Selfie-Portrait

The selfie has become the currency of today; boldly stating: I was here, this is how I felt, and, most importantly, I exist. This has become our self-reflection. Exploring the self-portrait, as have countless artists of the past, Johnny Shield uses the various selfies as reference for his sculptural works - both empty vessels and sculptural busts. Made from glass these fragile objects are all doomed to break. You, the viewer, are witnessing a truly damned object: the central portrait uneasily rests on a pedestal that is actively electrolytically corroding. While on display, this pedestal will lean more and more precariously, ultimately spilling the glass portrait onto the ground. By participating in the legacy of self-portraiture but producing a self-destructive object, Johnny is simultaneously endorsing and condemning the sacredness of the art object, the selfie, as well as the practice of glorifying the artist

Sources of unburned carbon in the fly ash produced from low-NOx pulverized coal combustion

Journal ArticleThe unburned carbon in the fly ash produced from low-NOx pulverized coal combustion is shown to consist of a mixture of soot and coal char. The soot was identified by the presence of chains or aggregates of 10-50-nm-diameter primary particles in electron microscope images of both laboratory samples and a sample of fly ash from a power plant operating low-NOx burners. Laboratory samples showed increasing carbon content with decreasing nitrogen oxide (NOx) concentration. The experiments included a high-NOx base case and four low-NOx cases consisting of (1) staged combustion with short (0.5 s) residence time, (2) staged combustion with long (1.5 s) residence time, (3) a low-NOx burner with slow mixing, and (4) reburning using coal as the reburning fuel. Comparison of the base case that used premixed coal and air with the long-residence-time staged combustion case shows a decrease in the NOx from over 900 ppm to below 200 ppm and an increase in the carbon in the ash from 4% to over 30%. The fly ash from staged combustion was a mixture of large soot aggregates, porous char, and spherical particles of mineral ash, whereas the ash from reburning lacked the large aggregates. For all laboratory conditions, the carbon content in the particle fraction with an aerodynamic diameter over 10 lm was higher than in the 1-2.5- lm-diameter fraction. Both soot aggregates and char contributed to the high carbon in the large particle fraction. The difference in carbon burnout between the two staging conditions was consistent with published soot oxidation rates. Both char burnout and soot formation need to be considered in studies of the carbon content of pulverized coal fly ash

Asymmetric Cache Coherency: Policy Modifications to Improve Multicore Performance

International audienceAsymmetric coherency is a new optimisation method for coherency policies to support non-uniform work- loads in multicore processors. Asymmetric coherency assists in load balancing a workload and this is applica- ble to SoC multicores where the applications are not evenly spread among the processors and customization of the coherency is possible. Asymmetric coherency is a policy change, and consequently our designs re- quire little or no additional hardware over an existing system. We explore two different types of asymmetric coherency policies. Our bus based asymmetric coherency policy, generated a 60% coherency cost reduction (reduction of latencies due to coherency messages) for non-shared data. Our directory based asymmetric co- herency policy, showed up to a 5.8% execution time improvement and up to a 22% improvement in average memory latency for the parallel benchmarks Sha, using a statically allocated asymmetry. Dynamically allo- cated asymmetry was found to generate further improvements in access latency, increasing the effectiveness of asymmetric coherency by up to 73.8% when compared to the static asymmetric solution

So That the People May Live (Hecel Lena Oyate Ki Nipi Kte): Lakota and Dakota Elder Women as Reservoirs of Life and Keepers of Knowledge about Health Protection and Diabetes Prevention

