Why ALPAL

Really it's "why use symbolic math programs to develop number crunching software," but these are from the doc_282 in the ALPAL docs (my emphasis).

• First, physics code could be generated and modified to incorporate new physics and features at a much greater speed than occurs with present codes. Such a language would directly foster improvements in the physics models employed, as well as teh numerical methods used to approximate these models. Two reasons point out the need to experiment with numerical methods for a given set of integro-differential equations. First, as a direct consequence of the paucity of mathematical theorems that constructively characterize partial differential equations (PDEs) in general, there is no means of determining what approximation technique will most faithfully capture the solution. Second, in almost all cases, analysis of an approximation technique is limited to idealized linear problems, so the stability and convergence properties of applying a given approximation technique to actual set of PDEs is unknown. Thus, the optimal algorithm for solving any given PDE or set of PDEs is not known, and any tool to aid the computational physicist must be capable of dealing with many different numerical algorithms and methods.
• Second, much of the drudgery and concomitant errors in constructing simulation codes would be eliminated by such a language. Large amounts of uninteresting algebra are associated with both the development of appropriate physical models and the discrete versions of the these models on a computer. If the algebraic work involved could be largely automated, computational physicists could spend a great deal more time doing the physics they were trained to do.
• Third, a more natural way of describing the physics model is possible with such a language. Errors in the modeling and numerical approximation process would become more obvious, thereby reducing the number of errors in the simulation code.
• Fourth, it becomes possible to automate the computation of Jacobian matrices both for linear and nonlinear problems. Not only would this automatic calculation greatly reduce the number of algebraic errors commited for those cases that solve linear systems of equations (with or without a nonlinear solver0, but it would make possible a large number of implicit techniques for situations where it has just not been feasible to use them in the past.
• Fifth, such a language could fulfill the need to optimize the very expensive computation that goes on in simulation codes. While a competent scientis can do a good job of optimizing a simple simulation code, the complexity of this task for large simulation codes is beyond the capabilities of even the most skilled scientist. Moreover, optimizing a code is a mundane task that once again does not reward the scientist in his primary pursuit. Optimization becomes an even more critical issue on non-scalar computer architectures such as the CRAY-XMP or an ultracomputer. A high-level view of how to vectorize and/or parallelize a given algorithm (or meta-algorithm) on one of these supercomputers is crucial so the scientist can substantially improve the cost-effectiveness of a simulation on that computer. In principle, a language like ALPAL can provide such a view.
• Sixth, since the cost of developing simulation codes is great, especially for new machine architectures, this language could be used to dramatically cut development costs. This is true whether a simulation code is being created for a new machine or whether it is being ported from a previously used computer. Experience with vector computers over the past decade at LLNL has taught this lesson well. More recently, some simulation codes have been ported to the CRAY-XMP, with use being made of its distributed computing capability. This porting to a distributed computer has required an even larger investment of manpower. These large manpower development costs will be repeated many times because a great variety of parallel computers are now appearing, and because parallel computing is a far greater technical challenge than even vector computing.
• Seventh, more complete and coherent documentation can be developed with such a language. In fact, a journal-style specification of a code can provide many details that are not generally provided in a journal article about the code. The journal-style specification is expressly designed for readability, wheras the text of a traditional simulation code is not. This is so because it is impossible to express high-level mathematical concepts such as derivatives and integrals together with their numerical approximations in Fortran or any other conventional high-level language.

International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification Latex Template

I had a bit of trouble getting the Latex document class, ij4uq.cls, for the new International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification to work on my install of Fedora 14, so I figured I'd share my recipe for making it work. The editor and journal support staff were very helpful with quick responses and useful pointers.

First you need to download IJ4UQ Latex Template and unzip that in a convenient location.

[jstults@grafton ij4uq]$ unzip IJ4UQ-Latex-Template.zip

This creates a directory with the ij4uq.cls file you need to make documents for the journal. Instead of the standard article class you'll have something like

\documentclass[review,article]{ij4uq}

at the top of the Latex document. The zip file also contains author instructions, a latex template document, a readme and instructions on installing the Palatino font which is required by the journal style.

The reason I had so much trouble getting this style to work is that Fedora still uses TexLive 2007. There is an effort underway to update things to TexLive 2010 for Fedora 15. Until that becomes standard, you have to turn on a development repository and install texlive. Unless you want to really break your distro and install the styles by hand. However, the sane way is to use the package management system as much as possible.

Second you need to turn on the development repo and update (or if you don't already have texlive installed, then install texlive).

[root@grafton ij4uq] rpm -i http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/2010/packages.f14/texlive-release.noarch.rpm [root@grafton ij4uq] yum clean all && yum update

Warning: this is a fairly significant download. Be prepared to go do something else while this crunches.

Third, try to compile the template document. It will likely break because you don't have all of the required *.sty files. Since you are running the sweet new development version of texlive, you can specify these to yum as they apear in the Latex error messages. This saves you from needing to track down which Fedora package provides the particular style file you are missing. This one-liner should get you most of the way there.

[root@grafton ij4uq] yum install 'tex(arial.sty)' 'tex(sectsty.sty)' 'tex(appendix.sty)' 'tex(changebar.sty)' 'tex(nicefrac.sty)' 'tex(lineno.sty)' 'tex(overpic.sty)' 'tex(stfloats.sty)' 'tex(textfit.sty)'

Fourth, you need to fix the unfree floatflt.sty.

[root@grafton ij4uq] mkdir -p /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/floatflt [root@grafton floatflt] cd /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/floatflt [root@grafton floatflt] rm -f floatflt.* float*.tex [root@grafton floatflt] wget http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/floatflt/floatflt.ins [root@grafton floatflt] wget http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/floatflt/floatflt.dtx [root@grafton floatflt] latex floatflt.ins [root@grafton floatflt] texhash

Fifth, you need to update the font maps for the new fonts.

[root@grafton ij4uq] updmap-sys --enable Map /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/map/dvips/palatino/upl.map

That's it. Now the ij4uq.cls template document that comes with the zip file should compile on your (only slightly broken) Fedora 14.

Storms of Our Grandfathers

Are we "rolling 13s" and getting thousand year storms every year?

NOAA April 2011 Precipitation Anomaly

The contour plots below are taken from Theory of the hydraulic jump and backwater curves. These studies of historical storm records were used to inform design decisions for the Miami Valley Conservancy District's retarding basins and channel improvements following the 1913 floods. My previous post has pictures of the hydraulic jump below Huffman Dam in operation.

My question to Dr Curry about what value high-fidelity (read: relatively expensive to run and analyze) climate simulations have for decision makers was motivated by reading up on infrastructure projects like the retarding basins and channel improvements in the Miami Valley. I think it would be interesting to take a look at a historical project like this that included rudimentary analysis of climate (weather event frequency and magnitude) in its design, and say, "here's how it would be informed differently using modern tools."

The design philosophy taken by the engineers working for the Miami Valley Conservancy District was to design for the worst possible case (historical records from Europe were also considered since they went back further and more reliably) plus roughly twenty percent margin due to the inherent uncertainty in estimating the worst possible case.

If it were necessary to depend wholly on the records of storms which have occurred in the United States, it might be thought possible for moderately great storms to occur over a period of a few hundred years, and then to find, as an exception, a storm three or four times as great. Theoretically that is very improbable, simply because water vapor in sufficient quantities cannot be transported from the ocean or gulf fast and long enough to cause such exceptional storms. As stated in chapter XI, however, records were collected of the stages of rivers in Europe for long periods of time, and these furnish fairly conclusive proof that such great exceptional storms actually do not occur. On the Danube at Vienna, for instance, we have records since about the year 1000 A.D.; fairly accurate records are available for stages of floods in the Tiber at Rome for more than 2,000 years; and records have been made of floods on the Seine at Paris for a long period of years.
Relation of Great Storms to Maximum Possible

After making the extensive investigation of storms in the eastern United States, it is believed that the March, 1913, flood is one of the great floods of centuries in the Miami Valley. In the course of three or four hundred years, however, a flood 15 or 20 per cent greater may occur. We do not believe a flood will ever occur which is more than 20 or 25 per cent in excess of that of March 1913. There is a factor of ignorance, however, against which we must provide, and the only way to do this is arbitrarily to increase the size of the maximum flood to be provided for. If longer records were available a closer estimate could be made, but in planning works on which the protection of the Miami Valley depends, it is necessary to go beyond human judgment. This has been done on all the other phases of the design, and we believe it would not be good engineering practice to stop at our judgment on this phase. We must be able to say that the engineering works are absolutely safe in every respect. For this reason provision is made for a flood nearly 40 per cent greater than that of March 1913. This is 15 or 20 per cent in excess of what is believed to be the greatest possible flood that will ever occur.
Reasons for Choosing as a Basis for Design a Flood 40% Greater than that of March 1913

