Capital Science 2008
The Abstracts are preceded by a Table of Contents, which is divided into two sections: the highlights of the Conference followed by an alphabetical listing of the participating Affiliates. Entries in the Table of Contents are linked to the Abstracts of their respective Affiliates. Where a speaker has submitted a presentation, in addition to the Abstract, that Abstract is linked to the presentation.
This remains a work in progress. Abstracts, descriptions, and presentations will be added as they are submitted to us.
AAAS DISCUSSION ON SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING IN THE COURTROOM: ETHICS AND THE EXPERT WITNESS
| Reception | Sunday 4:00PM Board Room 12th Floor |
|
Science and Engineering in the Courtroom: Ethics and the Expert
Witness Speakers: Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein, U.S. District Judge for
the Western District of Washington and Director of the Federal Judicial Center
and Mark S. Frankel, Ph.D., Director of the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility
and Law Program, American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
4:30PM Board Room 12th Floor |
AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY - DC CHAPTER
| Panel of local TV broadcasters, including Bob Ryan and Joe Witte, as well as Steve Zubrick, the Science and Operations Officer (SOO) at the Washington/Baltimore National Weather Service Forecast Office and Jason Samenow, Chief Meteorologist of the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang WEATHER AND YOU - A Town Hall Meeting | Saturday 2:00PM Room 110 |
| Weather is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous subjects of informal conversation. It affects just about everyone every day as they make decisions on whether to set forth for the day with umbrellas to preparing for an impending snowstorm, severe thunderstorms, flooding rains, etc., etc. This session is about, the nature, issues, and problems of observing and predicting the weather. The panel members will provide a brief overview of a relevant and topical subject. The remainder of the session and most important aspect of the Town Hall will be an open question, answer and discussion period. |
| Greg Zell, Natural Resource Specialist, Arlington County, VA A Case Study: The Challenge of Protecting Natural Resources in an Urban Environment | Saturday 9:00 AM Room 390 |
| Arlington County is in the process of completing a comprehensive Natural Heritage Resource Inventory (NHRI) of natural lands and public open spaces within a highly urbanized corridor. The County is approximately 40% impervious and is considered "built out" from a development standpoint. The project has collected data relating to local flora, fauna, geology, hydrology, and has documented significant remaining resources. The next step is to develop a County-wide Natural Resource Management Plan. Part I of the presentation will be an overview of the techniques used to collect natural resource data and will share some of the interesting results to date. Part II of the presentation will be a Roundtable discussion, where participants will be asked to provide insight, experience, and suggestions on what elements should be included in the development of a Natural Resource Management Plan and Policy. |
| Jerry Dieruf, Arborist/Gypsy Moth Coordinator, City of Alexandria Department of Recreation, Parks, and Cultural Activities, Park Planning Division GypCheck Pesticide Application for Gypsy Moth Caterpillars Suppression in the City of Alexandria, Virginia | Saturday 2:00 PM Room 390 |
| Populations of Gypsy Moth Caterpillars surged throughout the Washington, D.C. area in 2007, causing widespread damage to native oak species and oak dominated forests. In Alexandria as throughout much of the region, oak species comprise the dominant vegetation of our forests. This presentation will include the reason for the application, the application coverage, follow-up survey of gypsy moth caterpillars, other variables affecting the gypsy moth population, results of the suppression program, and others' experiences with Gypchek in 2007. |
| Alain Touwaide, PhD, and Alice Tangerini, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany Botanical Illustration: Past and Present | Saturday 3:00 PM Room 390 |
| In the first part of this presentation, Alain Touwaide will examine the creation of ancient botanical illustration in classical antiquity, particularly the question of the supposed schematic nature of such representations in ancient Greek manuscripts, as well as the transformation of botanical illustrations from manuscripts to printed books during the 15th and 16th centuries. In the second part, Alice Tangerini will discuss the changes in the way contemporary botanical illustrations reproduce plants and communicate the knowledge contained in such representations to a world wide audience. She will devote a special attention to the methods of reproduction of illustrations as illustrated by the transformation from woodcuts and etchings to digital images to be consulted on the Internet. |
| Marion Lobstein, Associate Professor of Biology, NVCC The Flora of Virginia Project: A Perspective of 401 Years of Exploration of Virginia Botanical Diversity | Sunday 10:00AM Room 390 |
| Virginia has the greatest diversity of plant species for its surface area of all of the 50 states in the U.S. In this presentation, Marion Lobstein will discuss reasons for this diversity and botanical exploration in Virginia since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. In 1737, the Colony of Virginia had the first flora of any of the original thirteen colonies, The Flora Virginica by John Clayton in 1737, but the Commonwealth of Virginia has not had a modern flora since that time period. This presentation will cover the progress being made to produce a modern Flora of Virginia in the next three years. |
| Rod Simmons, Plant Ecologist, City of Alexandria Department of Recreation, Parks, and Cultural Activities, Park Planning Division A Survey of Native Oaks and Their Hybrids in the Greater Washington, D.C. Area | Sunday 11:00AM Room 390 |
| The Washington-metro region contains a wide diversity of native oak species and natural oak hybrids. Live material will be used in this hands-on workshop, which will cover all of the native oak species throughout the region and the known natural hybrids. Species range and distribution, habitats, and rarity will also be discussed. |
| Kimberly L. Hunter PhD, and Richard B. Hunter, Department of Biological Sciences, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD Plants, Polyploidy, and Undergraduate Research at Salisbury University | Sunday 2:00PM Room 390 |
| The goal of the program was to increase undergraduate botanical research, and to find innovative methods for recruiting students. In most departments on college campuses, there are independent study/research courses. Such faculty members mentor 1-6 students working on projects that the faculty member designs. We have increased the number of students to 20, and have students work on common projects as a team. Each project involves most of the following: field collection of plant samples, modern genetic analysis, intensive literature research, grant writing, lab work, data analysis, and presentation of the research. There were biweekly meetings with each group and the faculty mentor. Progress of the projects depended upon the effort each group. This method was evaluated in four ways: 1) number of presentations, 2) students continuing beyond the first semester, and 3) monitoring students going on to graduate or professional school. |
| Mark Holland, PhD, Head of the Department of Biological Sciences, Richard A. Henson School of Science and Technology, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD PPFM bacteria: Plant symbionts with applications in agriculture | Sunday 2:30PM Room 390 |
| Pink-pigmented facultatively methylotrophic (PPFM) bacteria in the genus Methylobacterium are ubiquitously distributed on plant surfaces. Although once thought to be insignificant or accidental visitors on plants, we have demonstrated that their metabolic activities have a positive effect on plant growth and development and that their relationship with plants is a true symbiosis. We have also developed strategies for exploiting the symbiosis to the benefit of agriculture. |
| Emily N. Burnett, Kimberly Hunter and Richard Hunter, Department of Biological Sciences, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD Genetic Diversity of Liquidambar styraciflua in Cusuco National Park, Honduras | Sunday 3:00PM Room 390 |
| Liquidambar, the sweet gum tree has classic disjunct distributions in western Asia, eastern North America and Central America. In collaboration with Operation Wallacea, who operates biological conservation expeditions in regions of the world with high biodiversity, Liquidambar styraciflua was gathered from five sites in the cloud forest of Cusuco National Park, Honduras. The goal of this research was to find the genetic diversity of this species in a primitive field location. DNA extraction using DNeasy Qiagen kits were used along with puReTaq Ready-To-Go PCR beads to amplify the DNA. Through ISSR (inter-simple sequence repeats) the genetic variability was mapped using primers 825, 840 and 855. These repeats recognized by the primers occurred in individuals in varying numbers. The differences in the numbers of repeats were visualized as bands on a gel which were separated according to molecular weight. A Cambrex Flash Gel was used to analyze the DNA indicating variability among individuals. Analyzing DNA in field situations is possible due to the stability of the PCR bead and Cambrex Flash Gel at room temperature. The mean gene diversity ranged from 0.23 to 0.36 while the percent polymorphic loci ranged from 61% to 90%. The importance of this research was to aide in the conservation research taking place in Cusuco National Park. Our research provided a stepping stone into genetic research for Operation Wallacea as well as an accurate representation of the genetic diversity of Liquidambar styraciflua in Cusuco National Park, Honduras. |
| Katharine Spencer, Emily N. Burnett, Mary E. Cockey, Kimberly Hunter, Richard Hunter, and Katherine Miller, Department of Biological Sciences, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD Nordihydroguaiaretic Acid (Ndga) Localization and Quantification in Three Ploidy Levels of Larrea Tridenta | Sunday 3:30PM Room 390 |
| Larrea is one of the dominant perennials in the deserts of North and South America. North American Larrea tridentata has three ploidy levels in three distinct regions: Chihuahuan Desert –diploid; Sonoran Desert – tetraploid; Mojave Desert – hexaploid. Nordihydroguaiaretic acid (NDGA) is one of the most widely investigated phytochemicals within this genus. NDGA is a tetrahydroxy lignan found in Larrea leaves at a concentration of 5-10% dry weight. It is a powerful antioxidant that inhibits cancer, microbes, fungi, and viruses. Larrea tridentata ploidy levels were examined to determine a relationship between higher ploidy levels and concentrations of NDGA. Methanol was used to extract NDGA from 20mg (2 leaves) of plant tissue, which was quantified using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Plant tissue from the three different ploidy levels was analyzed and results suggest NDGA concentrations are variable across the landscape. However, a correlation does exist between NDGA concentration and time of year collected. There is an increase in NDGA concentration during August. August is the hottest and driest month in these regions. Secondly, subcellular fractionation was used to determine the unknown location of NDGA in Larrea leaf cells. A density gradient was formed in Percoll and gradient layers were tested for NDGA concentration. A high concentration of NDGA was found in Larrea chloroplasts. |
AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR TECHNICAL INNOVATION
| Thomas Meylan, PhD EvolvingSUCCESS Can the features of elective virtual communities be used to create effective virtual workforces? | Saturday 9:00AM Room 370 |
| Virtual communities are springing up as quickly as people can identify enough points of mutual identification to justify the establishment of a virtual meeting space. The communities being considered in this presentation are built around "elective" membership. People WANT to build software products on SourceForge. People WANT to play simple games together on Horse Isle. People WANT to formulate different methods of interaction on Second Life. The question is: Can virtual community models based on elective membership be transferred to workforce deployment needs? Three factors considered in this presentation are: 1) the intellectual price of entry into an elective community and how it relates to the financial costs of setting up an online, virtual workforce; 2) metrics of pleasure and fulfillment in elective communities, and how they relate to productivity and job satisfaction in virtual-but-definitely-real task-driven workforces; 3) structures, rules, customs and conformity enforcement procedures in elective communities that can transfer to virtual workforce environments. |
| Gene Allen, MSC.Software Corporation Simulation-supported Decision Making | Saturday 9:25AM Room 370 |
| Engineering provides a Knowledge Base for decision making. An Engineering Knowledge Base is the culmination of education, training, and experience that provides insight and understanding of how things work or don't work. A program's Engineering Knowledge Base consists of the knowledge and expertise of all the personnel involved over the lifecycle of a program with all accompanying documentation. The majority of an Engineering Knowledge Base is learned from experience in testing and operations. However, learning from prototype testing and operational accidents/problems is both costly, time consuming, and risky. In the past, this has been an accepted cost of adopting new technologies, as it has been the only way we learn about what we do not know. The unanticipated and often non-intuitive results of new technologies are often realized in operations, and sometimes only after decades. This uncertainty is the result of combinations of factors or characteristics, all of which have natural ranges of variability. This variability and uncertainty has historically been taken into account through the use of safety factors, based on experience. The advances and availability of compute capability can be used as a substitute for the experience-based safety factors used in design. Virtual data can be generated by running multiple physics-based analyses of a parameterized computer model, varying parameters across their natural ranges with each run. This process provides an accurate simulation of reality. Results are a cloud of points with each point being an accurate result of that specific combination of variables. The simulation process includes as many variables as possible. A simulation consists of 100 analysis runs, sampling all variables using advanced Monte Carlo sampling methods. 100 analysis runs provides a simulation resolution equivalent to the resolution of inputs. This process minimizes the need for making initial assumptions, which are often a source of problems as people most often do not know what they do not know at the time of making their assumptions. Different correlation methods are used to filter the number of variables in the simulation result to those individual variables, or groups of variables, that are most significant. This provides information that can be used to understand what can happen. Additionally, automatic outlier detection can be used to quickly identify those combinations of variables what generate anomalies. The combination of 1) correlation information and 2) the knowledge gained through understanding outliers provides accurate input to the Engineering Knowledge Base that can be used for Decision Making. Simulation, using today's readily available compute capability, is being used to learn and gain otherwise unavailable knowledge for making decisions. |
| Dr. Geoffrey P Malafsky, TECHi2 A New Technology for Unifying Knowledge and Semantics to Harness the Fusion of People-Process-TechnologySimulation-supported Decision Making | Saturday 9:50AM Room 370 |
| The information universe continues to expand from what can be considered its own big bang of the advent of the openly available Internet while producing only a few regions of viable systems. The potential for widespread knowledge sharing and automated processes based on human concepts remains an abstract goal except for these few systems. Some of these are focused on the positive inclinations of humanity, such as global knowledge sharing amongst like-minded professionals and hobbyists, others on the entertainment interests of groups, and finally others on the more banal human tendencies. Yet, in each case processing and managing these information clouds into useful environments has been extremely costly and replete with low-quality products. Data quality is the foundation of using data for effective management and operations. Data in and of itself is not the goal of an enterprise data management system nor business process. Rather, it is the use of the data to support decision-making and operations that is the goal. Yet, data quality is inextricably tied to business processes, governance regulations, and technical standards. This inherent integration across people, process, and technology has impeded, and in many cases, derailed attempts to ensure that data is accurate, trustworthy, secure, interoperable, and shareable. Even more important to the operation and difficult to achieve is maintaining data quality in continuous operations. Data is frequently stored and used in widely different technologies, formats, and varying levels of quality. Attempts at using the previous generation of data technologies (e.g. relational databases, data warehouses, business intelligence tools, client-server architectures, data brokers, metadata management, case based reasoning, natural language processing, expert systems, object modeling) have failed to solve this challenge. The real solution of semantically integrated data explicitly tied to governance defined rules remains unsolved. The data must be authoritative and correct at the element level in both organizational and technical terms. We have created a new technology that meets the architectural requirements of modern standards based modular components like a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), and also ties together human knowledge to machine processing rules and semantics to provide a light-weight, adaptive, highly functional solution to harnessing enterprise-scale data that is authoritative. This technology is poised to yield a dramatic increase in organizational capabilities from the combination of the knowledge held by people with the rules required by processes to the intelligent automation enabled by semantic data. |
| F. D. Witherspoon, HyperV Technolgies Corp High Velocity Dense Plasma Jets for Fusion Applications* | Saturday 10:15AM Room 370 |
| High velocity dense plasma jets are under development at HyperV
Technologies Corp. for a variety of fusion applications. The initial motivation
for this line of research was Magneto-Inertial Fusion using high density, high
velocity plasma jets as standoff drivers to implode a magnetized plasma target.