Around the world, Type 2 diabetes is on the rise, affecting adults and youth from societies in the throes of industrialization. Over time, uncontrolled diabetes can leave in its wake people facing renal failure, blindness, and heart disease, and communities daunted by new, chaotic phenomena. Westernized lifestyles are a recognized explanation for the escalating prevalence. The web of causation, however, may be broader and thicker, woven by complex interactions with environmental, sociological, and historical roots. The purpose of this participatory ethnographic study was to document, understand, and support Lakota and Dakota elder women’s beliefs and knowledge about health protection and diabetes prevention. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine elder women to learn: (1) about the factors attributable to diabetes, (2) about related narratives addressing health protection and diabetes prevention, and (3) how knowledge about health protection is shared. The elders saw diabetes as an outside, unnatural disorder, the contributing influences of which are external as well as internal. They offered narratives about chaos, restitution, testimony, and quests for cures and meaning. The elders connected health to traditional values and ways, the land, and memory. Reservoirs of wisdom reside in the knowledge systems of tribal elders who remember when diabetes was unknown. Health leaders at local and national levels would be wise to respect and draw upon this knowledge for guidance in program planning and policy development

Management of reconfigurable multi-standards ASIP-based receiver

International audienceThe emergence of multiple wireless standards is introducing the need of flexible platforms which are able to self-adapt to various environments depending on the application requirements. Our work lies in the domain of self-adaptive heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures. In this paper, we present our ideas about the management of an ASIP-based multi-standards iterative receiver, which includes the support for turbo-decoding. In this context, the management of a multi-standards receiver provides the services for the self-adaptation mechanisms based on a collect and an analysis of information, a decision making process and a fast reconfiguration of the platform

Giant Enhancement of Magnetic Anisotropy in Ultrathin Manganite Films via Nanoscale 1D Periodic Depth Modulation

The relatively low magnetocrystalline anisotropy (MCA) in strongly correlated manganites (La,Sr)MnO3 has been a major hurdle for implementing them in spintronic applications. Here we report an unusual, giant enhancement of in-plane MCA in 6 nm La0.67Sr0.33MnO3 (LSMO) films grown on (001) SrTiO3 substrates when the top 2 nm is patterned into periodic stripes of 100 or 200 nm width. Planar Hall effect measurements reveal an emergent uniaxial anisotropy superimposed on one of the original biaxial easy axes for unpatterned LSMO along (110) directions, with a 50-fold enhanced anisotropy energy density of 5.6 × 106 erg/cm3 within the nanostripes, comparable to the value for cobalt. The magnitude and direction of the uniaxial anisotropy exclude shape anisotropy and the step edge effect as its origin. High resolution transmission electron microscopy studies reveal a nonequilibrium strain distribution and drastic suppression in the c-axis lattice constant within the nanostructures, which is the driving mechanism for the enhanced uniaxial MCA, as suggested by first-principles density functional calculations

Seasonal Carbohydrate Dynamics and Climatic Regulation of Senescence in the Perennial Grass, Miscanthus

Miscanthus is a perennial energy grass predominantly used for combustion but there is increasing interest in fermenting the cell-wall carbohydrates or green-cutting for soluble sugars to produce bioethanol. Our aims were to: (1) quantify non-structural carbohydrates (NSC), (2) observe the timing of seasonal shifts in the stems and rhizome, and (3) identify developmental and/or climatic conditions that promoted carbohydrate remobilization from the stems to the rhizome during senescence. Two genotypes of Miscanthus sinensis, a Miscanthus sacchariflorus and a Miscanthus × giganteus were grown at replicated field sites in Aberystwyth, West Wales and Harpenden, South East England. NSC were quantified from the rhizome and aboveground organs and then correlated with climatic data collected from on-site weather stations. PAR and maximum daily temperatures were higher at Harpenden throughout the year, but daily minimum temperatures were lower. Senescence was accelerated at Harpenden. Carbohydrates were retained within the stems of non-flowering genotypes, at both sites, in winter and were still present after a frost event to −2 °C. Rhizome starch concentrations were at least equal to the previous winter’s levels (February 2011) by September. Lower daily minimum temperatures accelerate the rate of senescence and warmer daily maximum temperatures cannot counteract this effect. At current yields, M. × giganteus, could produce 0.7 t ha−1 of NSC in addition to ligno-cellulosic biomass in November but with concerted breeding efforts this could be targeted for improvement as has been achieved in other crops. Shifting harvests forward to November would not leave the rhizome depleted of carbohydrates