Recombinant Melody: Ten Things to Love About Willaert's Music

Willaert's music was much celebrated in its own time. Today, however, musicologists find little to praise outside of its sonorous richness and sensitivity to text. Its seamlessness and contrapuntal density seem to be respected but not loved. In the following pages, I propose that the powerful expressive potential of this music lies beneath the apparently seamless surface in the details of its contrapuntal complexity. Singling out a handful of "especially tuneful pieces" is a dead end-most of Willaert's music is melodically very uniform. However, it is this very uniformity that permits the contrapuntal manipulations that are the basis for an expressiveness based not on melody alone, but on combinations of melodies. Performers willing to examine the details of its construction and draw conclusions about Willaert's intentions will discover a highly expressive music, leading to lively performance, filled with contrast

Solar power satellite with no moving parts

The only solution to the global energy mess is sunlight captured in space. No other technology scales as well, and is as clean as Space Solar Power. Best of all, this is baseload power – “always on” – without the intermittency which will always plague ground-based solar and wind. Although invented in 1968, SSP designs have been impractical until now. A novel design architecture, relying on use of materials already in space, enables SSP at costs competitive with existing baseload power sources. And all this without greenhouse gas emissions. This work describes the technology and economics. The “tin can” solar power satellite is comprised of a cylindrical shell of solar panels. This configuration has integral thermal management by using the non-illuminated portions of the shell as a radiating heat shield, maintaining the solar cells within workable temperature ranges. The tethers holding the shell to the central conductor spire present a complex radiative environment which is studied further herein to obtain a more precise measurement of high and low temperature limits. Heat generated by the transmitting antenna and its power electronics is also studied to understand its impact on the requirements imposed on components and subsystems. Achieving a slow rotation of a very large diameter cylindrical shell with minimal internal strength interacts with the assembly process through tradeoffs between propellant, assembly jigs, and construction spacecraft. Vibrations induced in the cylindrical shell are studied including transient behavior during spin-up. The panel-to-panel forces expected during spin-up, and during on-going operations as gravity gradients excite low-frequency modes are studied in order to derive specifications for linkage rotation and strength. Finally, the results of imperfect assembly, lost parts, and meteorite strikes are investigated to assess risk to other spacecraft. Solar wind pressure is evaluated to determine station-keeping requirements. Assembly in an orbit slightly higher than GEO may be selected to minimize collateral damages, and means of adjusting the orbit are studied to derive overall architecture propellant requirements, anticipating a mixture of in situ propellant options versus earth-sourced propellants. This work charts a pathway to the ultimate energy source for all mankind for all time to come.Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energ

Doubly Self-Aligned DMOSFET in SiC for Microgravity Manufacture

The need exists for power electronics capable of operation at high temperatures in a high radiation environment, such as in deep space. There is a rationale for fabricating such devices from materials already in situ, such as building very large phased array antennas. Device manufacture on human-staffed microgravity platform presents a challenge to the tight lithographic alignment required for traditional fabrication methods. Presented here for the first time is a process sequence to produce high-mobility DMOS FETs with no masking steps requiring critical alignment, yet yielding channel lengths of 0.15 micron. The fabrication process is further designed to utilize and recycle materials expected to be available on certain classes of asteroids and within extinct comets, with minimal need for reagents from earth. One application is manufacture of the tens of millions of MMIC power amplifiers required for wireless power transfer to terrestrial customers from solar power satellites in geostationary earth orbit

Mentored, Unpaid Design Team Internship Experience

An international team of 7 undergraduate interns working pro bono during the summer made significant advances in several areas of Space Solar Power. Distinct from a capstone design effort, this study group revived the practice common in the 1970s and 1980s of considering broad topics of high relevance to public citizens and elected decision-makers. Significant obstacles to success included lack of research experience, lack of motivating paycheck, and a highly-complex system under study. Each student was assigned a mentor from the aerospace industry or academia to guide the creation of a research plan, and to periodically review progress. Team-building exercises were conducted to develop relationships, and weekly team workshops were held to teach interoperability with other subsystems. Student experiences shifted from excitement at the outset to a sense of being overwhelmed with the magnitude and difficulties associated with a space-based project running in the tens of billions of dollars. Yet, each student was able to overcome such mid-term concerns, and to make a meaningful contribution to a key research question. Their results were published at a national space conference with all students listed as co-authors. The present work assesses the formation of such an unpaid team and the management thereof, analyzes the techniques used to encourage desired outcomes, and finishes with post-project follow-up on perceptions and career choices. This approach may find interest among professors with limited funds who seek to develop solid preliminary data to make grant applications more competitive

