2,574 research outputs found
A Survey of Digital Systems Curriculum and Pedagogy in Electrical and Computer Engineering Programs
Digital Systems is one of the basic foundational courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering. One of the challenges in designing and modifying the curriculum for the course is the fast pace of technology change in the area. TTL chips that were in vogue with students building physical circuits, have given way to new paradigms like FPGA based synthesis with hardware description languages such as VHDL. However, updating a course is not as simple as just changing the book, and changing the syllabus. A large amount of work needs to be done in terms of selecting the book that will accommodate the course, the device that should be used, the laboratory content, and even how much time needs to be dedicated for every topic. All these issues, and many more makes it hard to take the decision of updating the course. For that reason, this paper surveys the pedagogy and methodology that is used to teach the digital systems curriculum at different universities. The goal is that it will serve as a resource for faculty looking to update or revamp their digital systems curricula. Within the document they will find a comparative study by electrical and computer engineering program, a list of textbooks, and the devices most commonly used.Cockrell School of Engineerin
The impacts of climate variability on welfare in rural Mexico
This paper examines the impacts of weather shocks, defined as rainfall or growing degree days more than a standard deviation from their respective long-run means, on household consumption per capita and child height-for-age. The results reveal that the current risk-coping mechanisms are not effective in protecting these two dimensions of welfare from erratic weather patterns. These findings imply that the change in the patterns of climatic variability associated with climate change is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the current coping mechanisms even more and thus increase household vulnerability further. The results reveal that weather shocks have substantial (negative as well as positive) effects on welfare that vary across regions (North vs. Center and South) and socio-economic characteristics (education and gender). The heterogeneous impacts of climatic variability suggest that a"tailored"approach to designing programs aimed at decreasing the sensitivity and increasing the capacity of rural households to adapt to climate change in Mexico is likely to be more effective.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Science of Climate Change,Regional Economic Development,Global Environment Facility,Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases
Nariai--Bertotti--Robinson spacetimes as a building material for one-way wormholes with horizons, but without singularity
We discuss the problem of wormholes from the viewpoint of gluing together two
Reissner--Nordstr\"om-type universes while putting between them a segment of
the Nariai-type world (in both cases there are also present electromagnetic
fields as well as the cosmological constant). Such a toy wormhole represents an
example of one-way topological communication free from causal paradoxes, though
involving a travel to next spacetime sheet since one has to cross at least a
pair of horizons through which the spacetimes' junction occurs. We also
consider the use of thin shells in these constructions. Such a ``material'' for
wormholes we choose taking into account specific properties of the
Nariai--Bertotti--Robinson spacetimes.Comment: 5 pages, a talk delivered at the 11th Marcel Grossmann Meeting (2006
Assessing attempt at the impossible in South African criminal law
From text: An inquiry into attempt liability may be justified on two grounds. First, the area of attempt liability raises very significant issues for criminal law theory in general
Analytical operator solution of master equations describing phase-sensitive processes
We present a method of solving master equations which may describe, in their
most general form, phase sensitive processes such as decay and amplification.
We make use of the superoperator technique.Comment: 10 pages, LaTex, 3 figures, accepted for publication in International
Journal of Modern Physics
Magnetic fields from inflation?
We consider the possibility of generation of the seeds of primordial magnetic
field on inflation and show that the effect of the back reaction of this field
can be very important. Assuming that back reaction does not spoil inflation we
find a rather strong restriction on the amplitude of the primordial seeds which
could be generated on inflation. Namely, this amplitude recalculated to the
present epoch cannot exceed in scales. This field seems to be
too small to be amplified to the observable values by galactic dynamo
mechanism.Comment: 10 page
Harnessing Rural Radio for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in the Philippines
The working paper documents the pilot rural radio campaign, dubbed as 'Climate Change i-Broadkas Mo', implemented by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security in Southeast Asia (CCAFS SEA) and the Philippine Federation of Rural Broadcasters (PFRB) in strategic regions of the Philippines from 2015 to 2018. The radio campaign provided PFRB affiliated broadcasters with scripts and ready-to-be-aired (RTBA) interviews on climate-smart agriculture. The lessons learned from the project can be used to enhance the capacities of rural broadcasters on climate change reporting and to create a demand for radio-based distance learning, not only in Northern Philippines, but in similar regions in Southeast Asia
An Extinction Study of the Taurus Dark Cloud Complex
We present a study of the detailed distribution of extinction in a region of
the Taurus dark cloud complex. Our study uses new BVR images of the region,
spectral classification data for 95 stars, and IRAS Sky Survey Atlas (ISSA) 60
and 100 micron images. We study the extinction of the region in four different
ways, and we present the first inter-comparison of all these methods, which
are: 1) using the color excess of background stars for which spectral types are
known; 2) using the ISSA 60 and 100 micron images; 3) using star counts; and 4)
using an optical (V and R) version of the average color excess method used by
Lada et al. (1994). We find that all four methods give generally similar
results, with important exceptions. To study the structure in the dust
distribution, we compare the ISSA extinction and the extinction measured for
individual stars. From the comparison, we conclude that in the relatively low
extinction regions studied, with 0.9 < A_V < 3.0 mag (away from filamentary
dark clouds and IRAS cores), there are no fluctuations in the dust column
density greater than 45% (at the 99.7% confidence level), on scales smaller
than 0.2 pc. We also report the discovery of a previously unknown stellar
cluster behind the Taurus dark cloud near R.A 4h19m00s, Dec. 27:30:00 (B1950)Comment: 49 pages (which include 6 pages of tables and 6 pages of figures
Linearity and Scaling of a Statistical Model for the Species Abundance Distribution
We derive a linear recursion relation for the species abundance distribution
in a statistical model of ecology and demonstrate the existence of a scaling
solution
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