Would modern tools cut the design margin due to reduced uncertainty or would they indicate that the project is now under-designed due to projected climate change? The latter seems unlikely considering that the magnitude of the purported effects has been repeatably shown to be smaller than we can reliably detect given the length of our data record. Would there be any practically significant changes to the decisions and designs? If your system already has sufficient margin for projected changes in weather-event magnitude do projected changes in frequency matter?

Technocrats and Philosopher Kings can Save our Impotent Polity

Wow, really awesome article on Climate Resistance, Trust Me, I Speak for Science. I liked these parts from the concluding paragraphs especially. I think you'll notice the parallels to my posts, The Social Ethic and Appeals for Technocracy and No Fluid Dynamicist Kings in Flight-Test.

This metaphysical confusion runs throughout Mooney’s argument. For Mooney, ‘ideology’ is some insidious, toxic force, the antithesis to ‘truth’ itself. The thrust of his argument is that we need particular scientific institutions to ameliorate this intrinsic weakness of human nature. And as such, these institutions deserve elevated status above the reach of those prone to ideology. Otherwise, we would tend towards creationism, to MMR-scares, to climate-change denial. In other words, our flawed minds would create a catastrophe, and it is this possibility of catastrophe that seemingly legitimises the elevated position of scientific institutions. Mooney reinvents Plato’s city state administrated by Philosopher Kings, the main differences being that Mooney conceives of a global polity, and the wisdom of the Guardians only produces the possibility of mere survival, not even a better way of life. To bring this back the matter of trust, Mooney doesn’t trust humans. Their minds are flawed. Their ambitions and ideas are mere fictions. The institutions they create are accordingly founded on false premises, which, instituted and acted upon, will cause disaster. Even when humans are exposed to ‘the truth’, it is, on Mooney’s view, absorbed into the poisonous, ideological programmes of partisans: liars and cheats who distort it. But without a disaster looming, this instance of a politics of fear would collapse.

He simply can’t make a popular argument for his political idea, and so turns to ‘science’ to identify the necessity of such a programme — i.e. the crisis — and to identify reasons why conventional democratic processes cannot realise it...

It's always a good day when you can throw a little Plato into the mix ; - )

Fooling Yourself is Easy

Common problems from an interesting set of slides:

• Confounding in experimental design
• Mixing up the sample labels
• Mixing up the group labels
• Incomplete documentation

"Unfortunately, we suspect, The most simple mistakes are common."

AAAS, Feb 19: pursuing reproducibility audio / slides

Things we look for:

• Data
• Provenance
• Code
• Descriptions of nonscriptable steps
• Descriptions of Planned Design, if Used

Dayton Flood Control Infrastructure at Work

Photos of the flood control contrivances in and around Dayton. All of these were taken on 3 May 2011. But first, a little history and engineering detail so you'll have a better appreciation of the pictures.

Arthur P. Morgan came to Dayton after the 1913 flood to design a flood control system to protect the entire Miami Valley. One element of this system was a dry dam—a dam that held water only during a flood and released the water at a rate that the downstream riverbed could carry. The problem was that the speed of the water through the dam made it powerful and destructive. To solve that problem, Morgan went with Col. Edward Deeds to his farm in Moraine where they built models in his swimming pool. They developed the hydraulic jump, which sends water through a series of baffles and steps, and then finally into a low wall that forces the water back onto itself, dissipating its own energy. This process of turning water onto itself is the hydraulic jump. From there, the water flows downstream calmly. This technology is still used in hydrological engineering throughout the world.

From Dayton Inventors River Walk

Here's a graphical depiction of a hydraulic jump.

A basic 1-D analysis follows the figure (clicking the image should take you to the free Google e-book).

Something that's kind of neat is that this system of flood control was designed in the days when "computers" were people (often women) not machines:

These engineers were certainly sure of themselves:
The bottom line is the important part. The hydraulic jump works by increasing the rate of turbulent kinetic energy production, this leads rather quickly (immediately if you assume equilibrium turbulence) to an increased rate of turbulent kinetic energy dissipation at the bottom of the energy cascade. The destructive capability (momentum) of the water is greatly reduced in exchange for raising its temperature ever so slightly.

