Life and energy; an attempt at a new definition of life, with applications to morals and religion. A revised account of four addresses given at the Polytechnic Institute, Regent Street, London.

Mode of access: Internet.

British campaigns in the nearer East, 1914-1918. From the outbreak of war with Turkey to the armistice, with 30 maps and plans,

Includes index.

The charter of the city of New York : chapter 466, laws of 1901, with amendments to and including 1915, and city ordinances, charter amendments.

Subtitle from cover: An act to provide for the government of New York -- including 1915 amendments : a history of city charter making.

The principle of relativity with applications to physical science /

Mode of access: Internet.

Compiled laws of Kansas, 1885. Being a compilation of all laws of a general nature based upon the General statutes of 1868 (embracing all of said statutes unrepealed) together with subsequent enactments, including the session laws of 1885, with references to decisions,

Mode of access: Internet.

A list of books (with references to periodicals) on mercantile marine subsidies; comp. under the direction of Appleton Prentiss Clark Griffin, chief bibliographer. 3d ed., with additions.

Additional references relating to mercantile marine subsidies; comp. under the direction of Hermann Henry Bernard Meyer, chief bibliographer. Washington, Govt. print. off., 1911. Bound with above and included in numbering.

Parameters for tool life optimisation with respect to face milling

DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS, ONLY AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATION AT ASTON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY WITH PRIOR ARRANGEMENT

The role and training requirements of scaffolders with regard to access scaffolding safety

DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS ONLY AVAILABLE FOR CONSULTATION AT ASTON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY WITH PRIOR ARRANGEMENT

Discovering the preferences of physicians with regards to rank-ordered medical documents

The practice of evidence-based medicine involves consulting documents from repositories such as Scopus, PubMed, or the Cochrane Library. The most common approach for presenting retrieved documents is in the form of a list, with the assumption that the higher a document is on a list, the more relevant it is. Despite this list-based presentation, it is seldom studied how physicians perceive the importance of the order of documents presented in a list. This paper describes an empirical study that elicited and modeled physicians' preferences with regard to list-based results. Preferences were analyzed using a GRIP method that relies on pairwise comparisons of selected subsets of possible rank-ordered lists composed of 3 documents. The results allow us to draw conclusions regarding physicians' attitudes towards the importance of having documents ranked correctly on a result list, versus the importance of retrieving relevant but misplaced documents. Our findings should help developers of clinical information retrieval applications when deciding how retrieved documents should be presented and how performance of the application should be assessed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

AN ENTROPIC THEORY OF DAMAGE WITH APPLICATIONS TO CORROSION-FATIGUE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

This dissertation demonstrates an explanation of damage and reliability of critical components and structures within the second law of thermodynamics. The approach relies on the fundamentals of irreversible thermodynamics, specifically the concept of entropy generation due to materials degradation as an index of damage. All failure mechanisms that cause degradation, damage accumulation and ultimate failure share a common feature, namely energy dissipation. Energy dissipation, as a fundamental measure for irreversibility in a thermodynamic treatment of non-equilibrium processes, leads to and can be expressed in terms of entropy generation. The dissertation proposes a theory of damage by relating entropy generation to energy dissipation via generalized thermodynamic forces and thermodynamic fluxes that formally describes the resulting damage. Following the proposed theory of entropic damage, an approach to reliability and integrity characterization based on thermodynamic entropy is discussed. It is shown that the variability in the amount of the thermodynamic-based damage and uncertainties about the parameters of a distribution model describing the variability, leads to a more consistent and broader definition of the well know time-to-failure distribution in reliability engineering. As such it has been shown that the reliability function can be derived from the thermodynamic laws rather than estimated from the observed failure histories. Furthermore, using the superior advantages of the use of entropy generation and accumulation as a damage index in comparison to common observable markers of damage such as crack size, a method is proposed to explain the prognostics and health management (PHM) in terms of the entropic damage. The proposed entropic-based damage theory to reliability and integrity is then demonstrated through experimental validation. Using this theorem, the corrosion-fatigue entropy generation function is derived, evaluated and employed for structural integrity, reliability assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of Aluminum 7075-T651 specimens tested.

The exploitation of small pelagic fishes of the great lakes of Africa with reference to the mukene (Rastrineobola argentea) fishery of the northern waters of Lake Victoria

Small pelagic fish species have ultimately become important on most of the Great Lakes of Africa, especially after the depletion of the larger, initially preferred fish species. In Lake Victoria, the small pelagic cyprinid Rastrineobola argentea is now the only abundant native species supporting a fast growing light fishery. In Pilkington Bay, off Lingira Island the artisanal light fishery is well established and in the last two years this bay has witnessed a sharp increase in the fishing effort. This has been followed by a modification of fishing method and a reduction in the mesh size of nets used. R. argentea now caught from this bay consist of mainly juveniles and this could result into localized recruitment overfishing. Drawing examples from what is happening to the fishery in Pilkington Bay, it is necessary to carry out research on the stocks, gear and suitable fishing crafts before light fishing spreads to most parts of the lake.