Additional applications include fusion reactor feuling, injection of angular
momentum into centrifugally confined plasmas, high energy density plasmas
(HEDP), plasma thrusters, and others. The near term technical goal is to
accelerate plasma slugs of density greater than 10^17 per cc and total mass
above 200 micrograms to velocities above 200 km/s. The approach utilizes
symmetrical injection of very high density plasma into a coaxial
electromagnetic accelerator having a tailored cross-section geometry designed
to prevent formation of the blow-by instability. The injected plasma is
generated by an array of radially oriented ablative capillary discharges
arranged uniformly around the circumference of an angled annular injection
region of the accelerator, or by a similar array of small non-ablative parallel
plate minirailguns now under development. We describe computer modeling and
experiments to develop these plasma jets, including descriptions of an
injection experiment currently underway at the University of Maryland, and an
early test of jet merging using 64 capillary injectors to form an imploding
ring of dense plasma. *Work supported by the U.S. DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences |
| D. A. Tidman* and F. D. Witherspoon** Slingatron - A Hypervelocity Mechanical Mass Accelerator | Saturday 10:40AM Room 370 |
| The slingatron(1) is a mechanical mass accelerator that is dynamically similar to the ancient sling, but unlike the classical sling it appears capable of accelerating projectiles of large mass to extremely high velocity, possibly to above 10 km/sec. In this machine a projectile slides on its self-generated gas bearing in a steel accelerator tube that guides the projectile along a curved path that is typically circular or spiral. The projectile accelerates when the tube is moved with an inward component along the radius of curvature of the tube at the projectile location, i.e., along the direction of the centripetal force acting on the projectile so that work is done on the projectile. This motion of the tube can be implemented by mounting the entire curved tube on distributed swing arms that propel the tube around a gyration circle of relatively small radius without changing its orientation, i.e., the structure gyrates but does not spin. A projectile accelerating in a gyrating sling tube initially slides on its thin outer Teflon film. This film wears off, and evaporation of a polycarbonate layer (or energetic plastic) then provides a low friction gas film in the range from ~ 1 to many km/sec. Heat from this hot bearing gas does not have sufficient time to diffuse far into a projectile during its acceleration. For a phase-locked projectile accelerating in a spiral the acceleration time is the number of turns times the gyration period, e.g., 0.05 seconds for a 3-turn spiral with a gyration frequency of 60 cps. A theoretical model and experimental data also show that the projectile gas bearing is thicker than asperity heights on the steel track, so that sling-tube damage is avoided. For large projectiles, the bearing gas film is thicker than for small projectiles so that its viscous drag per cm2 on the track and the sliding friction coefficient are smaller. This occurs because the "residence time" of gas evaporated into the bearing of a large projectile is longer than for a small projectile. The slingatron mechanics is similar to rolling a ball bearing around in a circular frying pan (or sliding an ice cube in a cooled pan) in a horizontal plane and gyrating the pan around a small circle, except that the slingatron gyration speed is much higher, e.g., ~ 150 m/sec for a projectile velocity gain of ~ 1 km/sec per turn, and the projectile slides at high velocity and low friction along the curved path on its self-generated gas film. We will discuss the dynamics, mechanics, and some preliminary experimental results for this hypervelocity mass accelerator. *ALCorp, 6801 Benjamin Street, McLean, VA 22101, 703-790-0620, datidman@cox.net **HyperV, 13935 Willard Road, Chantilly, VA 20151, 703-378-4882, witherwspoon@hyperV.com (1)"Slingatron, A Mechanical Hypervelocity Mass Accelerator", D. A. Tidman, Aardvark Global Publishing, 2007. A book available at www.slingatron.com |
| James Jordan and James Powell, Maglev-2000, Inc. Maglev Transport - A Necessity in the Age of No Oil | Saturday 2:00PM Room 370 |
| World oil production will peak in the next few years and then steadily decline, causing prices to rapidly escalate far beyond the present $100 per barrel. To maintain affordable transport of people and goods in the oncoming Age of No Oil, a crucial requirement for the U.S. and World economy, new modes of transport that can operate without oil must be quickly developed and implemented on a large scale. The 3 new options proposed to date - biofuels, hydrogen, and coal-to-liquids - do not appear to be practical solutions. Biofuels are very limited in supply capability, and will cause major increases in food prices and World hunger, and seriously degrade long-term soil fertility. Hydrogen fuel requires an enormous increase in expensive electrical generation capacity, much greater than now exists. Coal to liquid fuel greatly increases greenhouse gas emissions and drastically accelerates global warming. Electrically powered transport can meet U.S. and World future transport needs in an affordable, energy efficient, and environmentally acceptable manner. Maglev transport will play a major role in electric transport. The advanced Maglev-2000 system which can transport passengers, highway trucks, freight, and passenger autos at speeds of 300 mph with much less energy usage and at much lower cost than present transport systems, is described. Implemented as a 25,000 mile National Maglev Network, using the rights-of-way along the Interstate Highways and existing railroad trackage, it would serve all major U.S. Metropolitan regions in a seamless high speed web. The first phase of the National Maglev Network, a transcontinental East-West and North-South routes could be operating by 2019 AD. The Network would be financed by private investment, with a payback time of 5 years, using revenues generated by transporting long-distance highway trucks. |
| John Bosma, NRAC, Arlington, VA Tech Futures 2008-2030 | Saturday 2:25PM Room 370 |
| The key elements of tech trends influencing global security, economics and business through 2030 are discussed, covering the following nine major topics: 1) 'Bio-fication' and MEMS-ification of 'primary industry' processes: hydrocarbon energy mining, renewables (solar), farming and forestry, metals mining and metallurgy, metals/radionuclides cleanup, extremophile industrial biologies; 2) Conventional-oil exhaustion (50% drop by 2030?) - vs. massive North American hydrocarbon stocks for liquefaction; can US/Canada become 'new Persian Gulf'? 3) Step-jump productivity/ROI improvements in 'big iron' industrial activities (fast intermodal shipping, solid free-form manufacturing…) will outrank IT whoopee; 4) 'Big iron' ops in extreme environments (deep offshore oil, Arctic oil and minerals, heavy lift (4000 tons) across tundra/wetlands, in-situ coal mining; 5) 4-5 orders-of-magnitude reduction in size-weight-cost of future military ops (including terrorist ops) from current state-of-the-art - e.g. 25-lb SUAVs (small unmanned air vehicles) crossed Atlantic unrefueled in Dec 1998, mass production cost <$15,000; 6) Personalized medicine (self-diagnosis via electronic/sensor-textile underwear, noninvasive wearable ultrasound, cheap personal medical imagers, global Web-enabled 'on call' medical expertise w/ 'smart agent' software assist, telemedicine; 7) Rapid development of poor-country Internet, telephony/WiMAX, women-owned startups, communications-based rural take-off - but medical MUST be solved; 8) Dirt-cheap space launch via all-mechanical Slingatrons (www.slingatron.com) - enables cheap missile defense, cheap distributed-aperture solar power satellites; 9) Downsides/'bad news': high probability of 1-2 regional nuclear wars (Pakistan, Iran) and/or terror nukes in US, Europe (7-12 cities) - w/ TBD aftermaths but assuredly strong anti-nuclear, anti-terror tech, 'defensive emphasis'/BMD drives. |
| Richard Smith, MS President Flexible Medical Sysems, LLC Micro- and Nanotechnologies for Near Term Medical Diagnostics | Saturday 2:50PM Room 370 |
| Micro- and nanotechnologies are allowing university and lab scientists to create medical diagnostic capabilities never before seen. These new capabilities can facilitate the realization of telemedicine and make universal health care affordable. While these capabilities were once thought to be far in the future, commercial products are in the human trials stage right now. The CEO of a local medical diagnostics company will discuss the science, the commercialization process (including traversing the "valley of death") and the remarkable near-term possibilities. |
| Jim Burke Manager Futures, Forecasting, and Change Management Northrop Grumman Scientific Leaders and the Workforce of 2015 | Saturday 3:15PM Room 370 |
This talk emphasizes that 2015 is not that far off, but that a lot
can happen in eight years, especially in the workforce. The pace of change
calls for attention to the trends that are driving change within technical
organizations and the rest of the world. Some trends are micro-trends (e.g.,
the growth of self-storage businesses in the US), while others are macro-trends
(e.g., population growth or decline). The three buckets of trends that will
affect most scientific organizations in the next eight years fall are:
|
| Limor Schafman, Keystone Tech Group Fairfax, Virginia . Distributed Business: How IPv6 Will Change Business and Government Operations | Saturday 3:40PM Room 370 |
