A study of the applicability of gallium arsenide and silicon carbide as aerospace sensor materials

Most of the piezoresistive sensors, to date, are made of silicon and germanium. Unfortunately, such materials are severly restricted in high temperature environments. By comparing the effects of temperature on the impurity concentrations and piezoresistive coefficients of silicon, gallium arsenide, and silicon carbide, it is being determined if gallium arsenide and silicon carbide are better suited materials for piezoresistive sensors in high temperature environments. The results show that the melting point for gallium arsenide prevents it from solely being used in high temperature situations, however, when used in the alloy Al(x)Ga(1-x)As, not only the advantage of the wider energy band gas is obtained, but also the higher desire melting temperature. Silicon carbide, with its wide energy band gap and higher melting temperature suggests promise as a high temperature piezoresistive sensor

European Jobs Monitor 2014: Drivers of Recent Job Polarisation and Upgrading in Europe

[Excerpt] European labour markets added nearly 30 million new jobs in a golden age of employment creation prior to the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. These labour markets subsequently shed six million jobs, and unemployment peaked at 11% in 2013, its highest rate in well over a decade. This third annual European Jobs Monitor report looks in detail at recent shifts in employment at Member State and European Union level in the two years from the second quarter of 2011 to the second quarter of 2013. It applies a jobs-based approach, which ranks jobs according to wage and then groups them into five categories of equal size (quintiles) ranging from lowest-paid to highest-paid. The net employment change between the starting and concluding periods (in terms of people employed) for each quintile in each country is summed to establish whether there has been net gain or loss. This analytic approach enables employment shifts to be described quantitatively (how many jobs were created or destroyed) and qualitatively (what sectors and occupations were most affected). The report also examines some of the likely drivers of recent shifts in the employment structure: technological advances, as measured by the cognitive and routine task content of jobs; globalisation and trade, measured as the offshorability of tasks or direct international trade; and labour market institutions

Teen-age participation in neighborhood centers

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Employment Polarization and Job Quality in the Crisis

[Excerpt] European labour markets added nearly 30 million new jobs in a golden age of employment creation prior to the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. The markets have subsequently shed five million jobs and unemployment – rising rapidly once again – is at its highest since the late 1990s. This second annual European Jobs Monitor report looks in detail at recent shifts in employment at Member State and European level. The analysis covers three distinct periods: the pre-recession employment expansion (1995–2007); the Great Recession (2008–2010); the stalled recovery (2011–2012). A ‘jobs-based’ approach is applied to describe employment shifts quantitatively (how many jobs were created or destroyed) and qualitatively (what kinds of jobs)

EMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL TRENDS IN ROMANIA

This paper deals with demographic trends in Romania and their influence on the labour market. In this context, unemployment and emigration are factors that play a significant role in the economy. The decline in employment weakens the social security system as employers and employees have to pay greater contributions. Also, the diminution in workforce and in the number of people in paid employment and the shortage of professionals working in specialized fields of health and education are issues requiring urgent clarification.mobility, demographic economics, particular labour markets, unemployment

WORK – LIFE BALANCE IN ROMANIA. A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

In Romania, gross domestic product dropped from a total of € 48.75 billion in 1989 to € 40.28 billion in 2000, and after 2002 a significant increase reached over € 79 billion in 2005. The overall decrease in the number of employed persons by 2.56 million people, between 1989 and 2005, led to an increase in productivity of around €1,222 per employed person – representing 28.4% of the total productivity increase. A central factor of work–life balance policies is the issue of time. However, for many Romanians ‘time is money’, and the low level of income earned by the majority of Romanian workers means that the issue of free time tends to be a low priority. Such issues represent particular features of working time in Romania and imply a very specific perspective in terms of the balance between working life and family life.Economic trends, Wage, Households Income, Work-life balance

Last-saturation applications to the humidity of the subtropical middle troposphere

