A Study on the Assessment of Management Frameworks for Waste Electronic Home Appliances

Serious adverse impacts on the environment and human health from the recycling and disposal of electronic waste have occurred in the past and continue to occur in China today, due to the lack of a national management strategy. With aiming to support the management strategy development, a study was carried out to plan and quantitatively evaluate the optional management frameworks for the selected five main types of large electronic home appliances in Beijing, the capital city and a typically big municipality in China. This paper outlined the main findings yielded from the series of assessment studies which started from the generation amount prediction and material flow analysis of the used electronic appliances, planning and optimization of the collection & transportation frameworks and ended at the economic evaluation of the optional recycling processes for the waste appliances. Although the revenue could be expected from the result of isolated evaluation of the recycling processes, the entire system will be economically unavailable if the used appliances are still collected from the owners at current prices. The traditional understanding of householders on the values of their used appliances should be changed in Beijing and China as a whole. Establishment of a formal collection system that could take back the used appliances at lower prices (less than 40% of the current level) is the key for the construction of a formal management framework with sustainability

Probing new intra-atomic force with isotope shifts

In the development of atomic clocks, some atomic transition frequencies are measured with remarkable precision. These measured spectra may include effects of a new force mediated by a weakly interacting boson. Such effects might be distilled out from possible violation of a linear relation in isotope shifts between two transitions, as known as King's linearity, with relatively suppressed theoretical uncertainties. We discuss the experimental sensitivity to a new force in the test of the linearity as well as the linearity violation owing to higher order effects within the Standard Model. The sensitivity to new physics is limited by such effects. We have found that for Yb$^+$, the higher order effect is in the reach of future experiments. The sensitivity to a heavy mediator is also discussed. It is analytically clarified that the sensitivity becomes weaker than that in the literature. Our numerical results of the sensitivity are compared with other weak force search experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures; published versio

A Manga-Driven System Requirements Development PBL Exercise

We conducted a Project-Based Learning (PBL)-type exercise incorporating Japanese cartoon (manga) techniques into Requirements Development (RD) processes. Manga has established techniques, such as those for character setting and story development, that we thought are also valid for RD processes. Using this manga-driven method, students were able to clarify high-level project goals early in the development life-cycle, and succeeded in defining high quality and unique system ideas.Comment: SEEM201

Josephson Effect due to Odd-Frequency Pairs in Diffusive Half Metals

Motivated by a recent experiment [Keizer et al., Nature (London) 439, 825 (2006)], we study the Josephson effect in superconductor/diffusive half metal/superconductor junctions using the recursive Green function method. The spin-flip scattering at the junction interfaces opens the Josephson channel of the odd-frequency spin-triplet Cooper pairs. As a consequence, the local density of states in a half metal has a large peak at the Fermi energy. Therefore the odd-frequency pairs can be detected experimentally by using the scanning tunneling spectroscopy