Search results for "Hard"
showing 10 items of 2294 documents
An Electrical Tuner to Command Optical NanoAntennas
2010
Optical antennas are passive device where fabrication designs decide operating frequency, gain and emission diagram. By introducing an electrically controllable load medium for the antenna, these characteristics can be externally controlled.
Enhanced thermoelectric performance in the p-type half-Heusler (Ti/Zr/Hf)CoSb0.8Sn0.2 system via phase separation
2014
A novel approach for optimization of the thermoelectric properties of p-type Heusler compounds with a C1b structure was investigated. A successful recipe for achieving intrinsic phase separation in the n-type material based on the TiNiSn system is isoelectronic partial substitution of Ti with its heavier homologues Zr and Hf. We applied this concept to the p-type system MCoSb0.8Sn0.2 by a systematic investigation of samples with different compositions at the Ti position (M = Ti, Zr, Hf, Ti0.5Zr0.5, Zr0.5Hf0.5, and Ti0.5Hf0.5). We thus achieved an approximately 40% reduction of the thermal conductivity and a maximum figure of merit ZT of 0.9 at 700 °C. This is a 80% improvement in peak ZT fr…
Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Consciousness and the Intermediate Level Fallacy
2018
Recently, there has been considerable interest and effort to the possibility to design and implement conscious robots, i.e., the chance that a robot may have subjective experiences. However, typical approaches as the global workspace, information integration, enaction, cognitive mechanisms, embodiment, i.e., the Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Consciousness, henceforth, GOFAC, share the same conceptual framework. In this paper, we discuss GOFAC's basic tenets and their implication for AI and Robotics. In particular, we point out the intermediate level fallacy as the central issue affecting GOFAC. Finally, we outline a possible alternative conceptual framework towards robot consciousness.
Famiglie, disagio e servizio sociale
2019
Il volume raccoglie contributi che intendono disvelare la natura sociale e culturale della famiglia. Gli autori dei contributi hanno messo in evidenza come la famiglia, lungi dall'essere una entità ovvia e data per scontata, sia invece il prodotto di aspettative, comportamenti socialmente strutturati, oltre che di negoziazioni e di rapporti di potere e dinamiche, talvolta profondamente conflittuali. The volume collects contributions that intend to reveal the social and cultural nature of the family.
Choice between alternative investments in agriculture: The role of organic farming to avoid the abandonment of rural areas
2015
Abstract Sicily has a long tradition in citrus fruit cultivation that, with vineyard and olive tree, represents the main Mediterranean tree crops. Since many Sicilian farmers in recent years have decided to abandon conventional lemon orchards, in this paper we have evaluated the financial sustainability of organic lemon production by comparing it with the conventional one. Financial analysis has been carried out in a case study on the northwestern coast of Sicily, considering a 50-year economic life of an orchard. The results, per hectare of area, showed a clear advantage of organic lemon orchard. This was due to fewer labor requirements and to greater market appreciation for organic produc…
Design and simulation of a fast DC recharging station for EV
2017
In this paper a detailed description of the design and simulation of a DC ultra-fast recharging station for Electric Vehicles is carried out. The system consist of a single AC/DC grid connected inverter, a DC-Bus and two DC/DC converter to recharge the batteries of the EVs. The system also has the vehicleto- grid (V2G) capability. The design of the components of the system and the control schemes are explained and a simulation of the system, performed in Matlab/Simulink environment is presented.
Femtosecond pulse compression in a hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber by tuning its cross section
2012
Abstract We present a numerical study of soliton pulse compression in a seven-cell hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber. We analyze the enhancement of both the compression factor and the pulse shape quality of 360 nJ femtosecond pulses at the wavelength of 800 nm by tuning the cross section size of the fiber. We use the generalized non-linear Schrodinger equation in order to modeled the propagation of light pulses along the fiber. Our numerical results show that output compressed pulses can be obtained, in a propagation length of 31 cm, with a compression factor of 5.7 and pulse shape quality of 77% for a reduction of 4.5% of the cross section size of the fiber. The predicted compression fact…
Correction: The genomic and clinical landscape of fetal akinesia
2020
Abstract An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Challenges and Solutions for Tracing Storage Systems
2018
IBM Spectrum Scale’s parallel file system General Parallel File System (GPFS) has a 20-year development history with over 100 contributing developers. Its ability to support strict POSIX semantics across more than 10K clients leads to a complex design with intricate interactions between the cluster nodes. Tracing has proven to be a vital tool to understand the behavior and the anomalies of such a complex software product. However, the necessary trace information is often buried in hundreds of gigabytes of by-product trace records. Further, the overhead of tracing can significantly impact running applications and file system performance, limiting the use of tracing in a production system. In…
ESB: Ext2 Split Block Device
2012
Solid State Disks (SSDs) start to replace rotating media (hard disks, HDD) in many areas, but are still not as cost efficient concerning capacity to completely replace them. One approach to use their superior performance properties is to use them as a cache for magnetic disks to speed up overall storage operations. In this paper, we present and evaluate a file system level optimization based on ext2. We split metadata and data and store the metadata on a SDD while the data remains on a common HDD. We evaluate our system with filebench under a file server, web server, and web proxy scenario and compare the results with flashcache. We find that many of the scenarios do not contain enough meta…