A Human Powered Micro-generator for Charging Electronic Devices

A hand-pulled generator has been designed and tested. A preliminary result has been obtained and discussed. This device was created to provide no outlet and off-grid charging. Nothing is worse than going out into the wilderness and having a phone or a necessary electronic device run out of battery. This presentation overviews the device\u27s design, build, and electrical system. Two different tests are run to prove the device is capable of charging the storage battery. The device presented can provide 14 minutes of charging time with one hour of string-pulling. It is concluded that this device can be beneficial to people with electronic devices that need off-grid charging

Mathematical Modeling of Product Rating: Sufficiency, Misbehavior and Aggregation Rules

Many web services like eBay, Tripadvisor, Epinions, etc, provide historical product ratings so that users can evaluate the quality of products. Product ratings are important since they affect how well a product will be adopted by the market. The challenge is that we only have {\em "partial information"} on these ratings: Each user provides ratings to only a "{\em small subset of products}". Under this partial information setting, we explore a number of fundamental questions: What is the "{\em minimum number of ratings}" a product needs so one can make a reliable evaluation of its quality? How users' {\em misbehavior} (such as {\em cheating}) in product rating may affect the evaluation result? To answer these questions, we present a formal mathematical model of product evaluation based on partial information. We derive theoretical bounds on the minimum number of ratings needed to produce a reliable indicator of a product's quality. We also extend our model to accommodate users' misbehavior in product rating. We carry out experiments using both synthetic and real-world data (from TripAdvisor, Amazon and eBay) to validate our model, and also show that using the "majority rating rule" to aggregate product ratings, it produces more reliable and robust product evaluation results than the "average rating rule".Comment: 33 page

Social Norms, Information and Trust among Strangers: Theory and Evidence

Can a social norm of trust and reciprocity emerge among strangers? We investigate this question by examining behavior in an experiment where subjects repeatedly play a two-player binary ―trust‖ game. Players are randomly and anonymously paired with one another in each period. The main questions addressed are whether a social norm of trust and reciprocity emerges under the most extreme information restriction (anonymous community-wide enforcement) or whether trust and reciprocity require additional, individual-specific information about a player’s past history of play and whether that information must be provided freely or at some cost. In the absence of such reputational information, we find that a social norm of trust and reciprocity is difficult to sustain. The provision of reputational information on past individual decisions significantly increases trust and reciprocity, with longer histories yielding the best outcomes. Importantly, we find that making reputational information available at a small cost may also lead to a significant improvement in trust and reciprocity, despite the fact that most subjects do not choose to purchase this information.Social Norms, Trust Game, Random Matching, Trust and Reciprocity, Information, Reputational Mechanisms, Experimental Economics.

High Speed Mid-Wave Infrared Uni-traveling Carrier Photodetector

Mid-wave infrared (MWIR) frequency comb is expected to dramatically improve the precision and sensitivity of molecular spectroscopy. For high resolution application, high speed MWIR photodetector is one of the key components, however, the commercially available high speed MWIR photodetector only has sub-GHz bandwidth currently. In this paper, we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, a high speed mid-wave infrared (MWIR) uni-traveling carrier photodetector based on InAs/GaSb type-II superlattice (T2SL) at room temperature. The device exhibits a cutoff wavelength of 5.6{\mu}m, and 3dB bandwidth of 6.58 GHz for a 20{\mu}m diameter device at 300K. These promising results show the device has potential to be utilized in high speed applications such as frequency comb spectroscopy, free space communication and others. The limitations on the high frequency performance of the photodetectors are also discussed