bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Design and simulation of a wireline core drilling device for near-shore applications
Authors: Cocci M , Barletta S , Berzi L , Capitani R , Delogu M , Mariottoni E , Sacchetto M , Pugi L 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
The PROTEUS project involves the construction of a self-propelled and floating amphibious machine for near shore geological surveys. In this context, the development of a wireline core drilling device was tackled, evolving with respect to existing models and responding to the specificities of the new application. In the preliminary phase, comparative research was carried out both through market research and through reverse engineering activities on core drill models deemed suitable for the purpose, thus identifying the functional priorities and criticalities of the existing material through the ex-post analysis of the subject elements to wear and tear. Once the requirements of the new core drilling device were formalized, the constructive layout was defined, giving priority to functions such as sample management, interlocking and rapid disengagement from the drilling actuation system. The construction details of the mechanical coupling profiles were then optimized by simulation in a multibody software environment, in order to ensure full functionality even in harsh environments, typical of the application, making an advancement with respect to the previously identified reference solutions. Finally, the executive design of the component was carried out by introducing the corrections deriving from the simulation results and considering different solutions in relation to the material adopted and its production needs through machining processes.
Residual stress measurements on a deep rolled aluminum specimen through X-Ray Diffraction and Hole-Drilling, validated on a calibration bench
Authors: Beghini M , Grossi T , Santus C , Seralessandri L , Gulisano S 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Residual stress measurements are notably affected by a high sensitivity to errors in input data. Measurements should then be presented together with an estimation of their accuracy. A common strategy is to carry out more measurements and/or to compare the results of different techniques. However, error contributions due to biases could be dangerously left unseen. In a previous work, the authors presented a calibration bench which can impose a known bending stress distribution on a specimen while simultaneously performing X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) or Hole-Drilling Method (HDM) residual stress measurements. Since the external load can freely be applied and removed, the superposition principle can be exploited to simultaneously identify either the reference bending stress distribution or the actual residual stress distribution, with the same experimental setup. A deep rolling treatment was measured and analyzed on the calibration bench with both XRD and HDM. First, residual stresses on the surface were evaluated with XRD measurements, then electrochemical material removal was performed to investigate stresses at higher depths. After that, HDM measurements were carried out and compared with the results of XRD. Both methods were also used to identify the known bending stresses, providing an additional validation of the residual stress results.
Simulated and real world tests to compare drivers performance in dynamic wireless technology perspective
Authors: Berzi L , Barbieri R , Uggiosi D , Delogu M 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
The ongoing electrification of road vehicles needs to be supported by proper growth of charging infrastructure. In this context, dynamic wireless charging can provide a number of advantages, main being the possibility to extend vehicle range without increasing on board battery capacity, potentially reducing cost, mass, and tank-to-wheel energy consumption. The development of such solutions however poses various questions, including the acceptance and the capability of users in driving according to infrastructure characteristics; in particular, the misalignment reduction while a driver follows a straight path positively influence the charging efficiency in dynamic wireless technology. In this paper, authors describe a tests campaign to determine driving performances using both a simulator and a real world equipped vehicle. The research question of this paper is to assess and quantify differences between the two approaches. To reach this objective, in a first phase, data have been collected through a driving simulator (i.e. a full car body mounted on a parallel linked kinematics with a large screen, proposing a virtual city scenario), and in a second phase through a car equipped with a camera. As a post processing phase, statistical tools have been used to describe driving performance indexes and related impacts on wireless charging infrastructure by determining the secondary voltage on the vehicle. Data coming from the activity will be functional to be used by scenario analyst to develop characterization tests only with a simulative approach to decrease costs.
Time-of-Flight measurement on a rail by laser-ultrasound
Authors: Vangi D , Gulino M S 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Stress states of thermal origin on the Continuously Welded Rail (CWR) are a source of possible inconvenience due to winter breakage or dangerous summer buckling. To date, alongside procedures based on the measurement of rail displacements or rail cutting, several methods for measuring the stress state in the rail have been proposed, based on X-ray diffraction, Barkhausen noise, and the acoustoelastic effect; all these approaches have some critical issues for extensive use in the field. The acoustoelastic method is based on the dependence of the ultrasonic wave speed on the stress state of the material and involves the measurement of the Time of Flight (ToF). Because of the modest acoustoelastic effect, the speed variations caused by the stress states are very limited, which is reflected in the need for ToF measurements with an accuracy of the order of a few nanoseconds.
In the past, the research group successfully used the acoustoelastic method to monitor a 3 km portion of a rail between Florence and Pontassieve, with fixed measurement stations, where the ultrasonic probes were permanently positioned on the neutral axis of the rail. Today, the need is to have a mobile measuring system, which can measure in several points or even continuously as the system moves along the rail. This appears to be possible through the use of, for example, non-contact systems such as those based on laser and air-coupled probes or lasers alone. In the first case, however, the acoustic wave partly propagates in the air before reaching the piezoelectric probe, and this path is subjected to variations in temperature and thus ToF. In the second case, the ultrasonic waves are generated and detected by optical methods with lasers. For the generation of acoustic waves, the use of pulsed lasers has become a widespread, reliable practice, which allows researchers to obtain signals of high amplitude and wide bandwidth. For the reception of the acoustic signal, the precision required in the measurement involves careful analysis and experimentation to identify the most appropriate laser technique, depending on the quality of the surface on which the measurement is performed, the sensitivity of the method, and the possibility of taking measurements while moving.
In the present work, a technique for laser detection of ultrasonic waves, Optical Beam Deflection (OBD), is analysed. The technique is based on the deflection of an optical beam: the beam irradiates the surface of the rail and is reflected at angles that depend on the orientation of the surface at the point of measurement, which is perturbed by the passage of the acoustic wave. The technique, developed in the 1990s, has limited applications in non-destructive testing, where interferometer-based techniques are more widespread; still, they require more sophisticated and expensive equipment. Different experimental arrangements and initial experimental results are analysed and presented, to optimise their sensitivity and verify their suitability for the purpose.
A “Wild and Ambiguous Medium”: Democracy, Interiority, and the Early American Epistolary Novel
Authors: Koenigs Thomas 
Published: February 2023

AbstractThis essay argues that early American novelists’ sustained commitment to epistolary fiction reflects their recognition that the mediated access it offered to inner life made it a potent vehicle for highlighting the limits of our ability to decipher the concealed interiorities of other people. Faced with the question of how novels might best prepare readers for republican social and political life, novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson turned to this increasingly outmoded form because it foregrounded the uncertainties inherent in reading inner life. Eschewing third-person fiction’s fantasy of direct access to another mind, these novels foster an epistemological humility regarding other interiorities that would be valuable in negotiating civic life in the early republic. While early American novels have long been regarded as encouraging sympathetic identification as a means of establishing political union, novels such as Brown’s Clara Howard and Rowson’s Sincerity instead harness the epistolary novel’s partial, uncertain revelations of interiority to highlight our inability to access fully someone else’s thoughts or feelings. These novels warn readers that successfully navigating the epistemological challenges of this new democratic social order requires resisting the fantasy that another person’s true feelings can ever be fully known.Rowson and Brown saw epistolary novels as a means of not just teaching Americans how to read inner life, but also of cautioning them that they could never do so with certainty.
“The Mound of His Back”: The Profession of Literature and the Fear of the Mob
Authors: McCann Sean 
Published: February 2023

AbstractRecent novels respond to the current crisis of democracy by invoking literary fiction as a means to cultivate empathy and as a model for more inclusive forms of community. But such novels also often defend the mission of literature by casting service workers and popular voters as foils and by defining those figures as ignorant and irrational. Reflecting the educational cleavage that shapes both literary culture and the current political environment, such defenses of literature point toward the class limitations of contemporary liberalism and, in this respect, are not good models of democracy.This is a sentence that expresses a judgment about the characters it depicts, and the judgment is clear: they are poor, ugly, and stupid.
Narrative Disorders: Surveillance, Truth, and Democracy in Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle
Authors: McAlister Melani 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle comprises three novels that, taken together, reimagine democracy after the end of the nation-state. The series tells an eerily timely story of a late twenty-first-century global election being undermined by an attack on the election apparatus, run by a ubiquitous surveillance system called Information. When Information is attacked, the global election goes haywire, and our protagonists, most of whom work for Information, are forced to dash around the world trying to save the system. Whether the system is worth saving and what democracy needs to survive are two of the questions that occupy the multi-racial and cosmopolitan women at the center of this sprawling science fiction world, richly conceptualized by Older, a Latinx writer and “Senior Global Futures Scientist” at Arizona State University.The novels postulate that we cannot radicalize and reinvigorate democracy without reducing its scale. The price for that will be expansions of technological reach and the real peril of global conspiracy across small states. In that world, narrative is currency, and overreading a practice of freedom.
Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Decolonization and Democracy in Leslie Marmon Silko’sGardens in the Dunes
Authors: Young Alex Trimble 
Published: February 2023

