The Cornell-BNL FFAG-ERL Test Accelerator (C\(\beta\)) will comprise the first ever Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) based on a Fixed Field Alternating Gradient (FFAG) lattice. In particular, we plan to ...use a Non Scaling FFAG (NS-FFAG) lattice that is very compact and thus space- and cost- effective, enabling multiple passes of the electron beam in a single recirculation beam line, using the superconducting RF (SRF) linac multiple times. The FFAG-ERL moves the cost optimized linac and recirculation lattice to a dramatically better optimum. The prime accelerator science motivation for C\(\beta\) is proving that the FFAG-ERL concept works. This is an important milestone for the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) plans to build a major Nuclear Physics facility, eRHIC, based on producing 21 GeV electron beams to collide with the RHIC ion beams. A consequence of the C\(\beta\) work would be the availability of significantly better, cost-effective, compact CW high-brightness electron beams for a plethora of scientific investigations and applications, such as X-ray sources, dark-matter and dark-energy searches, and industrial high-power Free-Electron Laser (FEL) applications. C\(\beta\) brings together the resources and expertise of a large DOE National Laboratory, BNL, and a leading research university, Cornell. C\(\beta\) will be built in an existing building at Cornell, for the most part using components that have been developed under previous R&D programs, including a fully commissioned world-leading photoemission electron injector, a large SRF accelerator module, and a high-power beam stop. The only elements that require design and construction from scratch is the FFAG magnet transport lattice. This white paper describes a project that promises to propel high-power, high-brightness electron beam science and applications to an exciting new level.
Collaborative web applications such as Facebook, Flickr and Yelp present new challenges for storing and querying large amounts of data. As users and developers are focused more on performance than ...single copy consistency or the ability to perform ad-hoc queries, there exists an opportunity for a highly-scalable system tailored specifically for relaxed consistency and pre-computed queries. The Web 2.0 development model demands the ability to both rapidly deploy new features and automatically scale with the number of users. There have been many successful distributed key-value stores, but so far none provide as rich a query language as SQL. We propose a new architecture, SCADS, that allows the developer to declaratively state application specific consistency requirements, takes advantage of utility computing to provide cost effective scale-up and scale-down, and will use machine learning models to introspectively anticipate performance problems and predict the resource requirements of new queries before execution.
Insight-oriented group psychotherapy is a common modality of treatment on inpatient psychiatric wards, yet is effectiveness for acutely hospitalized patients has not been adequately studied. A ...comparison was made of the effects of three experimental conditions (insight-oriented group psychotherapy, activity-oriented task group, and unstructured control condition) on 86 acutely hospitalized psychiatric patients at a United States Air Force teaching hospital. The group psychotherapy and task group patients did not show greater improvement after 20 days of hospitalization than control patients. In fact, significantly more psychotic patients scored worse in the group psychotherapy condition. It is suggested that insight-oriented group psychotherapy may not be an effective treatment modality during the first 3 weeks of psychiatric hospitalization, especially for psychotic patients.
