The severity of drunken driving as perceived by drunken drivers

Men convicted of drunken driving rated this particular offence as significantly less serious than men from a control group who had no convictions for drunken driving offences. Instead of shame and guilt feelings preventing the person from committing further acts of drunken driving, prosecution and court appearance seems to have a detrimental effect on the offender's attitudes to this type of criminal behaviour.     

Energy resource demands of food production

Historically food has been produced by using solar energy, natural fertilizer and manual labor. However, as populations have increased food products had to be increased proportionately so it has become necessary to use industrial equipment instead of manual labor and artificial fertilizer in place of manure. Thus, in modern agriculture, fuel energy has largely replaced animate energy. This has made the food delivery system one of the most energy intensive industries. It is apparent that this demand for energy will increase because the world population is expected to double by the end of the century and hence will require rapid increases in food production.This paper sets forth the energy supply and demand situation as it concerns food production. Also, considered are externalities such as climate and population. Finally, an agenda for future research in the energy-food sector is presented.     

Oxidative roasting of covellite with minimal retardation from the CuO⋅CuSO4 film

Copper (II) sulfide can be efficiently converted to the oxide at lower temperatures than normally required in aerobic roasting by a new method involving programed environment roasting (PER). When heating was conducted in absence of oxygen up to about 650°C, and then nitrogen was replaced by air, the sulfide was easily converted to oxide without need for further increase in temperature. Traditional oxidative roasting of chalcocite required a temperature range of 800° to 850°C for conversion to tenorite. Unlike the situation with conventional roasting, CuSO₄ was not detected in the X-ray diffractogram of the product obtained with the PER method above 625°C. Also, the amount of CuO ⋅ CuSO₄ significantly decreased as the halt temperature in the PER process increased from 600° to 700°C. Apparently the shell of copper oxysulfate is impervious to oxygen and/or sulfur dioxide and delays the formation of tenorite until the sulfate and oxysulfate are decomposed. If the oxysulfate stage were bypassed with an inert atmosphere, then, even if small amounts of this salt were formed upon introducing the oxidant, it would decompose at an appreciable rate and the impedance of its thin film to gaseous transport would be considerably diminished. By contrast, the accelerating effect of externally added iron on the oxidative roasting of covellite was confined to the low temperature reactions and hence iron promoted the extent of sulfate formation. Iron did not, however, lower the thermal requirement for complete oxidation of CuS or Cu₂S because it had virtually no effect on the thermal decomposition of CuO ⋅CuSO₄.     

Optical transmission utilizing injection light sources

Although a large amount of work in optical transmission has been accomplished through the use of lasers, modern developments have enabled noncoherent light sources also to be used in this area with great success. In particular, injection light sources?in the form of the coherent injection laser and the noncoherent light-emitting diode (LED)?offer designers of optical transmission systems characteristics that are in many ways superior to those of other methods. The present article deals essentially with how injection light sources may be employed to transmit or ``communicate' information optically. Such optical techniques can be used not only in communication systems, in the classic RF sense, but in computer, video, telemetry, and detection systems as well.     

Seismic response of a structure subjected to rotational base excitation

A modal superposition method which can perform the seismic analysis of a structure subjected to translational and rotational base excitation is presented. Discussed are two different approaches to derive the equations of motion. In the first approach, the reference axes are fixed in space. While in the second approach, they are rigidly fixed at the base of the structure. For rotational base excitation, it is shown that the application of second approach results in equation of motion with asymmetric, time-dependent coefficient matrix due to presence of the Coriolis acceleration term.Analytic integration is used to integrate the modal equations of motion derived by the first approach. Most of the mode shapes have to be included in the time history analysis.The modal superposition method is applied to the seismic analysis of a building subjected to translational and rotational excitation. The displacement results and the computer cost of this analysis are compared with those of using the direct integration method. The computer cost associated with the modal superposition method is lower than that associated with the direct integration method.     

Acrylic Homo- and Co-polymers Based on 2, 4-dichlorophenyl Methacrylate and 8-quinolinyl Methacrylate

The monomer 2, 4-dichlorophenyl methacrylate (2,4-DMA) was synthesized from 2, 4-dichlorophenol and characterized by conventional methods. The homopolymers of 2,4-dichlorophenyl methacrylate and its copolymers with 8-quinolinyl methacrylate (8-QMA) in different feed ratio were prepared by free radical polymerization using dimethyl formamide (DMF) as a solvent and 2,2-azobis iso butyronitrile (AIBN) as an initiator. The resulting polymers were characterized by using IR spectroscopy. Reactivity ratios of monomer were evaluated using UV-spectroscopy. Average molecular weights and polydispersity were determined by gel permeation chromatography (GPC). Solution viscosity was also obtained. The thermal analysis was carried out using TGA and DSC. The homo- and co-polymers were also tested for their antimicrobial properties against selected microorganism. The metal ion uptake capacity of synthesized copolymers was estimated by batch equilibration method using different metal ion solution under different experimental conditions. It is observed that due to the presence of pendant ester bound quinoline group, the copolymers are capable of adsorbing cations from their aqueous solution.     

Brain-computer interface design for asynchronous control applications: improvements to the LF-ASD asynchronous brain switch

The low-frequency asynchronous switch design (LF-ASD) was introduced as a direct brain-computer interface (BCI) technology for asynchronous control applications. The LF-ASD operates as an asynchronous brain switch (ABS) which is activated only when a user intends control and maintains an inactive state output when the user is not meaning to control the device (i.e., they may be idle, thinking about a problem, or performing some other action). Results from LF-ASD evaluations have shown promise, although the reported error rates are too high for most practical applications. This paper presents the evaluation of four new LF-ASD designs with data collected from individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries and able-bodied subjects. These new designs incorporated electroencephalographic energy normalization and feature space dimensionality reduction. The error characteristics of the new ABS designs were significantly better than the LF-ASD design with true positive rate increases of approximately 33% for false positive rates in the range of 1%-2%. The results demonstrate that the dimensionality of the LF-ASD feature space can be reduced without performance degradation. The results also confirm previous findings that spinal cord-injured subjects can operate ABS designs to the same ability as able-bodied subjects.     

Virtual three-dimensional blackboard: three-dimensional finger tracking with a single camera

We present a method for three-dimensional (3D) tracking of a human finger from a monocular sequence of images. To recover the third dimension from the two-dimensional images, we use the fact that the motion of the human arm is highly constrained owing to the dependencies between elbow and forearm and the physical constraints on joint angles. We use these anthropometric constraints to derive a 3D trajectory of a gesticulating arm. The system is fully automated and does not require human intervention. The system presented can be used as a visualization tool, as a user-input interface, or as part of some gesture-analysis system in which 3D information is important.