Thermal conductivity of diamond-loaded glues for the ATLAS particle physics detector

The ATLAS experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. ATLAS has been collecting data from the collisions of protons since December 2009, in order to investigate the conditions that existed during the early Universe and the origins of mass, and other topics in fundamental particle physics. The innermost layers of the ATLAS detector will be exposed to the most radiation over the first few years of operation at the LHC. In particular, the layer closest to the beam pipe, the B-layer, will degrade over time due to the added radiation. To compensate for its degradation, it will be replaced with an Insertable B-Layer (IBL) around 2016. The design of and R&D for the IBL is ongoing, as the hope is to use the most current technologies in the building of this new sub-detector layer. One topic of interest is the use of more thermally conductive glues in the construction of the IBL, in order to facilitate in the dissipation of heat from the detector. In this paper the measurement and use of highly thermally conductive glues, in particular those that are diamond-loaded, will be discussed. The modified transient plane source technique for thermal conductivity is applied in characterizing the glues across a wide temperature range

Correlation of gravimetric and satellite geodetic data Interim progress report, 11 Sep. 1967 - 29 Feb. 1968

Gravimetric and geodetic data correlation for satellite position prediction accuracy with error analysi

Society Doesn’t Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games as Speculative Fiction

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine and simulate as well as prepare. Thus, reading the game through the lens of speculative fiction shows that GTA: San Andreas offers the kinds of intertexts, allusions, and parallels that Brabazon, Redhead, and Chivaura (2018) argue is essential for making sense of a dystopic present

Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship [Book Review]

The very first thing I can say about Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship is that I cannot wait for the authors to consider adding a Canadian version – more on that later – since they include British reality shows. Admittedly, many of these last shows have been successful enough to lead to Americanized versions. In considering reality television, the Laurie Ouellette (no known relation) and James Hay seem to sacrifice one of the oldest, and currently largely underexamined as such, varieties of the reality television, the game show. This is not to say that new game shows such as Deal or No Deal and Who Wants to be a Millionaire are not consider, but rather that the repackaging and repurposing of older game shows – here I am thinking most pointedly about the return of Price is Right to prime-time and the repurposing of Liar\u27s Club and To Tell the Truth – tends to be sacrificed. I mention this not so much as a criticism but as a concept worth reconsidering in light of the findings, for Ouellette and Hay do spend their time very carefully showing that the themes and categories of contemporary reality television provide ample pedagogical (and generally didactic) accompaniments to the neo-liberal politics which seem to dominate North American culture as we reach the end of the second Bush era and approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As the authors demonstrate, under Bush the system has evolved that the government [...] not only cooperates with but also facilitates the privatization of care (48). This entails a downloading of state responsibilities onto the individual. However, there also has been a concurrent development of private, for-profit enterprises which have commodified care. What really comes to the fore, then, is the idea – stressed most pointedly by makeover shows, financial rescue shows and even the Survivor-type shows – of a system which espouses the freedom of the individual while actually (and contradictorily) creating a situation in which individuals are really only free to actively govern themselves

“I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This”: Pedagogy & Allegory in “Post 9/11” Video Games

Although critics and scholars have considered the extent to which the terror attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 influenced subsequent media productions, video games comprise a largely unexamined form. This oversight also applies to related forms of media production and among those who study video games is in part attributable to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship(s) between narrative and play. Even so, as early as 1997, JC Herz was investigating the role of video games in the military-entertainment complex. That said, the focus of this paper will not be the obvious games which draw settings and plots directly from the terror attacks, from the war on terror or from the overwhelming popular responses to them. Instead, it will consider games which function allegorically (at the very least metaphorically) and pedagogically through their imbrication with the web of so-called post-9/11 narratives. Syphon Filter 3 and Medal of Honor: Rising Sun both represent installments of successful video game series which were affected by the post-9/11 mindset. Through an examination of the games\u27 content and pedagogical functions, the tension between audience expectations and the media\u27s ideological manipulations will be examined, including how this occurs in and through the playing of the games

We Should Have Brought The Tank : Hypermediated Interactivity in Red vs. Blue

Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin\u27s propositions about new media\u27s relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies

Gay for Play: Theorizing LGBTQ Characters in Game Studies

Despite, and perhaps because of, popular press reactions to stereotypical depictions of beefy boys and busty babes in video games, the realm of gender, sex, and sexuality remains a lacuna in the emerging field of game studies. Of particular interest is the notion of performance and the ways this impacts both on gender and on game play. The combination might be expected to offer a very interesting way of approaching LGBTQ characters in digital games, especially given the recent inclusion of such characters in some popular and well-studied game franchises, including Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar 1997-present), Jade Empire (BioWare 2005-08) and Mass Effect (Electronic Arts 2007-present). In addition, there is a well documented history, complete with the authority of a Wikipedia page, of characters who are gay, who might be gay, who could be gay, and who are ambiguously gendered, which is more than gay enough for the people who leave messages on YouTube and on Xbox LIVE. However, this enumeration highlights the mass conflation of gender, sex, and sexuality— that is, the performance of a conventionalized set of behaviours, the chromosomal assignment of XX or XY, and the locus of erotic desire, respectively (Sedgwick 1997)—in contemporary popular culture. For Richard Dyer (1978, 2002, 2005) this situation means the continued depiction of LGBTQ characters according to the rubric of the dominant culture. As Dyer (1978, 2002, 2005) explains, these constructions rely on stereotypes that attribute queerness to a very reduced set of features as opposed to recognizing even the barest physical, emotional, and libidinal differences entailed in LGBTQ identities. Indeed, the approach taken by game makers and by game players confirms Dyer’s position insofar as game designers so far have left characters such as Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard unchanged other than to say “now he has sex with men.” Similarly, players—including gay ones—have taken characters’ cross-dressing or androgyny as sufficient for membership