A capstone design project to meet the needs of the changing power systems industry and satisfy new accreditation standards

Currently, two motivators are effecting change in power systems education. First, the industry's transition to a more competitive environment is requiring changes in the content and pedagogy of power systems education. Second, engineering education as a whole is seeking to modify its curriculum to reflect a better balance between science and education in order to better meet the needs of industry. These curricular changes are largely a result of revised Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) accreditation requirements. In response to these changes, new curriculum and analysis tools were developed for a power systems capstone design course. The project integrates market economics and socio-political considerations with transient stability analysis and transmission planning. A power systems analysis package and an economic analysis tool were developed for use with this project. Student evaluations of the course in which the project was implemented indicate that the curriculum successfully addresses a broad range of ABET accreditation criteria.     

Retrospectroscope. The origin of electroshock therapy for treatment of psychiatric illnesses

There are several psychiatric illnesses that are difficult to treat with drugs. Among these are schizophrenia, manic depression, and profound depression; many of these may involve a tendency to suicide. In 1938 U. Cerletti conducted convulsive experiments on pigs using power-line current applied to electrodes at various sites. The effect of current duration was also investigated. As yet it is not known which areas in the brain are the optimum targets for the therapeutic use of cranially applied current to treat psychiatric illnesses, although the frontal lobes appear to be the best targets.     

Literature reviews in student project reports

Writing project reports is an important part of the engineering curriculum at Singapore universities. One important section of the formal report is the literature review. Most universities around the world provide guidelines on writing reviews, emphasizing that plagiarism is unethical. However, these guidelines do not offer explicit training on how to avoid plagiarism. In order to write academically acceptable reviews while avoiding copying from source materials, students face a major challenge and resort to employing various strategies to cope with the task. In this study, we examined the literature review sections of final year project reports to find out how engineering undergraduates in a Singapore university cope with writing reviews and to suggest ways in which they can extend their skills to improve their literature reviews.     

Electroplating of nickel-cadmium alloys from alkaline solutions

The electroplating of Ni-Cd alloy coatings was carried out from alkaline baths (pH 10). For comparison, electroplating of the parent metals, Ni and Cd, was performed individually under the same conditions. The cathodic current efficiency for codeposition was high and decreased with increasing current density. The codeposition process is an anomalous type of plating with Cd being the preferentially deposited metal. The Ni content in the deposits increased with increasing current density. This increase in Ni content improves the corrosion resistance and microhardness of the deposits. X-ray diffraction analysis showed that the deposits consist of a mixture of Ni, β, γ, γ¹ phases.     

An accurate analysis of scalar quantization-based data hiding

This paper comes to fill a gap in watermarking theory, analyzing the exact performance of the scalar Costa scheme (SCS) facing additive Gaussian attacks when the usual approximation of high-resolution quantization is not valid, thus taking into account the host statistics. The analysis is focused on the assessment of the probability of error, showing new results, an although it is valid in a general scenario, its practical interest is increased when SCS is used in conjunction with the so-called spread-transform. The accomplished reformulation of the problem also permits to show that the achievable rate of SCS is never worse than that of classical spread-spectrum-based methods, as it was thought so far, and allows to establish interesting links with spread spectrum and the Improved Spread Spectrum method.     

Modeling electric field transfer of excitation at cell junctions

The electric field (EF) model was first developed on a "breadboard" using physical electric components (e.g., resistors, capacitors, batteries) and was then modeled mathematically by a series of differential equations and matrix equations and simulated on a large computer (CDC-6400). The results obtained by the two methods agreed very closely. However, these two methods of analysis are quite cumbersome. Therefore, in order to simplify the EF simulation, we wanted to model it on the PSpice program. In this article we discuss how we succeeded in demonstrating transmission of excitation from cell to cell in cardiac muscle and smooth muscle based on EF transmission at the cell junctions.