Customary Analysis Research Articles

Affective enactments of class: attuning to events, practice, capacity

ABSTRACT Based on empirical research with working-class students studying in Australian universities, this article frames class as a structuring relation, but also as a series of affective events, through which we emphasise capacities. Putting the concept of class in conversation with two analytics of affect, we show how class is a relational site of struggle in which subjectivities and socio-material arrangements come together to produce emergent yet patterned effects. Lines of inquiry are opened up that go beyond the reproduction of inequalities, which tends to command attention in customary critical class analysis. Class struggle is enacted via events of an affective-discursive-material kind that constrain and capacitate. While working-class identifications are normatively devalued, working-class students hold on to them, enacting classed subjectivities affirmatively. We suggest that expanding class analysis to include affective capacities illuminates new dimensions of class struggle.

Application of BIM for structural engineering: a case study using Revit and customary structural analysis and design software

Building information modelling (BIM) represents a workflow whose application on a construction project will enable all involved players to compile as well as work with information on every aspect of a building in a common model/database. Through BIM, the entire building can be virtually designed and built on a computer. BIM touches every part of a building’s life cycle starting from the design phase well into the construction phase and beyond that into asset management. This research examines the experiences of early adopters of BIM and use that insight to introduce BIM, specially focusing on the structural analysis and design stage of a building. The study demonstrates how all structural design activities can be integrated with each other and how cross-discipline collaboration with the architect can be achieved through the adoption of BIM without leaving ones customary structural design platform. As a demonstration, a sample building is modelled using Revit along with conventional structural software packages ETABS and SAFE. Plugins and applications were developed for these software packages to facilitate interoperability amongst them so that they all act together as a single platform. Modelling, analysis, design and clash detections were facilitated by applying BIM. Major benefits of employing BIM in a structural design project are illustrated through this research.

Emerging frontiers in wind engineering: Computing, stochastics, machine learning and beyond

Over the last several decades, wind engineering a multi-disciplinary subject involving engineering meteorology, fluid dynamics, structural dynamics, structural engineering, probabilistic methods, and design has addressed the challenges posed by winds of synoptic and non-synoptic origins. Combined computational approaches and laboratory to full-scale experiments have enhanced our ability to design and construct wind-resistant structures that range from low-rise to supertall buildings, footbridges to super long-span bridges and, wind turbines on the ground and floating foundations and floating offshore drilling and production systems. During this period, we have seen extraordinary advances in experimental facilities, instrumentation and data acquisition and management. At the laboratory scale, new wind tunnels have emerged with added features like extra-wide cross-sections, from passive to active driving systems, from boundary layer to flow simulators with vortical flows mimicking non-synoptic winds features. While at full-scale, we have been able to use deployable sensing networks in the path of landfalling hurricanes/typhoons to monitoring in real-time the performance of tall buildings and long-span bridges during extreme wind events. Advanced technologies like aerial surveying using drones and satellite imagery have been employed to enhance the post-storm surveillance capabilities. These advances have enabled us to build a cadre of civil infrastructure that meets some of the challenges posed by the extreme winds. Yet there remain several frontiers that still need to be addressed for example the three “Nons,” the triple emerging fronts, i.e., non-stationarity, non-Gaussianity, non-linearity prevalent in the changing dynamic of winds prevailing in gust fronts, vortical and convective systems, rolls, meso-scale features and intermittent turbulence. In the face of these challenges, increasing heights, spans, and depths of structures exposed to these winds pose additional challenges as their performance becomes more sensitive to their dynamics, thus necessitating new tools and perspectives that go beyond customary analysis and modeling norms. Fortunately, amidst these challenges, there are new opportunities to complement our existing capabilities as the burgeoning growth in computational resources and parallel computational advances coupled with data analytics and AI-based schemes, e.g., machine learning hold the promise of expanding our modeling and simulation capacity far beyond our current conventional schemes offer. All these advances can be couched in a Generalized Wind Loading Chain to capture the three “Nons” by building upon the wind loading chain proposed by Davenport based on linear and stationary conditions. An example of the Gust Front Factor in this framework is an effective means for designing under non-synoptic winds. This paper expands on these new computational opportunities and ways to take advantage of their added capabilities to address emerging challenges in building a resilient and sustainable civil infrastructure and beyond to stability and safety of high-speed trains.

