Privacy Is Not Dead: Expressively Using Law to Push Back Against Corporate Deregulators and Meaningfully Protect Data Privacy Rights

When the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed in 2016, it represented the world’s first major comprehensive data privacy law and kicked off a conversation about how we think about the right to privacy in the modern age. The law granted a broad range of rights to EU citizens, including a right to have companies delete data they collect about you, a right not to have your personal information sold, and a range of other rights all geared towards individual autonomy over personal data. All the while, platform companies like Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Amazon have taken advantage of a phenomenon called spontaneous deregulation to outrun legislation designed to regulate data privacy. Spontaneous deregulators take advantage of the inherent gap between the speed at which technology advances and the comparatively languid pace at which legislatures try to keep up. The deregulators do this through co-opting discourses about privacy and pitching a selfregulatory system in which they are entrusted with personal data that they have an inherent profit motive to capitalize on. In today’s economy, data is eminently valuable—trusting a system of deregulation creates unacceptable conflicts of interest at best and a predatory system of data mining at worst. This Note advocates for robust privacy legislation that takes full advantage of the expressive function of the law—the aspect of lawmaking that shapes and protects valuable social norms— to meaningfully protect individual data privacy rights from corporate deregulators. By placing social values and human rights at the forefront, expressive law makes it more difficult for deregulators to obfuscate the purposes and messaging of privacy

Microscopic Damage Evolution During Very High Cycle Fatigue (VHCF) of Tempered Martensitic Steel

AbstractDimensioning of high-strength steels relies on the knowledge of Wöhler-type S/N data and the assumption of a fatigue limit for applications where the number of load cycles exceeds 107. Very high cycle fatigue (VHCF) experiments applied to a 0.5C-1.25Cr-Mo tempered steel (German designation: 50CrMo4) revealed surface crack initiation at prior austenite grain boundaries in medium strength condition (37HRC) and internal crack initiation at non-metallic inclusions at high strength condition (48HRC). Despite the formation of small cracks during cycling up to 109 cycles, it seems that the medium strength condition exhibits a real fatigue limit. Application of automated electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) within the shallow-notched area of electro-polished fatigue specimens had shown that prior austenite grain boundaries act as effective obstacles to crack propagation. High resolution thermography during cycling of the specimens allowed the identification of local plasticity, which led to crack initiation at a later stage of the fatigue life. It was found that Cr segregation rows play a decisive role in the crack initiation process. By means of high-resolution electron microscopy in combination with focused ion beam milling (FIB), evolution of cyclic plasticity and crack initiation was correlated with the material's microstructure. The results are discussed in terms of the completely different crack initiation mechanisms of medium and high strength variants of the same steel. EBSD and crack propagation data are used to adapt numerical modeling tools to predict crack initiation and short crack propagation

Alloy and process design of forging steels for better environmental performance

In material development processes, the question if a new alloy is more sustainable than the existing one becomes increasingly significant. Existing studies on metals and alloys show that their composition can make a difference regarding the environmental impact. In this case study, a recently developed air hardening forging steel is used to produce a U-bolt as an example component in automotive engineering. The production process is analyzed regarding the environmental performance and compared with the standard quench and tempering steels 42CrMo4 and 33MnCrB5-2. The analysis is based on results from applying the method of Life Cycle Assessment. First, the production process and the alterations on material, product, and process level are defined. The resulting process flows were quantified and attributed with the environmental impacts covering Carbon Footprint, Cumulative Energy Demand, and Material Footprint as they represent best the resource-, energy- and thus carbon-intensive steel industry. The results show that the development of the air hardening forging steel leads to a higher environmental impact compared to the reference alloys when the material level is considered. Otherwise, the new steel allows changes in manufacturing process, which is why an additional assessment on process level was conducted. It is seen that the air hardening forging steel has environmental savings as it enables skipping a heat treatment process. Superior material characteristics enable the application of lightweight design principles, which further increases the potential environmental savings. The present work shows that the question of the environmental impact does not end with analyzing the raw material only. Rather, the entire manufacturing process of a product must be considered. The case study also shows methodological questions regarding the specification of steel for alloying elements, processes in the metalworking industry and the data availability and quality in Life Cycle Assessment

Coupling a single electron to a Bose-Einstein condensate

The coupling of electrons to matter is at the heart of our understanding of material properties such as electrical conductivity. One of the most intriguing effects is that electron-phonon coupling can lead to the formation of a Cooper pair out of two repelling electrons, the basis for BCS superconductivity. Here we study the interaction of a single localized electron with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and show that it can excite phonons and eventually set the whole condensate into a collective oscillation. We find that the coupling is surprisingly strong as compared to ionic impurities due to the more favorable mass ratio. The electron is held in place by a single charged ionic core forming a Rydberg bound state. This Rydberg electron is described by a wavefunction extending to a size comparable to the dimensions of the BEC, namely up to 8 micrometers. In such a state, corresponding to a principal quantum number of n=202, the Rydberg electron is interacting with several tens of thousands of condensed atoms contained within its orbit. We observe surprisingly long lifetimes and finite size effects due to the electron exploring the wings of the BEC. Based on our results we anticipate future experiments on electron wavefunction imaging, investigation of phonon mediated coupling of single electrons, and applications in quantum optics.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures and supplementary informatio

A Systematic Approach to the Test of Combined HW/SW Systems

Abstract-Today we can identify a big gap between requirement specification and the generation of test environments. This article extends the Classification Tree Method for Embedded Systems (CTM/ES) to fill this gap by new concepts for the precise specification of stimuli for operational ranges of continuous control systems. It introduces novel means for continuous acceptance criteria definition and for functional coverage definition

On parallel scalability aspects of strongly coupled partitioned fluid-structure-acoustics interaction

Multi-physics simulations, such as fluid-structure-acoustics interaction (FSA), require a high performance computing environment in order to perform the simulation in a reasonable amount of computation time. Currently used coupling methods use a staggered execution of the fluid and solid solver [6], which leads to inherent load imbalances. In [12] a new coupling scheme based on a quasi-Newton method is proposed for fluidstructure interaction which coupled the fluid and solid solver in parallel. The quasi- Newton method requires approximately the same number of coupling iterations per time step compared to a staggered coupling approach, resulting in a better load balance when running in a parallel environment. This contribution investigates the scalability limit and load-balancing for a strongly coupled fluid-structure interaction problem, and also for a fluid-structure-acoustics interaction problem. The acoustic far field of the fluid-structure-acoustics interaction problem is loosely coupled with the flow field