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• Traffic, vehicle type, platoon, and pavement condition influenced passing distance. • Vehicles with opposing traffic passed the bicyclist significantly closer. • The Log-normal distribution was found to best fit lateral passing distance. • Bicyclist risk estimates contribute to assess the implementation of countermeasures. • Minimum passing distance should be mandated according to urban and rural areas. In the United States, 91.4 cm (3.0 ft) has been considered a safe lateral distance when passing bicyclists; however, this threshold may be more suitable to urban environments where most bicycle safety research has originated—limited research is available on rural roadways. In this study, a road bicycle was instrumented to collect naturalistic data and analyze vehicle-bicycle lateral passing distances (LPD) on high-speed rural two-lane roadways with paved shoulders. The bicycle was ridden in the center of the shoulder. Overall, 2,119 observations of vehicles passing the instrumented bicycle were obtained from a study segment. The impacts of different variables on distributions of vehicle-bicycle LPD measurements were analyzed. Passing vehicles with opposing traffic passed the bicyclist significantly closer than passing vehicles without opposing traffic. More predominant with opposing traffic, heavy vehicles passed the bicyclist closer than passenger vehicles. Similarly, following vehicles passed the bicyclist closer than leading vehicles. The study segment was repaved during the data collection period, so data before and after the roadway improvement was available. Vehicles with old pavement/marking passed the bicyclist closer than vehicles with new pavement/marking conditions. Distribution of LPD measurements was skewed to the left towards smaller values and had a long tail to the right towards larger values. Through maximum likelihood estimation, the Log-normal distribution was found to best fit the data distribution. Using empirical and theoretical density distributions, LPD was formally specified as a function of opposing traffic with a theoretical mixture distribution and generalized to estimate the probability of vehicles passing bicyclists below a certain threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying individual animals, especially in large mammals, is an important goal for wildlife biologists and managers. Bears, occupying diverse habitats, face and experience significant conflict. Among Asian bears, the sloth bear Melursus ursinus (Shaw, 1791; Vulnerable IUCN Red List) is reported vulnerable due to negative interactions with humans, requiring solutions like identifying bear individuals using morphological features. To do so, we used an image-comparison algorithm to evaluate the uniqueness of chest markings using structural similarity index (SSIM) and trained a deep learning model based on the EfficientNet architecture for predicting an individual bear classification. We collected 1567 images (of 144 bears) to examine individual-level differences in chestmark patterns. The comparison yielded 98% accuracy in differentiating chestmarks as a unique pattern for an individual. Subsequently, we trained a circular classification model based on EfficientNet framework using augmented 5628 images for training (80%; of 115 bears), which was validated over 95% for top one and 99% for five individual predictions on 1407 testing images (20%; of 115 bears). The final step involved passing 58 non-augmented images (of 29 out-of-train bears), and the top five predictions of closely similar patterns suggested by the model were then manually compared for similarities in shapes, which suggested whether the image belonged to a new individual. The high accuracy of comparison and classification models suggests the potential applicability of this technique for helping maintain the ex-situ bear database, identifying the conflict individual and estimating bear populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the legacy of bell hooks, a prominent feminist and cultural critic, three years after her death. The author praises hooks for her influential writings on feminism, race, and social class, and acknowledges her critiques of white feminists and commitment to intersectionality. The article presents hooks as a powerful voice for justice and equality, highlighting her impact and contributions to various fields. It celebrates hooks' legacy and the lasting influence of her work, emphasizing her ability to challenge dominant narratives and engage with diverse perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

In Karolina Waclawiak's novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms (2012), the Polish American immigrant narrator changes her name from the "too-Polish" Zosia to Anya, in order to "pass" as Russian and gain access to the titular social club. This attempt to pass as Russian—imbued with personal hopes for a sense of belonging and power—alludes to a history of tensions across American ethno-racial lines, while at the same time illuminating significant differences among Europeans otherwise presumed to be simply White. Anya's attempts to pass center around her gendered and sexualized embodiment, a step that then allows her to define her relationships to the United States and Poland by questioning, developing, and leveraging her new name in exchange for a new ethno-racialized identity. The novel's thematic and formal preoccupation with naming and names thus reflects the ways in which immigrants negotiate the interconnectedness of identity's multiple manifestations and forge identities on their own terms. The privilege of the choice to pass within and among Slavic ethnicities distinguishes texts like Twin Palms as the ancestral inheritors of a US-immigrant literary tradition while also marking the Whiteness of their protagonists. Anya's