11,585 research outputs found
Welfare Effects of Technological Convergence in the Food Industries
In this paper we investigate the welfare effects of technological convergence in the food industries. We extend Krugman's (1980) monopolistic competition model to allow for technological differences between two (groups of) countries. Technological convergence is reflected in a narrowing inter-country gap between fixed or marginal production cost, and the effects of convergence on output composition, factor rewards, trade pattern, and consumer welfare are derived. The theoretical predictions are examined and confirmed using an internationally comparable dataset.Agribusiness,
Energy-aware Approaches for Energy Harvesting Powered Wireless Sensor Systems
Energy harvesting (EH) powered wireless sensor systems (WSSs) are gaining increasing popularity since they enable the system to be self-powering, long-lasting, almost maintenance-free, and environmentally friendly. However, the mismatch between energy generated by harvesters and energy demanded by WSS to perform the required tasks is always a bottleneck as the ambient environmental energy is limited, and the WSS is power hunger. Therefore, the thesis has proposed, designed, implemented, and tested the energy-aware approaches for wireless sensor motes (WSMs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), including hardware energy-aware interface (EAI), software EAI, sensing EAI and network energy-aware approaches to address this mismatch. The main contributions of this thesis to the research community are designing the energy-aware approaches for EH Powered WSMs and WSNs which enables a >30 times reduction in sleep power consumption of WSNs for successful EH powering WSNs without a start-up issue in the condition of mismatch between the energy generated by harvesters and energy demanded by WSSs in both mote and network systems. For EH powered WSM systems, the energy-aware approaches have (1) enabled the harvested energy to be accumulated in energy storage devices to deal with the mismatch for the operation of the WSMs without the start-up issue, (2) enabled a commercial available WSMs with a reduced sleep current from 28.3 μA to 0.95 μA for the developed WSM, (3) thus enabled the WSM operations for a long active time of about 1.15 s in every 7.79 s to sample and transmit a large number of data (e.g., 388 bytes), rather than a few ten milliseconds and a few bytes. For EH powered WSN systems, on top of energy-aware approached for EH powered WSM, the network energy-aware approaches have presented additional capabilities for network joining process for energy-saving and enabled EH powered WSNs. Once the EH powered WSM with the network energy-aware approach is powered up and began the network joining process, energy, as an example of 48.23 mJ for a tested case, has been saved in the case of the attempt to join the network unsuccessfully. Once the EH-WSM has joined the network successfully, the smart programme applications that incorporate the software EAI, sensing EAI and hardware EAI allow the EH powered WSM to achieve (4) asynchronous operation or (5) synchronised operation based on the energy available after the WSM has joined the network.Through designs, implementations, and analyses, it has been shown that the developed energy-aware approaches have provided an enabled capability for EH successfully powering WSS technologies in the condition of energy mismatch, and it has the potential to be used for wide industrial applications
Single-shot electro-optic sampling of coherent transition radiation at the A0 Photoinjector
Future collider applications and present high-gradient laser plasma wakefield
accelerators operating with picosecond bunch durations place a higher demand on
the time resolution of bunch distribution diagnostics. This demand has led to
significant advancements in the field of electro-optic sampling over the past
ten years. These methods allow the probing of diagnostic light such as coherent
transition radiation or the bunch wakefields with sub-picosecond time
resolution. Potential applications in shot-to-shot, non-interceptive
diagnostics continue to be pursued for live beam monitoring of collider and
pump-probe experiments. Related to our developing work with electro-optic
imaging, we present results on single-shot electro-optic sampling of the
coherent transition radiation from bunches generated at the A0 photoinjector.Comment: 3 p
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Super-rotating jets in a re-analysis of the martian atmosphere
Strong westerly, prograde jets have been identified in the martian atmosphere between about 10–20 km altitude throughout much of the year in a Mars Global Circulation Model (MGCM) study [2]. The development of data assimilation techniques for Mars [3, 5] now permits the analysis of super-rotation in less highly idealized cases using an atmospheric reanalysis, as would be done for the Earth. This paper reviews recent atmospheric reanalyses, in order to validate previous modeling results, to quantify jet amplitudes and to diagnose possible mechanisms supplying angular momentum to the jets.
[2] Lewis, S. R., and Read, P. L.: Equatorial jets in the dusty martian atmosphere, J. Geophys. Res., Vol. 108 (E4), 5034, pp. 1–15, 2003.
[3] Lewis, S. R., Read, P. L., Conrath, B. J., Pearl, J. C., and Smith, M. D.: Assimilation of Thermal Emission Spectrometer atmospheric data during the Mars Global Surveyor aerobraking period, Icarus, Vol. 192 (2), pp. 327–347, 2007.
