Transactions of the symposium on research on uranium plasmas and their technological application, 7-10 January 1970
Abstracts for symposium on uranium plasma research
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Scientific Transactions No. 11 of the Institute of Mechanics, Moscow State University
The results of flow around wings, the determination of the optimal form, and the interaction of the wake with the accompanying flow at supersonic and hypersonic speeds of the free-stream flow are given. Methods of numerical and analytical calculation of one dimensional unsteady and two dimensional steady motions of fuel-gas mixtures with exothermic reactions are also considered.
Gonor, A. L.↗
Concurrency control for transactions with priorities
Priority inversion occurs when a process is delayed by the actions of another process with less priority. With atomic transations, the concurrency control mechanism can cause delays, and without taking priorities into account can be a source of priority inversion. In this paper, three traditional concurrency control algorithms are extended so that they are free from unbounded priority inversion.
Marzullo, Keith↗
Consequences of Slot Transactions on Airport Congestion and Environmental Protection
Recent trends in the liberalization of market access by many commercial airlines have opened the skies to virtually unlimited flights between many countries. However, this liberalization is stultified by the lack of airport capacity to accommodate the many flights that are generated by demand for capacity. Accordingly, the allocation of slots for open skies airlines remain dependent on the expansion and effective management of airport capacity. This article examines the ramifications of slot allocation on traffic peaking at airports and environmental concerns, which may emerge with this activity.
Abeyratne, Ruwantissa I.R.↗
Minimizing Segregation During the Controlled Directional Solidification of Dendritic Alloys Publication: Metallurgical and Materials Transactions
Gravity-driven thermosolutal convection that arises during controlled directional solidification (DS) of dendritic alloys promotes detrimental macro-segregation (e.g. freckles and steepling) in products such as turbine blades. Considerable time and effort has been spent to experimentally and theoretically investigate this phenomena; although our knowledge has advanced to the point where convection can be modeled and accurately compared to experimental results, little has been done to minimize its onset and deleterious effects. The experimental work demonstrates that segregation can be. minimized and microstructural uniformity promoted when a slow axial rotation is applied to the sample crucible during controlled directional solidification processing. Numerical modeling utilizing continuation and bifurcation methods have been employed to develop accurate physical and mathematical models with the intent of identifying and optimizing processing parameters.
Grugel, R. N.↗
Swing Contract-Based Valuation for Distributed Energy Resources in Transactive Energy Systems: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
With the proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) and power grids with high fractions of renewable energy, market constructs are evolving to allow DERs to participate in multiple possible markets, at different levels of grid hierarchy. The effective participation of DERs in market environments is aided by swing contract-based pricing mechanisms, whereby DERs have a two-part compensation structure – one for their reservation/commitment and another for performancedriven ex-post payment for their actual mobilization during dispatch. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learningbased (Q-learning) approach that allows a rational DER agent to select the market it wants to participate in within a composite market environment where individual markets are coordinated by possibly different actors. The proposed Q-learning framework aids DERs in their self-valuation by implicitly maximizing their own payoff through market participation, assuming a swing contract-based compensation structure. We complement our work through simulation-based investigations where factors affecting the DER decision making process, such as parametric uncertainties in market (and grid) environments, are studied.
Naqvi, Syed Ahsan Raza↗
Bank Terminals
In the photo, employees of the UAB Bank, Knoxville, Tennessee, are using Teller Transaction Terminals manufactured by SCI Systems, Inc., Huntsville, Alabama, an electronics firm which has worked on a number of space projects under contract with NASA. The terminals are part of an advanced, computerized financial transaction system that offers high efficiency in bank operations. The key to the system's efficiency is a "multiplexing" technique developed for NASA's Space Shuttle. Multiplexing is simultaneous transmission of large amounts of data over a single transmission link at very high rates of speed. In the banking application, a small multiplex "data bus" interconnects all the terminals and a central computer which stores information on clients' accounts. The data bus replaces the maze-of wiring that would be needed to connect each terminal separately and it affords greater speed in recording transactions. The SCI system offers banks real-time data management through constant updating of the central computer. For example, a check is immediately cancelled at the teller's terminal and the computer is simultaneously advised of the transaction; under other methods, the check would be cancelled and the transaction recorded at the close of business. Teller checkout at the end of the day, conventionally a time-consuming matter of processing paper, can be accomplished in minutes by calling up a summary of the day's transactions. SCI manufactures other types of terminals for use in the system, such as an administrative terminal that provides an immediate printout of a client's account, and another for printing and recording savings account deposits and withdrawals. SCI systems have been installed in several banks in Tennessee, Arizona, and Oregon and additional installations are scheduled this year.
