Performance models for unreliable flexible manufacturing systems

This paper deals with the analysis and application of queueing models for single and multi stage flexible manufacturing systems that are subject to resource failure. Exact results are derived for the single stage queueing system. Two approximations are presneted for the multi stage queueing system as a closed network. We validate the approximations by comparing their performance estimates against the exact global balance solution.     

Working Together to Improve Accessibility: Consortial E-Resource Accessibility and Advocacy

Abstract

In 2015, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Libraries formed the BTAA Library E-Resource Accessibility Group. This group, which consists of members from each Big Ten library and the BTAA Library Initiatives staff, was charged with creating boilerplate accessibility license language for vendor contracts, as well as collectively funding high level accessibility testing of e-resources and posting these publicly for all libraries and users. Since the creation of the group, about 50 databases have been tested and accessibility license language has been created that can be used and adapted by anyone. In 2019, the group welcomed another consortia, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), to be partners in this work, renaming themselves the Library Accessibility Alliance. This paper examines the mission, accomplishments, and new partnership in more depth while also discussing the need for focused efforts to help ensure accessible e-resources.     

Healing from childhood sexual abuse: a theoretical model

Childhood sexual abuse is a prevalent social and health care problem. The processes by which individuals heal from childhood sexual abuse are not clearly understood. The purpose of this study was to develop a theoretical model to describe how adults heal from childhood sexual abuse. Community recruitment for an ongoing broader project on sexual violence throughout the lifespan, referred to as the Sexual Violence Study, yielded a subsample of 48 women and 47 men who had experienced childhood sexual abuse. During semistructured, open-ended interviews, they were asked to describe their experiences with healing from childhood sexual abuse and other victimization throughout their lives. Constructivist grounded theory methods were used with these data to develop constructs and hypotheses about healing. For the Sexual Violence Study, frameworks were developed to describe the participants' life patterns, parenting experiences, disclosures about sexual violence, spirituality, and altruism. Several analytic techniques were used to synthesize the findings of these frameworks to develop an overarching theoretical model that describes healing from childhood sexual abuse. The model includes four stages of healing, five domains of functioning, and six enabling factors that facilitate movement from one stage to the next. The findings indicate that healing is a complex and dynamic trajectory. The model can be used to alert clinicians to a variety of processes and enabling factors that facilitate healing in several domains and to guide discussions on important issues related to healing from childhood sexual abuse.     

我为电影狂

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Bayesian Recovery of the Initial Condition for the Heat Equation

We study a Bayesian approach to recovering the initial condition for the heat equation from noisy observations of the solution at a later time. We consider a class of prior distributions indexed by a parameter quantifying “smoothness” and show that the corresponding posterior distributions contract around the true parameter at a rate that depends on the smoothness of the true initial condition and the smoothness and scale of the prior. Correct combinations of these characteristics lead to the optimal minimax rate. One type of priors leads to a rate-adaptive Bayesian procedure. The frequentist coverage of credible sets is shown to depend on the combination of the prior and true parameter as well, with smoother priors leading to zero coverage and rougher priors to (extremely) conservative results. In the latter case, credible sets are much larger than frequentist confidence sets, in that the ratio of diameters diverges to infinity. The results are numerically illustrated by a simulated data example.     

Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Theoretical Model

Childhood sexual abuse is a prevalent social and health care problem. The processes by which individuals heal from childhood sexual abuse are not clearly understood. The purpose of this study was to develop a theoretical model to describe how adults heal from childhood sexual abuse. Community recruitment for an ongoing broader project on sexual violence throughout the lifespan, referred to as the Sexual Violence Study, yielded a subsample of 48 women and 47 men who had experienced childhood sexual abuse. During semistructured, open-ended interviews, they were asked to describe their experiences with healing from childhood sexual abuse and other victimization throughout their lives. Constructivist grounded theory methods were used with these data to develop constructs and hypotheses about healing. For the Sexual Violence Study, frameworks were developed to describe the participants' life patterns, parenting experiences, disclosures about sexual violence, spirituality, and altruism. Several analytic techniques were used to synthesize the findings of these frameworks to develop an overarching theoretical model that describes healing from childhood sexual abuse. The model includes four stages of healing, five domains of functioning, and six enabling factors that facilitate movement from one stage to the next. The findings indicate that healing is a complex and dynamic trajectory. The model can be used to alert clinicians to a variety of processes and enabling factors that facilitate healing in several domains and to guide discussions on important issues related to healing from childhood sexual abuse.     

Energy cost during locomotion across snow: a comparison of four types of snowshoes with snowshoe design considerations

Snowshoes are a common method of locomotion across snow but no investigations has previously examined the energy cost of different snowshoe models or looked for desirable snowshoe design characteristics. To this end, four Marines were studied while walking at 4 km/h in four different types of snowshoes. They traversed a field with an average grade of 2.4%, walking once downhill and once uphill with each snowshoe. Expired respiratory gases (for energy cost measures) and heart rates were collected continuously during the walk. The Pride Assault and US Army Standard models had a lower energy cost than the Montana Light model and tended to have a lower cost than the British Assault model. Correlations between snowshoe mass/surface area ratios and energy cost were 0.81 and 0.72 on the uphill and downhill portions of the course, respectively. Examination of the physical attributes of the snowshoes suggested several design characteristics may be favorable from an energy cost perspective: 1) a hinge-and-binding system that allows the snowshoe to be dragged across the snow, 2) an upturned front that pushes snow away and allows a more horizontal (less vertical) displacement of the snowshoe during locomotion, 3) a narrow profile that avoids leg abduction, and 4) a lower mass to surface area ratio. Further research will be necessary to determine the importance of these factors because of the limited number of subjects and the single snow condition examined here.     

Benedict Cumberbatch:天才最性感

泰戈尔在某部小说中说,女性手中的花环,要么挂在禽兽的恶汉脖子上,要么献给强同虚构人手般空想。因为女性在心底深处,渴望被肉欲的车轮碾碎,又或者在思想的烈火中融化--这种言辞似乎过于极端,好像女人都像受虐狂--不过,女人确实热爱幻想田人的强大,或肉体,或精神.     

So you want to earn a Ph.D. in economics: how much do you think you'll make?

Using data from individuals who earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1996-97, this study identifies factors associated with securing full-time permanent positions and determinants of starting salaries for new Ph.D. economists. Where individuals attend graduate school and factors including the field of specialization and work as a teaching/research assistant impact whether graduates obtain full-time permanent jobs. Choice of graduate program and amount of time spent in the program influence starting salary, as does obtaining a position outside academia or in a research-oriented academic institution, both of which entail higher salaries relative to employment at a B.A.-level academic institution.