Spheres of Practice for the Co-design of Wearables

As expectations within the area of smart textiles increasingly become informed and driven by technological developments, the disciplinary boundaries and relationship between user and technological innovation will unavoidably transform. The authors venture that new paradigms of collaborative practice will inevitably develop between design and science, to more fully realize both the opportunities and contexts that wearable textiles offer. Drawing on previous work by the authors namely Molecular Imprinted Textiles (MIT - 2009/10), Future Textile Visions (FTV - 2010/11), Design Specks: Connecting People with Speckled Computing (2012/13), Second Skin (2013/14), and The S*** Word: Designing the Empathic Underwardrobe (2014), a model is proposed to more clearly understand and navigate between design, technology and application, and more importantly, between our cultural understanding of the user and the wearer. This paper reflects on a series of projects that inform a methodological approach: a process of asking questions; developing scenarios; exploring materials and making; generating concepts and building prototypes. Each project involved collaborations between design, academics, users and industry, and a form of co-design, where knowledge exchange was central, design was the intermediary, and the goal was to understand the drivers and the stakeholders. Simultaneously, this research sought to better understand and communicate the development of more empathic textile and fashion artifacts, and solutions. Co-design in this context is seen as a core approach to shifting the balance from technology as merely adjunct, or as a hook for marketers and users, to a more informed and harmonised position, where technology sits proximally and comfortably. The notion of interdisciplinary understanding, which tracks across domains of product, fashion and textiles, presents an approach where the application is still emerging. Through analysis of this progressive series of projects, the authors suggest that there is an opportunity to explore the inherent connectedness that textiles might offer for the integration and embedding of technology within material as a means to embrace these affordance opportunities. Central to this notion is the realisation of opportunities arising from dialogue and collaborative making (i.e. co-design), and for exploring the transformative notions of the user and the wearer. This paper led the authors to pose a set of questions that align to a four stage design process: Research, Define, Develop, Reflect, to frame findings and insights, and to outline the potential for future opportunities of working with technology to achieve the making and wearing of desirable materializations on the body

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02

Spin-polarized low-energy positron beams and their applications

The production and use of low-energy (100 eV to 5 keV) high-intensity, spin-polarized positron beams is reviewed. Methods for obtaining beams with high polarization are discussed. Applications include studies of the moderation process, surface and bulk magnetism, optically active molecules, and the production of polarized anti-protons.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47033/1/339_2004_Article_BF00635183.pd

Measurement of event-shape observables in Z→ℓ+ℓ− events in pp collisions at √ s=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Event-shape observables measured using charged particles in inclusive $Z$-boson events are presented, using the electron and muon decay modes of the $Z$ bosons. The measurements are based on an integrated luminosity of $1.1 {\rm fb}^{-1}$ of proton--proton collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV. Charged-particle distributions, excluding the lepton--antilepton pair from the $Z$-boson decay, are measured in different ranges of transverse momentum of the $Z$ boson. Distributions include multiplicity, scalar sum of transverse momenta, beam thrust, transverse thrust, spherocity, and $\mathcal{F}$-parameter, which are in particular sensitive to properties of the underlying event at small values of the $Z$-boson transverse momentum. The Sherpa event generator shows larger deviations from the measured observables than Pythia8 and Herwig7. Typically, all three Monte Carlo generators provide predictions that are in better agreement with the data at high $Z$-boson transverse momenta than at low $Z$-boson transverse momenta and for the observables that are less sensitive to the number of charged particles in the event.Comment: 36 pages plus author list + cover page (54 pages total), 14 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC, All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2014-0

Multi-scale factors affecting bird use of isolated remnant oak trees in agro-ecosystems

With recent emphasis on sustainable agriculture, conservation of native biota within agricultural systems has become a priority. Remnant trees have been hypothesized to increase biological diversity in agro-ecosystems. We investigated how remnant Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana) trees contribute to conserving bird diversity in the agro-ecosystem of the Willamette Valley, Oregon, USA. We compared bird use of isolated oak trees in three landscape contexts - croplands, pastures, and oak savanna reserves - and ranked the relative importance of four factors thought to influence bird use of individual trees: (i) tree architecture; (ii) tree isolation; (iii) tree cover in the surrounding landscape; and (iv) landscape context, defined as the surrounding land use. We evaluated species-specific responses and four community-level responses: (i) total species richness; (ii) richness of oak savanna-associates; (iii) tree forager richness; and (iv) aerial and ground forager richness. We documented 47 species using remnant oaks, including 16 species typically occurring in oak savanna. Surprisingly, landscape context was unimportant in predicting frequency of use of individual trees. Tree architecture, in particular tree size, and tree cover in the surrounding landscape were the best predictors of bird use of remnant trees. Our findings demonstrate that individual remnant trees contribute to landscape-level conservation of bird diversity, acting as keystone habitat structures by providing critical resources for species that could not persist in otherwise treeless agricultural fields. Because remnant trees are rarely retained in contemporary agricultural landscapes in the United States, retention of existing trees and recruitment of replacement trees will contribute to regional conservation goals