particular imagination of US-immigrant-selfhood is predicated on ethno-racial differentiation and gendered embodiment determined both by an overidentification premised on erasure and by distinction within the twenty-first-century American racialized milieu. Waclawiak's narrative deploys different strategies at the level of naming in order to circle around the issue of race while simultaneously centering the differences within post-Soviet Slavic White ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 2017, huge wildfires in the British Columbia region (Canada) led to the injection of a remarkably high concentration of biomass burning aerosol in the atmosphere. These aerosol masses reached the city of Naples, Italy, at the end of August 2017, where they were characterized by means of a multiwavelength lidar and a sun–sky–lunar photometer. Here we report on the optical and microphysical properties of this aerosol in an intriguing condition, occurring on 4 September 2017, which is characterized by an interesting multi-layered vertical distribution of the aerosol. The Lidar profiles highlighted the presence of four aerosol layers, with two located in the lower troposphere and the other two at stratospheric altitudes. A rather thorough characterization of the biomass burning aerosol was carried out. The aerosol depolarization ratio showed an increasing dependence on the altitude with averaged values of 2–4% for the tropospheric layers, which are indicative of almost spherical smoke particles, and larger values in the stratospheric layers, suggestive of aspheric particles. Lidar-derived size distributions were retrieved for the first three aerosol layers, highlighting a higher particle concentration in the fine-mode fraction for the layers observed at higher altitudes. A dominance of fine particles in the atmosphere (fine-mode fraction > 0.8) with low absorption properties (absorption AOD < 0.0025 and SSA > 0.97) was also observed over the whole atmospheric column by sun photometer data. The space-resolved results provided by the lidar data are consistent with the columnar features retrieved by the AERONET sun photometer, thus evidencing the reliability and capability of lidar characterization of atmospheric aerosol in a very interesting condition of multiple aerosol layers originating from Canadian fires overpassing the observation station. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hot air puffing is the simplest, hazard- and contamination-free, and quickest method, wherein grains are suddenly exposed to a high temperature short time (HTST) process to get puffed. In this study, the continuous hot air puffing system was developed, comprising of grain feeder, heating chamber, puffing chamber, cyclone separator, and recirculation pipe. The experiments were conducted using Central Composite Rotatable Design (CCRD), on pre-processed rice (cv. MTU 1010), with one pre-heating pass of 11.50 s at 150 °C. The results showed that the puffed rice can be produced optimally at a pre-fixed whirling air velocity of 4.75 (± 0.25) m/s, puffing air temperature of 260 °C and with a feed rate of 6500 g/h, resulting in final moisture content (% db), expansion ratio, puffing percentage (%), whiteness index, hardness (kg) and crispness (+ve peaks) as 3.71, 5.68, 95.87, 69.82, 32.12 and 89.81, respectively. Further study on increased time of preheating upto 46 s (4 passes) at 150 °C keeping all other puffing parameters unchanged, showed that final moisture content (% db), expansion ratio, puffing percentage (%), and whiteness index were further improved like final moisture content reduced upto 2.68% db and expansion ratio, puffing percentage, whiteness index increased upto 7.35, 99.58% and 87.76, respectively. Thus, the rice puffing using a continuous hot air puffing system can be accomplished using 4 pre-heating passes (accumulative retention heating time of 46 s) at 150 °C, puffed using a hot air puffing system with whirling velocity of 4.75 m/s at a puffing temperature and feed rate of 260 °C and 6500 g/h. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gate-type carbon nanotubes cathodes exhibit advantages in long-term stable emission owing to the uniformity of electrical field on the carbon nanotubes, but the gate inevitably reduces the transmittance of electron beam, posing challenges for system stabilities. In this work, we introduce electron beam focusing technique using the self-charging SiNx/Au/Si gate. The potential of SiNx is measured to be approximately −60 V quickly after the cathode turning on, the negative potential can be maintained as the emission goes on. The charged surface generates rebounding electrostatic forces on the following electrons, significantly focusing the electron beam on the center of gate hole and allowing them to pass through gate with minimal interceptions. An average transmittance of 96.17% is observed during 550 hours prototype test, the transmittance above 95% is recorded for the cathode current from 2.14 μA to 3.25 mA with the current density up to 17.54 mA cm−2. Gate-type field emission cathodes based on carbon nanotubes face challenges of achieving high E-beam transmittance to avoid the collision with the gate to form irreversible damages. Here, the authors present a self-charging gate to control the E-beam trajectory by inducing a local electric field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can individuals choose how they will be perceived by others? What are the consequences of human beings' efforts to control the societal gaze? In this chapter, I explore both issues through a consideration of Nella Larsen's Passing alongside Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. I first examine the ways these two texts respectively define the binaries and normativity within which the central characters find themselves and the reasons there is pressure to 'pass.' I