Self-Healing Partial Reconfiguration of an FPGA

The goal of this project, sponsored by General Dynamics, is to create an FPGA-based system capable of detecting and gracefully recovering from errors without compromising system functionality. Previous research developed a prototype for partial reconfiguration, but a major limitation was the need for a PC to partially reprogram the FPGA. By implementing a method of self-reconfiguration and developing a system using triple module redundancy, the FPGA can locate errors and partially self-reconfigure the corrupted areas while maintaining valid system outputs

Worcester HS career aspiration replication study.

A gender comparative study determining the career interests of juniors was performed in the Worcester Public High Schools for the Advisory Committee on the Status of Women. The primary goal was to determine if the results replicated the previous year\u27s findings. The same approximate gender ratios of students by career interests, post-graduation plans, and career concerns were found to repeat. The research team concluded the findings and trends from the previous study by Handler and Hogan (2005) were still present among juniors. It was less clear whether acceptable sophomore data collected with the same survey instrument produced the same result

Influence of brine formation on Arctic Ocean circulation over the past 15 million years

The early oceanographic history of the Arctic Ocean is important in regulating, and responding to, climatic changes. However, constraints on its oceanographic history preceding the Quaternary (the past 1.8 Myr) have become available only recently, because of the difficulties associated with obtaining continuous sediment records in such a hostile setting. Here, we use the neodymium isotope compositions of two sediment cores recovered near the North Pole to reconstruct over the past approx15 Myr the sources contributing to Arctic Intermediate Water, a water mass found today at depths of 200 to 1,500 m. We interpret high neodymium ratios for the period between 15 and 2 Myr ago, and for the glacial periods thereafter, as indicative of weathering input from the Siberian Putoranan basalts into the Arctic Ocean. Arctic Intermediate Water was then derived from brine formation in the Eurasian shelf regions, with only a limited contribution of intermediate water from the North Atlantic. In contrast, the modern circulation pattern, with relatively high contributions of North Atlantic Intermediate Water and negligible input from brine formation, exhibits low neodymium isotope ratios and is typical for the interglacial periods of the past 2 Myr. We suggest that changes in climatic conditions and the tectonic setting were responsible for switches between these two modes