Very Low Power Cockcroft-Walton Voltage Multiplier for RF Energy Harvesting Applications

A device was required that could harvest the electromagnetic energy present in ambient radio frequency (RF) signals. A part of this device must convert the AC RF signal received by the antenna into a DC signal that can be used in an embedded application. Since the RF signal amplitude is small, it must first be amplified and rectified to become a usable signal. The Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier is a subsystem of the design which ideally converts a 100 mV AC signal coming from the antenna to a 350 mV DC signal. The output of the voltage multiplier is used to power another subsystem. At 10 MHz, the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier was able to output a DC voltage of 350 mV given an AC input signal of 140 mV. The results of the testing show verifiable proof-of-concept that the Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier has the potential to be used for low power RF energy harvesting applications

Performance of genetic programming optimised Bowtie2 on genome comparison and analytic testing (GCAT) benchmarks.

Genetic studies are increasingly based on short noisy next generation scanners. Typically complete DNA sequences are assembled by matching short NextGen sequences against reference genomes. Despite considerable algorithmic gains since the turn of the millennium, matching both single ended and paired end strings to a reference remains computationally demanding. Further tailoring Bioinformatics tools to each new task or scanner remains highly skilled and labour intensive. With this in mind, we recently demonstrated a genetic programming based automated technique which generated a version of the state-of-the-art alignment tool Bowtie2 which was considerably faster on short sequences produced by a scanner at the Broad Institute and released as part of The Thousand Genome Project

Older Artists and Acknowledging Ageism

Intergenerational (IG) learning has the potential to reinforce ageist ideas, through the culturally produced binary of old and young which often describes IG learning. This research with older artists revealed implicit age bias associated with a modernist tradition in art education which minimized the value of art production viewed as feminine. Language associated with ageism shares the descriptors of the feminine and seep into our perceptions. Cooperative action research with multi-age participants facilitated personal growth and through critical reflection, implicit ageism revealed in the researcher’s prior perspective is revealed

The distribution of amorphous computer outputs

Fitness distributions (landscapes) of programs tend to a limit as they get bigger. Markov minorization gives upper bounds ((15.3 + 2.30m)/ log I) on the length of program run on random or average computing devices. I is the size of the instruction set and m size of output register. Almost all programs are constants. Convergence is exponential with 90% of programs of length 1.6 n2N yielding constants (n = size input register and size of memory = N). This is supported by experiment

Artists as Mentors: A Mid-Career Art Educator Rekindles Her Artist Self

A mentoring relationship between a mid-career art educator and a late-stage artist, is facilitated through the art educator\u27s action research and life story narrative which is key in learning and sharing the artist’s philosophy. The author uses narrative inquiry and Deleuze\u27s sense and event to represent the affective knowing of IG learning and demonstrates psychosocial benefits of mentoring

Modelling of the low-impulse blast behaviour of fibre–metal laminates based on different aluminium alloys

A parametric study has been undertaken in order to investigate the influence of the properties of the aluminium alloy on the blast response of fibre–metal laminates (FMLs). The finite element (FE) models have been developed and validated using experimental data from tests on FMLs based on a 2024-O aluminium alloy and a woven glass–fibre/polypropylene composite (GFPP). A vectorized user material subroutine (VUMAT) was employed to define Hashin’s 3D rate-dependant damage constitutive model of the GFPP. Using the validated models, a parametric study has been carried out to investigate the blast resistance of FML panels based on the four aluminium alloys, namely 2024-O, 2024-T3, 6061-T6 and 7075-T6. It has been shown that there is an approximation linear relationship between the dimensionless back face displacement and the dimensionless impulse for all aluminium alloys investigated here. It has also shown that the residual displacement of back surface of the FML panels and the internal debonding are dependent on the yield strength of the aluminium alloy

PRNG Random Numbers on GPU

Limited numerical precision of nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX and other GPUs requires careful implementation of PRNGs. The Park-Miller PRNG is programmed using G80’s native Value4f floating point in RapidMind C++. Speed up is more than 40. Code is available via ftp ftp://cs.ucl.ac.uk/genetic/gp-code/random-numbers/gpu park-miller.tar.g

Prisoners of War as Library Users

One does not usually associate libraries and study classes with amenities provided for internees in Prisoner of War camps in the First World War. It was surprising then for me, as Librarian/Archivist of the Canadian War Museum, to find evidence in our Library/Archives of well-organized libraries in the First World War internment camps in Germany. My introduction to POW library users in this war came about as I was undertaking a preliminary inventory of the rich resources of the Canadian War Museum (CWM) Archives. In the CWM Archives are two files related to libraries in POW camps in Germany. One file (Accession 19800077) holds letters from 2nd Lieutenant Archibald Campbell, a Canadian, sent to his parents from his POW camp in Germany. The other file (Accession 19710056) contains information on officially sanctioned libraries in German POW camps. These discoveries provoked the initial interest and prompted me to see as an experiment what else could be found to flesh out this theme amongst the resources contained in the CWM’s archives and library. The results were sufficiently interesting, not only for demonstrating the potential of our archives/library but in elucidating this hitherto neglected theme in First World War history, as to merit being brought to the attention of the readership of this journal

Commentary on "The use of cognitive behaviour therapy to treat depression in people with learning disabilities: a systematic review"

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on “The use of cognitive-behaviour therapy to treat depression in people with learning disabilities: a systematic review”. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the literature, as well as both clinical and research experience, some reasons are outlined for the lack of attention given to psychological therapies to treat depression amongst people with intellectual disabilities (IDs). Findings – More research is needed, but existing evidence is promising regarding the effectiveness of adapted cognitive-behaviour therapy for depression amongst people with IDs. Originality/value – The commentary draws attention to the scope for developing a range of effective cognitive, behavioural and cognitive-behavioural treatments