An improved description of creep in dispersion-strengthened metals

An improved model based on thermally activated dislocation glide is proposed to describe the dislocation detachment-controlled creep of extruded and annealed GlidCop Al-15 and extruded GlidCop Al-60 at 973 K as well as the threshold behavior observed at lower stresses. Unlike the customary analysis using the Rösler-Arzt approach, both steady-state and strain-transient stress reduction creep tests were performed to obtain the activation energies and the obstacle strengths for creep. In contrast to pure copper, the constant-structure creep rates of GlidCop were greater than the subsequent steady-state creep rates in all tests. This result supports the concept that dislocation detachment from particles, rather than dislocation-dislocation interactions, is rate-controlling. In addition, the constant-structure creep rates at the same reduced stresses were found to be greater at higher initial stresses. This observation is interpreted as evidence that a forward internal stress arising from inter-dislocation interactions near the particles acts on the ready-to-detach dislocations and scales with the initial stress. This forward stress and an explicit treatment of the stress dependence of mobile dislocation density were incorporated in the improved model. Furthermore, the operational activation area for dislocation glide was determined at constant temperature and structure, and the values are consistent with the interparticle distances multiplied by the Burgers vector, which further supports the interpretation of detachment controlled glide. Finally, the true threshold stress for creep is modeled as originating from thermodynamic back jumps of just-detached dislocations due to the attractive nature of the particle/matrix interface.

The Effect of Aging Under Loading on the Phase Transformation Behavior of Near-Equiatomic NiTi Shape Memory Alloy

The phase transformation temperature of nickel titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloy (SMA), which is commonly used in biomaterial fields, is strongly influenced by aging heat treatments. In this study, we apply a new aging heat treatment under loading conditions to near-equiatomic NiTi SMA wires to investigate its effect on phase transformation temperatures. We determine changes in the phase transformation temperatures via differential scanning calorimetry measurements. We analyze transformation temperatures, hysteresis properties, and enthalpy changes and discuss significant results with the help of micrographs. Moreover, we evaluate our results using two-way analysis of variance, axiomatic design methods, and customary analysis in order to make reliable inferences. We observe a significant difference between first and second heating-cooling cycle results for NiTi SMA samples on the basis of austenitic transformation temperatures. Consequently, we are able to theorize correlations between design parameters and functional requirements.

On current ambiguity in the interpretation of fission at intermediate excitation energy

Various approaches are currently used to interpret experimental data on fission. We critically examine a wide set of observables measured for fission of Po206,210 nuclei at medium excitation energy, and illustrate the ambiguity in current analysis. Dynamical calculations based on the four-dimensional Langevin equation using a macroscopic potential energy landscape are performed, and found to consistently describe available measurements. This observation calls into question the robustness of recent analysis based on statistical-model calculations and concluding, on the contrary, to substantial shell effects at the fission saddle point in Po206,210. The inconsistency in interpretation reached by the two approaches shows that, depending on the system, the conclusion can be strongly model-dependent. Although this may not be surprising, it emphasizes the today still limited reliability of firmly extracting fundamental nuclear properties from customary analysis.

Decrease trends of ultimate loads of eccentrically loaded model strip footings close to a slope

A series of bearing capacity tests was conducted with eccentrically loaded model surface and shallow strip footings resting close to a slope to investigate behavior of such footings (ultimate loads, failure surfaces, load-displacement curves, rotation of footing, etc.). Ultimate loads of footing close to slope decreased with increasing eccentricity for both surface and shallow footings. Failure surfaces were not symmetrical, primary failure surfaces occurred on the eccentricity side (the slope side) and secondary failure surfaces occurred on the other side. Lengths of failure surfaces decreased with increasing eccentricity. Footings always rotated towards eccentricity side a few degrees. For eccentrically loaded footing, decrease in ultimate load with increasing eccentricity is roughly in agreement with Customary Analysis.

