UK Fashion Designers Working in Micro-sized Enterprises; Attitudes to Locational Resources, Their Peers and the Market

This paper contributes to an understanding of the importance of locally based resources and interactions in a globalised industry, fashion design. It examines the product design stage of the fashion production chain, rather than the manufacture and commercialisation of apparel products. We studied the use of their geographies by UK-based fashion designers working in micro-sized enterprises ( < 10 employees) especially because of their likely sensitivity to various aspects of proximity, including their dependence on external resources to supplement their own. Factor and cluster analysis identified four different types of designers, which differed in the manner in which they interacted with peers and markets, and accessed location-based resources. The paper advances explanations for the patterns of behaviour observed in the various clusters, and in making recommendations for further research predicts the types of design position each is likely to prefer

Minimal extended flavor groups, matter fields chiral representations, and the flavor question

We show the specific unusual features on chiral gauge anomalies cancellation in the minimal, necessarily 3-3-1, and the largest 3-4-1 weak isospin chiral gauge semisimple group leptoquark-bilepton extensions of the 3-2-1 conventional standard model of nuclear and electromagnetic interactions. In such models a natural explanation for the fundamental question of fermion generation replication arises from the self-consistency of a local gauge quantum field theory, which constrains the number of the QFD fermion families to the QCD color charges.Comment: 10 pages. <[email protected]

Comment on ``Majoron emitting neutrinoless double beta decay in the electroweak chiral gauge extensions''

We point out that if the majoron-like scheme is implemented within a 331 model, there must exist at least three different mass scales for the scalar vacuum expectation values in the model.Comment: 4 pages, no figures, Revtex. To be published in Physical Review

Control and ultrasonic actuation of a gas-liquid interface in a microfluidic chip

This article describes the design and manufacturing of a microfluidic chip, allowing for the actuation of a gas-liquid interface and of the neighboring fluid. A first way to control the interface motion is to apply a pressure difference across it. In this case, the efficiency of three different micro-geometries at anchoring the interface is compared. Also, the critical pressures needed to move the interface are measured and compared to theoretical result. A second way to control the interface motion is by ultrasonic excitation. When the excitation is weak, the interface exhibits traveling waves, which follow a dispersion equation. At stronger ultrasonic levels, standing waves appear on the interface, with frequencies that are half integer multiple of the excitation frequency. An associated microstreaming flow field observed in the vicinity of the interface is characterized. The meniscus and associated streaming flow have the potential to transport particles and mix reagents

Investigation of Hamamatsu H8500 phototubes as single photon detectors

We have investigated the response of a significant sample of Hamamatsu H8500 MultiAnode PhotoMultiplier Tubes (MAPMTs) as single photon detectors, in view of their use in a ring imaging Cherenkov counter for the CLAS12 spectrometer at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. For this, a laser working at 407.2nm wavelength was employed. The sample is divided equally into standard window type, with a spectral response in the visible light region, and UV-enhanced window type MAPMTs. The studies confirm the suitability of these MAPMTs for single photon detection in such a Cherenkov imaging application

Strengthening of steel-reinforced concrete structural elements by externally bonded FRP sheets and evaluation of their load carrying capacity to face changed load service conditions

The paper has proposed a limit analysis procedure for a preliminary design of RC elements strengthened by externally bonded FRP sheets. The procedure, based on a multi-yield-criteria limit analysis approach, has led to a reliable prediction of peak loads and failure modes of the analyzed elements (slabs) by simultaneously considering the limit state of the constituent materials, so resulting very useful in many applications of engineering interest. The attention has been focused on hospital applications in which increment of service loads or realization of openings can weaken some structural elements that have been strengthened by FRP sheets

Quantization of eletric charge, the neutrino and generation nonuniversality

text of abstract It is showed that the eletric charge quantization is unconnected to Majorana neutrino in the non-universal generations leptoquark-bilepton flavordynamics which includes the right-handed neutrino and an explicit U(1) factor in the gauge semisimple group.Comment: 4 pages, latex ps, no figure

Reflective Toraldo pupil for high-resolution millimeter-wave astronomy

A novel, to the best of our knowledge, beam-shaping reflective surface for high-resolution millimeter/ submillimeter-wave astronomy instruments is presented. The reflector design is based on Toraldo’s superresolution principle and implemented with annulated binary-phase coronae structure inspired by the achromatic magnetic mirror approach. A thin, less than half a free-space wavelength, reflective Toraldo pupil device operated in the W-band has been fabricated using mesh-filter technology developed at Cardiff University. The device has been characterized on a quasi-optical test bench and demonstrated expected reduction of the beam width upon reflection at oblique incidence, while featuring a sidelobe level lower than −10 dB. The proposed reflective Toraldo pupil structure can be easily scaled for upper millimeter and infrared frequency bands as well as designed to transform a Gaussian beam into a flat-top beam with extremely low sidelobe level

Adaptive sliding mode boundary control of a perturbed diffusion process

This paper proposes a sliding-mode-based adaptive boundary control law for stabilizing a class of uncertain diffusion processes affected by a matched disturbance. The matched disturbance is assumed to be uniformly bounded along with its time derivative, whereas the corresponding upper bounding constants are not known. This motivates the use of adaptive control strategies. In addition, the spatially-varying diffusion coefficient is also uncertain. To achieve asymptotic stability of the plant origin in the (Formula presented.) -sense in the presence of the disturbance, a discontinuous boundary feedback law is proposed where the gain of the discontinuous control term is adjusted according to a gradient-based adaptation law. A constructive Lyapunov analysis supports the stability properties of the considered closed-loop system, yielding sufficient convergence conditions in terms of suitable inequalities involving the controllers' tuning parameters. Simulation results are presented to corroborate the theoretical findings