Solid-state transducer, system, and method

The present disclosure includes solid-state transducers, a system, and a method. In one embodiment, a solid-state transducer includes a housing, a first end portion, a second end portion, a plurality of electrical conductors, and a thin-film resistive material. The thin-film resistive material is disposed between and in electrical communication with a plurality of electrical conductors. The thin-film resistive material is configured to receive one or more electrical signals from the plurality of electrical conductors, and generate thermal oscillations to create pressure waves in a medium in response to receiving the one or more electrical signals.https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/patents/1153/thumbnail.jp

Solid state sound: A hot topic

As seen with the latest iPhone 7 release, traditional audio components can now be a limiting factor in technology design. What if we could make a loudspeaker with no moving parts and virtually no weight? Carbon nanotube loudspeakers are such devices. They create sound using heat oscillations, as opposed to a moving diaphragm. They have the thickness of only a handful of carbon atoms, are flexible and stretchable. In this TechTalk I’ll discuss the carbon nanotube loudspeaker and the design challenges in maturing this intriguing technology.https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/techtalks/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Unnatural Composite Higgs

Composite Higgs models can trivially satisfy precision-electroweak and flavour constraints by simply having a large spontaneous symmetry breaking scale, f > 10 TeV. This produces a 'split' spectrum, where the strong sector resonances have masses greater than 10 TeV and are separated from the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons, which remain near the electroweak scale. Even though a tuning of order 10^{-4} is required to obtain the observed Higgs boson mass, the big hierarchy problem remains mostly solved. Intriguingly, models with a fully-composite right-handed top quark also exhibit improved gauge coupling unification. By restricting ourselves to models which preserve these features we find that the symmetry breaking scale cannot be arbitrarily raised, leading to an upper bound f < 100-1000 TeV. This implies that the resonances may be accessible at future colliders, or indirectly via rare-decay experiments. Dark matter is identified with a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson, and we show that the smallest coset space containing a stable, scalar singlet and an unbroken SU(5) symmetry is SU(7) / SU(6) x U(1). The colour-triplet pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson also contained in this coset space is metastable due to a residual symmetry. It can decay via a displaced vertex when produced at colliders, leading to a distinctive signal of unnaturalness.Comment: 39 pages, 11 figures. V2: some additional material, version accepted for publicatio

Coming out and staying in industry: How sexual orientation and gender identity matters in construction employment

Over the last three years the New Civil Engineer, Architects’ Journal and Construction News have conducted a survey investigating the experiences of LGBT workers in the sector. The surveys reveal that homophobia is commonplace in the construction industry, with many gay men and women encountering homophobic comments in the workplace and few feeling that they could be open about their sexuality in the workplace (Ramchurn, 2015a; 2015b). Furthermore, respondents had little faith that their managers would handle such issues effectively. In this literature review paper we explore the theoretical and empirical explanations for the apparent institutionally homophobic situation of the sector. A key concern is what are the experiences of LGBT people and in what ways does gender/sexual identity present challenges in working lives? The results reveal the importance of sexuality in the reproduction of social relations in construction, the nature of sexualised banter and physical harassment of LGBT workers and the effects that this has on equality of opportunity. The cultural landscape represents a toxic environment for those who do not conform to the white, male, heterosexual stereotype of the construction worker and the homosocial relations that surround it. Furthermore, the review highlights how research has evolved to now present a critical perspective on how gender and sexualities are performed in organizational contexts (Rumens, 2013). The results presented set the agenda for empirical explorations of the experiences of workers. The main contribution of the paper is that it begins to unpack the institutional landscape that sustains the status quo and which must be challenged if more inclusive practices are to take hold within the sector

El Partido Comunista de Chile, 1922-1947

Chilean communist part

Fully Point-wise Convolutional Neural Network for Modeling Statistical Regularities in Natural Images

Modeling statistical regularity plays an essential role in ill-posed image processing problems. Recently, deep learning based methods have been presented to implicitly learn statistical representation of pixel distributions in natural images and leverage it as a constraint to facilitate subsequent tasks, such as color constancy and image dehazing. However, the existing CNN architecture is prone to variability and diversity of pixel intensity within and between local regions, which may result in inaccurate statistical representation. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel fully point-wise CNN architecture for modeling statistical regularities in natural images. Specifically, we propose to randomly shuffle the pixels in the origin images and leverage the shuffled image as input to make CNN more concerned with the statistical properties. Moreover, since the pixels in the shuffled image are independent identically distributed, we can replace all the large convolution kernels in CNN with point-wise ($1*1$) convolution kernels while maintaining the representation ability. Experimental results on two applications: color constancy and image dehazing, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed network over the existing architectures, i.e., using 1/10$\sim$1/100 network parameters and computational cost while achieving comparable performance.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. To appear in ACM MM 201

Researching cultures in science, engineering and technology: an analysis of current and past literature. Research Report Series for UKRC No.7

This report is a literature review of published research on the cultures of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) and the impact they have on women professionals employed in the sector. The report focuses primarily on the UK perspective, with reference to other Western countries where relevant