next explore the ways the works both reinforce and resist the idea of 'being enough' in relation to normative social constructs. I then consider the texts collectively to understand what both literary works say about not belonging and the available ways to cope in a society that seems to prefer a different kind of being than the one a figure exists in within his/her/their body. Finally, I report on my own recent study of Passing and The Argonauts within a secondary independent school setting. I include student voices alongside my own to make visible how 21st-century high school students interpret the 'longing to just be' in the ways Larsen and Nelson describe. I conclude by looking at the implications of this work for the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) curricula and English Language Arts (ELA) instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occurrences of alkaline and carbonatite rocks with high concentrations of rare earth elements (REE) are a defining feature of Precambrian geology in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California. The most economically important occurrence is the carbonatite stock at Mountain Pass, which constitutes the largest REE deposit in the United States. A central scientific goal is to understand the genesis of the carbonatite ore body in the context of widespread REE‐rich igneous activity. A swarm of mafic alkaline (shonkinite) dikes has been mapped and sampled at Bobcat Hills, 65 km southeast of the Mountain Pass mine. Whole‐rock geochemistry and zircon geochronology demonstrate a clear affinity to the ca. 1.4 Ga Mountain Pass intrusive system. Bobcat Hills dikes have comparably high REE concentrations (La ∼1,000× chondritic) and an error‐weighted mean 207Pb/206Pb zircon crystallization age of 1,426 ± 2 Ma (2σ). Unlike the alkaline intrusions at Mountain Pass, which have abundant inherited zircon from Paleoproterozoic basement rocks and crustally influenced oxygen isotope compositions (δ18Ozircon = 6.5–7.5‰), the Bobcat Hills dikes lack any evidence of crustal assimilation and have oxygen isotope values that overlap a mantle range (Bobcat Hills average δ18Ozircon = 5.6 ± 0.3‰). The dikes were a high‐temperature, early center of mafic alkaline magmatism in the Mojave Desert that serve as a snapshot of melt generation from a spatially extensive, metasomatized mantle source. We propose that modification of the crust over many tens of Myr at Mountain Pass created an environment that favored crustal assimilation and enabled ascent of late‐stage, REE‐rich carbonatite magmas. Key Points: The Bobcat Hills site expands the distribution of REE‐rich mafic alkaline magmatism 65 km southeast of the Mountain Pass mineShonkinite dikes at Bobcat Hills are physically and chemically similar to mafic intrusions at Mountain Pass and have comparably high REEBobcat Hills was an early center of REE‐rich magmatism in the Mojave Desert, with a zircon U‐Pb crystallization age of 1,426 ± 2 Ma [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) is important in capturing remote contextual information for pixel-level prediction tasks in scene-resolved detection of rice diseases. In this paper, the detection objects of the rice disease dataset used in this paper have almost the same target size and do not need to be passed through different filters to obtain different receptive fields of view. Therefore, this paper proposed a new pooling structure, SPPFCSPC-G, which split the feature vector into 2 channels for processing. One channel was processed using grouped 1×1 Conv, while the other channel mainly used multiple filters with the same parallel structure (5×5 MaxPool). Additionally, multiple 1×1 and 3×3 grouped convolutions were concatenated in series in that branch (Group-Conv) to extract more complex features in rice. Finally, the 2 parts were connected (Concat) together, with each convolutional layer Conv divided into 4 groups as a way to reduce the amount of computation in the model. The project team incorporated SPPFCSPC-G into the Backbone of YOLOv5 and trained it on NVIDIA Tesla T4 (GPU). The experimental results showed that the performance of the method used in this paper improved, including Precision, Recall, mAP, and training speed, while reducing the size of computational parameters (Parameters), computational volume (GFLOPs), and model size (Param.). The project team carried out the trained YOLOv5 model on Intel Core i5 (CPU) for inference detection of rice leaves in real scenarios, and the experiments showed that both pre-inference and actual inference were faster. Moreover, the consumption of computational resources was almost minimized, and the model effectively identified rice diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal protection for machinists in train accidents at crossings without door bars in the area of PT. Kereta Api Indonesia Persero Divre West Sumatra is based on Article 124 of Law Number 23 of 2007 concerning railways. PT KAI provides protection to machinists by being responsible if third parties can prove from the chronological results of investigations and investigations if it is proven that the machinist really made a mistake that resulted in an accident and caused casualties. Form its legal liability by insuring losses suffered by third parties. In train accidents at crossings without door bars, machinists are not given responsibility alone but are protected by the company. The legal responsibility of PT Kereta Api Indonesia Persero Divre West Sumatra to victims of train accidents at crossings without door bars is that the security and safety of public road users is not the responsibility of the transportation organizing body, in this case PT. (Persero) Indonesian Railways. The crossing gate bars are not for the security of public road users, but to secure and facilitate train travel alone. Criminal liability by the