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Technology progress and clean vehicle policies on fleet turnover and equity: insights from household vehicle fleet micro-simulations with $\text{ATLAS}$
This paper documents the design and application of ATLAS (Automobile and Technology Lifecycle-Based ASsignment), a comprehensive household vehicle transaction and technology adoption micro-simulator in the San Francisco Bay Area. ATLAS evolves the fleet mix of individual households by simulating the vehicle transaction and choice decisions in response to co-evolving demographics, land use, and vehicle technology simulations. While most existing literature has focused on the aggregate clean vehicle uptake, this paper differentiates distributional effects and decomposes the underlying mechanisms across heterogeneous sub-populations of households. Using scenarios and sensitivity simulations that vary vehicle technology and policy assumptions, we find that Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) penetrate into higher income groups at a faster rate than into lower income groups, which is intuitive and aligns with expectations. Interestingly, the relative income disparity in ZEV ownership shrinks over time across all scenarios, with a ZEV mandate coupled with declining battery cost leading to the greatest reduction in disparity of ZEV ownership by 2050. Federal, state, and local financial incentives influence the redistribution of ZEV uptake across income groups and contribute to narrowing income disparity. Vehicle transaction frequency and new versus used market dynamics are found to be important factors contributing to the income disparity.
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
Automobile and Technology Lifecycle-Based Assignment (ATLAS) v2.0.12
ATLAS is a comprehensive vehicle transaction and technology adoption microsimulator. ATLAS evolves the fleet mix of individual households by simulating the transaction (vehicle addition, disposal, and replacement) and choice (vehicle type, vintage, powertrain, and tenure) decisions in response to the co-evolving demographics, land use, and vehicle technology simulations. Different from the existing vehicle models that are either static or aggregated (e.g. stock model), ATLAS is fully disaggregated and dynamic following a sequential and circumstantial decision-making trajectory. This fine-grained approach not only enhances the realism of the simulation but also provides a nuanced understanding of the dynamics inherent in vehicle fleet evolution. ATLAS outputs are fully compatible with subsequent agent-based transportation modeling system and can enable distributional effect analysis regarding the fleet turnover among heterogeneous populations. ATLAS expands the typical new sale focused vehicle choice modeling to including used vehicle transactions that are of increasing interests to understanding the vehicle adoption behavior among lower income households.
Jin, Ling↗
The use of ion mobility spectrometry and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry for the detection of illicit drugs on clandestine records
Illicit drug distribution has over the past decade grown tremendously from simple 'drug pushing' where drugs were distributed from poorly organized individuals to today's well organized and well financed drug cartels. This change to a more 'corporate-like' atmosphere has resulted in a greater use of record keeping to monitor the profits generated. The use of record keeping by drug distributors is not restricted to high level drug smugglers but is used at all levels within the distribution network. Dealers at all levels including street dealers are generally 'fronted', given on consignment quantities of drugs that they in turn sell to customers, thereby requiring the need for records to keep track of drug sales versus liabilities. These records because of their illicit nature are often encrypted to hide the fact that they are indeed records of drug transactions. The creation of a handwritten notation concerning a drug transaction is normally brought on because of a purchase or sale. In a sale, this is commonly accomplished through a consignment, or the designation of a quantity to a customer to whom that amount has been 'fronted'. Because this activity generates a debt, it follows that an accounting for payments made, as well as new transactions completed, is only logical. One of the most common means of representing these is through an 'accounting flow', in which payments are subtracted from a running balance while new sales are added to it. The examination of illicit drug records has been the key to the prosecution of numerous federal, state, and local drug cases for a number of years. The Document Section of the FBI Laboratory, through its Racketeering Records Analysis Unit (RRAU), has been involved in such analytical efforts since 1983. Detailed analytical research brought about an evolution in the systematic approach utilized in the RRAU since that time. The close proximity of the drugs to the records often results in trace drug evidence being transferred to the records. The detection of trace drug residue on surfaces by ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is well documented in literature. The following procedure will deal primarily with the newer techniques of trace drug analysis and drug record analysis developed by the Chemistry/Toxicology Unit of the FBI Laboratory since the more traditional techniques of latent finger print analysis and document analysis are well known.
Donnelly, Brian↗
Flight Deck Data Link Displays: An Evaluation of Textual and Graphical Implementations
In Experiment 1, 16 pilots participated in a part-task simulation study that evaluated pilot data link communication for short and long message types and for two textual formats. No differences were found between the two textual formats when evaluating data link transaction times and pilot performance on a secondary task. Pilots initiated flight changes more quickly with the T-Scan format, where location of clearance information roughly corresponded to the cockpit instrument layout. Longer messages were less problematic than two short messages sent in close succession as pilots required more verbal clarification for closely spaced messages. 24 pilots participated in a second experiment that evaluated pilot communication performance for textual data link, two implementations of graphical data link, and a combined graphical and textual information modality. The two modalities incorporating text resulted in significantly faster transaction times and better performance on the secondary task than the two graphical-only implementations. The interval between messages was also more systematically varied in Experiment 2, and a short interval between messages significantly increased the access time for the second message. This delay in access was long enough to increase significantly the total transaction time of the second message, and this effect was exaggerated for the graphical-only implementations. Time to view the message before acknowledgement and time to initiate flight changes were not affected by the interval manipulation, This suggests that pilots adopt a sequential message handling strategy, and presenting messages closely in succession may present operational problems in a data link Air Traffic Control (ATC) environment. The results of this study also indicate that the perceived importance of message content is currently a crucial element in pilot data link communication.