| Central command and control is a concept of the past. We are seeing many technological developments and the human response to these new products and services that indicate a mind and behavioral shift taking place at a fundamental, root level. IPv6, the New Internet protocol is more than just an address structure. It is a mindset. Its impact on the social, mobile and connected world will alter how businesses and government agencies are structured, how employees work, how opportunity is identified and acted upon, and how value is brought to an organization. This presentation will discuss what IPv6 and other technologies mean to business operations, reasons for these changes and what the implications and opportunities for business and government can be going forward. |
ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON
| Recent Research in Human Skeletal Biology | Sunday 2:00PM Room 330 |
| Martin C. Solano, PhD, Contractor, Repatriation Osteology Laboratory, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution Sex differences in skeletal trauma among the 19th century working class. | 2:05PM |
| Skeletal trauma is analyzed in individuals from an almshouse cemetery skeletal sample from Albany, NY. The cemetery served as a potter's field for almshouse decedents and unclaimed bodies from Albany County from 1826 to 1926. Marked differences in the patterns of fractures were observed with respect to age and sex, reflecting occupational hazards and interpersonal violence. |
| Ryan W. Higgins, George Washington University, Department of Anthropology (graduate student) Limb Proportion Inheritance and Ancestry Determination from Fetal Crural and Brachial Indices | 2:20PM |
| Relative distal limb length is found to correlate with climate in modern human populations. The question remains whether this trait is determined by adaptation or epigenetic influences. Experiments on laboratory animals support the hypothesis that cold temperature influences limb development by reducing growth plate kinetics and/or vascular supply. Reduction in vascular supply would theoretically have a more pronounced effect on the smaller limb segments. Furthermore, differences in nutritional uptake between generations (i.e., secular trends) may affect distal limb segments more than proximal segments. Together these findings suggest intergenerational plasticity in (1) distal limb segments and ultimately (2) brachial and crural indices. Conversely, if upper and lower limb segment proportions are genetic traits shaped over generations by natural selection and affected little by ambient temperature and nutritional uptake during development, then limb segment proportions may aid forensic scientists in determining ancestry from the postcranial remains of immigrant populations adapted to different ancestral climates. The present study seeks to use (1) a natural experiment, the migration of Africans and Europeans to North America, to examine the role of genetic and epigenetic influences on human limb proportions, and (2) discriminant function analysis to assess the forensic value of limb proportion data for determining ancestry in adult and fetal African Americans and European Americans. |
| Marilyn R. London, MA, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland and Erica B. Jones, MA, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution Complete fusion of the mandible to the cranium during childhood in an Eskimo from southwestern Alaska | 2:35PM |
| A rare case of fusion between the mandible and the cranium is seen in an individual from a cemetery in southwestern Alaska. Although the fusion appears to have occurred in early childhood, the remains are those of an adult female, aged 30 to 45 years at death. The effects of the fusion on the life of the individual must have been significant. The mouth could not be opened, although some movement prevented atrophy of the mandible. The food passage was narrow and her food may have been softened or liquefied. Speech may have been somewhat difficult. However, there are indications throughout the skeleton of osteoarthritis, and both tibiae exhibit squatting facets. This suggests that the individual lived an active life and performed routine activities. The etiology of the fusion is discussed. |
| David R. Hunt, PhD and Deborah Hull-Walski, MS, COllections and Archives Program, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution "All That Remains" – Multidisciplinary study of a mid-19th Century Iron Coffin and Identification of the Individual Within | 2:50PM |
| In April 2005, a cast iron coffin was discovered during construction in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. A multidisciplinary study of the coffin and the contents was done to investigate preservation of bodies in iron coffins, the historical funerary significance of this type of burial, and, if possible, the identity of the individual inside. The biological profile of the individual was determined, by CT scanning and autopsy, to be an approximately 15 year old male of European ancestry. He died of lung infection with probable complications due to a heart valve disorder. Samples were taken and analyses performed for DNA, isotopes, and various pathogens that might be present in the coffin and body. The analysis of the clothing and coffin manufacture established the date of death at approximately 1851-2. After two years of extensive historical and genealogical research, the possible identity of the boy in the coffin was narrowed to three individuals. Smithsonian anthropologists obtained DNA from living relatives of each lineage and an absolute match to the boy was made. William Taylor White was from Accomack Co. Virginia, was attending Columbia College and died January of 1852. Many of his descendents still live in the Virginia eastern shore area. "Thus is cut off, in the morning of his days, one in whom many hopes were centred—and who had the fairest prospects of happiness and usefulness in life."—Excerpt from White's obituary, published Feb. 8, 1852, in the Religious Herald (Richmond, Va.). |
| Lynn Snyder, PhD, Science Director, Azoria Project, Crete; Researcher/Contractor, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Faunal and human remains from a 2nd century BCE well in the Athenian Agora; evidence of animal sacrifice and infanticide in Late Hellenistic Athens? | 3:05PM |
| The human and animal bones recovered from Well G5:3 in the Athenian Agora received little notice when they were first discovered in 1937/38, beyond a short note that the well contained human remains and "over eighty-five dogs". In 1945, J. Lawrence Angel published a short description of the human remains, noting the presence of "about 175 infants", an adult male and an 11-year-old child; he posited that the infants represented either deaths by exposure, or victims of disease and/or starvation. In 1996, a thorough re-examination of the skeletal materials from the well was begun, leading to the identification of the remains of 450 human infants, plus more than 150 dogs. Restudy of these remains indicate that the human infants were placed in this isolated location, away from the more urban and public areas of the Agora, with some care, and may represent still births and newborns who failed to thrive. References in ancient sources on childbirth indicate that infants were not accepted as full members of society until several weeks or months after death, and thus not afforded full burial rites; they also suggest that the dogs may have been sacrificed in purification rites associated with female fertility or childbirth. |
| J. Christopher Dudar, PhD. Repatriation Office, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History Archaeological discovery of a previously undocumented case of an anencephalic infant from a 19th Century Upper Canadian cemetery | 3:20PM |
| Anencephaly is defined as the absence of normal brain development due to a severe neural tube defect, and is among the leading causes of perinatal death in the developed world. While the incidence of anencephaly ranges between 1 to 5 per 1000 births, there is only one published example of anencephaly from the archaeological record, an Egyptian mummy described by Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire in the early 19th century. Compelling evidence will be presented for the diagnosis of only the second case of anencephaly in the paleopathological literature, an archaeologically recovered 8.5 to 9.5 lunar month gestation fetus from a pioneer Upper Canadian cemetery |
| Matthew W. Tocheri, PhD, Human Origins Program, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Concerning the Evidence for “Hobbits”: An Overview of Homo floresiensis | 3:35PM |
| The hominin skeletal remains discovered four and a half years ago at Liang Bua cave on Flores, Indonesia have intrigued scientists and the general public alike. The initial analyses suggested that the remains belonged to a previously unknown species of hominin, prompting the discoverers to name a new species, Homo floresiensis, and to nickname them the “hobbits” of human evolution. Some researchers have rejected the new species claim, arguing that the remains more likely represent modern humans with skeletal pathologies or growth disorders. However, the physical evidence in favor of the new species hypothesis continues to expand as more researchers conduct detailed comparative analyses of different aspects of H. floresiensis anatomy. As such, most experts of human evolutionary anatomy recognize the Flores hominin remains, which currently date between approximately 95 and 12 thousand years ago, as a legitimate taxon. In this presentation, I provide an overview of H. floresiensis anatomy in comparison to that of modern humans (normal and abnormal), other fossil hominin species, and extant great apes. I also discuss how this evidence applies to current and future debates about the paleobiology of H. floresiensis—a debate which is no longer centered on whether the “hobbits” are pathological modern humans or a distinct hominin species, but rather on the particular details of their evolutionary history and functional morphology. |
ASSOCIATION FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE. DC-METRO CHAPTER
