Investigations of generic self disassembly using shape memory alloys

Industrial recycling is a practice of growing importance while impending `Take Back' European legislation and economic pressures are increasing. Landfill sites are becoming exhausted and the industry could benefit from a novel approach to recycling pre and post consumer waste. Cost constraints limit the number of different products that can be recycled. Recyclers are working on broadening the range of reusable components from this waste stream, but the proposed approach would significantly increase the volume of recyclable material used in manufacturing new products. This alternative could potentially reduce recycling cost per product in the event of mandatory recycling as a wide variety of consumer electronics could be actively or self disassembled on the same generic dismantling line. The use of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators in a wide variety of consumer electronic products in the same dismantling facility was tested. The candidate products had undergone a multi-stage hierarchical temperature regime on their macro and subassembly disassemblies and results reported. Two forms of SMA actuators were employed in the designs of actuators; these were one-way Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) and two-way Copper-Zinc-Aluminum (CuZnAl) actuators

Cervical Transforaminal Epidural Injection in the Management of a Stinger

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146907/1/pmr273.pd

The subgroup identification problem for finitely presented groups

We introduce the subgroup identification problem, and show that there is a finitely presented group G for which it is unsolvable, and that it is uniformly solvable in the class of finitely presented locally Hopfian groups. This is done as an investigation into the difference between strong and weak effective coherence for finitely presented groups.Comment: 11 pages. This is the version submitted for publicatio

Verbal Communication Skills Requirements for Information Systems Professionals

The role of information systems (IS) professionals in organizations has changed through the years, from one who works mostly with technically oriented peers, to one who spends a significant amount of time interacting with people who are involved in the functional areas of the organization. In many organizations, IS professionals are assigned permanently to the user area and they are expected to not only be technically competent, but also be competent in the user\u27s area. This move of IS professionals to the functional areas necessitates that they communicate more with the functional users whose IS needs they are fulfilling. The users, on the other hand, are also required to interact and communicate more with the IS people. With the move toward distributed IS, users are becoming more involved in the specification, design and sometimes even construction of their own systems. It is therefore imperative that analysts and users be able to communicate with each other unequivocally, so that the systems are specified and developed properly. This research investigated the verbal communication skills requirements for IS practicing professionals and new university graduates. A survey was used for data collection. It was sent to IS professionals in several large organizations, that represented the industry in general. A nearly perfect response rate was achieved. The findings are useful for both IS professionals and university programs. Organizations can use the findings to identify areas of weaknesses in the skills of their IS personnel and eliminate them with continuing education. Universities can use the findings to identify skills that they may not be currently emphasizing in their curricula and make necessary adjustments

Emerging giant resonant exciton induced by Ta-substitution in anatase TiO2_{2}: a tunable correlation effect

Titanium dioxide (TiO$_2$) has rich physical properties with potential implications in both fundamental physics and new applications. Up-to-date, the main focus of applied research is to tune its optical properties, which is usually done via doping and/or nano-engineering. However, understanding the role of $d$-electrons in materials and possible functionalization of $d$-electron properties are still major challenges. Herewith, within a combination of an innovative experimental technique, high energy optical conductivity, and of the state-of-the-art {\it ab initio} electronic structure calculations, we report an emerging, novel resonant exciton in the deep ultraviolet region of the optical response. The resonant exciton evolves upon low concentration Ta-substitution in anatase TiO$_{2}$ films. It is surprisingly robust and related to strong electron-electron and electron-hole interactions. The $d$- and $f$- orbitals localization, due to Ta-substitution, plays an unexpected role, activating strong electronic correlations and dominating the optical response under photoexcitation. Our results shed light on a new optical phenomenon in anatase TiO$_{2}$ films and on the possibility of tuning electronic properties by Ta substitution

Design and Implementation of a State-Driven Operating System for Highly Reconfigurable Sensor Networks

Due to the low-cost and low-power requirement in an individual sensor node, the available computing resources turn out to be very limited like small memory footprint and irreplaceable battery power. Sensed data fusion might be needed before being transmitted as a tradeoff between procession and transmission in consideration of saving power consumption. Even worse, the application program needs to be complicated enough to be self-organizing and dynamically reconfigurable because changes in an operating environment continue even after deployment. State-driven operating system platform offers numerous benefits in this challenging situation. It provides a powerful way to accommodate complex reactive systems like diverse wireless sensor network applications. The memory usage can be bounded within a state transition table. The complicated issues like concurrency control and asynchronous event handling capabilities can be easily achieved in a well-defined behavior of state transition diagram. In this paper, we present an efficient and effective design of the state-driven operating system for wireless sensor nodes. We describe that the new platform can operate in an extremely resource constrained situation while providing the desired concurrency, reactivity, and reconfigurability. We also compare the executing results after comparing some benchmark test results with those on TinyOS

Landau-Ginzburg/Calabi-Yau correspondence, global mirror symmetry and Orlov equivalence

We show that the Gromov-Witten theory of Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces matches, in genus zero and after an analytic continuation, the quantum singularity theory (FJRW theory) recently introduced by Fan, Jarvis and Ruan following ideas of Witten. Moreover, on both sides, we highlight two remarkable integral local systems arising from the common formalism of Gamma-integral structures applied to the derived category of the hypersurface {W=0} and to the category of graded matrix factorizations of W. In this setup, we prove that the analytic continuation matches Orlov equivalence between the two above categories.Comment: 72pages, v2: Appendix B and references added. Typos corrected, v3: several mistakes corrected, final versio

Analysis of Synthetic Monodisperse Polysaccharides by Wide Mass Range Ultrahigh-Resolution MALDI Mass Spectrometry

Carbohydrates, such as oligo- and polysaccharides, are highly abundant biopolymers that are involved in numerous processes. The study of their structure and functions is commonly based on a material that is isolated from complex natural sources. However, a more precise analysis requires pure compounds with well-defined structures that can be obtained from chemical or enzymatic syntheses. Novel synthetic strategies have increased the accessibility of larger monodisperse polysaccharides, posing a challenge to the analytical methods used for their molecular characterization. Here, we present wide mass range ultrahigh-resolution matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometry (MS) as a powerful platform for the analysis of synthetic oligo- and polysaccharides. Synthetic carbohydrates 16-, 64-, 100-, and 151-mers were mass analyzed and characterized by MALDI in-source decay FT-ICR MS. Detection of fragment ions generated from glycosidic bond cleavage (or cross-ring cleavage) provided information of the monosaccharide content and the linkage type, allowing for the corroboration of the carbohydrate compositions and structures