AbstractOver the course of the 1990s, the reception of Almanac of The Dead’s (1991) strident decolonial allegory propelled Leslie Marmon Silko to the center of debates about the future of both liberal democracy and Indigenous sovereignty struggles. This article revisits how and why Silko was cast as a representative of liberal multiculturalism by scholars who championed and critiqued US liberalism in the wake of the Cold War, and reads her 1999 Gardens in the Dunes, a novel she describes as forming, with Almanac, a diptych “about capitalism and the effects of capitalism” (“Conversations” 118), in relation to these critical debates. It argues that the conclusion of Gardens in The Dunes engages with the Western genre as an allegorical means toward situating Silko’s commitment to Indigenous sovereignty in relation to the questions about the relation among law, violence, and democracy that animate so many Cold War westerns. The political orientation that emerges from this unlikely engagement with settler colonialism’s most recognizable genre is an allegorical vision of an Indigenous cosmopolitanism committed to both decolonial struggle and the universal liberatory ideals that liberalism espouses yet inevitably betrays.Through an oblique but unmistakable engagement with the Western genre . . . Gardens in the Dunes reaffirms Silko’s commitment to a broad vision of decolonization celebrating the universal liberatory ideals that US liberalism has betrayed.
The Limits of Latinx Representation
Authors: Nugent Carlos Alonso 
Published: February 2023

AbstractThis essay considers a crisis in the literary form we call “the novel” and the political form we call “democracy.” As many scholars have argued, these forms had a crucial convergence in the late eighteenth century: while novels made it easier for subjects to identify as rational decision-makers in secular social worlds, democracy became these subjects’ preferred way of institutionalizing political power. To be sure, most early novels helped consolidate the upper classes, but with each passing decade, an increasing number have sought to open democracy to the disenfranchised. However, when contemporary novels take up the cause of unauthorized migration, they often struggle to raise cultural awareness—and overwhelmingly fail to produce political change. In this context, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) tries to see—and see beyond—three limits of Latinx representation. Against a literary lineage that prizes complete portrayals of exemplary people, it demonstrates that completion and comprehension are often impossible. Similarly, amidst a culture industry in which “representation matters,” it explains why the category “Latinx” is usually inadequate to the diversity of migrant life. Finally, in a nation said to be a “representative democracy,” it shows how divisions between citizens and migrants are untenable.Lost Children Archive reenergizes the novel in/of democracy by reckoning with its limits. . . . whereas many novels have enabled their readers to feel like they lived in democracies, Lost Children Archive confronts us with other ways of imagining and institutionalizing political life—and political death.
Sovereign Flows and the Obligation of Repayment
Authors: Pexa Christopher 
Published: February 2023

AbstractStephen Graham Jones’s 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians, depicts the haunting and killing of four Blackfeet friends—Ricky, Lewis, Cassidy, and Gabriel—by the spirit of an elk cow called “Elk Head Woman,” who stalks the men after they have killed her and her unborn calf. Their punishment, and the unpayability of their debt to the ghost, entail asking what lies beyond a regime of rights when those rights have been judged to be always already ignorable by settler-colonial society. But Elk Head Woman’s haunting also positions violence against the land (via fracking) and its more-than-human inhabitants as a metonym for settler-colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls. This essay asks what justice may look like beyond a framework of individual rights that create a temporal enclosure, tying people and harm to moments in time and specific places, arguing that the mobility of intergenerational debt and its unpayable reparations across times and places constitute a sovereign flow—the enduring movement of an ethical–political object (here, the elk-Blackfeet law) created between sovereign peoples (human and more-than-human) that persists apart from the settler-colonial state across whose legal and geographic spaces and time the flow moves.[The Only Good Indians’] fictional dramatizing of settler-Indigenous-nonhuman relations shows a world apart from settler-colonial social justice and forms of democratic inclusion: a haunting that . . . [refuses] violence against Indigenous women and ongoing forms of capitalistic extraction on tribal lands.
The Critical Electorate: On Democracy and Disenchantment
Authors: Fleissner Jennifer L 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
This essay uses Chantal Mouffe's work in The Democratic Paradox (2000) to think through the paradoxical status of democracy in this special issue. At a moment when democracy is under authoritarian threat worldwide, contributors often treat it not as an imperiled good but as a misty future horizon. Moreover, it is seen as held back most by a commitment to “liberal” values, though little consensus prevails here about this term’s meaning. This stance then dovetails with a predilection for speculative rather than realist fictional forms. And yet the essays in fact display an ongoing unacknowledged allegiance to various actual liberal ideals. Together with the markedly strong disagreements evident across the issue as a whole, this fact speaks to Mouffe's affirmation of an “agonistic”—but, crucially, not “antagonistic”—politics, in which “liberalism” and “democracy” need to remain ideas in necessary and essential tension with one another. Their clash demonstrates the way that modernity's lack of transcendent grounding generates a situation of ongoing and irresolvable value conflict. This essay then suggests that a version of this conflict plays out in the novel in formal terms as well, as an unresolved dual allegiance both to realism and to what exceeds its bounds.[The essays'] very embrace and even hyperbolization of liberal idioms of individual choice, freedom, and so on . . . suggests that we may have a more complicated situation on our hands than the by-now programmatic affirmations of “democracy” and repudiations of “liberal” can effectively address.
FungiExpresZ: an intuitive package for fungal gene expression data analysis, visualization and discovery
Authors: Parsania Chirag , Chen Ruiwen , Sethiya Pooja , Miao Zhengqiang , Dong Liguo , Wong Koon Ho 
Published: February 2023

