15,440 research outputs found
Cotton spinning to climbing gear: practical aspects of design evolution in Lancashire and the North West of England
This article looks at the role of path dependency in the design of outdoor clothing and equipment, from the perspective of changing and overlapping industrial clusters in Lancashire and Sheffield, from the 1960s. It demonstrates that, unlike the fashion market, design in mountaineering clothing and equipment was originally based heavily upon functionality and hence on user innovation. It shows that skills and knowledge which evolved during the industrial revolution, in both industrial areas, were vitally important to the development of internationally competitive mountaineering equipment firms. It was, however, the way in which these sources of knowledge were combined with sporting expertise that contributed to the design of innovative functional products. In addition, fundamental changes occurred in the relationship between manufacturers and their customers and these were vital to the success of this process, marking a departure from past practice
Triangular buckling patterns of twisted inextensible strips
When twisting a strip of paper or acetate under high longitudinal tension,
one observes, at some critical load, a buckling of the strip into a regular
triangular pattern. Very similar triangular facets have recently been observed
in solutions to a new set of geometrically-exact equations describing the
equilibrium shape of thin inextensible elastic strips. Here we formulate a
modified boundary-value problem for these equations and construct post-buckling
solutions in good agreement with the observed pattern in twisted strips. We
also study the force-extension and moment-twist behaviour of these strips by
varying the mode number n of triangular facets
A multilevel account of hippocampal function in spatial and concept learning: Bridging models of behavior and neural assemblies
A complete neuroscience requires multilevel theories that address phenomena ranging from higher-level cognitive behaviors to activities within a cell. We propose an extension to the level of mechanism approach where a computational model of cognition sits in between behavior and brain: It explains the higher-level behavior and can be decomposed into lower-level component mechanisms to provide a richer understanding of the system than any level alone. Toward this end, we decomposed a cognitive model into neuron-like units using a neural flocking approach that parallels recurrent hippocampal activity. Neural flocking coordinates units that collectively form higher-level mental constructs. The decomposed model suggested how brain-scale neural populations coordinate to form assemblies encoding concept and spatial representations and why so many neurons are needed for robust performance at the cognitive level. This multilevel explanation provides a way to understand how cognition and symbol-like representations are supported by coordinated neural populations (assemblies) formed through learning
Nonaffine Correlations in Random Elastic Media
Materials characterized by spatially homogeneous elastic moduli undergo
affine distortions when subjected to external stress at their boundaries, i.e.,
their displacements \uv (\xv) from a uniform reference state grow linearly
with position \xv, and their strains are spatially constant. Many materials,
including all macroscopically isotropic amorphous ones, have elastic moduli
that vary randomly with position, and they necessarily undergo nonaffine
distortions in response to external stress. We study general aspects of
nonaffine response and correlation using analytic calculations and numerical
simulations. We define nonaffine displacements \uv' (\xv) as the difference
between \uv (\xv) and affine displacements, and we investigate the
nonaffinity correlation function
and related functions. We introduce four model random systems with random
elastic moduli induced by locally random spring constants, by random
coordination number, by random stress, or by any combination of these. We show
analytically and numerically that scales as A |\xv|^{-(d-2)}
where the amplitude is proportional to the variance of local elastic moduli
regardless of the origin of their randomness. We show that the driving force
for nonaffine displacements is a spatial derivative of the random elastic
constant tensor times the constant affine strain. Random stress by itself does
not drive nonaffine response, though the randomness in elastic moduli it may
generate does. We study models with both short and long-range correlations in
random elastic moduli.Comment: 22 Pages, 18 figures, RevTeX
Research study of some RAM antennas Final report, 18 Nov. 1964 - 18 Jun. 1965
Input impedance and radiation pattern determinations for cylindrical gap, waveguide excited and circular waveguide slot antenna array
Thermally assisted adiabatic quantum computation
We study the effect of a thermal environment on adiabatic quantum computation
using the Bloch-Redfield formalism. We show that in certain cases the
environment can enhance the performance in two different ways: (i) by
introducing a time scale for thermal mixing near the anticrossing that is
smaller than the adiabatic time scale, and (ii) by relaxation after the
anticrossing. The former can enhance the scaling of computation when the
environment is superohmic, while the latter can only provide a prefactor
enhancement. We apply our method to the case of adiabatic Grover search and
show that performance better than classical is possible with a superohmic
environment, with no a priori knowledge of the energy spectrum.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Final version to appear in PR
Organizing the innovation process : complementarities in innovation networking
This paper contributes to the developing literature on complementarities in organizational design. We test for the existence of complementarities in the use of external networking between stages of the innovation process in a sample of UK and German manufacturing plants. Our evidence suggests some differences between the UK and Germany in terms of the optimal combination of innovation activities in which to implement external networking. Broadly, there is more evidence of complementarities in the case of Germany, with the exception of the product engineering stage. By contrast, the UK exhibits generally strong evidence of substitutability in external networking in different stages, except between the identification of new products and product design and development stages. These findings suggest that previous studies indicating strong complementarity between internal and external knowledge sources have provided only part of the picture of the strategic dilemmas facing firms
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Hydropyrolysis of high molecular weight organic matter in Murchison
Hydropyrolysis of the Murchison macromolecular material releases polyaromatic compounds including phenanthrene, carbazole, fluoranthene, pyrene, chrysene, perylene, benzoperylene and coronene units with varying degrees of alklyation
Cross sections for the excitation of isovector charge-exchange resonances in 208Tl
The Glauber approximation for the treatment of heavy-ion scattering, has
already been shown to give reliable predictions for the reaction cross section
in the particular case of intermediate energy charge-exchange processes. In the
present work, we couple a Glauber-type model to microscopic Random Phase
Approximation calculations of the charge-exchange excitations of Pb.
The aim is to solve the longstanding question whether the very elusive
charge-exchange isovector monopole has been really identified in the past
experiments, or other multipoles were prevalent in the observed spectra.Comment: text + 4 figures; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
A study of acute respiratory disease in families exposed to different levels of Air pollution in the Great Salt Lake basin, Utah, 1971-1972 and 1972-1973.
The reported incidence of acute respiratory illness in families exposed to different concentrations of air pollution was studied during two consecutive school years. The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of increased exposure to sulfur dioxide and suspended particulate matter. In each of four study communities, the mothers of approximately 250 white families were contacted biweekly to obtain information regarding the occurrence of respiratory symptoms in each family member. Annual mean ambient sulfur dioxide concentrations in one community for the three years included in the study (1971-1973) were well above the current air quality standard of 80 micrograms/m3, while in the other three communities the annual sulfur dioxide concentrations were much lower (usually less than 40 micrograms/m3). Suspended particulate matter concentrations in high sulfur dioxide community were close to the limit designated by the annual standard (75 micrograms/m3) but actual exposures in the four communities probably were not excessive. Regression analyses of the data collected showed inconsistent associations between illness rates and educational attainment of the head of household, crowding in the home, bronchitis in parents or smoking of parents. However, once the effects of these factors were removed the adjusted rates showed little association with community of residence. It was concluded that the higher concentrations of sulfur dioxide in the Utah atmosphere could not be the cause of increases in acute respiratory illness in the exposed populations
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