The following figure shows the cuts that had to be made for the outlet channels and hydraulic jump pools (note Huffman Dam in the center).

And this one shows an aerial shot of the Huffman Dam just after completion.

These views from the top of the Huffman Dam show the turbulence at the end of the outlet channels due to the hydraulic jump.

Huffman Dam Outlet Channels

Huffman Dam Hydraulic Jump Pool Turbulence

View From the Top of Huffman Dam

These types of momentum dissipation mechanisms are also used throughout the city. The submerged dams take momentum out of the four streams that come together in the Dayton city limits: Miami, Mad and Stillwater Rivers and Wolf Creek.

Low Dam North-West of Downtown Dayton

Low Dam downstream of Dayton Canoe Club

There's talk of replacing these with something more water-sport (canoe / kayak) friendly.

Spring 2011 UAV News

Interesting stuff from today's AIAA news brief.

Light Manned Aircraft May Be Cheaper Option Than UAVs For Some.

Aerospace Daily and Defense Report (5/2, Fulgham) reported that because some countries cannot afford to maintain a force of UAVs for long periods, "a cheaper option is light, Predator-sized, manned aircraft equipped with sensors and weapons designed for the UAV market." Some of these include trainers that are "re-invented as light attack aircraft." Examples cited in the article include the Hawker Beechcraft/Lockheed-Martin AT-6B. According to the article, "given that the aircraft was designed for student-pilot abuse that's similar to the rigors of carrier landings, there appear to be a lot of operational options" such as "irregular warfare, homeland defense and civil support."

"Beast of Kandahar" Employed In Bin Laden Hunt.

Justin Hyde at Jalopnik (5/3) writes how the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel UAV known as the "Beast of Kandahar" was used in the operation that ended in bin Laden's death. The drone "was likely the eyes and ears of the operation, streaming live feeds back to command centers."

Satellite Images Show Location.

Space (5/3) reports Digital Globe released archival satellite images taken in January of the area where Osama bin Laden was found and killed. The company "located the probable compound using coordinates and physical descriptions through open sources."

Acquisition Death Spirals

This isn't about the normal death spiral of increasing unit costs driving production cuts, which increases unit costs, which drives production cuts, which.... It's about another sort of price spiral caused by the US government's infatuation with sole-sourcing critical capabilities. I think this is largely due to technocrats trusting simple, static industrial-age cost models which support decisions dominated by returns from economies of scale. The basic logic of the decisions these models support (an equilibrium solution) is: "things will be cheaper with one supplier because the overhead will be amortized over bigger quantities."

The basic mistake these models make is neglecting the dynamics. Price is a dynamic thing. If the capability is very critical, and there is only one supplier, then there is almost no ceiling on how high the price can rise. The price level reached under those dynamics is just below the point where you'd stop paying for the capability in favor of a more important one (I'll call this the buyer's "level of pain"). The alternative dynamics occurs when there are multiple competing suppliers. The price reached under these dynamics asymptotes towards the economic costs (this takes into account barriers to entry / opportunity costs). Here's a simple graph illustrating price behavior under these two situations.

Price Dynamics

This price increase doesn't happen because the contractors are evil. It happens because the contractors have a duty to their shareholders to maximize profit. This is, in fact, the ethical thing for them to do. If their customer is foolish and decides to create a little monopoly for them with every procurement, well, too bad for the customer's shareholders (taxpayers in this case)...

We see these dynamics play out in a variety of defense acquisitions. The F-35 engine program and the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program are two exemplars that are currently making the news.

The F-35 engine procurement was initially structured to support two suppliers during development, much like the engine programs for F-15 and F-16. There are operational advantages to having two engines. If a problem is found in one model, only half of the Air Force's tactical aircraft would have to be grounded while the solution is found. The other advantage comes from the suppliers competing with each other on price for various lots of engines. A disadvantage is overhead and development cost for the two suppliers and possibly increased logistics footprint for supporting two different engine models.

The recent news is that the budget does not include funds for the second engine. Not a week after this budget is passed which makes the engine buy a sole-source deal, we have an Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition complaining about the price from the remaining supplier.