McGann, Alison↗
Spokane Eco-District Campus Performance Under Alternative Electricity Rates: Benefits for virtual power plant participants and suppliers
Here, the respective benefits for virtual power plant participants and suppliers are revealed and compared under alternative electricity rate structures, including conventional large commercial electricity rates, large commercial electricity rates with special rates for demand-side generation, and dynamic hourly transactive prices. These three scenarios were explored using the capabilities of the Eco-District campus, a virtual power plant in Spokane, Washington, that is supplied electricity by Avista Utilities. The Eco-District Campus was modeled to host solar power generation, battery energy storage, and thermal energy resources that must be coordinated with building heating and cooling needs. First, the electricity supplier’s costs for energy, infrastructure, and energy losses were modeled. Then, the virtual power plant’s performance was modeled while presuming that its manager would minimize its costs under its electricity rate structure. The demand charges of conventional commercial electricity rates managed monthly peak, as would be expected, but hourly dynamic transactive pricing resulted in a striking alignment between the costs incurred by the supplier and the virtual power plant’s energy costs.
Electricity rates↗
SoK: What does it Mean to Benchmark Database Forensics?
Relational Database Management Systems are the backbone of modern enterprises and public-sector services, and are thus frequent targets of security incidents, insider threats, and thorough regulatory audits. Consequently, databases have become key sources of digital evidence, requiring investigators to reconstruct past activity from audit logs, transaction logs, and backups. Although benchmarking frameworks such as those developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) are widely used to evaluate database performance, they do not capture forensic requirements such as evidentiary completeness, tamper-evidence, chain of custody, or regulatory compliance under GDPR and CCPA. This survey examines the emerging domain of forensic database benchmarking. We gathered prior research on database forensics, secure logging, and tamper-evident data structures; we analyze modern forensic-ready features in commercial and open-source systems (SQL Server Ledger, Oracle Blockchain Tables, PostgreSQL pgAudit, Db2 Audit, Aurora Database Activity Streams, Oracle Real Application Security and IBM Guardium) and assess why existing benchmarks are insufficient. We propose forensic workloads, metrics, and methodologies that incorporate adversarial stressors, deleted-record recovery, and backup analysis. We also identify open research problems and call for a community-driven forensic benchmark suite. The result is an idea for evaluating not only database performance but also forensic soundness, bridging the gap between system engineering, compliance, and digital investigations.
Lenard, Ben↗
Two-Way Option Contracts That Facilitate Adaptive Water Reallocation in the Western United States
Many water markets in the western United States (U.S.) have the ability to reallocate water temporarily during drought, often as short-term water rights leases from lower value irrigated activities to higher value urban uses. Regulatory approval of water transfers, however, typically takes time and involves high transaction costs that arise from technical and legal analyses, discouraging short-term leasing. This leads municipalities to protect against drought-related shortfalls by purchasing large volumes of infrequently used permanent water rights. High transaction costs also result in municipal water rights rarely being leased back to irrigators in wet or normal years, reducing agricultural productivity. This research explores the development of a multi-year two-way option (TWO) contract that facilitates leasing from agricultural-to-urban users during drought and leasing from urban-to agricultural users during wet periods. The modeling framework developed to assess performance of the TWO contracts includes consideration of the hydrologic, engineered, and institutional systems governing the South Platte River Basin in Colorado where there is growing competition for water between municipalities (e.g., the city of Boulder) and irrigators. The modeling framework is built around StateMod, a network-based water allocation model used by state regulators to evaluate water rights allocations and potential rights transfers. Results suggest that the TWO contracts could allow municipalities to maintain supply reliability with significantly reduced rights holdings at lower cost, while increasing agricultural productivity in wet and normal years. Additionally, the TWO contracts provide irrigators with additional revenues via net payments of option fees from municipalities.