The Use of Statistical Risk Assessment by the FCC in Spectrum Regulation

This paper explores the FCC’s approach to spectrum regulation by examining its quantification of harmful interference, analysis of service rules in its rule-making process, and the content of its final service rules. The paper was developed to support the Interference Studies project of the FCC TAC 2013 Spectrum and Receivers working group. The FCC has traditionally used worst-case analysis to determine whether new service rules will cause interference, and the FCC’s final service rules have traditionally been single-value. However, a worst case-analysis and single-valued rules arguably creates unnecessarily conservative rules that may not result in the maximum benefit to society. Thus, a number of analysts and regulators have argued for statistical approaches to spectrum policy. This paper continues as follows: Section I identifies the FCC’s regulation of interference in the following three contexts: 1. The discussion and definition of harmful interference. 2. The technical analysis of service rules done during the rule-making process. 3. The content of final service rules. In order to better understand the status quo in the FCC’s spectrum policy, Section I examines the three contexts based on the following five distinctions. The first option in each distinction is the FCC’s traditional approach: 1. The definition of harmful interference can be qualitative or quantitative. 2. Analyses of service rules can be worst-case or multi-case. 3. Analyses of service rules can be qualitative or quantitative. 4. Final service rules can be single-value or statistical. 5. Final service rules can be quantitative or qualitative. Section II explains our four findings. In summary, the FCC’s: 1. Technical analysis and final rules fail to quantify harmful interference. 2. Customary analysis of service rules is worst-case. 3. Resulting service rules are almost always single-value. 4. Analysis of service rules is generally qualitative and resulting service rules are usually quantitative. Section III presents the Northpoint case to illustrate the application of the above criteria and findings. “Northpoint” was a controversy about the FCC’s approval of Multichannel Video Distribution and Data Service (MVDDS) — a terrestrial wireless broadband technology. Northpoint, a developer of MVDDS, tried to obtain approval to operate terrestrial transmitters in the face of objections from the incumbent operators of direct broadcast satellite receivers. In Northpoint, the FCC never quantified harmful interference in its technical analysis nor final rules, and it started with a multi-case analysis of service rules that ended in single-value service rules.

Least-order torsion-gravity for chiral-spinor fields, induced self-interacting potentials and parity conservation

We will consider the most general least-order derivative action for the torsional completion of gravitational backgrounds filled with left-handed and right-handed semi-spinorial fields, accounting for all parity-even as well as parity-odd contributions; we will proceed by performing the customary analysis, decomposing torsion and substituting it in terms of the semi-spinorial density currents, in order to obtain the effective action with the torsionally-induced self-interacting potentials among the chiral fermionic fields: we shall see that the resulting effective non-linear potentials will turn eventually out to be parity conserving after all.

Defending the beauty of the Invariance Principle

Customary stability analysis methods for nonlinear nonautonomous systems seem to require a strict condition of uniform continuity. Although extensions of LaSalle’s Invariance Principle to nonautonomous systems that mitigate this condition have been available for a long time, they have remained surprisingly unknown or open to misinterpretations. The large scope of the Principle might have misled the prospective users and its application to Control problems has been received with amazing yet clear uneasiness. Counterexamples have been used in order to claim that the Invariance Principle cannot be applied to nonlinear nonautonomous systems. Because the original formulation of the Invariance Principle still imposes conditions that are not necessarily needed, this paper presents a new Invariance Principle that further mitigates previous conditions and thus further expands the scope of stability analysis. A brief comparative review of various alternatives to stability analysis of nonautonomous nonlinear systems and their implications is also presented in order to illustrate that thorough analysis of same examples may actually confirm the efficiency of the Invariance Principle approach when dealing with stability of nonautonomous nonlinear systems problems that may look difficult or even unsolvable otherwise.

Are the results of customary methods for analyzing dioxin and dioxin-like compound congener profiles court-proof?

