Attitude change in desegregated Israeli high schools.

Administered a multiscale attitude questionnaire to 1,033 9th graders from Western and Middle-Eastern ethnic backgrounds at the beginning and end of their 1st yr in desegregated high schools. Results show that Western students' assessment of their own ethnic group declined over the course of the year, while students from the Middle-Eastern group expressed a more positive attitude toward and greater acceptance of members of their own ethnic group at the conclusion of the year than at the start. Students from both groups continued to view persons from the Western group as superior to those of Middle-Eastern background at the conclusion of the year. Thus, each ethnic group registered change in its members' relation to their own group rather than toward the other group. Contrary to current claims, neither the extent of previous ethnic contact nor the degree of ethnic mix in the desegregated classroom was found to affect attitudinal outcomes of desegregation. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Isaiah and the computer: A preliminary report

In the eighth century B.C.E. there lived in Jerusalem a prophet of royal descent whose name was Isaiah ben Amoż. His oracles, mostly in poetry, are concerned with the contemporary political scene dominated by the Assyrians, with the fate of the Jewish people in history in general, with the mutual relationship between God and Man, and with the ultimate fate of Mankind in the fullness of time. For Jews, these oracles are perhaps second in importance only to the Pentateuch. For Christians, they are of greatest relevance because no other book influenced Jesus to the same extent. And for humanity they are so much the expression of an idealistic Weltanschauungthat they are quoted wherever educators and statesmen try to imbue their audiences with the vision of, and the hope for, a better world. They are collected in sixty-six chapters, constituting the first and longest book of the “Latter Prophets.” The project was funded by the Technion and by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem.     

State of the art review of inspection technologies for condition assessment of water pipes

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of inspection techniques and technologies towards condition assessment of water distribution and transmission mains. Pipe condition assessment is the determination of its current condition, including structural health, impact on water quality, and hydraulic capacity. The collection and analysis of relevant data and information is the first and a paramount step to detect and monitor critical indicators to prevent or mitigate catastrophic failures. The technologies include conventional non-destructive inspection and advanced sensor techniques for condition monitoring. This paper focuses on the inspection techniques and technologies for structural deterioration of water pipes. Technologies like smart pipe, augmented reality, and intelligent robots are also briefly discussed and summarized.     

艺术品一样的城市构筑物

“我非常依赖于概念图解，我把它们当作我的秘密武器。它们协助我进行设计，从一个项目到另一个项目，从一个基地到另一个基地。如果我对每一个项目都采用一套固定的语言，做到现在应该很厌倦了，也许很罕以前就已经对建筑丧失兴趣了。从一开始就为每一个项目诉求一个概念，这是我能继续深入一个设计的方法，通过它启发新的想法源源不断地注入到建筑设计中。虽然很多或者说大多数的欣赏我作品的人似乎更关注于它们在体验或感官上的特质——比如对光、材料的运用等等——对我来说，更重要的是想法。“     

Influence of Obstacles on the Development of Gravity Current Prior to Backdraft

The phenomenon of backdraft is closely linked to the formation of a flammable region due to the mixing process between the unburned gases accumulated in the compartment and the fresh air entering the compartment through a recently created opening. The flow of incoming fresh air is called the gravity current. Gravity current prior to backdraft has already been studied, Fleischmann (1993, Backdraft phenomena, NIST-GCR-94-646. University of California, Berkeley) and Fleischmann (1999, Numerical and experimental gravity currents related to backdrafts, Fire Safety Journal); Weng et al. (2002, Exp Fluids 33:398–404), but all simulations and experiments found in the current literature are systematically based on a perfectly regular volume, usually parallelipedic in shape, without any piece of furniture or equipment in the compartment. Yet, various obstacles are normally found in real compartments and the question is whether they affect the gravity current velocity and the level of mixing between fresh and vitiated gases. In the work reported here, gravity current prior to backdraft in compartment with obstacles is investigated by means of three-dimensional CFD numerical simulations. These simulations use as a reference case the backdraft experiment test carried out by Gojkovic (2000, Initial Backdraft. Department of Fire Safety Engineering, Lunds Tekniska Högskola Universitet, Report 3121). The Froude number, the transit time and the ignition time are obtained from the computations and compared to the tests in order to validate the model.     

Fairness Versus Guaranteed Output Delivery in Secure Multiparty Computation

In the setting of secure multiparty computation, a set of parties wish to compute a joint function of their private inputs. The computation should preserve security properties such as privacy, correctness, independence of inputs, fairness and guaranteed output delivery. In the case of no honest majority, fairness and guaranteed output delivery cannot always be obtained. Thus, protocols for secure multiparty computation are typically of two disparate types: protocols that assume an honest majority (and achieve all properties including fairness and guaranteed output delivery) and protocols that do not assume an honest majority (and achieve all properties except for fairness and guaranteed output delivery). In addition, in the two-party case, fairness and guaranteed output delivery are equivalent. As a result, the properties of fairness (which means that if corrupted parties receive output then so do the honest parties) and guaranteed output delivery (which means that corrupted parties cannot prevent the honest parties from receiving output in any case) have typically been considered to be the same. In this paper, we initiate a study of the relation between fairness and guaranteed output delivery in secure multiparty computation. We show that in the multiparty setting these properties are distinct and proceed to study under what conditions fairness implies guaranteed output delivery (the opposite direction always holds). We also show the existence of non-trivial functions for which complete fairness is achievable (without an honest majority) but guaranteed output delivery is not, and the existence of non-trivial functions for which complete fairness and guaranteed output delivery are achievable. Our study sheds light on the role of broadcast in fairness and guaranteed output delivery and shows that these properties should sometimes be considered separately.