| Managing Your Career in Science: This session will begin with an overview of current data on gender equity in science and the impact that workplace culture, climate, and policies have on the recruitment, retention, and success of women working in scientific disciplines. In this context, speakers from both academe and industry will address the skills necessary for success in building scientific careers beyond the bench with particular emphasis on the different expectations and challenges faced by women as they advance to managerial/professorial and executive/department chairperson roles. Speakers will discuss how to identify and use opportunities both to hone and expand the needed skill sets. The session will also highlight ways to successfully navigate career transitions, focusing on issues such as setting career goals, deciding when to make a career change, and identifying opportunities suited to individuals' strengths and interests. The session will conclude with a moderated panel discussion, offering participants and panelists an additional opportunity to share insights and exchange ideas. | Sunday 2:00PM Room 380 |
| Natalia Melcer-Program Officer, National Academy of Sciences Welcome and Introduction | 2:00PM Room 380 |
| Ruth Fassinger-Professor, Department of Counseling and Personnel Services, University of Maryland, College Park Surveying the Landscape for Women in Science | 2:10PM Room 380 |
| Gretchen Schieber-Vice President, Product Development, Adlyfe, Inc. and Rachelle Heller-Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, The George Washington University Skills for Succeeding in Science | 2:30PM Room 380 |
| Alicia M. Rodriguez-Certified Executive Leadership Coach, Sophia Associates and Leanne Posko-Managing Director, Community Partnerships, Constellation Energy Successfully Navigating Career Transitions | Sunday 3:00PM Room 380 |
| Jennifer A. Hobin-Science Policy Analyst, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Moderated Panel Discussion | 3:30PM Room 380 |
ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY - DC CHAPTER
| Bill Spees, PhD, Forensic Software Engineer, Division of Electrical and Software Engineering Center for Devices and Radiological Health Office of Science and Technology, Food and Drug Administration and Practitioner Faculty, University of Phoenix OnlineLightweight Java State Machine | Sunday 2:00PM Room 365 |
| Classical state machines offer clarity, efficiency, and precision. Recent technology has provided opportunities to update and improve state machines, but the usual updates have clouded the simple workings of state machines with burdensome object oriented decoration.We will revisit the state machine and discover how it can appropriately enhance an object oriented system. We will explore a Java program for a basic board game and extend it with house rules. |
BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON
| W. Ronald Heyer President, Biological Society of Washington Can long-established, narrow-niche scientific societies such as the Biological Society of Washington survive the digital age? | Saturday 2:00PM Room 365 |
| The Biological Society of Washington was formed in 1880 primarily as a forum for the Washington based biologists to meet and discuss current biological research, with publication of those discussions and other submitted articles to the Society's journal, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A few years after formation, there was a general trend toward emphasizing the journal over the meetings and moving from all aspects of biology to the related topics of systematics and taxonomy. This trend culminated in the late 1950s, with the stated purpose of the Society to be: "For the furtherance of taxonomic study of organisms and for diffusion of biological knowledge among interested persons." This purpose served the Society well through the 1990s. Perhaps associated with the decline in support for systematics and taxonomy by the US academic community, the membership of the Society has been in slow decline since 1993. This decline, combined with competition from the new (2001) journal Zootaxa (an electronically produced and distributed journal dedicated to animal taxonomy), together with younger scientists preferring pdf files of publications over hard copy, sounded an alarm to the elected officers and Councilors of the Society. Deliberations resulted in undertaking major changes in the management and delivery system of the Society's publications together with activities to garner new members and institutional subscribers. The actions taken are recent and it is too early to assess whether they will be successful or hasten the demise of the Society. |
BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON (see American Society of Plant Biologists)
CHEMICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON
| Jesse Gallun and Jennifer Young, ACS Green Chemistry Institute, American Chemical Society Green Chemistry and the ACS Green Chemistry Institute | Sunday 11:00AM Room 310 |
| Green chemistry finds sustainable solutions through innovative technologies while preventing pollution, through the reduction or elimination in the use and generation of hazardous substances. The American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute (ACS GCI) has a mission to advance the implementation of green chemistry and engineering principles into all aspects of the chemical enterprise. To achieve this mission, ACS GCI works in several strategic areas: research, education, industrial implementation, international collaboration, communication and outreach, and policy advocacy. A brief overview about ACS GCI and its activities will be shared, as well as opportunities open to you, such as grants, awards, conferences, teaching materials, and more. Since the green chemistry movement began in the early 1990's, there are many real world examples of green chemistry, such as: new adhesives that mimic nature while eliminating hazardous chemicals like VOCs, redesigned pathways to important pharmaceuticals that significantly reduce the use of hazardous chemicals and generation of waste, and other consumer products that feature greener components and production. A number of these examples will be presented, with an interactive discussion of factors that may lead industry to utilize new green technologies or products. |
INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS (IEEE), DC AND NORTHERN VIRGINIA SECTIONS
| Invited Talk by Frederika Darema, NSF Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems | Saturday 9:00AM Room 310 |
| This talk will discuss the Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) concept, driving novel directions in applications and in measurements, as well as in computer sciences and cyber-infrastructure. DDDAS entails the ability to incorporate dynamically additional data into an executing application (these data can be archival or collected on-line), and in reverse the ability of the applications will be able to dynamically steer the measurement process. The dynamic environments of concern here encompass dynamic integration of real-time data acquisition with compute and data intensive -systems. Enabling DDDAS requires advances in the application modeling methods and interfaces, in algorithms tolerant to perturbations of dynamic data injection and steering, in systems software, and in infrastructure support. Research and development of such technologies requires synergistic multidisciplinary collaboration in the applications, algorithms, software systems, and measurements systems areas, and involving researchers in basic sciences, engineering, and computer sciences. Such capabilities offer the promise of augmenting the analysis and prediction capabilities of application simulations and the effectiveness of measurement systems, with a potential major impact in many science and engineering application areas. The concept has been characterized as revolutionary and examples of areas of DDDAS impact include computer and communication systems, information science and technologies, physical, chemical, biological, medical and health systems, environmental (hazard prediction, prevention, mitigation, response), and manufacturing, transportation and critical infrastructure systems. The talk will address technology advances enabled and driven the DDDAS concept, as well as challenges and opportunities, motivating the discussion with application examples from ongoing research efforts. |
| Ronald L. Ticker National Aeronautics and Space Administration The US National Laboratory on the International Space Station | Saturday 9:20AM Room 310 |
| The International Space Station (ISS) is rapidly approaching the long-awaited completion of assembly in 2010. All US core elements have been integrated and tested on-orbit, and the attention of NASA has turned to deployment of the European, Japanese, and Russian laboratories. Section 507 of the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 designated the US segment of the ISS as a "national laboratory", opening up use to other US Government agencies, US private firms and US academic institutions. This paper summarizes strategy and plans for implementation of the ISS National Laboratory as well as applicable research and support facilities. The original 1984 vision of a robust, multi-mission space station serving as a platform for the advancement of US science, technology and commerce will soon be achieved. |
| Gerard Christman Sr., Systems Engineer & PM OSD Technical Services Femme Comp Inc. In the Aftermath of the Indian Ocean Basin Tsunami: An Information Sharing Pilot Program in Support of Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief | Saturday 9:40 AM Room 310 |