Brownfield remediation powered by renewable energy

Subsurface contaminant plumes are a plague upon the earth. Some 1900 plumes remain after the go-fast atom bomb projects of the Cold War. Countless gasoline station sites dot our cities, leaching heavy metals and chlorinated solvents into drinking water. Superfund-type cleanup is so expensive that many sites languish while toxins continue to spread throughout the ecosystem. Federal funding for remediation research stopped 15 years ago. The only solution now is to move bad soil from one location to another. New advances in stem cell manipulation offer promise to clean up solvent-infused earth with a minimum of excavation at greatly reduced costs. Dielectrophoresis is the means by which polar molecules, in a matrix having a different dielectric constant, can be made to migrate along electric field gradients. A unique configuration called “pills and pillars” facilitates remediation of solvents. Electric field gradients originating in the deeply-driven “pillars” motivate solvents molecules towards the slightly-buried “pill”. When powered by renewable sources, such as solar panels, contaminants within a 1000 m3 volume can be concentrated within a 1 m3 volume at the pill, and then removed for disposal in a certified toxic waste repository. The pills and pillars are easily extracted for removal to a new site every 40 days. The solar panels are man-portable so that a single capital expenditure of a truckmounted kit can serve multiple sites simultaneously, and sequentially. The low labor overhead, the greatly reduced excavation, and the re-use of hardware contribute to make this novel method of brownfield remediation far cheaper than traditional, presently-available methods. Computer simulations including both vadose zone diffusion (natural spreading out) and drift via dielectrophoresis, demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. The next research step is to build a benchtop model to validate the simulation model, followed by field trials with partners in the environmental remediation industry.Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energ

Patents and the financial performance of firms - An analysis based on stock market data

The following article systematically analyzes the question of how the results of R&D and its protection - or so to say, the technology base of a firm - can influence its market value and profits. Based on theoretical arguments it is hypothesized that large and highly valuable patent portfolios of firms have significant effects on their competitiveness in the long run. For the empirical testing a panel dataset including 479 firms from 1990 to 2007 based on the DTI-Scoreboard is used, which contains data on R&D expenditures, market capitalization, turnover etc. and structural information like firm-size and industry sector. To this database the relevant information on patenting behavior and financial performance are added, so effects of firm characteristics can be calculated. To assess the value of a firm's patent portfolio, different value measures like the number of received patent citations, opposed patents, number of inventors etc. are being applied. The results suggest that at least at the firm level, especially forward citations and family size positively influence market value. Concerning the Return on Investment, especially oppositions and family size show positive effects. This leads to the conclusion that securing international markets has a positive effect on the value of the firm in the home market. --

Nuclear Power from Lunar ISRU

Thorium on the lunar surface can be transmuted into fissile uranium suitable for a controlled chain reaction to provide heat. Thorium is fertile, requiring bombardment by neutrons to become a suitable nuclear fuel. Oxides of thorium are dense and can be concentrated and beneficiated from comminuted regolith via inertial or thermal means. A neutron flux can be provided by encasing thoria within a beryllium and graphite vessel, which emits neutrons upon exposure to gamma rays or galactic cosmic rays. After a brief period at protactinium the transmuted material becomes U-233, a desirable fuel because decay product half-lives are below 100 years. When compressed into fuel pellets the uranium oxide is configured into a reactor through which a working fluid can extract thermal power. With regolith tailings as shielding such a reactor can operate safely for 30 years. A century later, the site can be harvested for specialty elements and then made available for other uses. The advent of launch-safe nuclear rockets in space greatly expands the potential for in situ resource utilization, a space-based economy, and profitable exploitation of the asteroid belt