Dr. Constance E. Ruhl is an Epidemiologist at Social & Scientific Systems, Inc., Silver Spring, MD. Dr. Jeanne M. Clark is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Director of the Division of General Internal Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Dr. James E. Everhart was Chief of the Epidemiology and Clinical Trials Branch in the Division of Digestive Diseases and Nutrit...

The spring-loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP), or monopedal hopper, is an archetypal model for running in numerous animal species. Although locomotion is generally considered a complex task requiring sophisticated control strategies to account for coordination and stability, we show that stable gaits can be found in the SLIP with both linear and "air" springs, controlled by a simple fixed-leg rese...

In this paper, we present our implementation of physically-based simulation of hair strips. We used a mass-spring model followed by a hybrid approach where particle systems and the method of clustering of hair strands are employed. All the forces related to springs are implemented: gravity, repulsions from collisions (head and ground), absorption (ground only), frictions (ground and air), inter...

The spring pendulum in resonance is a model system for formal reduction to one degree of freedom, where some symmetry (reversibility) is maintained. The reduction can be handled by equivariant singularity theory with a distinguished parameter, yielding an integrable approximation of the Poincar e map. This makes a concise description of certain bifurcations possible. The computation of reparame...

Digital watermarking techniques have been proposed to protect the copyright of multimedia data. Robustness against geometric distortion is one of the most important issues to be solved to increase the robustness of digital image watermarking systems. Such attacks are very simple to implement, so they can defeat most existing watermarking algorithms without causing serious perceptual distortion....

According to a company developed twelve meters bus, using the multi-body dynamics software ADAMS, they reached the conclusion that the change scope of the toe angle, and camber in the guide mechanism with wheel vertical, affects the operation stability. Utilizing: i) the air suspension guide mechanism of spatial position as design variables, ii) the front wheel alignment parameters as the objec...

The bivalve Macoma balthica migrates twice during the benthic part of its life cycle. During the spring migration (May–June), the newly settled spat (0-group) migrates to the nurseries in the high intertidal. Seven to nine months later, the bivalves migrate back to the low tidal flats and the subtidal (winter migration, 1-group). Both 0and 1-group M. balthica use byssus threads for active pelag...

This work presents a segmentation method based on a region growing approach. It has been implemented in the geographic information and image processing system (SPRING) which has been developed at INPE. The technique is applied to segment images which are being used to assess land use changes in the Amazon region. Segmented Landsat-TM images are shown to illustrate the technique.

The articles on weather and asthma focused on outbreaks of asthma flare-ups during periods of thunderstorms, especially in the late spring and early summer. These studies, conducted in Australia and Great Britain, did seem to find a correlation between spring storms and increased problems with asthma. Researchers speculate the phenomenon may have two possible causes. The most likely is related ...