LLV - Lunar Logistics Vehicle Final report

Design of unmanned space vehicle for landing 2500 pound payload on moo

The impact of distance to nearest education institution on the post-compulsory education participation decision

This paper uses data sources with the unique capacity to measure distances between home addresses and education institutions, to investigate, for the first time, the effect that such distance has on an individual´s post–compulsory education participation decision. The results show that there is no overall net effect. However, when attention is focussed on young people who are on the margin of participating in post–compulsory education (according to their prior attainment and family background) and when post–compulsory education is distinguished by whether it leads to academic or vocational qualifications, then greater distance to nearest education institution is seen to have a significant impact on the decision to continue in full–time post–compulsory education. This finding has relevance for education participation in rural areas relative to urban areas

Gambling and the use of credit: an individual and household level analysis

We explore the relationship between gambling and other forms of risk-taking behaviour, i.e. exposure to debt and the use of credit, at the individual and household level using representative pooled cross-section data drawn from the UK Expenditure and Food Surveys (EFS), 2001 to 2007. Gambling and the use of credit are shown to be positively correlated at the household level. While both the incidence and amount of gambling vary according to household income, the positive association between gambling and the use of credit is remarkably stable across household income. In addition to our household level analysis, we also explore the prevalence of intra-household gambling, which has attracted relatively limited attention in the existing literature. It is apparent that there is strong intra-household correlation in both gambling activity and in the use of credit, with somewhat stronger relationships in lower income households

Multi-axis inertial sensing with long-time point source atom interferometry

We show that light-pulse atom interferometry with atomic point sources and spatially resolved detection enables multi-axis (two rotation, one acceleration) precision inertial sensing at long interrogation times. Using this method, we demonstrate a light-pulse atom interferometer for Rb-87 with 1.4 cm peak wavepacket separation and a duration of 2T = 2.3 seconds. The inferred acceleration sensitivity of each shot is 6.7 * 10^(-12) g, which improves on previous limits by more than two orders of magnitude. We also measure the Earth's rotation rate with a precision of 200 nrad/s.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Laxatives Do Not Improve Symptoms of Opioid-Induced Constipation: Results of a Patient Survey

Introduction.:  Laxatives are commonly used to treat opioid-induced constipation, the commonest and most bothersome complication of opioids. However, laxatives have a nonspecific action and do not target underlying mechanisms of opioid-induced constipation; their use is associated with abdominal symptoms that negatively impact quality of life. Objective.:  To assess the effects of laxatives in patients taking opioids for chronic pain. Methods.:  One hundred ninety-eight UK patients who had taken opioid analgesics for at least one month completed a cross-sectional online or telephone survey. Questions addressed their pain condition, medication, and laxative use (including efficacy and side effects). The survey also assessed bowel function using the Bowel Function Index. Results.:  Since starting their current opioid, 134 of 184 patients (73%) had used laxatives at some point and 122 (91%) of these were currently taking them. The most common laxatives were osmotics and stimulants. Laxative side effects were reported in 75%, most commonly gas, bloating/fullness, and a sudden urge to defecate. Side effects were more common in patients less than 40 years of age. Approximately half of patients said laxatives interfered with work and social activities, and one-fifth needed an overnight hospital stay because of their pain condition and/or constipation. Laxatives did not improve the symptoms of constipation, as assessed by the Bowel Function Index. Constipation was not related to opioid strength, dose of opioid, or number of laxatives taken. Conclusions.:  Use of laxatives to treat opioid-induced constipation is often ineffective and associated with side effects. Instead of relieving the burden of opioid-induced constipation, laxative use is associated with a negative impact

Adversarial Training for Free!

Adversarial training, in which a network is trained on adversarial examples, is one of the few defenses against adversarial attacks that withstands strong attacks. Unfortunately, the high cost of generating strong adversarial examples makes standard adversarial training impractical on large-scale problems like ImageNet. We present an algorithm that eliminates the overhead cost of generating adversarial examples by recycling the gradient information computed when updating model parameters. Our "free" adversarial training algorithm achieves comparable robustness to PGD adversarial training on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets at negligible additional cost compared to natural training, and can be 7 to 30 times faster than other strong adversarial training methods. Using a single workstation with 4 P100 GPUs and 2 days of runtime, we can train a robust model for the large-scale ImageNet classification task that maintains 40% accuracy against PGD attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/ashafahi/free_adv_train.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 201

Phosphorus oxide gate dielectric for black phosphorus field effect transistors

The environmental stability of the layered semiconductor black phosphorus (bP) remains a challenge. Passivation of the bP surface with phosphorus oxide, POx, grown by a reactive ion etch with oxygen plasma is known to improve photoluminescence efficiency of exfoliated bP flakes. We apply phosphorus oxide passivation in the fabrication of bP field effect transistors using a gate stack consisting of a POx layer grown by reactive ion etching followed by atomic layer deposition of Al2O3. We observe room temperature top-gate mobilities of 115 cm2/Vs in ambient conditions, which we attribute to the low defect density of the bP/POx interface

LLV - Lunar Logistic Vehicle Final report

Evaluation of systems design training institute for engineering facult