Vibrophonocardiograph Patent

Vibrophonocardiograph comprising low weight and small volume piezoelectric microphone with amplifier having high imput impedance for high sensitivity and low frequency respons

Balloon borne humidity and aerosol sensors

Infrared detectors for balloon sensing of aerosols and atmospheric moistur

Creating ultracold molecules by collisions with ultracold rare gas atoms in an optical trap

We study collisions of para-H$_2$ with five rare gas atomic species (He, Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe) over the range from 1 K to 1 $\mu$ K and evaluate the feasibility of sympathetic cooling H$_2$ with ultracold ground state rare gas atoms co-trapped within a deep optical trap. Collision cross-sections over this large temperature range show that all of these species could be used to cool H$_2$ to ultracold temperatures and that argon and helium are the most promising species for future experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, submitted for publicatio

Super-resolution imaging of a low frequency levitated oscillator

We describe the measurement of the secular motion of a levitated nanoparticle in a Paul trap with a CMOS camera. This simple method enables us to reach signal-to-noise ratios as good as 10$^{6}$ with a displacement sensitivity better than 10$^{-16}\,m^{2}$/Hz. This method can be used to extract trap parameters as well as the properties of the levitated particles. We demonstrate continuous monitoring of the particle dynamics on timescales of the order of weeks. We show that by using the improvement given by super-resolution imaging, a significant reduction in the noise floor can be attained, with an increase in the bandwidth of the force sensitivity. This approach represents a competitive alternative to standard optical detection for a range of low frequency oscillators where low optical powers are require

An e-learning tool for understanding schedule properties

In this paper, we describe an e-learning tool that we have developed to assist University students studying various modules on database systems. We use the acronym DTST (viz. a learning tool for Database Transaction Schedule Testing) to refer to our learning tool. DTST enables students to actively construct their own learning environment, it can respond in an individualistic way to student input, and it has a built-in web interface that makes it widely accessible. Field tests conducted on DTST suggest that it provides students with a different and valuable type of learning experience that traditional methods do not provide

A database transaction scheduling tool in Prolog

In this paper, we describe an item of "intelligent" educational software that is intended to help students taking university computer science courses to understand the fundamentals of transaction scheduling. The software, implemented in PROLOG, empowers students to construct their own learning environment and is able to provide tailored forms of feedback to different types of learner. We describe the development and evaluation of the software, and we present details of the analysis of the results of our investigation into the effectiveness of the software as a teaching and learning tool. Our results suggest that our learning tool provides students with a different and valuable type of learning experience, which traditional methods do not provide

Oedipus of many pains: Strategies of contest in Homeric poetry

In this paper we analyse Oedipus’ appearance during Odysseus’ tale in book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey in order to outline and test a methodology for appreciating the poetic and thematic implications of moments when ‘extraneous’ narratives or traditions appear in the Homeric poems. Our analysis, which draws on oral-formulaic theory, is offered partly as a re-evaluation of standard scholarly approaches that tend to over-rely on the assumed pre-eminence of Homeric narratives over other traditions in their original contexts or approaches that reduce such moments to instances of allusions to or parallels with fixed texts. In conjunction with perspectives grounded in orality, we emphasise the agonistic character of Greek poetry to explore the ways in which Odysseus’ articulation of his Oedipus narrative exemplifies an attempt to appropriate and manipulate a rival tradition in the service of a particular narrative’s ends. We focus specifically on the resonance of the phrases algea polla and mega ergon used by Odysseus as a narrator to draw a web of interconnections throughout Homeric and Archaic Greek poetry. Such an approach, in turn, suggests to what extent the Homeric Oedipus passage speaks to the themes and concerns of Homeric poetry rather than some lost Oedipal epic tradition and illustrates the importance of recognizing the deeply competitive nature of Homeric narratives vis-à-vis other narrative traditions