Development of new addition-type composite resins

The most promising of a number of new addition type polyimides and polyaromatic melamine (NCNS) resins for use in high performance composite materials. Three different cure temperature ranges were of interest: 530-560 K (500-550 F), 475-530 K (400-500 F), and 450 K (350 F). Examined were a wide variety of polyimide precursors terminated with 5 norbornene groups and addition polymerized at 560 K similar to PMR-15 and LARC-160 polyimides. In addition, a number of lower curing cinnamal end capped polyimides and a bismaleimide were investigated but were not found promising. A group of NCNS resins were investigated and some were found to be superior to current epoxy resins in moisture resistance, oxidative aging and flame and smoke properties

Exploring Bluetooth based Mobile Phone Interaction with the Hermes Photo Display

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in today’s mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area - despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study nvolving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community

Perceptions of High Integrity Can Persist after Deception: How Implicit Beliefs Moderate Trust Erosion

Scholars have assumed that trust is fragile: difficult to build and easily broken. We demonstrate, however, that in some cases trust is surprisingly robust—even when harmful deception is revealed, some individuals maintain high levels of trust in the deceiver. In this paper, we describe how implicit theories moderate the harmful effects of revealed deception on a key component of trust: perceptions of integrity. In a negotiation context, we show that people who hold incremental theories (beliefs that negotiating abilities are malleable) reduce perceptions of their counterpart’s integrity after they learn that they were deceived, whereas people who hold entity theories (beliefs that negotiators’ characteristics and abilities are fixed) maintain their first impressions after learning that they were deceived. Implicit theories influenced how targets interpreted evidence of deception. Individuals with incremental theories encoded revealed deception as an ethical violation; individuals with entity theories did not. These findings highlight the importance of implicit beliefs in understanding how trust changes over time

Are you feeling lucky?:lottery-based scheduling for public displays

Scheduling content onto pervasive displays is a complex problem. Researchers have identified an array of potential requirements that can influence scheduling decisions, but the relative importance of these different requirements varies across deployments, with context, and over time. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a lottery-based scheduling approach that allows for the combination of multiple scheduling policies and is easily extensible to accommodate new scheduling requirements

A social-cognitive approach to understanding gender differences in negotiator ethics: The role of moral identity

To date, gender differences in ethics have received little theoretical attention. We utilize a social-cognitive framework to explain why these differences emerge and when women engage in less unethical negotiating behavior than do men. We propose that, relative to men, women’s stronger moral identities suppress unethical negotiating behavior. Study 1 establishes a gender difference in moral identity strength through a meta-analysis of over 19,000 people. Study 2 observes gender differences in two aspects of negotiator ethics – moral disengagement and opportunism. Study 3 establishes moral identity strength as an antecedent to negotiator ethics. Finally, Studies 4 and 5 explore financial incentives as a situational moderator. Because financial incentives temporarily decrease the salience of moral identity, they could mitigate gender differences in negotiator ethics, leading women to act more like men. Across both studies, financial incentives impacted women’s (but not men’s) unethical negotiating behavior. Our findings help to explain why and when gender differences in ethics emerge

Extending the Osmometer Method for Assessing Drought Tolerance in Herbaceous Species

Community-scale surveys of plant drought tolerance are essential for understanding semi-arid ecosystems and community responses to climate change. Thus, there is a need for an accurate and rapid methodology for assessing drought tolerance strategies across plant functional types. The osmometer method for predicting leaf osmotic potential at full turgor ((o)), a key metric of leaf-level drought tolerance, has resulted in a 50-fold increase in the measurement speed of this trait; however, the applicability of this method has only been tested in woody species and crops. Here, we assess the osmometer method for use in herbaceous grassland species and test whether (o) is an appropriate plant trait for understanding drought strategies of herbaceous species as well as species distributions along climate gradients. Our model for predicting leaf turgor loss point ((TLP)) from (o) ((TLP)=0.80(o)-0.845) is nearly identical to the model previously presented for woody species. Additionally, (o) was highly correlated with (TLP) for graminoid species ((tlp)=0.944(o)-0.611; r(2)=0.96), a plant functional group previously flagged for having the potential to cause erroneous measurements when using an osmometer. We report that (o), measured with an osmometer, is well correlated with other traits linked to drought tolerance (namely, leaf dry matter content and leaf vulnerability to hydraulic failure) as well as climate extremes linked to water availability. The validation of the osmometer method in an herb-dominated ecosystem paves the way for rapid community-scale surveys of drought tolerance across plant functional groups, which could improve trait-based predictions of ecosystem responses to climate change