Using Selective Electron Beam Melting to Enhance the High-Temperature Strength and Creep Resistance of NiAl–28Cr–6Mo In Situ Composites

By increasing the density of interfaces in NiAl–CrMo in situ composites, the mechanical properties can be significantly improved compared to conventionally cast material. The refined microstructure is achieved by manufacturing through electron beam powder bed fusion (PBF-EB). By varying the process parameters, an equiaxed or columnar cell morphology can be obtained, exhibiting a plate-like or an interconnected network of the (Cr,Mo) reinforcement phase which is embedded in a NiAl matrix. The microstructure of the different cell morphologies is investigated in detail using scanning electron microscope, transmission electron microscopy, and atom probe tomography. For both morphologies, the mechanical properties at elevated temperatures are analyzed by compression and creep experiments parallel and perpendicular to the building direction. In comparison to cast NiAl and NiAl–(Cr, Mo), the yield strength of the PBF-EB fabricated specimens is significantly improved at temperatures up to 1,027 °C. While the columnar morphology exhibits the best improved mechanical properties at high temperatures, the equiaxial morphology shows nearly ideal isotropic mechanical behavior, which is a substantial advantage over directionally solidified material.     

A Hemispherical Image Sensor Array Fabricated with Organic Photomemory Transistors

Hemispherical image sensors simplify lens designs, reduce optical aberrations, and improve image resolution for compact wide-field-of-view cameras. To achieve hemispherical image sensors, organic materials are promising candidates due to the following advantages: tunability of optoelectronic/spectral response and low-temperature low-cost processes. Here, a photolithographic process is developed to prepare a hemispherical image sensor array using organic thin film photomemory transistors with a density of 308 pixels per square centimeter. This design includes only one photomemory transistor as a single active pixel, in contrast to the conventional pixel architecture, consisting of select/readout/reset transistors and a photodiode. The organic photomemory transistor, comprising light-sensitive organic semiconductor and charge-trapping dielectric, is able to achieve a linear photoresponse (light intensity range, from 1 to 50 W m⁻²), along with a responsivity as high as 1.6 A W⁻¹ (wavelength = 465 nm) for a dark current of 0.24 A m⁻² (drain voltage = −1.5 V). These observed values represent the best responsivity for similar dark currents among all the reported hemispherical image sensor arrays to date. A transfer method was further developed that does not damage organic materials for hemispherical organic photomemory transistor arrays. These developed techniques are scalable and are amenable for other high-resolution 3D organic semiconductor devices.     

Problematic Demography: Representations of Population Ageing in the Swedish Daily Press

The ageing of populations has been a topic of discussion during the last few decades, but how is this subject represented in the media, and what images of old age are produced? In this article we present the results of a quantitative content analysis that investigates how the concept of population ageing has been represented in Swedish local and national daily news press between 1988 and 2009, and the old age positions that are offered in these representations. We also use discourse analysis in order to qualitatively examine the ways in which the concept of population ageing is articulated in these news press articles and the old age positions that are thereby constituted. The results show that the concept is constituted as a naturalised expert concept, and is primarily used in order to contextualise articles about future political and economical difficulties or even crises. By articulating population ageing with both political policies, political economy and older people??s (as a group) reported need for care and services, population ageing was constituted as a political economic concern rather than a problem for the aged individual.     

Shifts in sensory dominance between various stages of user-product interactions

In the area of product design, sensory dominance can be defined as the relative importance of different sensory modalities for product experience. It is often assumed that vision dominates the other senses. In the present study, we asked 243 participants to describe their experiences with consumer products in various situations: while buying a product, after the first week, the first month, and the first year of usage. The data suggest that the dominant sensory modality depends on the period of product usage. At the moment of buying, vision is the most important modality, but during the usage the other sensory modalities gain importance. The roles of the different modalities during usage are product-dependent. Averaged over 93 products analyzed in this study, after one month of usage touch becomes more important than vision, and after one year vision, touch and audition appear to be equally important. We conclude that to create a long-lasting positive product experience, designers need to consider user-product interaction at different stages of product usage and to determine which sensory modality dominates product experience at each stage.     

