The Prometheus Challenge Redux

Following up on its predecessor in this Journal, the article defends philosophy as a guide to making and analyzing art; identifies Cubist solutions to the Prometheus Challenge, including a novel analysis of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; defines a new concept of aesthetic attitude; proves the compatibility of Prometheus Challenge artworks with logic; and explains why Plato would have welcomed such artworks in his ideal state

Modeling Impacts of Cold Climates on Vehicle Emissions

This project relates to the research thrust area of ‘environmental impact assessment,' specifically the impact of cold climates on vehicle exhaust emissions. Motor vehicles emit pollutants that are harmful to human. Emissions are thought to be elevated during engine cold starts. During winter, low-lying temperature inversion can trap vehicle emissions near the surface, leading to significantly elevated pollutant concentrations. Despite the importance, vehicle emissions data for cold climates are sparse and the accuracy of vehicle emissions model parameterizations for cold climates is not known. The goal of this project is to improve ability of EPA's Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) model to simulate cold start emissions in cold climate

Experimental study of visual corona under aeronautic pressure conditions using low-cost imaging sensors

Visual corona tests have been broadly applied for identifying the critical corona points of diverse high-voltage devices, although other approaches based on partial discharge or radio interference voltage measurements are also widely applied to detect corona activity. Nevertheless, these two techniques must be applied in screened laboratories, which are scarce and expensive, require sophisticated instrumentation, and typically do not allow location of the discharge points. This paper describes the detection of the visual corona and location of the critical corona points of a sphere-plane gap configurations under different pressure conditions ranging from 100 to 20 kPa, covering the pressures typically found in aeronautic environments. The corona detection is made with a low-cost CMOS imaging sensor from both the visible and ultraviolet (UV) spectrum, which allows detection of the discharge points and their locations, thus significantly reducing the complexity and costs of the instrumentation required while preserving the sensitivity and accuracy of the measurements. The approach proposed in this paper can be applied in aerospace applications to prevent the arc tracking phenomenon, which can lead to catastrophic consequences since there is not a clear protection solution, due to the low levels of leakage current involved in the pre-arc phenomenon.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A “Hip-Hop” Broadway Masterpiece or a Misrepresentation of Hip Hop Culture

In February of 2015, a music sensation hit the streets of New York City and started a revolution across the country. The renowned Lin Manuel Miranda; composer, musician and actor, debuted his six-year creation - an integration of hip hop music into the world of Broadway through the sensational story of Alexander Hamilton. Based off of Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, this entirely musical production details the story of the poor immigrant who came to America with big ideas and wrote his way to being a predominate figure in American history (Miranda, 2016). Impressive choreography is combined with powerful lyrics to narrate Alexander Hamilton’s journey through war, politics, his family and the birth of our nation. Concerned with protecting his legacy and having his voice heard, Hamilton constantly put himself in compromising positions for the greater good of our country. The show’s unconventional structure and use of race bending casting has caused a true Broadway revolution across the country

Protecting the SWAP\sqrt{SWAP} operation from general and residual errors by continuous dynamical decoupling

We study the occurrence of errors in a continuously decoupled two-qubit state during a $\sqrt{SWAP}$ quantum operation under decoherence. We consider a realization of this quantum gate based on the Heisenberg exchange interaction, which alone suffices for achieving universal quantum computation. Furthermore, we introduce a continuous-dynamical-decoupling scheme that commutes with the Heisenberg Hamiltonian to protect it from the amplitude damping and dephasing errors caused by the system-environment interaction. We consider two error-protection settings. One protects the qubits from both amplitude damping and dephasing errors. The other features the amplitude damping as a residual error and protects the qubits from dephasing errors only. In both settings, we investigate the interaction of qubits with common and independent environments separately. We study how errors affect the entanglement and fidelity for different environmental spectral densities.Comment: Extended version of arXiv:1005.1666. To appear in PR