"I'm not happy, as I am with so many parts of all our programs, with (the P&W engine's) cost performance so far," Carter told the House of Representatives Appropriations subcommittee on defense on Wednesday. "We need to drive the costs down." [...] "Our analysis does not show the payback," Carter told the subcommittee. He added that "people of good will come to different conclusions on this issue." U.S. "not happy" with F-35 engine cost overruns

Did the analysis include the second supplier offering to assume the risks and go fixed price on the development? Is complaining about the price, being really unhappy about paying it, but paying it anyway because there is no alternative anything but empty political theater? Makes for great content in the trade rags: Acquisition Official gives contractor a stern talking to! Contractor hangs head in a suitably chastened way, "yes, our prices are very high for these unique capabilities, we are working hard to contain the costs for our customer." Much harrumphing is heard from various congresscritters, meanwhile the price continues to spiral higher...

In the case of the EELV, despite the fact that the Air Force paid for two parallel rocket development programs we now have just a single supplier. The two launch service providers were so expensive, they could not compete in the commercial market. The business case for the two rockets hinged on them being able to make money in the commercial market and get their launch rates up. When no other customers but the US government could afford their high prices they had to combine into the single consortium: ULA. So it's sole-source with two vehicles. Recall the various advantages and disadvantages of developing two products discussed above in the case of the F-35 engine. Now EELV has the worst of both worlds: high overhead and logistics costs to support two vehicles, and no competition or customer diversification to get flight rates up and bring prices down.

Launch-service providers agree that their viability, as well as their ability to keep costs down, is based on launch rhythm. The more often a vehicle launches, the more reliable it becomes. Scale economies are introduced as well in a virtuous cycle. One U.S. government official agreed that if SpaceX is now allowed to break ULA’s monopoly on U.S. government satellite launches as indicated by the memorandum of agreement, it could force ULA’s already high prices even higher as it eats into ULA’s current market. “In the longer term we may be faced with questions about whether one of them [ULA or SpaceX] can remain viable without direct subsidies — the same questions we faced with ULA,” this official said. “Then what do we do? We have a policy of assured access to space, which means at least two vehicles. The demand for launches has not increased since ULA was formed, so we could be heading toward a nearly identical situation in a few years. But we are spending taxpayers’ money and if we can find reliable launches that are less expensive, we are not going to ignore that.” SpaceX Receives Boost in Bid To Loft National Security Satellites

It is interesting to note the thinking of the unnamed government official. He doesn't recognize the dynamics of the situation. He's living in a sole-source mindset, it just happens that he's going to change to this new, lower cost source.

NASA has a pricing model that shows savings from "outsourcing development", but not because of any interesting dynamics that they've included. The justification is the same as those underlying the broken decisions about aircraft engines: "returns from economies of scale". The dynamics of competition remains ignored.

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, in a separate presentation here April 12, said the agency’s policy of pushing rocket-development work onto the private sector will only reach maximum benefit if other customers also purchase the vehicles developed initially with NASA funding. Referring specifically to SpaceX, Garver said a conventional NASA procurement of a Falcon 9-class rocket would cost nearly $4.5 billion according to a NASA-U.S. Air Force cost model that includes the vehicle’s first flight. Outsourcing development to SpaceX, she said, would cut that figure by 60 percent, but only if other customers purchase the vehicle, thus permitting scale economies to reach maximum effect. After Servicing Space Station SpaceXs Priority is Taking on EELV

The way out of the death spiral is program dependent. In the EELV case it took a new entrant who has signed commercial contracts in addition to chasing the government launches (from a couple different agencies). SpaceX has built in significant customer diversification that ULA never developed (though this was hoped for in the early justifications of the program structure). Why did Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, and subsequently ULA never develop this customer diversification? Because they didn't have to. The government guaranteed their continued existence. SpaceX, on the other hand, has no such guarantee. The only option for their continued existence is to make a profit from more than one customer. In the F-35 engine case, DoD has decided that even the assumption of development risk by the second supplier under a fixed price contract is not enough to close the case. This puzzles me. Maybe the second engine has become a symbol of "duplication and waste" rather than "competition and efficiency". If so, then DoD has given the primary engine supplier a way to "frame" their competition out of existence with political argument (removing the need for them to earn market share honestly).

