Educated insane: a nineteenth-century psychiatric paradigm

In the 1830s the time-honored notion that excess study could lead to madness underwent a significant change in America. Under the influence of Enlightenment pedagogy and phrenology, influential superintendents like Amariah Brigham and Isaac Ray feared that the "unnatural" overstimulation of children in schools would ruin their development. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as belief in environmental determinism waned and assumptions about what is "natural" changed, this psychiatric etiology was debated; then, overthrown. By the turn of the century, education was thought to aid, not harm, the mentally ill.     

Novel bacterial structures in human blood: cultural isolation

Evidence for the existence of a novel bacteriological system has been obtained from osmotically lysed and filtered human blood (membrane filters with a pore size of 0.22 micronm) placed in special culture media. These blood filtrates gave rise to ordinary bacteria for 71% of the blood specimens processed from diseased humans and for 7% of those from supposedly normal humans. Morphologically, the bacteria resembled streptococcal, staphylococcal, and gram-positive filamentous (cocco-bacillary) forms. Prior to the appearance of bacteria in the media, large and small "dense bodies" were microscopically observed but disappeared when ordinary bacteria were apparent, Cultures of of unlysed blood as conventionally performed were negative. These organisms may represent an adaptation of certain bacteria to life in the blood.     

Testing interruptions in reactive systems

Modelling and testing of reactive systems with interruptions are discussed. These systems are commonly found in portable devices, where interruptions to a running application can be demanded at any time, due to concurrent execution of processes sharing a single resource, such as screen, as well as arrival of calls from network distributed services. Since the possible number of combinations of allowed interruptions is large, proper test case selection activities need to be performed. But, in order to systematically investigate and select test cases, it is fundamental to explicitly model interruption behaviour in a compositional way, avoiding the need for explicit enumeration. This work presents a strategy for testing interruptions in reactive systems that covers modelling for testing of systems with interruptions, generation and selection of sound test cases. The strategy is supported by the LTS-BT tool. Moreover, a formal model of an environment devoted to execution of test cases with interruptions is presented. Finally, a case study illustrates its applicability in the mobile phone application domain.     

Image Space Rendering of Point Clouds Using the HPR Operator

The hidden point removal (HPR) operator introduced by Katz et al. [KTB07] provides an elegant solution for the problem of estimating the visibility of points in point samplings of surfaces. Since the method requires computing the three‐dimensional convex hull of a set with the same cardinality as the original cloud, the method has been largely viewed as impractical for real‐time rendering of medium to large clouds. In this paper we examine how the HPR operator can be used more efficiently by combining several image space techniques, including an approximate convex hull algorithm, cloud sampling, and GPU programming. Experiments show that this combination permits faster renderings without overly compromising the accuracy.     

Development of a new hybrid plasma torch for materials processing

The main objectives of this study were to construct a plasma generator device and to investigate its applications in welding, cutting, and surface hardening. The device was derived from the union of two plasma-generating technologies, non-transferred-arc plasma and magnetoplasmadynamic thruster (MPDT), and characterised by the simultaneous formation of two plasma arcs in one device, generating a plasma jet with high energy density. Initially, trials were conducted to analyse the influence of the physical variables (gas flow rate and electric current intensities – primary and secondary) on the plasma jet, for which the thruster and the length of the plasma jet expulsed from the chamber were determined. The relevant parameters for welding, cutting and surface hardening were determined by trial and error, in which the trials were conducted using various plate thicknesses and materials. The results have shown that this device can be used for welding, cutting and surface hardening.     

Antioxidant Stability in Vegetable Oils Monitored by the ASTM D7545 Method

The PetroOXY method was used to evaluate the kinetics of oxidation of two edible vegetable oils, extracted from moringa and passion fruit. This method, which uses pure oxygen at 700 kPa is effective and fast and our experiments were carried out at temperatures 110–140 °C with BHA antioxidant additive concentration ranging from 0 to 500 ppm. Moringa and passion fruit oils followed first-order kinetics although, in the case of passion fruit oil, mathematical approximations in the first-order kinetic expression resulted in a final equation that could also be interpreted as deriving from zero-order kinetics. The higher stability of moringa oil was characterized by an activation enthalpy ca. 50 % higher than the one related to passion fruit oil.     

Relationship between solar radiation and surface distribution of vegetation in Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island,Maritime Antarctica

The aim of this work is to produce a simplified vegetation map of ice-free areas of the Fildes Peninsula (FP) and Ardley Island (AI) thought object-oriented classification using a QuickBird satellite image and to evaluate the influence of the global solar radiation (GSR) over the vegetation distribution. The vegetation data were generated from multiresolution segmentation using the panchromatic and infrared layers, and for the classification we calculated the normalized vegetative difference index (NVDI) and the green NVDI. Two classes were created – Lichen and Moss Cushion SubFormation and Moss Subformation – with 48 vegetation samples collected on surveys during the austral summers of 2008 and 2009. We used a kappa index to evaluate the classification efficiency using 100 sampled points obtained in austral summer of 2013. The GSR was estimated, and in order to evaluate the effect of meteorological phenomena and cloudless, we measured the GSR using a net radiometer model CNR4 installed in FP between 2014 and 2016. The estimate of GSR was done for seasons of 2015, in order to estimate the light compensation point and the saturation point for the plant communities in FP and AI. The kappa index was 0.73 and the global accuracy was 0.78, showing consistency between the classification and ground truth. The area was covered by vegetation in FP was 16.7% and in AI is 59.1%. The vegetation cover is distributed differently at FP and AI, and our results suggest GSR plays an important role in vegetation distribution and these tendencies could be related to greater GSR demand by mosses when compared to lichens.