Note: flowing ion population from a resonance cavity source

The experimental low energy plasma for hemispherical analyzers nominal testing thermal plasma facility of Dartmouth College uses a microwave plasma source which generates an ionosphere-like plasma through a two-step process. The plasma is initially generated inside a cylindrical, insulated, resonance cavity. This initial plasma must pass through a sheath in order to enter the main experimental region. This process imparts a significant flow velocity to the ions which has been neglected in previous analysis of this plasma source. We predict the flow energy of the ions to be between 12-15 eV depending on conservation laws and show agreement with experimental results.     

Discipline-based instruction to promote interdisciplinary design of wearable and pervasive computing products

This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing that focuses on pervasive computing devices. Across a broad range of targeted application areas and user groups, many of the student designs have been wearable computers. Consequently, our course will be of interest to the wearable computing community, particularly in terms of our aim of bridging the gap between design and engineering. For the two most recent offerings of the course, we have utilized external observers and surveyed the students in order to validate the impact of aspects of our process and changes to it. This paper is based upon 5 years of experience and 2 years of analysis of our course, and it presents an overview of our process with both qualitative and quantitative results from these two most recent offerings.     

Analyzing the performance of a cluster-based architecture for immersive visualization systems

Cluster computing has become an essential issue for designing immersive visualization systems. This paradigm employs scalable clusters of commodity computers with much lower costs than would be possible with the high-end, shared memory computers that have been traditionally used for virtual reality purposes. This change in the design of virtual reality systems has caused some development environments oriented toward shared memory computing to require modifications to their internal architectures in order to support cluster computing. This is the case of VR Juggler, which is considered one of the most important virtual reality application development frameworks based on open source code.     

Oral medication delivery in impaired swallowing: thickening liquid medications for safe swallowing alters dissolution characteristics

Acetaminophen (paracetamol) is available in a wide range of oral formulations designed to meet the needs of the population across the age-spectrum, but for people with impaired swallowing, i.e. dysphagia, both solid and liquid medications can be difficult to swallow without modification. The effect of a commercial polysaccharide thickener, designed to be added to fluids to promote safe swallowing by dysphagic patients, on rheology and acetaminophen dissolution was tested using crushed immediate-release tablets in water, effervescent tablets in water, elixir and suspension. The inclusion of the thickener, comprised of xanthan gum and maltodextrin, had a considerable impact on dissolution; acetaminophen release from modified medications reached 12–50% in 30?min, which did not reflect the pharmacopeia specification for immediate release preparations. Flow curves reflect the high zero-shear viscosity and the apparent yield stress of the thickened products. The weak gel nature, in combination with high G' values compared to G'' (viscoelasticity) and high apparent yield stress, impact drug release. The restriction on drug release from these formulations is not influenced by the theoretical state of the drug (dissolved or dispersed), and the approach typically used in clinical practice (mixing crushed tablets into pre-prepared thickened fluid) cannot be improved by altering the order of incorporation or mixing method.     

Development of a Cloud Trust Label: A Delphi Approach

The purpose of this research is to identify the potential information components of an online, real-time trust label, which is proposed as a communication mechanism to encourage trust in cloud service providers and cloud computing products. An online Delphi process was used with 28 cloud computing experts (including vendors, software providers, and legal and business representatives). The proposed label contains 81 information components, covering the cloud service provider (e.g. physical location, legal jurisdiction), the cloud service itself (e.g. data location, security, backup, certification), and a historical service-level summary (e.g. uptime data, support response times). The potential benefits of such a label to encourage trustworthiness perceptions and trust behaviors in the cloud computing environment are explored. Limitations of the study are highlighted, and further research studies are suggested to test the concept of the label and to refine the components of the label itself.