High efficiency, high frequency magnetic deflection driver

Electromagnetic deflection yoke stores energy during the scan and releases it in the flyback or retrace. The operation of the device involves a method of switching to a voltage high enough to dissipate the flyback pulse during the retrace time and then operating during the scan time at a much lower voltage

The feasibility study for electronic imaging system with the photoheliograph

The development of the electronic subsystems used for the photoheliograph and its application for a high resolution study of the sun are discussed. Basic considerations are as follows: (1) determination of characteristics of solar activity within the spectral response of the photoheliograph, (2) determination of the space vehicles capable of carrying the photoheliograph, (3) analysis of the capability of the ground based data gathering network to assimilate the generated information, and (4) the characteristics of the photoheliograph and the associated spectral filters

Jointly Optimizing Placement and Inference for Beacon-based Localization

The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high localization accuracy.Comment: Appeared at 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

El Centre de documentació de Televisió Espanyola a Sant Cugat

L'article presenta un estat de la qüestió dels fons documentals del centre de Televisió Espanyola a Sant Cugat els primers anys d'emissió. S'identifiquen, d'entrada, dos condicionants dels primers temps: com en tota novetat, inicialment no es va reconèixer la transcendència històrica de les emissions televisives; així mateix, hi havia dificultats tècniques, lligades a la multiplicitat de suports que, a més, en pocs anys quedaven obsolets. Això ha comportat la pèrdua d'alguns materials, o la impossibilitat de visionar-ne d'altres. Des de 1974 es comencen a arxivar programes en vídeo, però, amb tot, es destaca que és des de 1977 que el centre documental de Sant Cugat disposa d'un arxiu convenientment indexat i informatitzat, on es guarden tots els documents en català.This article describes the state of the documentary collection at the Spanish Television (TVE) station in Sant Cugat during its first years of broadcasting. Two conditioning factors of those first years are identified: as with any novelty, the historical transcendence of the television broadcasts was not initially recognized; there were also technical difficulties related with the multiplicity and short life of supporting mechanisms, which led to the loss of some material and the impossibility of viewing others. Since 1974, programs have been filed in video format but, even so, it should be mentioned that since 1977 the Sant Cugat documentary centre has a conveniently indexed and computerized archive where all documentaries in Catalan are saved

“It’s a White People Thing”: The Experience of Negotiating Sexual and Cultural Identity for Young-Adults in Durban

The creation of the post-apartheid government founded itself on the principles of equality for all people as laid out in the Constitution. However, while discrimination against people based on sexual orientation is illegal, homosexuals still experience a lack of acceptance in mainstream South African society. The purpose of this study is to understand the experience of Zulu and other black and coloured young-adult lesbian, gay, and bisexual (lgb ) peoples living in Durban, South Africa. I looked at how these people have developed their identities and what challenges and surprising joys they have found in their lives in relation to their sexuality. I spent time at the Durban Lesbian and Gay Community and Health Centre (DLGCHC) in their drop-in room getting to know as many visitors to the centre as possible. The DLGCHC is the only openly LGBT support organization in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. I conducted in-depth interviews with 7 individuals in the drop-in centre about their life stories to collect information and added to this through my own observations and experience at the centre. My hypothesis in this study is that lgb young-adults in Durban who visit the DLGCHC feel as though they have to separate their sexual identity from their identity in their home culture to find acceptance. What I have found is that all of my participants faced at least some level of discrimination ranging from taxi drivers whispering as they walked past to one mother burning her daughters pants to get rid of the Satan in her. None of the people I talked to said that they would rather be heterosexual or indicated that they were unhappy with their sexuality. In fact, almost all of my participants expressed pride in being gay and love this part of their identity having found positive self-images for themselves. There is a disconnect between the identities of these young adults and the cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism that surrounds them in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. This traditionalism has caused the development of a strong sub-culture in which all lgb or questioning individuals can find acceptance (according to my participants). In order for all lgb South Africans to feel empowered in their sexuality a unified political movement needs to develop in which lgb people can speak-out against the discrimination they face and educate their communities for liberalization and social acceptance

Leveraging Complexity Science and Emergence for a Self-organizing Battlespace [video]

TechCon2017 (CRUSER)Presented by Dr. Josef Schaff: NAVAIRIncludes slidesThe network-centric battlespace is constructed from thousands of decentralized nodes that need to share a world model known as a common operational picture (COP). The nodes represent each element of the battlespace, and consist of the functional element with aspects of communication and simple autonomy. Each node is mapped to a mobile vehicle or static intelligent communication device, and in some cases, can consist of several intelligent sensors at a single location. To effectively manage the battlespace, each node should have some awareness of the topology of the force laydown, as well as the relative position of some of its neighbors. This knowledge would facilitate rapid self-organizing strategies for dynamic routing of priority data between nodes in one section of the battlespace, with a more distant section. The chosen topology can affect network failures as well as the success of network attacks, and this information should be transferred within a sparse data element, similar to the stigmergic information used by ant colonies (pheromone marker) and beehives (bee “dance”). Recent work has shown that spatially distributed large ad-hoc networks lose edge-node communication due to scaling issues for the large numbers of networked nodes needed for a battlespace. This can compromise availability within the network. To further complicate matters, a Congressional Research Report from 2007 showed that the resulting scaling limitations were caused by a combinatorial explosion, due to the massive number of route calculations needed for large scale ad-hoc networks. This research investigated an adaptive fractal algorithm (NPPR) for emergent self-organizing topologies, that may improve the availability and resiliency for large ad-hoc networks required for cyber offense and defense. The results of this study showed stigmergic behavior, where two variables were able to dynamically convey the collective topology to all network nodes. By using a linear equation similar to the point-slope line equation, the calculation requirement for each node to compute the relative positions of 10,000 other nodes in under 100 milliseconds, was met by even the slowest computational nodes. The resulting topologies exhibited swarm-like self-organizing behaviors that clustered around targets and rendezvous points.NPS CRUSE