User innovation in Internet businesses

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 39).This paper examines the concept of user innovation, how this concept has been applied to internet businesses, and behaviors and motivation of the users who have participated in user innovative activities for internet businesses. This thesis presents definitions and characteristics of both user innovation activities in web businesses. As a major research method, a survey is conducted to identify the trend and phenomenon of current user innovation activities on the web. Major discoveries from the web user innovation survey are two. First, most lead users who participate in user innovation activity in the web businesses do not significantly differ by gender, age, or profession. Second, most lead users participate in user innovation activities for social-networking purpose as well as the goal of contributing to society. User innovations are seldom oriented or initiated from financial benefit purpose as similar as many traditional user innovations are formed for non financial benefit reasons. Internet businesses can leverage these findings to bring a user innovation to their business more effectively.by Jin Suk Park.S.M

The Cosmological Constant and Horava-Lifshitz Gravity

Horava-Lifshitz theory of gravity with detailed balance is plagued by the presence of a negative bare (or geometrical) cosmological constant which makes its cosmology clash with observations. We argue that adding the effects of the large vacuum energy of quantum matter fields, this bare cosmological constant can be approximately compensated to account for the small observed (total) cosmological constant. Even though we cannot address the fine-tuning problem in this way, we are able to establish a relation between the smallness of observed cosmological constant and the length scale at which dimension 4 corrections to the Einstein gravity become significant for cosmology. This scale turns out to be approximately 5 times the Planck length for an (almost) vanishing observed cosmological constant and we therefore argue that its smallness guarantees that Lorentz invariance is broken only at very small scales. We are also able to provide a first rough estimation for the infrared values of the parameters of the theory $\mu$ and $Lambda_w$.Comment: 9 pages, Late

Metal waste forms from the electrometallurgical treatment of spent nuclear fuel

Stainless steel-zirconium alloys are being developed for the disposal of radioactive metal isotopes isolated using an electrometallurgical treatment technique to treat spent nuclear fuel. The nominal waste forms are stainless steel-15 wt% zirconium alloy and zirconium-8 wt% stainless steel alloy. These alloys are generated in yttria crucibles by melting the starting materials at 1,600 C under an argon atmosphere. This paper discusses the microstructures, corrosion and mechanical test results, and thermophysical properties of the metal waste form alloys

Intel: Tick-Tock product development cadence

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-142).This thesis investigates on changes in semiconductor industry's product development methodology by following Intel's product development from year 2000. Intel was challenged by customer's preference change, competitors new enhanced product, internet bubble burst economy, and miss steps in the business strategy. Dynamics of these challenges drove Intel to develop a new product strategy: Tick-Tock product cadence. The paper discusses reasons why Intel landed at the Tick-tock strategy and results how strong product portfolio Intel ended up constructing. The thesis further discusses how the new "Global Product Development" strategy evolves, which can take advantage of TickTock cadence and deliver it to the next level helped from the effective GPD and systems engineering deployment.by Cheolmin Park.S.M

Equations for filling factor estimation in opal matrix

We consider two equations for the filling factor estimation of infiltrated zinc oxide (ZnO) in silica (SiO_2) opal and gallium nitride in ZnO opal. The first equation is based on the effective medium approximation, while the second one - on Maxwell-Garnett approximation. The comparison between two filling factors shows that both equations can be equally used for the estimation of the quantity of infiltrated nanocrystals inside opal matrix.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Addendum to the article: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/050815

Broadening of band-gap in photonic crystals with optically saturated media

Due to strong absorption of the incident light, the media with high refractive index are considered restrictive for applications in photonic crystals (PhCs). The possibility to resolve this problem by optical saturation effectively minimizing the absorption of the PhC medium is discussed. Such approach might be promising for the significant broadening of the photonic band-gap.Comment: 10 page

Learning for informative path planning

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-108).Through the combined use of regression techniques, we will learn models of the uncertainty propagation efficiently and accurately to replace computationally intensive Monte- Carlo simulations in informative path planning. This will enable us to decrease the uncertainty of the weather estimates more than current methods by enabling the evaluation of many more candidate paths given the same amount of resources. The learning method and the path planning method will be validated by the numerical experiments using the Lorenz-2003 model [32], an idealized weather model.by Sooho Park.S.M

Out-of-equilibrium singlet-triplet Kondo effect in a single C_60 quantum dot

We have used an electromigration technique to fabricate a $\rm{C_{{60}}}$ single-molecule transistor (SMT). Besides describing our electromigration procedure, we focus and present an experimental study of a single molecule quantum dot containing an even number of electrons, revealing, for two different samples, a clear out-of-equilibrium Kondo effect. Low temperature magneto-transport studies are provided, which demonstrates a Zeeman splitting of the finite bias anomaly.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure