196,233 research outputs found
An applied uncertainty analysis on the techno-economic valuation of engine wash procedures
No full textOverall economic assessments (OEAs) can provide a sound basis for decision-making in the areas of investments in new technologies and the application of existent technologies or operating practices. However, due to their long time horizons and complex nature, OEAs often contain many uncertain inputs, making a deterministic simulation insufficient to reflect the true value of the output. In order to incorporate these uncertainties, a systematic and efficient approach for uncertainty analysis is required. This paper sets out such a process, which consists of an iterative Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) based on importance measures for each uncertainty obtained from a Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA). Methods for UQ and GSA are generally actively researched and well established in theory, but are infrequently applied on actual problems due to the computational and organisational complexity associated with integrative uncertainty assessments. To address this issue, the process is demonstrated on an interdisciplinary problem, namely the economic valuation of Engine Wash (EW) procedures using the cost-benefit tool LYFE. It is concluded that with this iterative uncertainty quantification procedure, the total uncertainty in the output distribution, measured using the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles and expressed in terms of the Delta Net Present Value, is reduced from 983K to 584K. To achieve this reduction, additional modelling was carried out for only the two most important of the six uncertainties, determined using the GSA results, which illustrates the efficient allocation of modelling resources.Aerospace Engineerin
Volitional control of anticipatory ocular smooth pursuit after viewing, but not pursuing, a moving target: evidence for a re-afferent velocity store
No full textAlthough human subjects cannot normally initiate smooth eye movements in the absence of a moving target, previous experiments have established that such movements can be evoked if the subject is required to pursue a regularly repeated, transient target motion stimulus. We sought to determine whether active pursuit was necessary to evoke such an anticipatory response or whether it could be induced after merely viewing the target motion. Subjects were presented with a succession of ramp target motion stimuli of identical velocity and alternating direction in the horizontal axis. In initial experiments, the target was exposed for only 120 ms as it passed through centre, with a constant interval between presentations. Ramp velocity was varied from +/- 9 to 45 degrees/s in one set of trials; the interval between ramp presentations was varied from 640 to 1920 ms in another. Subjects were instructed either to pursue the moving target from the first presentation or to hold fixation on another, stationary target during the first one, two or three presentations of the moving display. Without fixation, the first smooth movement was initiated with a mean latency of 95 ms after target onset, but with repeated presentations anticipatory smooth movements started to build up before target onset. In contrast, when the subjects fixated the stationary target for three presentations of the moving target, the first movement they made was already anticipatory and had a peak velocity that was significantly greater than that of the first response without prior fixation. The conditions of experiment 1 were repeated in experiment 3 with a longer duration of target exposure (480 ms), to allow higher eye velocities to build up. Again, after three prior fixations, the anticipatory velocity measured at 100 ms after target onset (when visual feedback would be expected to start) was not significantly different to that evoked after the subjects had made three active pursuit responses to the same target motion, reaching a mean of 20 degrees/s for a 50 degrees/s target movement. In a further experiment, we determined whether subjects could use stored information from prior active pursuit to generate anticipatory pursuit in darkness if there was a high expectancy that the target would reappear with identical velocity. Subjects made one predictive response immediately after target disappearance, but very little response thereafter until the time at which they expected the target to reappear, when they were again able to re-vitalize the anticipatory response before target appearance. The findings of these experiments provide evidence that information related to target velocity can be stored and used to generate future anticipatory responses even in the absence of eye movement. This suggests that information for storage is probably derived from a common pre-motor drive signal that is inhibited during fixation, rather than an efference copy of eye movement itself. Furthermore, a high level of expectancy of target appearance can facilitate the release of this stored information in darkness
Dr. Duane M. Jackson, Morehouse College, July 2011
No full textThis video is a conversation with Dr. Duane M. Jackson. Dr. Jackson talks about his paper, "Recall and the Serial Position Effect: The Role of Primacy and Recency on Accounting Students' Performance." Jackie Daniel, AUC Woodruff Library, is the interviewer
"Reflections on the subject of Emigration from Europe with a view to Settlement in the United States" By M. Carey.
No full text"Reflections on the subject of Emigration from Europe with a view to Settlement in the United States: containing bried sketches of the moral and political character of those states.
By M. Carey, member of the American philosophical, and of the American Antiquarian Society, and author of The Olive Branch, Cindiciae Hibernicae, essays on banking, on political economy, and on internal improvement.
To which are now added the English editor's comments on the subject; together with Important Advice to Emigrants, and Cautions Against Impositions Practiced in the Outports
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Dr. Glendon Swarthout
No full textHosted by Roger M. Busfield, MSU Assistant Professor of Speech and Theater, Meet the Author is designed to introduce a general audience to a contemporary author and their work through in-depth interviews. This episode features a conversation between Dr. Glendon Swarthout, prolific author and English professor at MSU, and assistant professors Sam S. Baskett and Theodore B. Strandness
Reconstruction and Analysis of the Po River Inundation of 1951
No full textFlood inundation models have become essential tools in flood risk management, being used also in the analysis of historical flood events, which is often needed for a reliable assessment of the potential flood hazard. This study aims at reconstructing the 1951 inundation of the Polesine Region, Italy. The 1951 flooding was a mayor natural catastrophe that caused a large inundated area (1080 km2) and produced devastating social consequences. The reconstruction of the 1951 hydraulic conditions is based on partial knowledge of discharges and water stages at the Pontelagoscuro gauging station (downstream of the 1951 levee breach) using extrapolation of the rating curves beyond the measurement range. This is, even today, something open to uncertainty. We applied a decoupled hybrid approach to the hydraulic modeling: a 1D model is used to simulate the flow into the river and to compute the flow through the levee breach; this result is then adopted as the inflow condition for a 2D model application on the inundated area. A good agreement between the patterns of the observed and reconstructed inundation areas was found, and the timing of the inundation was also found to be close to the information derived from the historical chronicles. The results of the flood inundation modelling exercise provide two practical insight: (i) obstacles in the floodplains increased the flooded area by 40% and prolonged the time to reach the sea from 5 to 15 days, (ii) the peak discharge of the event was overestimated by up to 20
Study of clay soils swelling by the new method based on Laser Interferometry and the classical Odometer test
No full textGeotechnical engineering participates in the act of construction, which means that it must meet a double concern for securityand economy. Therefore, an essential part of the engineer's responsibility rests on the recognition of soils in order to determine their nature and properties (taking into account the flow of water). In the present work, we measure the swelling and the permeability by detection of the swelling, by our new optical method based on the interferometry-laser, invented by Hassan Asselman, within the team of Optics and photonics of sciences faculty, Tetouan-Morocco. This new prototype allows us to directly measure the following parameters: the permeability k (m / s), the Young module Eand the swelling index Cs. For the latter parameter, the evolution of the strain as a function of the stresses ρ (Pa) is measured for a given degree of saturation (Until saturation). Moreover, we will use the classical odometer test, which reproduces the conditions of deformation of the soils. Using the results of the latter by the graphic methods of Taylor and Gasagrande, it is possible to determine the value of the coefficient of consolidation of the soil Cv. According to the Darcy theoretical modelfor a saturated medium, Cv depends on the permeability, the compressibility coefficient mv (or the inverse of the model of Young odometric) and the voluminal weight of the water γw. These tests will be carried out at the GEORET Geotechnical Laboratory in Tetouan. To perform this work, we chose a sample of claydistrubed, already characterized by X-ray diffraction (whose clay fraction is illite). It is extracted from the so-called "Teffalin" quarry of the Tetouan region, used in the manufacture of pottery. Finally we give a comparison between our new patented method and the classic Odometric test</jats:p
Study of clay soils swelling by the new method based on Laser Interferometry and the classical Odometer test
No full textGeotechnical engineering participates in the act of construction, which means that it must meet a double concern for securityand economy. Therefore, an essential part of the engineer's responsibility rests on the recognition of soils in order to determine their nature and properties (taking into account the flow of water). In the present work, we measure the swelling and the permeability by detection of the swelling, by our new optical method based on the interferometry-laser, invented by Hassan Asselman, within the team of Optics and photonics of sciences faculty, Tetouan-Morocco. This new prototype allows us to directly measure the following parameters: the permeability k (m / s), the Young module Eand the swelling index Cs. For the latter parameter, the evolution of the strain as a function of the stresses ρ (Pa) is measured for a given degree of saturation (Until saturation). Moreover, we will use the classical odometer test, which reproduces the conditions of deformation of the soils. Using the results of the latter by the graphic methods of Taylor and Gasagrande, it is possible to determine the value of the coefficient of consolidation of the soil Cv. According to the Darcy theoretical modelfor a saturated medium, Cv depends on the permeability, the compressibility coefficient mv (or the inverse of the model of Young odometric) and the voluminal weight of the water γw. These tests will be carried out at the GEORET Geotechnical Laboratory in Tetouan. To perform this work, we chose a sample of claydistrubed, already characterized by X-ray diffraction (whose clay fraction is illite). It is extracted from the so-called "Teffalin" quarry of the Tetouan region, used in the manufacture of pottery. Finally we give a comparison between our new patented method and the classic Odometric tes
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