| On December 26th, 2004, the world was shaken by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The epicenter was located in the Indian Ocean Basin that resulted in a tsunami wave extending around the world. Most of its devastating effects were felt in Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. The US Department of Defense (DoD) characterizes such an event as a Humanitarian Assistance Disaster Relief Operation (HADR). With humanity impacted on such a scale, the key to saving lives and providing relief is the ability to triage, assess, and determine accurate situational awareness. Situational awareness can lead to aid and services being directed for maximum benefit. This paper will discuss activities and describe how the DoD is approaching the way forward to share information with non governmental organizations (NGOs), other governmental organizations (OGOs), private voluntary organizations (PVOs), host nations civil authorities, agencies across the Interagency of the US Government, and international Organizations (IOs). The DoD has through outreach developed a dialog and a plan to create a Community of Interest (COI) to map out the business processes and the information to be shared in order to enable non-DoD entities to marry-up their capabilities with emerging requirements around theater of operations. |
| Tim Weil - Associate (CISSP/CISA) Booz | Allen | Hamilton Securing Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE): A Case Study of the Department of Transportation VII Project | Saturday 10:00AM Room 310 |
| The Department of Transportation Vehicular Infrastructure Integration (DOT VII) program has paved the way for the Intelligent Transportation Systems of tomorrow. VII envisions a future in which intelligent vehicles routinely communicate with each other and the transportation infrastructure in real time. Booz Allen Hamilton has led the Systems Integrator's role for building a model DOT VII network based on the deployment of network and software infrastructure using a newly published set of IEEE standards. The VII technical architecture is based on IEEE 1609 Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standards which define an architecture and a complementary set of services that enable secure vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure wireless communication. The IEEE WAVE family of standards(1609) provide the foundation for a broad range of applications in the transportation environment, including vehicle safety, public safety, communication fleet management, automated tolling, enhanced navigation, traffic management and other operations. The recently published WAVE Networking standard (IEEE 1609.3) provides an Intelligent Transportation Systems framework from which a Proof of Concept VII Service Oriented Architecture, WAVE Networking Stack, and the Real-Time Messaging VII have been implemented. This VII model also includes a detailed description of the Publish / Subscribe MQ Architecture developed to support collection/parsing of vehicle probe data and the scheduling/delivery of standard SAE J2735 messages to vehicles in a limited connectivity environment. The suite of WAVE protocols provides application services and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) communication channels, allowing secure messaging and application services between wireless roadside access points and vehicle radio transceiver units. This wireless security technology, IEEE 1609.2, WAVE Security Services for Applications and Management Messages, presents the VII program with Identity and Access Management challenges An examination of the working model will demonstrate the use of Mobile PKI to manage VII actors, messaging and applications using DSRC/WAVE communication services. The discussion will conclude with an overview of how the Communications Industry is positioned to take advantage of the IEEE 1609 standards for Application Services, IPv6 Networking and Multi-Channel Radio Operation. |
| Haik Biglari - Fairchild Controls CorporationPast, Present and Future of Safety-Critical Real-time Embedded Software Development | Saturday 10:20 AM Room 310 |
| Safety-Critical systems are those systems whose failure could result in loss of life, cause significant property damage or cause damage to the environment. These complex systems tend to have sufficient kinetic or potential energy which can become uncontrollable and thus pose a hazardous condition. Therefore, the system controller must be designed in such a way as to guarantee system stability during all of the system operational modes. Furthermore, when a fatal fault occurs, the controller shuts down the system safely. This paper will present the evolution of software development for these systems, current certification issues, the gap that exists between systems engineering and software engineering disciplines, software reuse, use of productivity tools and the future of safety-critical real-time embedded software development. |
| Ashwin Swaminathan (University of Maryland, College Park) Digital Detective for Electronic Imaging | Saturday 10:40 AM Room 310 |
| Electronic imaging has experienced tremendous growth in recent decades, and digital images including those taken by digital cameras have been used in a growing number of applications. With such increasing popularity and the availability of low-cost image editing software, the integrity of digital image content can no longer be taken for granted. Rapid technology development has also led to a number of new problems related to protecting intellectual property rights, handling patent infringements, authenticating acquisition source, and identifying content manipulations. In this presentation, we consider the problem of image acquisition forensics and introduce a fusion of a set of signal processing features to identify the source of digital images. We show that traces of the in-device processing operations such as color interpolation along with the noise characteristics of devices' image acquisition process jointly serve as good forensic features to help accurately reconstruct the history of the input image to its production process and differentiate between images produced by cameras, cell phone cameras, scanners, and computer graphics. Through analysis and extensive experimental studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for image acquisition forensics. (Include joint work with Prof. Min Wu, Prof. K.J. Ray Liu, Dr. Hongmei Gou, and Ms. Christine E. McKay.) |
| X. Zhu 1, 2, Y. Yang 1, Q. Li 1, D. E. Ioannou 1, J. S. Suehle 2 and C. A. Richter 2 High Performance Silicon Nanowire Field Effect Transistor and Application to Non-Volatile Memory 1. ECE Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA 2. CND Group, Semiconductor Electronics Division, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA | Saturday 2:00PM Room 310 |
| We report the fabrication and characterization of double-gated silicon nanowire field effect transistors (SiNWFET) with excellent current-voltage characteristics, low subthreshold slope (~ 85mV/dec) and high on/off current ratio (~ 106). The silicon nanowire devices were fabricated by using a self-aligned technique with standard photolithographic alignment and metal lift-off processes, ensuring large-scale integration of high-performance nanowire devices. We have studied the effect of device structure and forming gas rapid thermal annealing on the nanowire transistor's electrical properties. We attribute the excellent current-voltage characteristics displayed by our devices to the low interface state densities achieved by the above fabrication process. We also report non-volatile memory cells (NVM) based on these nanowires. The SiNWs are integrated into memory devices by using a self-alignment technique. The top gate dielectric, which surrounds most of the nanowire, consists of three stacked layers: blocking SiO2, charge-storing layer HfO2 and thin tunneling oxide. Prior to the SiNW growth a thermal SiO2 was grown on a p-type silicon wafer by dry oxidation to form the bottom-gate oxide of these dual-gated structures. The diameter of the SiNW is ~ 20 nm and the gate length ranges from 2 µm to 8 µm. When these devices are electrically characterized, a large threshold voltage shift is observed under voltage sweep of either the top or the bottom gate. The top gate control is superior to that of the bottom gate control as demonstrated by the large memory windows and large on/off current ratios (~107) observed in these devices. |
| Boris Veytsman(1), Leila Akhmadeyeva(2), Fernando Morales(3,4), Grant Hogg(3), Tetsuo Ashizawa(5), Patricia Cuenca(4) Gerardo del Valle(4), Roberto Brian(4), Mauricio Sittenfeld(4), Alison Wilcox(3), Douglas E. Wilcox(3) and Darren G. Monckton(3) Microsatellite Expansion: The Search for Underlying Pattern 1. George Mason University, MS 5A2, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA 2. Bashkir State Medical University, 3 Lenina Str., Ufa, 450077, Russia 3. University of Glasgow, Glasgow G11 6NU, UK 4. Universidad de Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica 5. The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX 77555-0539, USA | Saturday 2:20PM Room 310 |
| Microsatellite expansion is the cause of a number of severe diseases like Fragile X, Huntington disease, Myotonic Dystrophy and others. An interesting common feature of the expansion in these case is the instability of the mutation: once expanded, the number of microsatellites continues to change in the patient's cells. An understanding of the mechanism of microsatellite expansion will help in the prediction of the individual development of the disease and planning the medical care. Recently (J. Theor. Biol., v. 242, 401--408, 2006) we proposed a mathematical model to describe the mechanism of the microsatellite expansion and resulting distribution of repeats lengths in the patient's DNA. Here we compare the theoretical predictions with the data on the repeat lengths of a wide group of patients having Myotonic Dystrophy I (DyM I). We find that the theoretical predictions agree fairly well with the clinical data. The distribution of repeats lengths is close to the one predicted by the mathematical model. We used the clinical data to estimate the theoretical parameters: the rate of increase of the number of repeats and the rate of widening the distribution. We find that while these parameters have large individual variations, the average values give reasonable predictions for the development of mutations. These values can be used to estimate the initial mutation (the number of repeats in the progenitor allele) and to predict the development of the disease. |
| Hojin Kee1, Newton Petersen2, Jacob Kornerup2, Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya1 Synthesis of FPGA-Based FFT Implementations 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, 20742, USA. 2National Instruments Corporation, Austin, 78759, USA. {hjkee, ssb}@umd.edu, {newton.petersen, jacob.kornerup}@ni.com | Saturday 2:40PM Room 310 |
| In this paper, we propose a systemic approach for synthesizing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations of fast Fourier transform (FFT) computations. We also demonstrate these methods in the dataflow-based programming environment of LabVIEW FPGA, and through our experiments, we show efficiency levels that are comparable to, and in some cases better than, commercially-available intellectual property cores for the FFT. Our approach considers both cost (in terms of FPGA resource requirements), and per-formance (in terms of throughput), and optimizes for both of these dimensions based on user-specified requirements. By appropriately combining complementary forms of loop unrolling, we systematically achieve cost-optimized FFT implementations in terms of FPGA slices or block RAMs in FPGA, subject to the given throughput constraints. Furthermore, our approach provides the advantages of being able to optimize implementations based on arbitrary, user-specified performance levels with general formulations of FFT loop unrolling trade-offs, which can be retargeted to different kinds of FPGA devices. |
| Raj Madhavan, Stephen Balakirsky and Chris Scrapper, Intelligent Systems Division, NISTAn Open-Source Virtual Manufacturing Automation Competition | Saturday 3:00PM Room 310 |
| Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) represent an integral component of today's manufacturing processes. They are widely used on factory floors for intra-factory transport of goods between conveyors and assembly sections, parts and frame movements, and truck-trailer loading/unloading. Automating these systems to operate in unstructured environments presents an exciting area of current research in robotics and automation. Unfortunately, the traditional entry barrier into this research area is quite high. Researchers need an extensive physical environment, robotic hardware, and knowledge in research areas ranging from mobility and mapping to behavior generation and scheduling. An accepted approach to lowering this entry barrier is through the use of simulation systems and open source software. This talk will present an overview of research and collaboration being undertaken by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with a grant received under the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's New Initiatives Competition. It is our belief that competitions are an effective means of stimulating interest and participation among students by providing exciting technological problems to tackle. Under this effort, faculty members and their interested students from six universities in the Greater Washington Area (Washington D.C., Northern Virginia and Baltimore) were introduced to this time-critical research area through the creation of a factory automation regional competition and tutorial. Since all code used in these competitions is open source, participants are able to learn from their competitors and self-sustain their research in their areas of expertise. This talk will also outline the performance metrics that were used to judge the competition. The competition arenas and metrics used for scoring were specifically designed to create a "level" playing field for the various research disciplines. The specific metrics, the way in which the competition was run, and the future directions of the competition will be discussed in detail. Defects that were noted in the metrics will also be outlined. |
| Kiki Ikossi, I-Cube Inc. and George Mason University Antimonides for High Efficiency Solar Cells | Saturday 3:20 PM Room 310 |
| Solar cells generate electricity utilizing the photovoltaic effect. The energy band gap of the semiconductor materials comprising the solar cells determine which part of the solar spectrum is utilized for electrical generation. Currently the record high efficiency solar cells are multijunction solar cells based on germanium and combined with different compound semiconductor cells. Cost considerations however limit these high efficiency cells to space applications. In this work we examine the possibility of using new materials in a novel way that uses a variable energy bandgap and spatial dimensions to convert into electricity most of the solar spectrum. Realistic modeling with position dependant material parameters, degeneracy effects, bandgap narrowing effects, surface and interface recombination are used to design the optimum parameters for the novel solar cell. A simple graded antimonide based monolithic solar cell with a 37.4% efficiency current matched at a current density of 23 A/cm2 under AM1.5 global illumination is demonstrated. The results show that efficiencies as high as the ultra high efficiency space solar cells are possible and are promising for development of low cost high efficiency solar cells for terrestrial applications. |
| Brian Borak, Engineering team student leader for the DC electrical systems on the 2007 University of Maryland Solar Decathlon team, Dan Feng, a recent graduate from the University of Maryland, John Kucia, one of the project managers on the 2007 University of Maryland Solar Decathlon team, and Dan Vlacich is a Senior Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., and a mentor to the 2007 University of Maryland Solar Decathlon team.What it Takes to Design and Build a Successful Solar Home. | Saturday 3:40PM Room 310 |
| The Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is an international competition where students teams build fully-functional 100% solar-powered homes. The students then compete in a week long competition on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to determine who has the best solar home. Homes are judged on a variety of criteria ranging from the amount of excess electricity produced, to heating and cooling comfort, to how far they can drive an electric car that is charged from the house. The University of Maryland has competed in all three Solar Decathlon events to date (2002, 2005, 2007) and recently placed 2nd in the world (and 1st in the United States) last October. This presentation will discuss the competition, what it takes to design and build a successful solar home, the student's experiences and plans for future competitions. |
| Computational Modeling of Decision-Making Chair / Organizer: Douglas A. Samuelson, Serco |
| Douglas A. Samuelson, Serco Modeling Attention Management in Organizational Decision-Making | Saturday 9:00AM Room 120 |
| Consider how to improve organizational decision-making by streamlining the process of seeking and allocating the attention of top decision-makers. These decision-makers try to optimize the value they receive by allocating their attention, taking uncertainty into account. Establishing a "bidding" process for attention-seeking improves efficiency and reduces problems. Now consider agent-based models of teams of workers. Workers have skills and various numbers of units of work they can accomplish, per skill area, per time period. The version of the model in which problems arrive and drift through the organization's space randomly until they encounter a team that can solve them appears to approximate - and explain - the behavior of the Cohen, March and Olsen Garbage Can Model. Other, more hierarchical versions are likely to deadlock, overwhelming the managers and unnecessarily idling many of the workers, in a manner that fits intuition for certain large, tightly controlled bureaucracies. Explicitly modeling the attention required by managers and supervisors to assign problems and monitor progress adds another level of complexity and realism. This approach promises a rich variety of interesting results. |
| H. Ric Blacksten and Joseph C. Chang, Homeland Security Institute Fermi model estimation of illegal immigration deterrence as function of apprehension probability | Saturday 9:40AM Room 120 |
| While U.S. leaders and legislators demand that our Southwestern borders be secured and controlled to stop illegal immigration, operators and researchers express reservations as to how easily that can be achieved. Recidivism statistics and surveys suggest that once an alien decides to cross into the USA, he or she will persist until successful. Does this mean that deterrence is hopeless? We present a "Fermi" framework, implemented in Excel, to explore this question. Using educated estimates of economic variables, we project the reduction in economic immigrant demand, i.e., deterrence, as a function of probability of apprehension. |
| Steven Wilcox, Serco GOSSIP: A Computational Model of Team-Based Intelligence Gathering | Saturday 10:20AM Room 120 |
| The Goal-Oriented Sales-Specific Information Processing (GOSSIP) simulation model is a prototype for computationally modeling task complexity and the effect of team communication on the performance of intelligence gathering and exploitation tasks such as selling insurance or finding terrorists. In GOSSIP, Kauffman's NK model of environmental complexity meets the Garbage Can model (Cohen, March & Olsen, 1972) and the phenomenon of diffusion along social networks, thus allowing one to use the power of simulation modeling for performing organizational design and analyzing impacts on search performance for elusive targets. In lieu of employing social network analysis measures in regression models of organizational effectiveness data, GOSSIP models the information passing process and the complexity of the task directly, thus pointing the way to enhanced clarity in quantitative modeling and analysis. |
| Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Response Chair / Organizer: Douglas A. Samuelson, Serco |
| Pete Hull, Homeland Security Institute and Skills That Serve, Inc. What Faith-Based Organizations Can Teach Us about Disaster Response: Post-Katrina Lessons Learned | Saturday 2:00PM Room 120 |
| Faith-based organizations (FBOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) stepped in to fill the gaps when the geographic scales, intensities, and durations of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita overwhelmed the existing disaster response resources. FBOs and NGOs undertook a surprisingly large, varied, and demanding set of activities with extraordinary effectiveness. They provided shelter, food, medical services, hygiene services, mental health and spiritual care, physical reconstruction, logistics management and services, transportation, children's services, and case management. The FBOs' and NGOs' successes in providing these services are a stark contrast to the many chronicled deficiencies and failures of government during the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season. We will discuss these organizations' successes and glean lessons that may make the nation better prepared for future disasters. |
| Douglas A. Samuelson, Serco Agent-Based Simulation of Mass Egress from Public Facilities and Communities | Saturday 3:00PM Room 120 |
| We review computer simulation models of selected attack scenarios on civilian targets and of the effects of possible counter-measures. In particular, these models focus on representing mass egress from large facilities, following one or more detonations, to evaluate some proposed ways to facilitate evacuation and reduce casualties. This review focuses on models developed by Homeland Security Institute (HSI) and Redfish Group (Santa Fe, New Mexico) to analyze two venues: a sports stadium and a subway station. Innovations include an order-of-magnitude increase, relative to previous models, of the number of people represented (70,000 in the stadium), and new computational portrayals of crowd movement and explosions. These approaches appear to conform especially well to real events, according to their developers' experiments and comparisons. We also discuss, more briefly, recent models of wide-area evacuations in response to wildfires and nuclear terrorism. We conclude that the development and analysis completed to date, while far from exhaustive, suffice to demonstrate the utility of models such as these for evaluating proposed countermeasures, for indicating policy and technology issues that should be analyzed further, and for response planning. We also address the unusual problems such models pose for validation and evaluation. |
| Papers of the Institute of Industrial Engineers/ Program Chair: Joseph Scheibeler |
| Donald E. Crone, Program Director for the Flats Sequencing System (FSS), Headquarters Engineering, U.S. Postal Service Postal Automation and the Flats Sequencing System | Sunday 10:00AM Room 120 |
| Over the past 25 years automation has revolutionized the US Postal Service. This Session will explore the many technologies used by the US Postal Service in its day to day operations. The first half of the session will focus on key technologies such as bar code sorting, Delivery Point Sequencing (DPS), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and package sorting systems used by the US Postal Service to process mail. The second half the session will provide an in-depth review of the Flats Sequencing System (FSS), the Postal Service's latest advancement in flat mail sorting technology. The Flats Sequencing System advances flat mail processing by sorting flat mail in the order that postal carriers walk their route. This significantly improves the efficiency of flat mail processing and allows postal carriers more time to serve customers. FSS is designed to automatically sequence flat mail at a rate of approximately 16,500 pieces per hour, and is capable of sorting and sequencing up to 75,000 pieces of flat mail in one sequencing session. The machine is designed to sequence 280,500 pieces to more than 125,000 delivery addresses on a typical 17 hour daily operating window. |
| Michael E. McCartney, Program Performance Specialist, Capital and Program Evaluation at U.S. Postal Service Headquarters Finance Project Management Shared Network Reporting System for Tracking Capital Investment Projects | Sunday 11:00AM Room 120 |
| US Postal Service (USPS) Project Managers submit quarterly status reports on investment projects for consolidation by USPS Headquarters Finance using a shared network Access-based reporting system. Finance edits the Project Managers' submittals, incorporating individual project financial data from the corporate data base to create a Quarterly Investment Highlights Report for the USPS Board of Governors, the Postmaster General, the Chief Financial Officer and other Postal executives comprising the Capital Investment Committee. Project progress, previously reported using individual Word files by Project Managers for each project, followed by tedious copying and pasting in Headquarters Finance to create the consolidated report, is now input into a shared network by Project Managers using an Access data base and uploaded to the Finance reporting system for editing. In each subsequent Quarter, the updated and edited information from the previous Quarter is downloaded to the respective Project Managers who have access to their assigned projects for updating and the report consolidation process for the Quarterly report is repeated with the updated information. Project Managers now add only the updated or changed information instead of modifying the entire project report and Finance consolidates only the new information into each project's report records. The enhanced reporting process is transparent to the complete consolidated Quarterly Investment Highlights Report. Required approval of the Project Managers' input by Project Management executives is built into the system whereby each executive reviews only the projects of the executive's assigned Project Managers. |
| Charles L. Hochstein, Purchasing and Supply Management Specialist, Commodity Management Center (CMC) Mail Transport Equipment (MTE) and Spares at U.S. Postal Service Headquarters Supply Management Acquisition Cost Optimization Through Supply Chain Management | Sunday 2:00PM Room 120 |
| The Postal Service drives down its material and services acquisition costs by applying optimization techniques and expressive bidding methodologies to drive supply chain efficiencies. Advanced computer modeling methodologies, web based tools, and strategic sourcing methodologies are used to achieve these results. The Postal Service's accomplishments in these areas were recently recognized with the Technology Innovation Award from the November 2007 Chief Purchasing Officer's Summit. The Postal Service will present the framework it uses to make these accomplishments and a case study demonstrating its success |
| Joseph J. Scheibeler, Program Performance Specialist, Capital and Program Evaluation at U.S. Postal Service Headquarters Finance After Cost Review Process for Capital Investments | Sunday 3:00PM Room 120 |
| This talk focuses on the methodology underlying the US Postal Service's (USPS) capital investment justification and review process. In the preparation of both Decision Analysis Reports (DARs) to facilitate investment decision-making of approval authorities and in subsequent cost study reviews, cash flows - of project investments and incremental costs and benefits - are projected for a ten year benefit period to determine the return on investment (ROI). The cash flows are discounted at the appropriate interest rate (based on project risk and cost of capital) to calculate a project's net present value (NPV). "After cost studies" for capital investment projects exceeding $25 million are undertaken as directed by the USPS Board of Governors (BOG) to evaluate the results of BOG-approved projects after at least one full year of normal continuous operation. Utilizing discounted cash flow methodology, a given project's "actual" ROI and NPV of its after cost analysis are compared with the DAR's. The information contained in the DARs and the after cost study reports includes subject matter experts' estimates, vendors' estimates and prices and data from USPS's extensive corporate data base, which includes operation work hours and volumes processed, and actual project capital and expense payments. Information is also obtained by direct contact with field operations personnel, as well as the use of data collection, modeling and analysis techniques such as sensitivity analysis and productivity analysis, to estimate future costs and benefits. Inflation factors are applied to the estimates for the projection of anticipated results over a ten-year post-investment time horizon. |
MARIAN KOSHLAND SCIENCE MUSEUM OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
| Erika Shugart Presenting Current Science: Lessons from the Marian Koshland Science Museum | Sunday 10:00AM Room 110 |
| Global warming, vaccination, and forensic DNA evidence are all topics that have been in the headlines. What approaches can be used to help the public understand these complex issues? The Marian Koshland Science Museum presents exhibits on topics such as climate change, infectious disease, and DNA technology since it opened in 2004. Dr. Erika Shugart, deputy director of the Koshland Museum, will show examples of a variety of approaches for making complex science accessible, share what she is learning about museum visitors, and explore some of the lessons learned and how they can be applied beyond the museum environment. |
MARYLAND NATIVE PLANT SOCIETY (see American Society of Plant Biologists)
NATIONAL CAPITAL SECTION/OPTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA & IEEE/LEOS