Examples of finite element mesh generation using SDRC IDEAS

IDEAS (Integrated Design Engineering Analysis Software) offers a comprehensive package for mechanical design engineers. Due to its multifaceted capabilities, however, it can be manipulated to serve the needs of electrical engineers, also. IDEAS can be used to perform the following tasks: system modeling, system assembly, kinematics, finite element pre/post processing, finite element solution, system dynamics, drafting, test data analysis, and project relational database

Characterization of a Resistive Half Plane over a Resistive Sheet

The diffraction of a resistive half plane over a planar resistive sheet under plane wave illum1ination is determined via the dual integral equation method (a variation of the Wiener-Hopf method). The solution is obtained upon splitting the associated Wiener-Hopf functions via a numerically efficient routine. Based on the derived exact half plane dliffraction coefficient, a simplified equivalent model of the structure is developed when the separation of the half plane and resistive plane is on the order of a tenth of a wavelength or less. The model preserves the geometrical optics field of the original structure for all angles and is based on an approximate image theory of the resistive plane. Good agreement is obtained with the diffracted field exact solution

Audio-Visual Materials

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Fundamental Rights in the European Community Legal Order

The role of the courts in the protection of human rights in any legal system is a constitutionally sensitive one. The observance and protection of such rights articulate with many aspects of the exercise of governmental and legislative power. The value nature of human rights accentuates these sensibilities. Some have viewed sovereign law as an essential ingredient in the make-up of national identity, a perception which tends to confirm a presumption that legal systems, while responsive to new pressures, are nonetheless holistic, coherent, and state-bound. National law is a rampart against outside corruption of the national ethos. Inevitably all of this poses particular challenges for a supranational court with jurisdiction to pass judgment on human rights compliance, directly or indirectly, by states that are justly proud of their own legal democratic traditions. The exercise by the European Court of Justice (“Court of Justice” or “Court”) of jurisdiction to protect the individual from breaches of their fundamental rights is a constitutional role which trammels not only the exercise of political power by the institutions of the European Community (the “Community”) but indirectly (and often directly) the use of governmental and legislative power at a national level. This constitutional role, exercised in the context of the doctrines of primacy and direct effect, challenges the ideology of a state\u27s legal autonomy and the associated sense of self-determination. Not surprisingly, the Court of Justice at the early stages showed a marked reluctance to be drawn into this area

An apparent medieval stereogram incorporating a symbol for optical illusion

Stereograms mark a threshold in understanding visual perception. Modern study of stereopsis began with Wheatstone's invention of the stereogram and stereoscope (~ 1832), important tools in vision research and technical imagery ever since. Stereoscopic images formed with frieze and wallpaper patterns in illuminated Insular manuscripts such as the Book of Durrow (~ 680 CE), Lindisfarne Gospels (~ 700-720), and Book of Kells (~ 800) show that, long before spectacle-quality magnifying lenses (~ 1286), illuminators somehow copied multicolored, microscopically detailed designs _freehand_ with an accuracy unsurpassed in scientific instruments until the Renaissance (but well within the power of normally sighted humans' stereoscopic discrimination). If the artists accomplished this feat by free fusion using the unaided eyes as a magnifying stereocomparator, as suggested, they should have been able to create autostereograms. Did they? Here I report two examples of an apparent stereopair from the Book of Durrow, which gives a sharp, strongly three-dimensional image that includes, among other symbols, an eye-shaped sign identified with mirages (Fig. 1). Apparently, precocious empirical knowledge of stereopsis played more than a technical role in the creation of some of the world's more famous graphic art