulating at the centre of the peatland ∼19,600 cal BP (∼17,500–20,400 cal BP, 95% confidence interval), and between ∼9500 (9430–9535 cal BP) and 10,500 (10,310–10,660 cal BP) cal BP towards the margins. Pollen data from the peatland centre show that an initial grass- and sedge-dominated vegetation, which burned frequently, was replaced by a Manilkara-type dominated flooded forest at ∼12,640 cal BP, replaced in turn by a more mixed swamp forest at ∼9670 cal BP. Mixed swamp forest vegetation has persisted to the present day, with variations in composition and canopy openness likely caused at least in part by changes in palaeo-precipitation. Stable isotope data (δDn-C29-v&icecorr) indicate a large reduction in precipitation beginning ∼5000 and peaking ∼2000 cal BP, associated with the near-complete mineralization of several metres of previously accumulated peat and with a transition to a drier, more heliophilic swamp forest assemblage, likely with a more open canopy. Although the peatland and associated vegetation recovered from this perturbation, the strong response to this climatic event underlines the ecosystem's sensitivity to changes in precipitation. We find no conclusive evidence for anthropogenic activity in our record; charcoal is abundant only in the Pleistocene part of the record and may reflect natural rather than anthropogenic fires. We conclude that autogenic succession and variation in the amount and seasonality of precipitation have been the most important drivers of ecological change in this peatland since the late Pleistocene

Assessment of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning among smallholder vegetable farmers in Trinidad and Jamaica

Poisoning caused by pesticides is widely recognized as a major public health problem among smallholder farmers and rural communities, including in the Caribbean. However, a lack of quality data impedes understanding of the problem and hampers the development of effective strategies for its management. To better understand the prevalence of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning (UAPP) in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica and the pesticides and practices involved, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 197 and 330 vegetable farmers in Trinidad and Jamaica, respectively. The findings from this study revealed a high incidence of self-reported health effects from occupational pesticide exposure, with 48 and 16% of respondents, respectively, experiencing symptoms of UAPP within the previous 12 months. Furthermore, the substantial proportion of UAPP incidents were associated with a few highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs), particularly lambda-cyhalothrin, acetamiprid, and profenofos in Jamaica, and alpha-cypermethrin, paraquat and lambda-cyhalothrin in Trinidad. Given the well-documented adverse effects of these chemicals on human health, the results of this study should be of significant concern to health authorities in Jamaica and Trinidad. This clearly indicates an urgent need for improved regulation and safer alternatives to the use of HHPs, as well as the promotion of alternatives. We provide policy recommendations and identify alternatives to HHPs for tropical vegetable production

Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde

The contributors who wrote the texts and scores are: John Berndt, Felicity Ford, Panos Ghikas, Paul Gilgunn, Stephen Graham, Majella Munro, Simon O’Connor, Rían O’Rahallaigh, Nick Roth, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Jennifer Walshe. Thanks very much to Richard Devine for his recordings which brought Zaftig to life and Jack McMahon for his performance as Ultan O’Farrell, and to Malcolm Tyrrell for his dream of an episode of Hands focussing on Irish performance art.Before you begin reading the articles in this book and listening to the recordings on the Aisteach Foundation’s website, I have a confession to make – all of the composers and artists are fictional. The Aisteach Foundation and the Historical Documents of the Irish Avant-Garde are a communal thought experiment, a revisionist exercise in “what if?”, a huge effort by many people to create an alternative history of avant-garde music in Ireland, to write our ancestors into being and shape their stories with care. We played fast and loose with history and the truth and we like to think Flann O’Brien would have approved. I am extremely grateful to the Arts Council of Ireland for funding this project and allowing me to collaborate with the contributors listed below. If you feel there’s something we missed, something you want to have happened and would like to bring into being, please let us know. This project is dedicated with love to Bob Gilmore. Dr. Jennifer Walshe, President, Aisteach FoundationArts Council of Irelandhttp://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/jennifer-walshe/historical-documents-of-the-irish-avant-garde/paperback/product-22906851.html#productDetail

Mining a Sea of Data: Deducing the Environmental Controls of Ocean Chlorophyll

Chlorophyll biomass in the surface ocean is regulated by a complex interaction of physiological, oceanographic, and ecological factors and in turn regulates the rates of primary production and export of organic carbon to the deep ocean. Mechanistic models of phytoplankton responses to climate change require the parameterization of many processes of which we have limited knowledge. We develop a statistical approach to estimate the response of remote-sensed ocean chlorophyll to a variety of physical and chemical variables. Irradiance over the mixed layer depth, surface nitrate, sea-surface temperature, and latitude and longitude together can predict 83% of the variation in log chlorophyll in the North Atlantic. Light and nitrate regulate biomass through an empirically determined minimum function explaining nearly 50% of the variation in log chlorophyll by themselves and confirming that either light or macronutrients are often limiting and that much of the variation in chlorophyll concentration is determined by bottom-up mechanisms. Assuming the dynamics of the future ocean are governed by the same processes at work today, we should be able to apply these response functions to future climate change scenarios, with changes in temperature, nutrient distributions, irradiance, and ocean physics

Genesis and development of an interfluvial peatland in the central Congo Basin since the Late Pleistocene

The central Congo Basin contains the largest known peatland complex in the tropics. Here we present a detailed multi-proxy record from a peat core, CEN-17.4, from the centre of a 45 km wide interfluvial peatland (Ekolongouma), the first record of its kind from the central Congo peatlands. We use pollen, charcoal, sedimentological and geochemical data to reconstruct the site's history from the late Pleistocene to the present day. Peat began accumulating at the centre of the peatland ∼19,600 cal BP (∼17,500–20,400 cal BP, 95% confidence interval), and between ∼9500 (9430–9535 cal BP) and 10,500 (10,310–10,660 cal BP) cal BP towards the margins. Pollen data from the peatland centre show that an initial grass- and sedge-dominated vegetation, which burned frequently, was replaced by a Manilkara-type dominated flooded forest at ∼12,640 cal BP, replaced in turn by a more mixed swamp forest at ∼9670 cal BP. Mixed swamp forest vegetation has persisted to the present day, with variations in composition and canopy openness likely caused at least in part by changes in palaeo-precipitation. Stable isotope data (δDn-C29-v&icecorr) indicate a large reduction in precipitation beginning ∼5000 and peaking ∼2000 cal BP, associated with the near-complete mineralization of several metres of previously accumulated peat and with a transition to a drier, more heliophilic swamp forest assemblage, likely with a more open canopy. Although the peatland and associated vegetation recovered from this perturbation, the strong response to this climatic event underlines the ecosystem's sensitivity to changes in precipitation. We find no conclusive evidence for anthropogenic activity in our record; charcoal is abundant only in the Pleistocene part of the record and may reflect natural rather than anthropogenic fires. We conclude that autogenic succession and variation in the amount and seasonality of precipitation have been the most important drivers of ecological change in this peatland since the late Pleistocene