Silencing Speech with Pornography

The aim of this paper is to offer a map of the dynamics through which pornography may silence women’s illocutions. Drawing on Searle’s speech act theory, I will take illocutionary forces as sets of conditions for success. The different types of silencing, I claim, originate from the hearer’s missed recognition of a specific component of the force of the speaker’s act. In addition to the varieties already discussed in literature (which I label essential, authority, and sincerity silencing), I shall finally consider another kind of silencing produced by the failure to acknowledge the speaker’s words as serious (seriousness silencing)

Optical Module Front-End for a Neutrino Underwater Telescope: PMT interface

A proposal for a new system to capture signals in the Optical Module (OM) of an Underwater Neutrino Telescope is described. It concentrates on the problem of power consumption in relation to precision. In particular, a solution for the interface between the photomultiplier (PMT) and the front-end electronics is presented

Smart Analogue Sampler for the Optical Module of a Cherenkov Neutrino Detector

A transient waveform sampler/recorder IC has been developed and realized in AMS C35B4 technology. This chip has been designed to fit the needs of a proposal for a front-end architecture for the readout of the anode signal of the photomultipliers in an underwater neutrino telescope. The design is based around a 3 channels x 32 cells switched capacitor array unit sampling its voltage inputs at 200MHz external clock rate and transferring the stored analogue voltage samples to its single analogue output at 1/10th of the sampling rate. This unit is replicated inside the ASIC providing 4 independent analogue sampling queues for signal transients up to 32 x 5 ns and a fifth unit storing transients up to 128 x 5 ns. A micro-pipelined unit, based on Muller C-gates, controls the 5 independent samplers. This paper briefly summarizes the complete front-end architecture and discusses in more detail the internal structure of the ASIC and its first functional tests

Experimental Characterization of Ionic Polymer Metal Composite as a Novel Fractional Order Element

Ionic polymer metal composites (IPMCs) are electroactive materials made of ionic polymer thin membranes with platinum metallization on their surfaces. They are interesting materials due to not only their electromechanical applications as transducers but also to their electrochemical features and the relationship between the ionic/solvent current and the potential field. Their electrochemical properties thus suggest the possibility for exploiting them as compact fractional-order elements (FOEs) with a view of defining fabrication processes and production strategies that assure the desired performances. In this paper, the experimental electrical characterization of a brand new IPMC setup in a fixed sandwich configuration is proposed. Two IPMC devices with different platinum absorption times (5 h and 20 h) are characterized through experimental data: first, a preliminary linearity study is performed for a fixed input voltage amplitude in order to determine the frequency region where IPMC can be approximated as linear; then, a frequency analysis is carried out in order to identify a coherent fractional-order dynamics in the bode diagrams. Such analyses take the first steps towards a simplified model of IPMC as a compact electronic FOE for which the fractional exponent value depends on fabrication parameters as the absorption time

Low Power Front End for the Optical Module of a Neutrino Underwater Telescope

A proposal for a new system to capture signals in the Optical Module (OM) of an underwater neutrino telescope is described. It concentrates on the problem of power consumption and time precision. In particular, a solution for the interface between the photomultiplier (PMT) and the front-end electronics is presented

Proposal, development and test of an analog front-end electronic board for Nemo telescope

The NEMO collaboration is involved in the R&D of the main technologies for the project of a km3 scale underwater neutrino telescope. The proposed detector is made up of thousands of Optical Modules (hereafter OM), spread over the entire volume for Cˇ erenkov light detection. Each OMis equipped with a photo multiplier tube (PMT) and an electronic circuit for data acquisition and transmission (DAQ-Board). This work points out the possible benefits of a hybrid solution based on an analog ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) employed for the analog signal acquisition and an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), a digital programmable IC (Integrated Circuit) which performs the data acquisition and the data transmission

Synchronization of spatiotemporal semiconductor lasers and its application in color image encryption

Optical chaos is a topic of current research characterized by high-dimensional nonlinearity which is attributed to the delay-induced dynamics, high bandwidth and easy modular implementation of optical feedback. In light of these facts, which adds enough confusion and diffusion properties for secure communications, we explore the synchronization phenomena in spatiotemporal semiconductor laser systems. The novel system is used in a two-phase colored image encryption process. The high-dimensional chaotic attractor generated by the system produces a completely randomized chaotic time series, which is ideal in the secure encoding of messages. The scheme thus illustrated is a two-phase encryption method, which provides sufficiently high confusion and diffusion properties of chaotic cryptosystem employed with unique data sets of processed chaotic sequences. In this novel method of cryptography, the chaotic phase masks are represented as images using the chaotic sequences as the elements of the image. The scheme drastically permutes the positions of the picture elements. The next additional layer of security further alters the statistical information of the original image to a great extent along the three-color planes. The intermediate results during encryption demonstrate the infeasibility for an unauthorized user to decipher the cipher image. Exhaustive statistical tests conducted validate that the scheme is robust against noise and resistant to common attacks due to the double shield of encryption and the infinite dimensionality of the relevant system of partial differential equations.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures; Article in press, Optics Communications (2011

First test of a power-pulsed electronics system on a GRPC detector in a 3-Tesla magnetic field

An important technological step towards the realization of an ultra-granular hadronic calorimeter to be used in the future International Linear Collider (ILC) experiments has been made. A 33X50 cm2 GRPC detector equipped with a power-pulsed electronics board offering a 1cm2 lateral segmentation was successfully tested in a 3-Tesla magnet operating at the H2 beam line of the CERN SPS. An important reduction of power consumption with no deterioration of the detector performance is obtained when the power-pulsing mode is applied. This important result shows that ultra-granular calorimeters for ILC experiments are not only an attractive but also a realistic option.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure