the purpose of this study was to estimate relative potential hazards to birds and bats from wind developments in texas. we compiled lists of rare, threatened, or endangered species, along with their respective ranges in texas. using a geographic information system (gis), we calculated a potential hazard index (phi) for 31 bird and ten bat species based upon the percentage of known or observed s...

Smart Table Tennis Racket In article number 2100535, Mengying Zhang, Jinbo Wu, and coworkers invent a smart table tennis racket with tunable stiffness based on electrorheological elastomers. The face is multilayer structure of rubber, soft electrode, anisotropic elastomer copper electrode. By applying an electric field, the successfully changed trajectory balls, reduced ejection angle increased...

Tennis stroke mechanics have attracted considerable biomechanical analysis, yet current filtering practice may lead to erroneous reporting of data near the impact of racket and ball. This research had three aims: (1) to identify the best method of estimating the displacement and velocity of the racket at impact during the tennis serve, (2) to demonstrate the effect of different methods on upper...

Tracing just-in-time (JIT) compilers record and optimize the instruction sequences they observe at runtime. With some modifications, a tracing JIT can perform well even when the executed program is itself an interpreter, an approach called meta-tracing. The advantage of meta-tracing is that it separates the concern of JIT compilation from language implementation, enabling the same JIT compiler ...

Rhythmically bouncing a ball with a racket is a hybrid task that combines continuous rhythmic actuation of the racket with the control of discrete impact events between racket and ball. This study presents experimental data and a two-layered modeling framework that explicitly addresses the hybrid nature of control: a first discrete layer calculates the state to reach at impact and the second co...

Some students cheat by buying solutions to assignments and paying other people to sit their exams. We investigated such a case in 2001, in which around thirty students appear to have obtained material from a private tutor. Some details were reported in the press during 2003 when a student and the tutor were sentenced in court. In this paper the case is reviewed. It has lessons for plagiarism ma...

The "racket" lesion is a rare presentation of tuberculoid leprosy, which consists of a thickened nerve branch emerging from a tuberculoid plaque. It results from centripetal damage to cutaneous nerves caused by granuloma formation. We describe a typical case of tuberculoid leprosy presenting as a "racket" lesion. The lesion persisted after treatment with paucibacillary multidrug therapy.