I completed atmospheric transport modeling studies into distributions of subtropical water vapor, to identify the mechanisms by which humidity varies over distinct temporal scales: inter-annual time-scales associated with the El Nino – Southern Oscillation, over the next century in response to global warming, and over periods of about 2 to 7 days. The latter study on 2 to 7 day variability is a modeling component of a field campaign from October – November, 2008, involving continuous in-situ measurement of water vapor stable isotope compositions at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. These studies were conducted from a last saturation perspective, considering humidity and water vapor isotope composition of sub-saturated air to have effectively been set by the conditions at which the air parcels last encountered saturation. During El Nino northern winter, the free troposphere over the subtropical north Pacific is both drier and warmer than during La Nina. For instance, during El Nino (La Nina) northern winter, 57% (49%) of the air at 20˚N and 633 hPa over the north Pacific was last saturated poleward of 20˚N and above 500 hPa. ENSO humidity variability can be explained in terms of changes in the location of last saturation, and not by changes in the temperature field. Modeled specific humidity at the subtropical relative humidity minimum is projected to increase by about 0.2-0.3 g/kg, by the end of this century, in the simulations completed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Most of this projected increase can be attributed to last saturation within what will be a warmer free troposphere. The increase in specific humidity is partially offset by a poleward and upward shift of baroclinic instability and saturation patterns that effectively yield drier air to the RH minimum via isentropic transport. Two to 7 day variability of nighttime water vapor δD values at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u27s Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, range from -365° to -137°. Last saturation of air at Mauna Loa Observatory occurs primarily in the extra-tropical middle-upper troposphere, along mid-latitude baroclinic zones, and secondarily near Hawaii within mesoscale convective systems. Two to 7 day periods of lower (higher) water vapor δD values at MLO correspond to extra-tropical (near-Hawaii) last saturation

Communication System For Firefighters

Currently firefighters use two-way radios to communicate on the job, and they are forced to write reports based on their memory because there is not an easy way to record the communications between two-way radios. Firefighters need a system to automatically document what happened while they were responding to a call. To save them a significant amount of time when creating reports, our solution is to implement an application that allows firefighters to take pictures, record video and communicate in real time with their team of on-site responders. The proposed system will use a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) hosted on the fire truck itself to act as an access point (AP) to which the firefighters can connect. This AP will also save communication between firefighters to a local storage location. Upon return to the fire station, the AP will route all of the information stored locally to a larger database. For now, Wi-Fi will be our communication medium, with a prediction that our technology can eventually be extended to include radio signal

Force field feature extraction for ear biometrics

The overall objective in defining feature space is to reduce the dimensionality of the original pattern space, whilst maintaining discriminatory power for classification. To meet this objective in the context of ear biometrics a new force field transformation treats the image as an array of mutually attracting particles that act as the source of a Gaussian force field. Underlying the force field there is a scalar potential energy field, which in the case of an ear takes the form of a smooth surface that resembles a small mountain with a number of peaks joined by ridges. The peaks correspond to potential energy wells and to extend the analogy the ridges correspond to potential energy channels. Since the transform also turns out to be invertible, and since the surface is otherwise smooth, information theory suggests that much of the information is transferred to these features, thus confirming their efficacy. We previously described how field line feature extraction, using an algorithm similar to gradient descent, exploits the directional properties of the force field to automatically locate these channels and wells, which then form the basis of characteristic ear features. We now show how an analysis of the mechanism of this algorithmic approach leads to a closed analytical description based on the divergence of force direction, which reveals that channels and wells are really manifestations of the same phenomenon. We further show that this new operator, with its own distinct advantages, has a striking similarity to the Marr-Hildreth operator, but with the important difference that it is non-linear. As well as addressing faster implementation, invertibility, and brightness sensitivity, the technique is also validated by performing recognition on a database of ears selected from the XM2VTS face database, and by comparing the results with the more established technique of Principal Components Analysis. This confirms not only that ears do indeed appear to have potential as a biometric, but also that the new approach is well suited to their description, being robust especially in the presence of noise, and having the advantage that the ear does not need to be explicitly extracted from the background