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
Demographic Microsimulator for Integrated Urban Systems: Adapting Panel Survey of Income Dynamics to Capture the Continuum of Life
Agent-based models (ABMs) in transportation modeling simulate activity and travel decisions at the disaggregate level of households and individuals. To do this, ABMs require detailed and realistic information on agents’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Various synthetic population generators have been proposed to address this need. However, most of those currently in practice are cross-sectional in nature and do not account for the dynamics within households and individuals as they progress through life events over time. This is a major shortcoming, as literature has shown that transportation decisions are affected by the transition between and co-occurrence of life cycle events. While some demographic evolution simulators have been proposed to address this issue, they are developed using cross-sectional data and capture only a small set of life cycle events and their interdependence. Addressing these drawbacks, we propose a demographic microsimulator (DEMOS) that captures the “continuum of life” by considering a range of household- and individual-level life cycle events. DEMOS is developed using the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, one of the world’s longest-running longitudinal surveys. The DEMOS submodels consider key life cycle events that are influenced by agents’ demographic variables. DEMOS is applied to evolve the population of the San Francisco Bay Area over a 9-year horizon. Results demonstrate how DEMOS generates life trajectories and how DEMOS outputs match the observed demographic trends. DEMOS is expected to enable longitudinal analysis in the context of ABMs and expand ABMs analyses relating to dynamic processes such as household-level vehicle transactions.
Demographic evolution↗
Heterogeneous Multi-Domain Dataset Synthesis to Facilitate Privacy and Risk Assessments in Smart City IoT
The emergence of the Smart Cities paradigm and the rapid expansion and integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within this context have created unprecedented opportunities for high-resolution behavioral analytics, urban optimization, and context-aware services. However, this same proliferation intensifies privacy risks, particularly those arising from cross-modal data linkage across heterogeneous sensing platforms. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a comprehensive, statistically grounded framework for generating synthetic, multimodal IoT datasets tailored to Smart City research. The framework produces behaviorally plausible synthetic data suitable for preliminary privacy risk assessment and as a benchmark for future re-identification studies, as well as for evaluating algorithms in mobility modeling, urban informatics, and privacy-enhancing technologies. As part of our approach, we formalize probabilistic methods for synthesizing three heterogeneous and operationally relevant data streams—cellular mobility traces, payment terminal transaction logs, and Smart Retail nutrition records—capturing the behaviors of a large number of synthetically generated urban residents over a 12-week period. The framework integrates spatially explicit merchant selection using K-Dimensional (KD)-tree nearest-neighbor algorithms, temporally correlated anchor-based mobility simulation reflective of daily urban rhythms, and dietary-constraint filtering to preserve ecological validity in consumption patterns. In total, the system generates approximately 116 million mobility pings, 5.4 million transactions, and 1.9 million itemized purchases, yielding a reproducible benchmark for evaluating multimodal analytics, privacy-preserving computation, and secure IoT data-sharing protocols. To show the validity of this dataset, the underlying distributions of these residents were successfully validated against reported distributions in published research. We present preliminary uniqueness and cross-modal linkage indicators; comprehensive re-identification benchmarking against specific attack algorithms is planned as future work. This framework can be easily adapted to various scenarios of interest in Smart Cities and other IoT applications. By aligning methodological rigor with the operational needs of Smart City ecosystems, this work fills critical gaps in synthetic data generation for privacy-sensitive domains, including intelligent transportation systems, urban health informatics, and next-generation digital commerce infrastructures.
IoT↗
Toward the modeling of land use change: A spatial analysis using remote sensing and historical data
It was hypothesized that the chronological observation of land use change could be shown to follow a predictable pattern and these patterns could be correlated with other statistical data to develop transition probabilities suitable for modeling purposes. A literature review and preliminary research, however, indicated a totally stochastic approach was not practical for simulating land use change and thus a more deterministic approach was adopted. The approach used assumes the determinants of the land use conversion process are found in the market place, where land transactions among buyers and sellers occur. Only one side of the market transaction process is studied, however, namely, the purchaser's desires in securing an ideal or suitable site. The problem was to identify the ideal qualities, quantities or attributes desired in an industrial site (or housing development), and to formulate a general algorithmic statement capable of identifying potential development sites. Research procedures involved developing a list of variables previously noted in the literature to be related to site selection and streamlining the list to a set suitable for statistical testing. A sample of 157 industries which have located (or relocated) in the 16-county Knoxville metropolitan region since 1950 was selected for industrial location analysis. Using NASA color infrared photography and Tennessee Valley Authority historical aerial photography, data were collected on the spatial characteristics of each industrial location event. These data were then subjected to factor analysis to determine the interrelations of variables.
Honea, R. B.↗
Upgrade and interpersonal skills training at American Airlines
Segments of the interpersonal skills training audio visual program are presented. The program was developed to train customer contact personnel with specific emphasis on transactional analysis in customer treatment. Concepts of transactional analysis are summarized in terms of the make up of the personality, identified as the three ego states. These ego states are identified as the parent, the adult, and the child. Synopses of four of the tape programs are given.
Estridge, W. W.↗