Study of thin film large area photovoltaic solar energy converter final report

Process for fabricating thin film cadmium sulfide backwall solar cells on polyimide plastic foil substrate

Study of thin film large area photovoltaic solar energy converter Second quarterly report, 1 Jan. - 31 Mar. 1963

Thin film large area photovoltaic solar energy converter - cadmium sulfide films producted by vacuum evaparation techniqu

Faculty Member Responses to Multiple Organizational Identities: Jesuit, Catholic, and University

Many organizations, including Catholic universities, make concerted efforts to foster their organizational identities, yet little research has been conducted to explore the issues pertinent to doing so and there is little research published on the concepts of organizational identity and organizational identification. Using grounded theory methodology, this study explored why and how faculty members respond to multiple organizational identities and the conditions, actions, and consequences that are part of that process. This study sought to understand what responses faculty members make to the Jesuit, Catholic, and university identities and what factors influence their responses. Results are based on a grounded theory analysis of thirty faculty member interviews at one Jesuit university. In general, the organizational identities made a difference to how faculty members enacted their roles depending on the degree to which faculty members had a sense of connection with the organizational identities. A sense of connection was made by the degree to which a faculty member shared the values and/or beliefs that were embodied in the organizational identities and whether or not faculty members perceived the organizational identities as being relevant to their jobs, i.e. to their roles or subject matter. The stronger the sense of connection, the more likely the faculty member would implement the organizational identities into their roles, unless other conditions/factors intervened, e.g. perceived conflict between identities, perceived importance of identities, attitude towards identities and broader organizational forms. In response to the level of connection, faculty members took a variety of actions or inaction: implemented the identities into all roles (full implementation), some roles (fragmented implementation), not at all (no implementation), or simply had actions that were coincidentally consistent with the organizational identities but were not the result of the identities (coincidental actions). Consequences of a personal nature arose based upon the level of faculty members' connections and resulting actions/inactions; these included a range of feelings: positive, mixed or ambivalent, negative, or neutral. Contributions to the organizational identity and identification literature are discussed and ten guidelines offered for practitioners in Catholic higher education who wish to foster their identities

Total sulfane sulfur bioavailability reflects ethnic and gender disparities in cardiovascular disease

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) has emerged as an important physiological and pathophysiological signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system influencing vascular tone, cytoprotective responses, redox reactions, vascular adap- tation, and mitochondrial respiration. However, bioavailable levels of H2S in its various biochemical metabolite forms during clinical cardiovascular disease remain poorly understood. We performed a case-controlled study to quantify and compare the bioavailability of various biochemical forms of H2S in patients with and without cardiovascular disease (CVD). In our study, we used the reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography monobromobimane assay to analytically measure bioavailable pools of H2S. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were also identified using DNA Pyrosequencing. We found that plasma acid labile sulfide levels were significantly reduced in Caucasian females with CVD compared with those without the disease. Conversely, plasma bound sulfane sulfur levels were significantly reduced in Caucasian males with CVD compared with those without the disease. Surprisingly, gender differences of H2S bioavailability were not observed in African Americans, although H2S bioavailability was significantly lower overall in this ethnic group compared to Caucasians. We also performed SNP analysis of H2S synthesizing enzymes and found a significant increase in cystathionine gamma-lyase (CTH) 1364 G-T allele frequency in patients with CVD compared to controls. Lastly, plasma H2S bioavailability was found to be predictive for cardiovascular disease in Caucasian subjects as de- termined by receiver operator characteristic analysis. These findings reveal that plasma H2S bioavailability could be considered a biomarker for CVD in an ethnic and gender manner. Cystathionine gamma-lyase 1346 G-T SNP might also contribute to the risk of cardiovascular disease development

‘Stick them to the cross’:Anti-trafficking apps and the production of ignorance

There is a long history of ignorance production around trafficking in human beings. A proliferation of anti-trafficking apps plays an important role in the reinforcement of this ignorance. Anti-trafficking apps work in different ways to other (mis)information tools, but there is a lack of academic research on the topic. This paper addresses this gap through an agnotological approach: focusing on how ignorance is produced and becomes productive, rather than seeing ignorance as just a lack of knowledge. We investigate how anti-trafficking apps are used to manipulate (mis)understandings of and responses to human trafficking by enabling new types of awareness raising, user participation and ignorance production. The networking of ignorance that this allows – and the integration of this into new aspects of everyday life – illustrates de Goede’s (2012) warning that “the network is problematic as a security technique…because, ultimately, it has no outside” (p. 228)

Picking on the family: disrupting android malware triage by forcing misclassification

Machine learning classification algorithms are widely applied to different malware analysis problems because of their proven abilities to learn from examples and perform relatively well with little human input. Use cases include the labelling of malicious samples according to families during triage of suspected malware. However, automated algorithms are vulnerable to attacks. An attacker could carefully manipulate the sample to force the algorithm to produce a particular output. In this paper we discuss one such attack on Android malware classifiers. We design and implement a prototype tool, called IagoDroid, that takes as input a malware sample and a target family, and modifies the sample to cause it to be classified as belonging to this family while preserving its original semantics. Our technique relies on a search process that generates variants of the original sample without modifying their semantics. We tested IagoDroid against RevealDroid, a recent, open source, Android malware classifier based on a variety of static features. IagoDroid successfully forces misclassification for 28 of the 29 representative malware families present in the DREBIN dataset. Remarkably, it does so by modifying just a single feature of the original malware. On average, it finds the first evasive sample in the first search iteration, and converges to a 100% evasive population within 4 iterations. Finally, we introduce RevealDroid*, a more robust classifier that implements several techniques proposed in other adversarial learning domains. Our experiments suggest that RevealDroid* can correctly detect up to 99% of the variants generated by IagoDroid

Close Encounters: Intimate service interactions in lap dancing work as a nexus of ‘self-others-things’

Drawing on ethnographic research on lap dancing work, this paper focuses on how the subjectivities, interactions and settings that constitute the lap dancing industry come into being through three interrelated processes of encoding, embodying and embedding. In considering how these processes combine to ‘enact’ the industry, the paper draws on Merleau Ponty’s understanding of the world as a dynamic nexus of ‘self-others-things’. Focusing on how this nexus shapes lived experiences of intimate service interactions, the analysis considers how dancers continually negotiate customers’ expectations of the service encounter given the ways in which these are: (i) encoded in depictions of lap dancing work in marketing and advertising materials on club websites; (ii) embodied by lap dancers through their interactions with customers; and (iii) embedded within the materiality of lap dancing clubs. The paper shows how intimate service encounters can be understood as the outcome of a nexus of ‘self-others-things’ through which particular organizational subjectivities and settings are brought into being through these three interrelated processes

Cost effective risk assessment for process design

Bibliografi hlm. 245-247xvii, 252 hlm. : il. ; 21 cm