[5] Montabone, L., Lewis, S. R., Read, P. L., Hinson, D. P., Validation of Martian meteorological data assimilation for MGS/TES using radio occultation measurements, Icarus Vol. 185 (1), pp. 113–132, 2006
Formation and Acceleration of Uniformly-Filled Ellipsoidal Electron Bunches Obtained via Space-Charge-Driven Expansion from a Cesium-Telluride Photocathode
We report the experimental generation, acceleration and characterization of a
uniformly-filled electron bunch obtained via space-charge-driven expansion
(often referred to as "blow-out regime") in an L-band (1.3-GHz) radiofrequency
photoinjector. The beam is photoemitted from a Cesium-Telluride semiconductor
photocathode using a short ( fs) ultraviolet laser pulse. The produced
electron bunches are characterized with conventional diagnostics and the
signatures of their ellipsoidal character is observed. We especially
demonstrate the production of ellipsoidal bunches with charges up to
nC corresponding to a -fold increase compared to previous experiments
with metallic photocathodes.Comment: 9, pages, 13 figure
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Dust-related interannual and intraseasonal variability of Martian climate using data assimilation
Data assimilation has been applied in several studies [Montabone et al., 2005; Lewis et al., 2005; Montabone et al., 2006a; Montabone et al., 2006b; Lewis et al., 2007; Wilson et al., 2008; Rogberg et al. 2010] as an effective tool with which to analyze spacecraft observations and phenomena (e.g., atmospheric tides, transient wave behavior, effects of clouds in the tropics, weather predictability, etc.) in the Martian atmosphere. A data assimilation scheme combined with a Martian Global Circulation Model (GCM) is able to provide a complete, balanced, four-dimensional solution consistent with observations.
The GCM we use [Forget et al., 1999] combines a spectral dynamical solver and a tracer transport scheme developed in UK and Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD; Paris, France) physics package developed in collaboration with Oxford, The Open University and Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (Granada, Spain).
Here, we describe and discuss dust-related interannual and intraseasonal variability of the Martian climate. The results shown in this study come from a reanalysis using the Martian GCM with data assimilation scheme which assimilates Mars Global Surveyor/ Thermal Emission Spectrometer (MGS/TES) retrievals of temperature and column dust opacity. The detailed model setup was described by Montabone et al. [2006a], and the data assimilation scheme employed in this study was introduced in the work of Lewis et al. [2007]
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Regional and global dust storms on Mars investigated using data assimilation
Strain Energy Harvesting Powered Wireless Sensor Node for Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring
This is the final version of the article. Available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Proceedings of the 30th anniversary Eurosensors Conference – Eurosensors 2016, 4-7. Sepember 2016, Budapest, HungaryThis paper presents a wireless sensor node (WSN) powered by a strain energy harvester (SEH) through an adaptive power management module (PMM) for aircraft structural health monitoring (SHM). The energy distribution in the system, the efficiencies of the whole systems, and the WSN powering capability of the SEH under different strain loadings were studied to understand the developed system performance for practical applications of an autonomous WSN. Experimental results show that the SEH is able to produce up to 3.34 mW under strain loading of 600 μɛ at 10 Hz. The WSN can be powered up through the adaptive PMM at efficiency from 70 to 80% under different test conditions.The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from EPSRC in the UK through funding of the research into EPSRC via the project entitled “En-ComE” (EP/K020331/1)
SGXIO: Generic Trusted I/O Path for Intel SGX
Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the
underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to
software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome
this dependency, Intel introduced SGX, which allows to protect application code
against a subverted or malicious OS by running it in a hardware-protected
enclave. However, SGX lacks support for generic trusted I/O paths to protect
user input and output between enclaves and I/O devices.
This work presents SGXIO, a generic trusted path architecture for SGX,
allowing user applications to run securely on top of an untrusted OS, while at
the same time supporting trusted paths to generic I/O devices. To achieve this,
SGXIO combines the benefits of SGX's easy programming model with traditional
hypervisor-based trusted path architectures. Moreover, SGXIO can tweak insecure
debug enclaves to behave like secure production enclaves. SGXIO surpasses
traditional use cases in cloud computing and makes SGX technology usable for
protecting user-centric, local applications against kernel-level keyloggers and
likewise. It is compatible to unmodified operating systems and works on a
modern commodity notebook out of the box. Hence, SGXIO is particularly
promising for the broad x86 community to which SGX is readily available.Comment: To appear in CODASPY'1
Optimization approach for the computation of magnetohydrostatic coronal equilibria in spherical geometry
Context: This paper presents a method which can be used to calculate models
of the global solar corona from observational data. Aims: We present an
optimization method for computing nonlinear magnetohydrostatic equilibria in
spherical geometry with the aim to obtain self-consistent solutions for the
coronal magnetic field, the coronal plasma density and plasma pressure using
observational data as input. Methods: Our code for the self-consistent
computation of the coronal magnetic fields and the coronal plasma solves the
non-force-free magnetohydrostatic equilibria using an optimization method.
Previous versions of the code have been used to compute non-linear force-free
coronal magnetic fields from photospheric measurements in Cartesian and
spherical geometry, and magnetostatic-equilibria in Cartesian geometry. We test
our code with the help of a known analytic 3D equilibrium solution of the
magnetohydrostatic equations. The detailed comparison between the numerical
calculations and the exact equilibrium solutions is made by using magnetic
field line plots, plots of density and pressure and some of the usual
quantitative numerical comparison measures. Results: We find that the method
reconstructs the equilibrium accurately, with residual forces of the order of
the discretisation error of the analytic solution. The correlation with the
reference solution is better than 99.9% and the magnetic energy is computed
accurately with an error of <0.1%. Conclusions: We applied the method so far to
an analytic test case. We are planning to use this method with real
observational data as input as soon as possible.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
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