Privacy policies for shared content in social network sites

Social networking is one of the major technological phenomena of the Web 2.0, with hundreds of millions of subscribed users. Social networks enable a form of self-expression for users and help them to socialize and share content with other users. In spite of the fact that content sharing represents one of the prominent features of existing Social network sites, they do not provide any mechanisms for collective management of privacy settings for shared content. In this paper, using game theory, we model the problem of collective enforcement of privacy policies on shared data. In particular, we propose a solution that offers automated ways to share images based on an extended notion of content ownership. Building upon the Clarke-Tax mechanism, we describe a simple mechanism that promotes truthfulness and that rewards users who promote co-ownership. Our approach enables social network users to compose friendship based policies based on distances from an agreed upon central user selected using several social networks metrics. We integrate our design with inference techniques that free the users from the burden of manually selecting privacy preferences for each picture. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a privacy protection mechanism for social networking has been proposed. We also extend our mechanism so as to support collective enforcement across multiple social network sites. In the paper, we also show a proof-of-concept application, which we implemented in the context of Facebook, one of today’s most popular social networks. Through our implementation, we show the feasibility of such approach and show that it can be implemented with a minimal increase in overhead to end-users. We complete our analysis by conducting a user study to investigate users’ understanding of co-ownership, usefulness and understanding of our approach. Users responded favorably to the approach, indicating a general understanding of co-ownership and the auction, and found the approach to be both useful and fair.     

Gremlin: an interactive visualization model for analyzing genomic rearrangements

In this work we present, apply, and evaluate a novel, interactive visualization model for comparative analysis of structural variants and rearrangements in human and cancer genomes, with emphasis on data integration and uncertainty visualization. To support both global trend analysis and local feature detection, this model enables explorations continuously scaled from the high-level, complete genome perspective, down to the low-level, structural rearrangement view, while preserving global context at all times. We have implemented these techniques in Gremlin, a genomic rearrangement explorer with multi-scale, linked interactions, which we apply to four human cancer genome data sets for evaluation. Using an insight-based evaluation methodology, we compare Gremlin to Circos, the state-of-the-art in genomic rearrangement visualization, through a small user study with computational biologists working in rearrangement analysis. Results from user study evaluations demonstrate that this visualization model enables more total insights, more insights per minute, and more complex insights than the current state-of-the-art for visual analysis and exploration of genome rearrangements.     

Fuzzy induced generalized aggregation operators and its application in multi-person decision making

We present a wide range of fuzzy induced generalized aggregation operators such as the fuzzy induced generalized ordered weighted averaging (FIGOWA) and the fuzzy induced quasi-arithmetic OWA (Quasi-FIOWA) operator. They are aggregation operators that use the main characteristics of the fuzzy OWA (FOWA) operator, the induced OWA (IOWA) operator and the generalized (or quasi-arithmetic) OWA operator. Therefore, they use uncertain information represented in the form of fuzzy numbers, generalized (or quasi-arithmetic) means and order inducing variables. The main advantage of these operators is that they include a wide range of mean operators such as the FOWA, the IOWA, the induced Quasi-OWA, the fuzzy IOWA, the fuzzy generalized mean and the fuzzy weighted quasi-arithmetic average (Quasi-FWA). We further generalize this approach by using Choquet integrals, obtaining the fuzzy induced quasi-arithmetic Choquet integral aggregation (Quasi-FICIA) operator. We also develop an application of the new approach in a strategic multi-person decision making problem.     

Strategies for collaborative writing and phases of knowledge construction in CSCL environments

Within the framework of research that describes the processes of collaborative knowledge construction in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments, the present work has three objectives: (i) the identification of the strategies of six small groups of university students for the elaboration of written products in a CSCL environment; (ii) seek relations between the identified writing strategies and the processes and phases of collaborative knowledge construction in the groups; and (iii) relate these strategies and phases with the learning results obtained by the groups. We carried out a multiple-case study, with the analysis of four different didactic sequences, in two different virtual learning and teaching settings. In each setting, three student groups were studied, where each had to collaboratively develop between four and eight written products. For all the studied groups, the analysis enabled the identification of five types of strategies in the preparation of the elaboration of written products, and four types of phases of collaborative knowledge construction, which are interrelated and also connected with the grades that the groups obtained in each case.     

On the convective nature of the instability of a front undergoing a supercritical Turing bifurcation

Fronts are traveling waves in spatially extended systems that connect two different spatially homogeneous rest states. If the rest state behind the front undergoes a supercritical Turing instability, then the front will also destabilize. On the linear level, however, the front will be only convectively unstable since perturbations will be pushed away from the front as it propagates. In other words, perturbations may grow but they can do so only behind the front. It is of interest to show that this behavior carries over to the full nonlinear system. It has been successfully done in a case study by Ghazaryan and Sandstede [A. Ghazaryan, B. Sandstede, Nonlinear convective instability of Turing-unstable fronts near onset: a case study, SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 6 (2007) 319–347]. In the present paper, analogous results are obtained for the same system as in Ghazaryan and Sandstede (2007), but for a different parameter regime.