machinist for train accidents must be seen from the element of guilt and also see the responsible ability of a machinist, if all elements have been fulfilled then the machinist can be held responsible for train accidents. When crossing a crossing, it also bears the risk that if the crossbar is not provided as an adequate facility in limiting road users from passing and allowing the train to pass first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to train receivers in American football in a targeted and individual manner, the strengths and weaknesses of the athletes must be evaluated precisely. As human resources are limited, it is beneficial to do it in an automated way. Automated passing machines are already given, therefore the motivation is to design a computer-based system that records and automatically evaluates the athlete's catch attempts. The most fundamental evaluation would be whether the athlete has caught the pass successfully or not. An experiment was carried out to gain data about catch attempts that potentially contain information about the outcome of such. The experiment used a fully automated passing machine which can release passes on command. After a pass was released, an audio and a video sequence of the specific catch attempt was recorded. For this purpose, an audio-visual recording system was developed which was integrated into the passing machine. This system is used to create an audio and video dataset in the amount of 2276 recorded catch attempts. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for feature extraction with downstream Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to classify the video data. Classification of the audio data is performed using a one-dimensional CNN. With the chosen neural network architecture, an accuracy of 92.19% was achieved in detecting whether a pass had been caught or not. The feasibility for automatic classification of catch attempts during automated catch training is confirmed with this result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OBJECTIVE: Clerkship grades are a component of determining a residency candidate's competitiveness. In 2017, the University of Minnesota Medical School's pediatric clerkship transitioned its standardized multiple-choice exam, the Aquifer Pediatrics Examination, to pass/fail with eligibility for honors being determined by clinical performance, not exam performance. We assessed the effect this change had on Aquifer exam performance and evaluated for correlation between Aquifer exam performance and clinical evaluation scores in order to gather insight into the validity of each type of assessment with respect to one another. METHODS: We analyzed de-identified data from 750 medical students between the academic years of 2016 to 2017 and 2019 to 2020. Individual Aquifer exam scores were compared to individual clinical performance scores. Differences in exam performance before and after the transition to pass/fail were investigated with a two-sample t-test and Cohen's d for effect size. RESULTS: No correlation was found between Aquifer exam scores and clinical performance scores. The mean Aquifer exam score prior to the transition to pass/fail was 80.02±7.51 while the mean after the exam was made pass/fail was 77.8±7.42. This difference was statistically significant (P < .001) with a Cohen's d (effect size) of 0.297. CONCLUSIONS: A lack of correlation between the Aquifer exam scores and clinical performance scores was found. There was a small yet statistically significant decrease in Aquifer exam scores after the change to pass/fail; it is not clear if this represents a meaningful decrease in learning by students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most basic techniques in the game of soccer is to be able to make good and correct passes. This study aims to determine whether the drill and practice method can improve the ability of students at SDN Kamal 3 and the extent of the resulting improvement. This research is classified as a classroom action research method. The data collection techniques used in this research are interviews, observation, tests, and documentation. Based on the results of the research conducted at SDN Kamal 3, the researchers found that many students still could not do good and correct passing events. This research was held in 2 cycles. The results showed that in cycle 1, students experienced an increase from before, but the result was that there were still some students who had not yet completed the percentage of completeness which was at 69% and incompleteness was at 31%. In cycle 2, the drastic increase experienced by students with completeness is at a maximum of 100% while incompleteness is at a minimum of 0%. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the drill and practice method can improve students' abilities in carrying out passing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr. Michael Wertheimer, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, passed away at the age of 95. He was born in Berlin, Germany in 1927 and came to the United States in 1933 to escape the Holocaust. Dr. Wertheimer had a distinguished career as a teacher and scholar, with numerous publications and leadership roles in professional organizations. He was known for his precision in teaching and his dedication to his students' learning and success. Dr. Wertheimer's love for music was also a significant part of his life and teaching. [Extracted from the article]

The article informs about the passing of two retired Angle Southern California members, Dr. John Gawley (May 2019) and Dr. Donald Tuverson (January 2023). Topics include the background and career contributions of both individuals, Dr. Gawley's unique orthodontic approach, Dr. Tuverson's recognized achievements, and their lasting impact on orthodontics through mentoring and teaching even after retirement.