The congener profile of samples contaminated with dioxin and dioxin-like compounds allows identifying sources of contamination. This article studies the statistical methods of congener profile analysis reported in the literature with respect to the reliability of obtained results. The performance of customary analysis methods regarding raw data transformation and applied TEF (toxic equivalency factor) values is discussed. In particular, the method of principal component analysis and k-means cluster is taken as an example and examined in detail. Reasons for occurring inconsistencies such as the dependence of results on raw data transformation and the disregard of measurement uncertainty are described, and it is shown that they also explain inconsistencies in other methods of cluster analysis such as hierarchical cluster analysis and neural networks. It is concluded that these methods cannot be employed to reach court-proof decisions, i.e. decisions which meet court evidentiary standards. An alternative approach to analyzing congener profiles based on mathematical statistics is briefly presented, allowing reliable, court-proof decisions.

Ultimate loads for eccentrically loaded model shallow strip footings on geotextile-reinforced sand

A series of tests were carried out with an eccentrically loaded model surface shallow strip footing on reinforced dense sand to investigate the decrease of the ultimate loads with increasing eccentricity and to compare the experimental results with commonly used approaches such as Meyerhof's effective width concept and the customary analysis. An experimental system was produced and used to run the tests. The experimental system consists of a tank, model footing, sand, loading mechanism, etc. A single woven geotextile sheet was placed horizontally below the footing's base at a depth of half of the footing's width. Geotextile reinforcement increased ultimate loads when compared to the unreinforced cases. This contribution decreases with increasing eccentricity. The measured decreases in ultimate loads with increasing eccentricities in the unreinforced tests within the core (kern, middle third) are in good agreement with Meyerhof's approach, while customary analysis is a little on the conservative side. Outside the core, Meyerhof's approach is on the conservative side in this case. Decreasing ultimate loads with increasing eccentricity for the reinforced tests cases were in general agreement with customary analysis, although they are slightly greater. Use of geotextile reinforcement improves load-displacement performance of eccentrically loaded strip footing from the settlement perspective. In other words, footings supported on a reinforced subgrade can generally carry larger loads than unreinforced footings for the same level of displacement.

Time as a Dimension in High‐Throughput Homogeneous Catalysis

AbstractHigh‐throughput screening offers major opportunities to accelerate the discovery and optimization of homogeneously catalyzed reactions. A general method for acquisition of reaction profiles through a high‐throughput quenching (HTQ) approach is described, which gives a more accurate picture of catalyst performance, e.g., total productivity, induction periods, selectivity and lifetime, than the customary analysis at a fixed, arbitrary time.

Quality Improvement by Using Inverse Gaussian Model in Robust Engineering

The concept of robust engineering (RE) which is based on the philosophy of Genichi Taguchi aims at providing industries with a cost effective methodology for enhancing their comptetive position in the global market. Since in most cases it is not possible to model the mathematical relationship between quality characteristic (QC), parameter designs and noise factors of situation under study, a proper statistical model in design of experiments (DOE) is proposed. However, the used statistical procedures in DOE are based on normality assumption of real data of QC or its transformed distribution. In many engineering cases, the data is highly skewed and therefore cannot be always removed by usual transformations; and even if it will be removed to a great extend, it may lead to inaccurate inferences in model parameters. Alternatively, the Inverse Gaussian family of distributions is flexible enough to provide a suitable model for these types of data. In this study, in dealing with such type of data, the concept of RE method is combined with Inverse-Gaussian (IG) model to reduce total deviations from target values of 17 quality characteristics in oil pump housings produced by Iranian diesel engine manufacturing (IDEM) company. As the distridution of data obtained from RE methodology follows the IG, the analysis without any data transformation (uncontrary in traditional RE procedure) is done straight forward through an IG model, and then its analysis is compared with customary analysis of RE method. This paper consists of four sections. The first section provides a brief description of problem. Section two gives a brief introduction to RE methodology. Section three devoted to introducing the proposed DOE model which is base upon inverse-Gaussian distribution. In section four, application of the two approaches to improve quality of produced oil pump housings in IDEM are considered and their relative results are obtained. And finally, in section five, the analysis results of application of the two models are compared.

