Control of attendance applied in higher education through mobile NFC technologies

This paper presents an improved attendance control system, required for continuous evaluation which has become compulsory following the Bologna Process. It provides a solution based on NFC technology and is based on a real project developed and pilot tested at the “Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Campus Madrid”.     

Large-scale parallel lattice Boltzmann–cellular automaton model of two-dimensional dendritic growth

An extremely scalable lattice Boltzmann (LB)–cellular automaton (CA) model for simulations of two-dimensional (2D) dendritic solidification under forced convection is presented. The model incorporates effects of phase change, solute diffusion, melt convection, and heat transport. The LB model represents the diffusion, convection, and heat transfer phenomena. The dendrite growth is driven by a difference between actual and equilibrium liquid composition at the solid–liquid interface. The CA technique is deployed to track the new interface cells. The computer program was parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) technique. Parallel scaling of the algorithm was studied and major scalability bottlenecks were identified. Efficiency loss attributable to the high memory bandwidth requirement of the algorithm was observed when using multiple cores per processor. Parallel writing of the output variables of interest was implemented in the binary Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) to improve the output performance, and to simplify visualization. Calculations were carried out in single precision arithmetic without significant loss in accuracy, resulting in 50% reduction of memory and computational time requirements. The presented solidification model shows a very good scalability up to centimeter size domains, including more than ten million of dendrites.     

Controlled suppression of the photoluminescence superlinear dependence on excitation density in quantum dots

We have shown that it is possible to tune, up to complete suppression, the photoluminescence superlinear dependence on the excitation density in quantum dot samples at high temperatures by annealing treatments. The effect has been attributed to the reduction of the defectivity of the material induced by annealing.     

Inhibition of colon adenocarcinoma cell proliferation by flavonols is linked to a G2/M cell cycle block and reduction in cyclin D1 expression

The moderate consumption of red wine has been proposed to reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer. Its anti-cancer action my in part be mediated by the actions of polyphenols on colon cancer epithelial cells. We show that a red wine phenolic (50 μg/ml) extract devoid of anthocyanins (removed to reflect polyphenol bioavailability to the large intestine) and the major red wine flavonols quercetin, myricetin, laricitrin and syringetin (50 μM) are capable of inhibiting the proliferation of colorectal epithelial adenocarcinoma cells. This anti-proliferative activity was partly mediated by the direct cytotoxic actions of flavonols and also their ability to cause a significant cell cycle blockage in G2/M. The anti-proliferative effects induced by flavonols were preceded, in most cases, by a strong and significant reduction of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and cyclin D1 expression. These results indicate that the observed inverse correlation between colon cancer and a moderate red wine intake may be partly mediated by the actions of red wine flavonols on the growth of cancer cells.     

Identifying organizational requirements for the implementation of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (AMT)

AMT selection and adoption processes have been extensively studied. Topics that include financial and human factors, productivity, and coordination of the AMT implementation establish a substantial content of the present research agenda. The purpose of this paper is to study the organizational factors that influence the AMT implementation, considering a manufacturing strategy context and an analysis based on an organizational design framework. The research strategy is based on ‘empirical iterations’ using survey secondary data, experts’ interviews information and multiple case studies. The results show that there is a set of recommendations, which strongly influence the AMT implementation. Companies require a structured and integrative approach for the AMT implementation in order to take advantage of all their individual and systemic benefits. The set of proposed AMT recommendations for integrating these technologies to the organizational design are framed by structural, process and contextual aspects.     

Sub-1 V band-gap based and MOS threshold-voltage based voltage references in 0.13 µm CMOS

Portable and implantable device applications require low supply voltage reference circuits due to increasing trend for lower power requirements. Voltage references have been proposed for operation below 1 V for CMOS and a comprehensive analysis of the behavior of the different topologies is needed for ultra-low power designs, in order to select the right circuit topology for a given requirement. This work compares two major classes of voltage reference topologies: threshold voltage (V_T0)-based and (V_G0) bandgap voltage-based reference circuits. Four different topologies of voltage-reference designs with 1-V supply were designed and fabricated in 130 nm CMOS process. Monte Carlo analysis shows the variability of the references and of their temperature coefficients (TC), and the results are compared to measured samples. Simulations and measurements show that the threshold voltage-based references are more susceptible to the variations in the CMOS fabrication process.