Ultra-soft 100 nm Thick Zero Poisson’s Ratio Film with 60% Reversible Compressibility

About a 100 nm thick multilayer film of nanoparticle monolayers and polymer layers is shown to behave like cellular-foam with a modulus below 100 KPa. The 1.25 cm radius film adhered to a rigid surface can be compressed reversibly to 60% strain. The more than four orders of magnitude lower modulus compared to its constituents is explained by considering local bending in the (nano)cellular structure, similar to cork and wings of beetles. As the rigidity of the polymer backbone is increased in just four monolayers the modulus of the composite increases by over 70%. Electro-optical map of the strain distribution over the area of compression and increase in modulus with thickness indicates the films have zero Poisson’s ratio

Tactile Imaging of an Imbedded Palpable Structure for Breast Cancer Screening

Apart from texture, the human finger can sense palpation. The detection of an imbedded structure is a fine balance between the relative stiffness of the matrix, the object, and the device. If the device is too soft, its high responsiveness will limit the depth to which the imbedded structure can be detected. The sensation of palpation is an effective procedure for a physician to examine irregularities. In a clinical breast examination (CBE), by pressing over 1 cm2 area, at a contact pressure in the 70−90 kPa range, the physician feels cancerous lumps that are 8- to 18-fold stiffer than surrounding tissue. Early detection of a lump in the 5−10 mm range leads to an excellent prognosis. We describe a thin-film tactile device that emulates human touch to quantify CBE by imaging the size and shape of 5−10 mm objects at 20 mm depth in a breast model using ~80 kPa pressure. The linear response of the device allows quantification where the greyscale corresponds to the relative local stiffness. The (background) signal fro

Primitive computations in phrase construction

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-73).The Minimalist Program in current linguistic theory seeks to explain linguistic structure in terms of economy principles, under the assumption that the human language faculty is a perfect system that performs only enough work to satisfy interface requirements. We consider processing costs as a property of syntactic computation and propose that these principles of economy may be met by the availability of alternative operations, each favorable in different circumstances. We characterize the basic Merge operation as a collection of three nested operations that apply to three corresponding levels of nested syntactic data types. In this framework, we provide an analysis of coordinate structure that uses a goal of minimizing processing cost to explain a number of peculiar characteristics of coordination, including the Coordination of Likes Constraint, the Coordinate Structure Constraint, and apparent case and agreement violations.by Chieu V. Nguyen.M.Eng

MANAGEMENT OF TRAINING ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING STAFF AT CAN THO COLLEGE, VIETNAM

With the topic "Management of training activities for teaching staff at Can Tho College", the study has systematized the theoretical basis of the management of training activities. It deals with a survey on the current situation of training the teaching staff of Can Tho College, Can Tho City, Vietnam, and proposes some measures to foster the teaching staff at Can Tho College, Can Tho City. On the basis of theoretical research and practical survey, the authors would propose 6 specific measures to manage training activities for teaching staff at Can Tho College. The proposed measures would affect all subjects and stages of the management process from raising the needs, planning, organizing, directing to checking and evaluating; impacting on all elements of the management of training activities of lecturers in order to foster, as well as diversify training activities to meet the needs of lecturers. Each proposed measure also has different goals, tasks and implementation, but in general, they are closely related, interact and complement each other. Therefore, those measures must be implemented in a synchronous, unified, flexible and flexible manner in order to achieve high results, meeting the requirements of improving the level and quality of teaching at the school today.  Article visualizations

Robust domain adaptation for relation extraction via clustering consistency

We propose a two-phase framework to adapt existing relation extraction classifiers to extract relations for new target domains. We address two challenges: negative transfer when knowledge in source domains is used without considering the differences in relation distributions; and lack of adequate labeled samples for rarer relations in the new domain, due to a small labeled data set and imbalance relation distributions. Our framework leverages on both labeled and unlabeled data in the target domain. First, we determine the relevance of each source domain to the target domain for each relation type, using the consistency between the clustering given by the target domain labels and the clustering given by the predictors trained for the source domain. To overcome the lack of labeled samples for rarer relations, these clusterings operate on both the labeled and unlabeled data in the target domain. Second, we trade-off between using relevance-weighted sourcedomain predictors and the labeled target data. Again, to overcome the imbalance distribution, the source-domain predictors operate on the unlabeled target data. Our method outperforms numerous baselines and a weakly-supervised relation extraction method on ACE 2004 and YAGO. © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics

The Seiberg-Witten equations on manifolds with boundary

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-252).In this thesis, we undertake an in-depth study of the Seiberg-Witten equations on manifolds with boundary. We divide our study into three parts. In Part One, we study the Seiberg-Witten equations on a compact 3-manifold with boundary. Here, we study the solution space of these equations without imposing any boundary conditions. We show that the boundary values of this solution space yield an infinite dimensional Lagrangian in the symplectic configuration space on the boundary. One of the main difficulties in this setup is that the three-dimensional Seiberg-Witten equations, being a dimensional reduction of an elliptic system, fail to be elliptic, and so there are resulting technical difficulties intertwining gauge-fixing, elliptic boundary value problems, and symplectic functional analysis. In Part Two, we study the Seiberg-Witten equations on a 3-manifold with cylindrical ends. Here, Morse-Bott techniques adapted to the infinite-dimensional setting allow us to understand topologically the space of solutions to the Seiberg-Witten equations on a semiinfinite cylinder in terms of the finite dimensional moduli space of vortices at the limiting end. By combining this work with the work of Part One, we make progress in understanding how cobordisms between Riemann surfaces may provide Lagrangian correspondences between their respective vortex moduli spaces. Moreover, we apply our results to provide analytic groundwork for Donaldson's TQFT approach to the Seiberg-Witten invariants of closed 3-manifolds. Finally, in Part Three, we study analytic aspects of the Seiberg-Witten equations on a cylindrical 4-manifold supplied with Lagrangian boundary conditions of the type coming from the first part of this thesis. The resulting system of equations constitute a nonlinear infinite-dimensional nonlocal boundary value problem and is highly nontrivial. We prove fundamental elliptic regularity and compactness type results for the corresponding equations, so that these results may therefore serve as foundational analysis for constructing a monopole Floer theory on 3-manifolds with boundary.by Timothy Nguyen.Ph.D

The Surrounded Atom Theory of Order-disorder Phase Transition in Binary Alloys

In this paper, the surrounded atom model is developed to study the order-disorder phase transition in binary alloys. We calculate the configurational free energy of the alloys, derive the equation of equilibrium and determine the critical temperature of the phase transition