The thermodynamic significance of the local volume averaged temperature

Since the temperature is not an additive function, the traditional thermodynamic point of view suggests that the volume integral of the temperature has no precise physical meaning. This observation conflicts with the customary analysis of non-isothermal catalytic reactors, heat pipes, driers, geothermal processes, etc., in which the volume averaged temperature plays a crucial role. In this paper we identify the thermodynamic significance of the volume averaged temperature in terms of a simple two-phase heat transfer process. Given the internal energy as a function of the point temperature and the density e(beta) = F (T-beta, rho(beta)), we show that the volume averaged internal energy is represented by [e(beta)](beta) = F([T-beta](beta), [rho(beta)](beta)), when e(beta) is a linear function of T-beta and rho(beta), or when the traditional length-scale constraints associated with the method of volume averaging are satisfied. When these conditions are not met, higher order terms involving the temperature gradient and the density gradient appear in the representation for [e(beta)](beta).

From ship hulls to contact lenses: repression of protein adsorption and the puzzle of PEO

Poly(ethyleneoxyde) (PEO) is utilized for repression of protein adsorption in a variety of biomedical and technological situations. The customary analysis of the interactions between proteins and PEO models the PEO as a simple polymer comprising monomers having a single state. We review the evidence suggesting that such analysis should allow for multiple and interconverting monomeric states.

Behavioral changes of Wistar rats with experimentally-induced painful diabetic neuropathy.

With the purpose of studying data on spontaneous customary changes in diabetic rats, we induced diabetes in 28 Wistar rats with streptozotocin. The animals were observed for 27 weeks in an attempt to characterize spontaneous customary changes that could suggest signs of chronic pain. Morphine, as a central-acting potent analgesic and its specific antagonist naloxone, were used. Our results evidenced in the animals a clinical syndrome similar to human diabetes. Long-term customary analysis revealed a significant (p < 0.05) increase of scratching and resting/sleeping behaviors, but diminished motor, eating and grooming customs. Moreover, the thermal tests revealed hyperalgesia in 43% of the animals, what may corroborate the meaning of scratching as a sign of pain. Pharmacological tests with morphine showed a significant (p < 0.05) inhibition of scratch, with concomitant increase of motor and eating activities and diminished rest/sleep capacity. Naloxone antagonized the effects induced by morphine. Such results suggest that these animals exhibit evoked behavior of hyperalgesia and that scratch may possibly be a spontaneous manifestation of chronic pain also in Wistar rats with this experimental model of painful diabetic neuropathy.

Predictive inference on equicorrelated linear regression models

Beyond the customary analysis through the estimation and hypothesis testing about the parameters of the multiple regression models, often a natural interest is to predict the responses for a given set of values of the predictors. The main objective of this article is to obtain the prediction distribution for a set of future responses from a multiple linear regression model which follow equicorrelation structure. It derives the marginal likelihood estimate for the equicorrelation parameter, ρ, and then uses the invariant differentials to compute the joint distribution of the unobserved but realized future errors. The prediction distribution is derived by using the structural relation of the model. The main finding of this paper is that the prediction distribution turned out to be a Student- t which depends only on the estimated ρ and is invariant to the degrees of freedom of the original Student- t distribution.

Finite-size effects on drying and wetting transitions in a molecular dynamics simulation

We report on finite-size effects in molecular dynamics simulations of the drying and wetting transitions in Lennard-Jones systems. These effects could be the reason for the incompatibility of previous, conflicting results on the nature of the drying of a substrate by a fluid. We indeed observe a crossover from a quasi-first-order to a continuous-like transition with increasing substrate area. We point out that the customary analysis based on the contact angle has disadvantages for a detailed study of the transition, which are absent in the study of the total substrate–fluid surface free energy. Furthermore, we introduce histogram techniques to this problem.

Another Look at the Power of Meta-Analysis in the Solomon Four-Group Design

Braver and Braver (1988) promoted a meta-analysis technique as the most powerful single test for analyzing data from a Solomon Four-Group Design. Customary analysis on fabricated data was not significant, but the meta-analysis yielded significance. The current paper counters that fabricated data sets can easily be constructed to show that customary tests can yield significance, whereas the meta-analysis does not. Statements about the efficacy and power of meta-analysis should be made more cautiously.