AbstractBioinformatics analysis and visualization of high-throughput gene expression data require extensive computer programming skills, posing a bottleneck for many wet-lab scientists. In this work, we present an intuitive user-friendly platform for gene expression data analysis and visualization called FungiExpresZ. FungiExpresZ aims to help wet-lab scientists with little to no knowledge of computer programming to become self-reliant in bioinformatics analysis and generating publication-ready figures. The platform contains many commonly used data analysis tools and an extensive collection of pre-processed public ribonucleic acid sequencing (RNA-seq) datasets of many fungal species, including important human, plant and insect pathogens. Users may analyse their data alone or in combination with public RNA-seq data for an integrated analysis. The FungiExpresZ platform helps wet-lab scientists to overcome their limitations in genomics data analysis and can be applied to analyse data of any organism. FungiExpresZ is available as an online web-based tool (https://cparsania.shinyapps.io/FungiExpresZ/) and an offline R-Shiny package (https://github.com/cparsania/FungiExpresZ).
Refining the moose serum progesterone threshold to diagnose pregnancy
Authors: Struck Madeline , Severud William J , Chenaux-Ibrahim Yvette M , J. Isaac Edmund , Brown Janine L , Moore Seth A , Wolf Tiffany M 
Published: February 2023

Abstract
Pregnancy determination is necessary for sound wildlife management and understanding population dynamics. Pregnancy rates are sensitive to environmental and physiological factors and may indicate the overall trajectory of a population. Pregnancy can be assessed through direct methods (rectal palpation, sonography) or indicated using hormonal assays (serum progesterone or pregnancy-specific protein B, fecal progestogen metabolites). A commonly used threshold of 2 ng/ml of progesterone in serum has been used by moose biologists to indicate pregnancy but has not been rigorously investigated. To refine this threshold, we examined the relationship between progesterone concentrations in serum samples and pregnancy in 87 moose (Alces alces; 64 female, 23 male) captured from 2010 to 2020 in the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in northeastern Minnesota, USA. Pregnancy was confirmed via rectal palpation (n = 25), necropsy (n = 2), calf observation (n = 25) or characteristic pre-calving behavior (n = 6), with a total of 58 females determined pregnant and 6 not pregnant; 23 males were included to increase the non-pregnant sample size. Using receiver operating characteristic analysis, we identified an optimal threshold of 1.115 ng/ml with a specificity of 0.97 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.90–1.00) and a sensitivity of 0.98 (95% CI = 0.95–1.00). Progesterone concentrations were significantly higher in cases of pregnant versus non-pregnant cows, but we did not detect a difference between single and twin births. We applied our newly refined threshold to calculate annual pregnancy rates for all female moose (n = 133) captured in Grand Portage from 2010 to 2021. Mean pregnancy rate during this period was 91% and ranged annually from 69.2 to 100%. Developing a reliable method for determining pregnancy status via serum progesterone analyses will allow wildlife managers to assess pregnancy rates of moose without devoting substantial time and resources to palpation and calf monitoring.
Grandparent-Headed Families in University-Assisted Community Schools: Application of Social Capital Theory
Authors: Lee Youjung , Young Sarah R 
Published: February 2023

AbstractUniversity-assisted community schools (UACS), which work as partnerships between schools and universities that assist the mobilization of coordinated services to children, families, and communities, can build capacity for schools and neighborhoods to better serve the needs of marginalized families, such as grandparent-headed households. Despite the increase of grandparents raising grandchildren, school staff are often ill equipped with the necessary skills and resources to support these children and their caretakers, who have multifaceted needs and complicated family contexts. In this conceptual article, the authors utilize social capital theory to propose social work practice implications for implementing UACS to support grandparent-headed families, focusing on three target areas: (1) social obligation and social trust, (2) network and information flow, and (3) norms and effective sanctions. The UACS model can be a vehicle for building social trust among grandparent-headed families, schools, and local communities that can lead to a shared model for grandchildren’s academic success. Strengthened networks and information flows are necessary to enhance engagement with these marginalized caregivers. Last, details of how to create norms of cooperation that utilize grandparent-headed families as partners and experts are suggested for effective implementation of the UACS model that engages grandparent-headed families.