I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

to be done in this area. Face recognition is a problem that scarcely clamoured for attention before the computer age but, having surfaced, has involved a wide range of techniques and has attracted the attention of some fine minds (David Mumford was a Fields Medallist in 1974). This singular application of mathematical modelling to a messy applied problem of obvious utility and importance but with no unique solution is a pretty one to share with students: perhaps, returning to the source of our opening quotation, we may invert Duncan's earlier observation, 'There is an art to find the mind's construction in the face!'.

Linear and nonlinear waves, by G. B. Whitham. Pp.636. £50. 1999. ISBN 0 471 35942 4 (Wiley).

Digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) is a non-intrusive analysis technique that is very popular for mapping flows quantitatively. To get accurate results, in particular in complex flow fields, a number of challenges have to be faced and solved: The quality of the flow measurements is affected by computational details such as image pre-conditioning, sub-pixel peak estimators, data validation procedures, interpolation algorithms and smoothing methods. The accuracy of several algorithms was determined and the best performing methods were implemented in a user-friendly open-source tool for performing DPIV flow analysis in Matlab.

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PIVlab – Towards User-friendly, Affordable and Accurate Digital Particle Image Velocimetry in MATLAB

Turbulent dispersed multiphase flows are common in many engineering and environmental applications. The stochastic nature of both the carrier-phase turbulence and the dispersed-phase distribution makes the problem of turbulent dispersed multiphase flow far more complex than its single-phase counterpart. In this article we first review the current state-of-the-art experimental and computational techniques for turbulent dispersed multiphase flows, their strengths and limitations, and opportunities for the future. The review then focuses on three important aspects of turbulent dispersed multiphase flows: the preferential concentration of particles, droplets, and bubbles; the effect of turbulence on the coupling between the dispersed and carrier phases; and modulation of carrier-phase turbulence due to the presence of particles and bubbles.

Turbulent Dispersed Multiphase Flow

Capillarity and Wetting Phenomena: Drops, Bubbles, Pearls, Waves

The vortex organization of cylinder wakes is experimentally studied by time-resolved tomographic Particle Image Velocimetry at Reynolds numbers ranging from 180 to 5,540. Time resolved measurements are performed at Re = 180, 360 and 540, whereas the transitional (Re = 1,080) and turbulent regimes (Re = 5,540) are investigated by snapshots separated in phase by more than π/4. The vortex structure evolution is visualized by the 3D vorticity field, revealing a regular shedding at the lowest Reynolds, whereas at Re > 500 the Benard-Karman vortex street exhibits counter-rotating stream-wise vortex pairs (characteristic of Mode B) dominating the 3D motion. The regime at Re = 360 produces a transitional pattern where the counter-rotating vortex pairs (Mode B), coexist with profoundly distorted shedding of oblique elements forming a chain of rhombus-like vortex cells. In the turbulent flow regime (Re = 5,540) a large increase in the range of flow scales is directly observed with the appearance of Kelvin-Helmholtz type vortices in the separated shear layer consistently with what is abundantly reported in literature. The statistical description of the secondary structures is inferred from a 3D autocorrelation analysis yielding two span-wise wavelengths for the counter-rotating pairs, an inner length given by (twice) the distance between counter-rotating elements and an outer one given by the distance between pairs. The uncertainty analysis of the present tomographic PIV experiments reveals that this approach is suited for the investigation of vortex wakes with a typical error of 2 and 10% on the velocity and vorticity vectors, respectively.

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Three-dimensional vorticity patterns of cylinder wakes

The understanding of the physics of flapping flight has long been limited due to the obvious experimental difficulties in studying the flow field around real insects. In this study the time-dependent three-dimensional velocity field around a flapping wing was measured quantitatively for the first time. This was done using a dynamically-scaled wing moving in mineral oil in a pattern based on the kinematics obtained from real insects. The periodic flow is very reproducible, due to the relatively low Reynolds number and precise control of the wing. This repeatability was used to reconstruct the full evolving flow field around the wing from separate stereoscopic particle image velocimetry measurements for a number of spanwise planes and time steps. Typical results for two cases (an impulsive start and a simplified flapping pattern) are reported. Visualizations of the obtained data confirm the general picture of the leading-edge vortex that has been reported in recent publications, but allow a refinement of the detailed structure: rather than a single strand of vorticity, we find a stable pair of counter-rotating structures. We show that the data can also be used for quantitative studies, such as lift and drag prediction.

Time-resolved reconstruction of the full velocity field around a dynamically-scaled flapping wing

Coherent structures and their time evolution in the logarithmic region of a turbulent boundary layer investigated by means of 3D space–time correlations and time-dependent conditional averaging techniques are the focuses of the present paper. Experiments have been performed in the water tunnel at TU Delft measuring the particle motion within a volume of a turbulent boundary layer flow along a flat plate at a free-stream velocity of 0.53 m/s at Re ? = 2,460 based on momentum thickness by using time-resolved tomographic particle image velocimetry (PIV) at 1 kHz sampling rate and particle tracking velocimetry (PTV). The obtained data enable an investigation into the flow structures in a 3D Eulerian reference frame within time durations corresponding to 28 ?/U. An analysis of the time evolution of conditional averages of vorticity components representing inclined hairpin-like legs and of Q2- and Q4-events has been performed, which gives evidence to rethink the early stages of the classical hairpin development model for high Reynolds number TBLs. Furthermore, a PTV algorithm has been applied on the time sequences of reconstructed 3D particle image distributions identifying thousands of particle trajectories that enable the calculation of probability distributions of the three components of Lagrangian accelerations.

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Eulerian and Lagrangian views of a turbulent boundary layer flow using time-resolved tomographic PIV

Whole-field velocity measurement techniques based on ultrasound imaging (a.k.a. ‘ultrasound imaging velocimetry’ or ‘echo-PIV’) have received significant attention from the fluid mechanics community in the last decade, in particular because of their ability to obtain velocity fields in flows that elude characterisation by conventional optical methods. In this review, an overview is given of the history, typical components and challenges of these techniques. The basic principles of ultrasound image formation are summarised, as well as various techniques to estimate flow velocities; the emphasis is on correlation-based techniques. Examples are given for a wide range of applications, including in vivo cardiovascular flow measurements, the characterisation of sediment transport and the characterisation of complex non-Newtonian fluids. To conclude, future opportunities are identified. These encompass not just optimisation of the accuracy and dynamic range, but also extension to other application areas.

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Ultrasound imaging velocimetry : A review

The wall shear stress plays a key role in the interaction between blood flow and the surrounding tissue. To obtain quantitative information about this parameter, velocity measurements are required with sufficient spatial (and temporal) resolution. We present a methodology for the determination of the wall shear stress in vivo in the vitelline network of a chick embryo. Velocity data is obtained by microscopic particle image velocimetry using correlation ensemble averaging; the latter is used to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements. The temporal evolution of the pulsatile flow is reconstructed by sorting the image pairs based on a phase estimate. From these flow measurements, the wall shear stress can be derived either directly from the magnitude of the gradients or from fits to velocity profiles. Both methods give results that are in good agreement with each other, while the former method is significantly easier to implement. For more accurate studies, the full three-dimensional velocity field may be required. It is demonstrated how this velocity field can be obtained by scanning the measurement volume.

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Christian Poelma

Papers

Three-dimensional vorticity patterns of cylinder wakes

Time-resolved reconstruction of the full velocity field around a dynamically-scaled flapping wing

Eulerian and Lagrangian views of a turbulent boundary layer flow using time-resolved tomographic PIV

Ultrasound imaging velocimetry : A review

In vivo blood flow and wall shear stress measurements in the vitelline network