Architectures for Silicon Nanoelectronics and Beyond

Although nanoelectronics won't replace CMOS for some time, research is needed now to develop the architectures, methods, and tools to maximally leverage nanoscale devices and terascale capacity. Addressing the complementary architectural and system issues involved requires greater collaboration at all levels. The effective use of nanotechnology calls for total system solutions     

Patch Management

Imagine this scenario. As a security manager for your organization, your responsibilities include analyzing and applying patches to all Windows servers across the enterprise. Your process is going to each machine and manually evaluating what patches are missing and installing the most critical security patches as soon as possible. How long does this take? One hour per server? Two hours? Maybe more? How many patches are critical? How often do you do it? And, how many servers do you have? It doesn’t take long to do the math to realize that your battle may be a futile one to keep up with the most critical, let alone every, patch that’s released.     

Factors influencing learning through play in ICT settings

Using a mixed method approach of questionnaires, observations and field notes, the authors have studied a number of settings during the past two years which have focussed on the development of ICT capability through play. Some of these have involved children identified as disaffected or disadvantaged, whilst others have involved initial teacher education students. In this paper, we consider some of the results obtained from the most recent of these settings, relate these to those obtained from the other settings, and explore further a number of inter-related issues which have arisen from the analysis. We particularly focus on the effect of learners’ self-esteem and self-efficacy; the influence of gender-related characteristics; the role of interaction between learners during activity; and the value of reflection.     

Salmonid observations at a Klamath River thermal refuge under various hydrological and meteorological conditions

The Beaver Creek confluence with the main‐stem Klamath River was studied to assess salmonid use in a thermal mixing zone under various summer hydrological and meteorological conditions. Main‐stem flow releases from Iron Gate Dam ranged from 17 cms (615 cfs) to 37 cms (1320 cfs) during the study period and main‐stem water temperatures ranged from 19.5 to 26°C. A grid was constructed to define the thermal refuge as a system of cells. Temperatures were monitored using remote temperature loggers and fish counts were conducted using daytime snorkelling. Most juvenile salmonids were observed moving into the refuge when main‐stem temperatures exceeded 22–23°C. Salmonids in the thermal refuge did not necessarily seek the coolest water, but were generally located in habitats commensurate with species‐specific behavioural needs within their thermal tolerance range. Such ranges largely occurred within refuge areas. Variable meteorological conditions confounded observable biological thermal benefit to fish resulting from higher or lower main‐stem flows. Thermal regime dynamics indicated that under the hydrological and meteorological conditions observed, higher flows from Iron Gate Dam showed some ability to change the structure of the refuge area. It appeared that without the thermal refuge, main‐stem flows alone could not sustain the salmonid population because high water temperatures usually exceeded their published thermal tolerance limits. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Failure pressure evaluation of the containment building of a large dry nuclear power plant

The evaluation of the failure pressure of the containment building of a large dry PWR-W three loops nuclear power plant, based on computer numerical simulation, is described in this paper. The proposed method considers fully three-dimensional finite element models in order to take into account the effect of the most significant structural characteristics (presence of three buttresses, penetrations, additional reinforcement around the penetrations, etc.), the lack of symmetry of the forces generated by the prestressing system, as well as the nonlinear behaviour of the materials and the sensitivity of the results to uncertainties associated with several parameters. The computational model is completely described, including the constitutive equations for the concrete, the reinforcing steel and prestressing tendons, the spatial discretization—isoparametric elements including the reinforcement are used. The structural models and the analyses performed for their calibration are also described. The influence on the failure pressure of incorporating the foundation slab in the structural model, and the influence of the thermal effects, are discussed. One of the conclusions of the numerical study is that the failure process can be appropriately simulated by means of a structural model which does not include either the foundation slab or the thermal effects. Finally, results of a probabilistic simulation of the failure pressure are given.     

Instability of diatomic deuterium in fcc palladium

To clarify some of the solid-state aspects of cold fusion in deuterated transition metal electrodes, we have carried out first-principles self-consistent total energy calculations for various configurations of atomic and diatomic deuterium inside fcc palladium. We find that the stability of the Pd+D system is controlled by the relative position of the deuterium-inducedantibonding level with respect to the Fermi energy. The equilibrium D-D distance in dense PdD up to =3 is found to be much larger than the free space value. The calculated Born-Oppenheimer energy surface of diatomic D₂ in crystalline palladiuim is shown to have but metastable local minima whose internuclear separation is at least 0.2 Ålarger than that of the isolated D₂ molecule. We conclude that D₂ incrystalline Pd will have a substantially lower tunneling probability than hitherto thought and that explanation for fusion mechanisms should be sought elsewhere.     

Investigation of long term drift of an intraocular pressure sensor

Microsystem Technologies - “Zero drift” behavior of an optical intraocular pressure sensor is studied using an analytical model based on the deflection of a circular membrane. Results...