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Evaluating Campus Safety: Insights from Cal Poly Students
Get PDFCampus safety is a major concern for students and faculty, especially in light of a few recent incidents at Cal Poly. This study explores students’ overall perceptions of safety, thoughts on Cal Poly’s method of communicating with students about crises, and the selection process of Resident Advisors (RA) on campus. Using a mixed methods approach, a survey collected responses from 125 students at Cal Poly, analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. Analysis showed significant gender differences, with women reporting lower feelings of safety, satisfaction of Cal Poly crisis communication efforts, and overall lower trust in RA’s and Cal Poly’s vetting process. Qualitative data further supported these findings with students emphasizing the need for improved nighttime security, faster crisis notification systems, increased campus security, and a more transparent RA selection process. The results suggest that while generally students feel safe on campus there is room for improvement
A Pedagogy of Howling: Testimonies of Pedagogies for Peace at the University for Peace
Get PDFIn this critical commentary, we (five masters’ students and one faculty member) share testimonies of what has felt essential in our experience of pedagogies for peace at the University for Peace (UPEACE). Co-creating this article in a collective voice[1] is a living example of the heart of our pedagogical praxis of disrupting separation and expressing interconnectedness through collaboration. We practice as we write, together
YOLOT: A Recurrent YOLO Model for Robust Video-Based Automotive Object Detection
Get PDFThough incredibly effective at detecting objects in isolated frames, modern object detection models are often not designed to take advantage of information present in previous frames of a video stream, despite that data being readily avail- able. To address this shortcoming, this paper proposes YOLOT, a modification of the widely used YOLOv8 object detection model, which seeks to utilize this temporal information with the addition of recurrent structures. In the design of YOLOT, a series of recurrent convolutional modules were inserted at backbone and neck outputs and the final and most effective design was found to be the insertion of a Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit before the detect heads of the model. Training and evaluation of YOLOT are both performed on the challenging BDD100k MOTS Dataset, a benchmark for automotive object detection across seven classes. When evaluated, YOLOT outperforms the baseline architecture of YOLOv8 on the BDD100k validation dataset by 8.2 points in mAP50, while adding 10ms of inference time on an Nvidia RTX 3060m GPU. In addition to the development of YOLOT, this paper serves as the most comprehensive docu- ment outlining YOLOv8 and YOLOT’s architecture to date, including a detailed description of the baseline model and loss function, from basic concepts to high level design
Assessing Arterial Compliance: Utilizing a Surrogate Arm Bench Top Model for Oscillometric Blood Pressure Monitoring
Get PDFA study was conducted to evaluate the compliance of artificial artery systems utilizing an adaptation of the Yong-Geddes Surrogate Arm model, composed of a blood pressure cuff, artificial artery, pressure transducers, and flow to replicate physiological conditions to validate oscillometric non-invasive blood pressure measurement methods. The experiment phases included tube, blood pressure cuff, and the surrogate arm compliance tests both in static and dynamic conditions. Tube compliance tests showed that larger diameters resulted in increased compliance, with Sample 1 (smaller inner diameter, ID) resulting in an average compliance of 0.0912 mL/mmHg, and Sample 2 (bigger ID) resulting in 0.1597 mL/mmHg. Arterial compliance curves were fit to the data of Samples 1 and 2 with correlations of R2 = 96.56% and R2 = 98.55% respectively. Cuff compliance testing yielded an average compliance of 0.8991 cm2/mmHg, with a second-order inverse polynomial model achieving a strong fit (R2 = 85.02%). Static surrogate arm compliance tests revealed variability, with average compliance values of 0.1102 and 0.1862 for Samples 1 and 2, respectively with errors of 15.99–20.88% compared to tube compliance, highlighting the need for refinements in system design. Overall, the experiments demonstrated the model’s potential for compliance measurement, but identified variability and error, requiring further refinement. These findings provide a foundation for advancing surrogate arm systems and new techniques for validating noninvasive blood pressure systems models
Tuned Liquid Damper Design Using Liquid Sloshing in a Horizontal Cylindrical Tank
No full textVibration isolation is an essential design requirement for several real word applications including industrial machinery, automobiles and building structures. Different techniques of vibration isolation are employed in each of these applications. One such vibration isolator used in tall buildings is known as the Tuned Mass Damper , where a mechanical mass (pendulum, bogey, cylinder) is located at the top portion of the building and is connected to the building through a suspension. This mechanical mass – suspension system is designed to oscillate out of phase with the building in order to dissipate the vibration. Several buildings such as, Taipei 101, have such vibration isolators installed.
A fluid variant of the Tuned Mass Damper , known as a Tuned Liquid Damper, is also used in several tall buildings (Hotel Cosima, Tokyo) to achieve vibration isolation. In this research study, one such design of a Tuned Liquid Damper in the form of a horizontal cylindrical fluid container has been investigated. The concept of liquid sloshing in horizontal cylinders was utilized for the purpose of designing the Tuned Liquid Damper.
The research involved a multiple pronged approach which started with a detailed first principles approach of utilizing concepts from fluid mechanics to obtain a mathematical model of liquid sloshing in two different shaped containers (rectangular vessel and horizontal cylinder). These results were utilized to size the appropriate cylindrical vessel to be used as the Tuned Liquid Damper. This analytical study was then extended to include Lagrangian dynamics in order to transform the governing expressions obtained in the fluid domain to an equivalent mathematical model in the conventional mechanical domain (mass spring damper model).
A second approach involving the use of SolidWorks fluid simulation was utilized to simulate liquid sloshing in a horizontal cylinder and the results were corroborated with both the mathematical models (fluid domain and conventional mass domain).
The results from both these studies were experimentally corroborated by building a research prototype and testing on the existing Tuned Mass Damper equipment in the vibrations lab. The research study culminated in the creation of a student-friendly Tuned Liquid Damper product which could be utilized as laboratory equipment both in the undergraduate and graduate vibrations courses of the Mechanical Engineering curriculu