Solar energy and conservation at St. Mark's School

This report is a result of a request to investigate the possibility of employing solar energy at a residential secondary school to reduce energy costs. Our approach was to explore this possibility in the context of a more general survey of opportunities to conserve energy (in particular, fuel) at the school. Our purpose was more to illustrate how to go about an appraisal of conservation opportunities plus implementation and evaluation of the most productive conservation measures, than a rigorous examination of the facility with detailed instructions on how to take care of specific problems. A large number of actions that would result in net energy cost savings considerably greater than could be realized from solar systems were discovered. For a solar application, a domestic hot water system,supplementing that heated bytankless coils in oil burning furnaces,has the greatest potential for significant return on investment. The school's total utility system (total energy, co-generation) meets all electrical and steam needs with the exception of the electric power required for one building. A heat recovery system on the diesel engines for the electric generators furnishes a sizeable portion of the steam. Areas discussed in detail are: (1) optimization of the efficiency of oil fueled residential heating furnaces; (2) optimized operation of a total energy system; (3) lighting, insulation, air infiltration control; (4) heat management, scheduling and control. A methodology for preparing energy audits, energy flow charts and procedures for the evaluation of the need for the amounts of energy consumed for each individual purpose are also given. The importance of considering the application of solar energy in the broader conservation context is emphasized

Computer techniques for sensor validation during EBR-II natural circulation

"November, 1984.""Includes MIT technical contributions from D.D. Lanning, J.E. Meyer, A.L. Schor, R.J. Witt and R.D. Wittmeier.""U.S. Dept. of Energy Breeder Technology Program, Division of Educational Programs, Argonne National Laboratory."Includes bibliographical references (leaf 17)Final project report; November, 198

A web-based resource for radiation safety courses

CQU runs regular courses for intending Radiation Safety Officers from a variety of industry sectors. Participants have varying levels of prior knowledge to bring to the intensive three day program. To cater for those students whose prior knowledge of radiation physics is weak the print-based media for the course have been converted into a CD-ROM incorporating animations, worked examples, progress checks and self-assessment items. This allows the students who need extra study time on the basic physics concepts to cover as much as possible of the material before commencement of the course. The first course sessions can then concentrate on students’ individual problems and the required program content. This approach also allows the student with strong prior learning to submit an assessment test and be awarded a partial course exemption. Although the material selection is specifically for Radiation Safety training the CD-ROM has also been used in bridging courses, as reinforcement for first year students, and within our Engineering Technology Instrumentation program. The number of students who have used the CD-ROM is not statistically significant but student feedback on the material is very positive

Dissipation in Quasi One-Dimensional Superconducting Single-Crystal Sn Nanowires

Electrical transport measurements were made on single-crystal Sn nanowires to understand the intrinsic dissipation mechanisms of a one-dimensional superconductor. While the resistance of wires of diameter larger than 70 nm drops precipitately to zero at Tc near 3.7 K, a residual resistive tail extending down to low temperature is found for wires with diameters of 20 and 40 nm. As a function of temperature, the logarithm of the residual resistance appears as two linear sections, one within a few tenths of a degree below Tc and the other extending down to at least 0.47 K, the minimum temperature of the measurements. The residual resistance is found to be ohmic at all temperatures below Tc of Sn. These findings are suggestive of a thermally activated phase slip process near Tc and quantum fluctuation-induced phase slip process in the low temperature regime. When the excitation current exceeds a critical value, the voltage-current (V-I) curves show a series of discrete steps in approaching the normal state. These steps cannot be fully understood with the classical Skocpol-Beasley-Tinkham phase slip center model (PSC), but can be qualitatively accounted for partly by the PSC model modified by Michotte et al.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. To be appeared on Physical Review B 71, 200

BD-KD: Balancing the Divergences for Online Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) has gained a lot of attention in the field of model compression for edge devices thanks to its effectiveness in compressing large powerful networks into smaller lower-capacity models. Online distillation, in which both the teacher and the student are learning collaboratively, has also gained much interest due to its ability to improve on the performance of the networks involved. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence ensures the proper knowledge transfer between the teacher and student. However, most online KD techniques present some bottlenecks under the network capacity gap. By cooperatively and simultaneously training, the models the KL distance becomes incapable of properly minimizing the teacher's and student's distributions. Alongside accuracy, critical edge device applications are in need of well-calibrated compact networks. Confidence calibration provides a sensible way of getting trustworthy predictions. We propose BD-KD: Balancing of Divergences for online Knowledge Distillation. We show that adaptively balancing between the reverse and forward divergences shifts the focus of the training strategy to the compact student network without limiting the teacher network's learning process. We demonstrate that, by performing this balancing design at the level of the student distillation loss, we improve upon both performance accuracy and calibration of the compact student network. We conducted extensive experiments using a variety of network architectures and show improvements on multiple datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive comparisons and ablations with current state-of-the-art online and offline KD techniques