The outlook for lower cost space access looks good. However, as long as the DoD is stuck in its current frame, there is great opportunity for political theater that will serve mainly as a content generator for defense trade publications and a distraction from the root cause of steadily rising tactical aircraft engine costs into the future.

Red Hawks Host Black Knights

I went to watch some collegiate and amateur bouts down in Oxford on Saturday. Miami University was hosting the cadets from West Point (last year's collegiate champs, nice write-up in NY Times). If you're used to the glammed-up barroom brawling of UFC or even the raw knock-out power of professional boxing, then the style and speed of amateur boxing might come as quite a surprise. I really like the amateur fights because they tend to pivot on conditioning, thinking and skillful execution rather than landing lucky or brutal head-shots.

The 14-bout evening started out with a couple of tough young ladies, one from Cincinati, one from Oxford, going three rounds. It's hard to do match-ups for women because there are just fewer boxers in an already small pool of athletes (since boxing is no longer an NCAA sport). The winner of this bout threw very disciplined, quick, straight punches which her clearly less experienced opponent was ill-equipped to catch or counter. This fight was followed by a few match-ups with local fighters out of Cincinnati, OSU and Miami University. The early fights consisted of lots of off-balanced brawling. The result of "first fight" jitters and inexperience for many of these young athletes.

The cadets from West Point fought out of the blue corner for the remainder of the evening against a line-up consisting of mainly Miami University fighters, with the occasional fighter from OSU or Xavier thrown in to the mix. From the first cadet to fight, on up to the "main event" it was clear why these gentlemen have won three championships in a row. A string of cadets won judges decisions handily over their opponents. In the process demonstrating solid fundamentals, and coolness under the frequent early, but generally dissipative, aggressiveness of their foes.

Then, in the first bout at 132lbs (the second being the "main event" of the night), Lang Clarke of Army landed a solid combination to the head followed-up with a deliberate two-two that sent the man from Xavier to the mat (the referee was in the midst of "stop" as the second right landed). The first and only knock-out of the evening. The Xavier athlete was back on his feet (to the relieved cheers of the crowd) after a quick nap and a check from the ring-side doc.

The only heavy-weight bout of the night was stopped by the referee near the end of the first round. The fighter from West Point landed repeated hooks-to-the-head which the young man from Oxford was not defending.

The fight at 195lbs was relatively surprising, not in outcome (the cadet won), but in tactics. Previously the cadets had employed a shorter and simpler version of the rope-a-dope tactic when their less disciplined and less well-conditioned opponents came out swinging. Rather than stand and brawl toe-to-toe, they defended and let the other fighter tire, then exploited that self-inflicted weakness with steady "work" for the rest of the round. This cadet stood up inside his opponent's early windmill, and landed straight punches and upper cuts to the head. One or two furious windmillings punctuated by deliberately thrown and well-landed opposing hits was all that it took for the windmill's blades to drop and the hub to wobble on it's axis. Referee stops contest.

The crowd was ready for their main event. A nice cheer went up for the wiry 132-pounder from Oxford as he stepped in the ring. Yours truly was the only one to cheer when the young man from West Point entered the ring (much to my wife's embarrassment). After she heard the raucous cheer when they actually introduced the Oxford fighter, she said, "OK, you can go ahead and yell for that West Point guy," so I did.

Both fighters were about equally conditioned, which made for a much more exciting fight. They were both able to work (with varying levels of effectiveness) for the majority of each round. The fighter from Oxford threw a great volume of widely-arcing punches, most of which seemed ineffective to me due to the cadet's competent defense. After the repeated, straight head-shots landed by the cadet in the third round, I thought the decision would go his way (if the fight was not stopped sooner, which had been the outcome of this sort of pounding previously). The judges had a different perspective on the bout, so the decision went to the man from Oxford, who, much to his credit, was able to recover repeatedly from the wobbliness induced by these direct blows and swing away until the bell relieved him.

The coaches, medical and officiating crew at Miami University should be congratulated for putting on such a professional event that took good care of these young athletes, and allowed them to further develop their skills.

Thought this was funny; why you don't want guys from the same gym on the card:

Sparring partners are endowed with habitual consideration and forbearance, and they find it hard to change character. A kind of guild fellowship holds them together, and they pepper each other's elbows with merry abandon, grunting with pleasure like hippopotamuses in a beer vat.
The Sweet Science