What to Conserve? Heritage, Memory, and Management of Meanings

This Paper explores and criticizes different theories and perceptions concerning ‘cultural heritage’ to explore the definitions of ‘heritage’ throughout history, and questions how the conflicts in considering and identifying ‘heritage’ might have affected the approaches to its conservation. In such process, the paper investigates the relation between ‘place’ and ‘memory’ and how place has been always the medium through which history was written, resulting in two inseparable faces, tangible and the intangible, forming the two-faced coin of ‘cultural heritage’. This research assists understanding the complex construct of heritage places; stressing the growing awareness of intangible heritage’s importance, which represents a remarkable turn in heritage conservation realm in the twenty-first century, and emphasizing the notion of heritage as a coefficient of society, which is understood through experience, learnt through performance, and represented through ‘activities’ formed in the present maintaining and developing the identity of place and preserving its spirit, rather than a past oriented vision that tends to ‘pickle’ images from the past in a picturesque manner that is only tourism-oriented

Design of microstrip patch antenna for IEEE 802.16-2004 applications

This thesis presents microstrip patch antenna IEEE 802.16-2004 standards for microwave applications and WiMax. Narrow bandwidth (BW) is the main defect of microstrip patch antenna in wireless communication. The bandwidth can be improved by increasing the substrate thickness, and using air as substrate with low dielectric constant. The antennas were fabricated using FR4 board. Two types of microstrip antenna were used, the first was a single microstrip patch antenna and the second was using an air-gap technique as the dielectric between two antenna boards. The spacer of the air-gap has thickness of 2mm. It was made of wood to separate between the two boards. The transmission line model was used to get the approximate dimension for the design. Different parameters were obtained depending on the simulation and measurement. The Computer Simulations Technology (CST) software was used to simulate the design and the measurement was executed by Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). The two designs were compared to each other and found that some improvements were obtained on the air-gap technique. The bandwidth was improved by 4.51 % with air-gap technique and only 1.02 % with the single patch antenna

New Physics in the Third Family and its Effect on Low Energy Data

We investigate, in detail, a model in which the third family fermions are subjected to an SU(2) dynamics different from the first two families. Constrained by the precision Z-pole data, the heavy gauge boson mass is bounded from below to be about 1.7 TeV at the $2\sigma$ level. The flavor-changing neutral current (FCNC) in the lepton sector can be significant in $\tau\leftrightarrow e$ and $\tau \leftrightarrow \mu$ transitions. In the latter case, the ratio $Br(\tau\to \mu \bar{\nu_\mu} \nu_\tau)/ Br(\tau\to e \bar{\nu_e} \nu_\tau)$ and $Br(\tau\to \mu \mu \mu)$ can constrain the model better than LEP/SLC data in some region of the parameter space. Furthermore, FCNCs are unavoidable in the quark sector. Significant effects to the $B^0-\bar{B^0}$ mixing and the rare decays of the K and B mesons, such as $K^\pm \to \pi^\pm \nu {\bar \nu}$, $b \to s \nu {\bar \nu}, B_s \to \tau^+\tau^-, \mu^+\mu^-$ and $B_{s,d} \to \mu^\pm \tau^\mp$, are expected.Comment: 42 pages, Latex, 2 ps figure