A New Culture Embracing Sustainability for Apparel and Textiles Educational Programs

This paper examines an interdisciplinary body of literature to highlight social change theory and its significance to apparel and textiles educational programs in promoting change in behavior towards a sustainable future. This research concludes consumer education is needed and that education can create social change

Improving optical absorption in a-Si thin films with TiO2 Mie scatterers

To increase the optical absorption in very thin a-Si films is relevant for more efficient and inexpensive photovoltaics. In this work we deposited TiO2 particles with a gas aggregation source on top of a-Si thin films and study the effect on optical absorption. When using thin films, anti-reflection and enhanced-reflection occurs depending on the thickness, which was employed in this study. The experiments were compared with finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations which yielded good agreement. Both increased and decreased optical absorption was measured, depending on the photon energy range. This work demonstrates that by tailoring the various parameters, the TiO2 particles can contribute to increasing the efficiency of an a-Si based solar cell

Transaction-level power analysis of VLSI digital systems

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Gravity models of networks: Integrating maximum-entropy and econometric approaches

The World Trade Web (WTW) is the network of international trade relationships among world countries. Characterizing both the local link weights (observed trade volumes) and the global network structure (large-scale topology) of the WTW via a single model is still an open issue. While the traditional Gravity Model (GM) successfully replicates the observed trade volumes by employing macroeconomic properties such as GDP and geographic distance, it, unfortunately, predicts a fully connected network, thus returning a completely unrealistic topology of the WTW. To overcome this problem, two different classes of models have been introduced in econometrics and statistical physics. Econometric approaches interpret the traditional GM as the expected value of a probability distribution that can be chosen arbitrarily and tested against alternative distributions. Statistical physics approaches construct maximum-entropy probability distributions of (weighted) graphs from a chosen set of measurable structural constraints and test distributions resulting from different constraints. Here we compare and integrate the two approaches by considering a class of maximum-entropy models that can incorporate macroeconomic properties used in standard econometric models. We find that the integrated approach achieves a better performance than the purely econometric one. These results suggest that the maximum-entropy construction can serve as a viable econometric framework wherein extensive and intensive margins can be separately controlled for, by combining topological constraints and dyadic macroeconomic variables.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

Introverted and knotted spaces within modern and contemporary urban fabrics: passages, gallerias and covered squares

The scenic plaza mayor shares with the theater organisms some formative characters, since they both derive from a transformation, by knotting, of pre-existing buildings and fabrics. This architectural transformation is generated, at the beginning, by a change in the modalities of using public space. As for the corral de comedias, the process is due to the sedentarization of the theatrical practice, which abandons the itinerant dimension of the street to move inside the buildings (such as private homes and palaces). The original corral de comedias was in fact set up inside an open place that could be covered, and this feature became permanent  over time, creating a new building type. Similarly, since the sixteenth century,  squares became the fundamental location of Spanish civic life as well as they hosted all sorts of political, religious and festive representations, but also the venue of executions. For this purpose, namely to allow people to watch such events, the squares were transformed, by raising temporary walls and walkways. In some cases, like Tembleque and San Carlos del Valle, they began to realize permanent continuous balconies, with solutions that seem to have followed the same morphological evolution of corrales de comedias. In both cases it was necessary to unify different elements (buildings or rooms) and connect them to each other, through a process of “knotting”, in order to create a new organism. Over time the physiognomy of the spaces, originally open,  assumed the permanent characters of a new type, closed and similar to the courtyard of a “palazzo”.Falsetti, M.; Ciotoli, P. (2018). Introverted and knotted spaces within modern and contemporary urban fabrics: passages, gallerias and covered squares. En 24th ISUF International Conference. Book of Papers. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/ISUF2017.2017.5913OC

Local effects induced by dynamic load self-heating in NiTi wires of shape memory alloys

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Deterministic, quenched or annealed? Differences in the parameter estimation of heterogeneous network models

Analysing weighted networks requires modelling the binary and weighted properties simultaneously. We highlight three approaches for estimating the parameters responsible for them: econometric techniques treating topology as deterministic and statistical techniques either ensemble-averaging parameters or maximising an averaged likelihood over the topological randomness. In homogeneous models, equivalence holds; in heterogeneous network models, the local disorder breaks it, in a way reminiscent of the difference between `quenched' and `annealed' averages in the physics of disordered systems.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Reconciling econometrics with continuous maximum-entropy models

In the study of economic networks, econometric approaches interpret the traditional Gravity Model specification as the expected link weight coming from a probability distribution whose functional form can be chosen arbitrarily, while statistical-physics approaches construct maximum-entropy distributions of weighted graphs, constrained to satisfy a given set of measurable network properties. In a recent, companion paper, we integrated the two approaches and applied them to the World Trade Web, i.e. the network of international trade among world countries. While the companion paper dealt only with discrete-valued link weights, the present paper extends the theoretical framework to continuous-valued link weights. In particular, we construct two broad classes of maximum-entropy models, namely the integrated and the conditional ones, defined by different criteria to derive and combine the probabilistic rules for placing links and loading them with weights. In the integrated models, both rules follow from a single, constrained optimization of the continuous Kullback-Leibler divergence; in the conditional models, the two rules are disentangled and the functional form of the weight distribution follows from a conditional, optimization procedure. After deriving the general functional form of the two classes, we turn each of them into a proper family of econometric models via a suitable identification of the econometric function relating the corresponding, expected link weights to macroeconomic factors. After testing the two classes of models on World Trade Web data, we discuss their strengths and weaknesses.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

Detection of defect-induced magnetism in low-dimensional ZnO structures by Magnetophotocurrent

The detection of defect-induced magnetic order in single low-dimensional oxide structures is in general difficult because of the relatively small yield of magnetically ordered regions. In this work we have studied the effect of an external magnetic field on the transient photocurrent measured after light irradiation on different ZnO samples at room temperature. We found that a magnetic field produces a change in the relaxation rate of the transient photocurrent only in magnetically ordered ZnO samples. This rate can decrease or increase with field depending whether the magnetic order region is in the bulk or only at the surface of the ZnO sample. The phenomenon reported here is of importance for the development of magneto-optical low-dimensional oxides devices and provide a new guideline for the detection of magnetic order in low-dimensional magnetic semiconductors.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure