110830 research outputs found
Sort by
The sculpture kit : Material pedagogy and entangled making
Get PDFPlay, making and learning are increasingly understood in arts education and the wider social sciences as overlapping rather than distinct. This resonates with new materialist philosophies applied in a visual art context, which present the material encounter as a means of accessing information about the world, positioning it as a form of pedagogy. “The sculpture kit,” a collection of six materials (developed collaboratively with a young child, and then tested with larger groups of adults and children) responds to this condition. This paper presents the kit as a method to facilitate experiences of “entangled making,” acknowledging materials’ pedagogical role towards observing exchanges of knowledge between children and adults, materials and humans
The Dual Brokerage Role of Digital Platforms in the Transition to a Circular Economy
No full textThe transition to a circular economy hinges on effective brokerage—the work of intermediaries in connecting innovative closed-loop recyclers (the niche) with the established waste network (the regime). While brokerage theory and its classical tertius iungens/gaudens typology explain how a broker's strategic intent shapes their behaviors, it offers limited insight into how brokers operate at the niche-regime interface, a context defined by inherent tensions. This inductive study of a digital platform intermediary in the post-industrial textile waste contexts of Bangladesh and India addresses this by theorizing brokerage as a set of tension-derived strategies. Our empirical findings identify three tensions: network structure, operational capability, and socially sustainable capability tensions. We then show how the platform addresses these tensions through a dual role: structural brokerage, via semi-disintermediation, and capability brokerage, via standardization and legitimization. In addition, the platform engages in identity work to overcome its own challenge of being a new network actor. We contribute a novel contingent perspective on brokerage by unpacking a broker's response to inherent tensions in a transition period. The research also shows how technology-based intermediaries can be deployed to manage reverse flows, and it furthers understanding of how informal actors can be integrated into formal supply chains
Dual alignment : Partial negative and soft-label alignment for text-to-image person retrieval
Get PDFText-to-image person retrieval is a task to retrieve the right matched images based on a given textual description of the interested person. The main challenge lies in the inherent modal difference between texts and images. Most existing works narrow the modality gap by aligning the feature representations of text and image in a latent embedding space. However, these methods usually leverage the hard label and mine insufficient or incorrect hard negatives to achieve cross-modal alignment, generating incorrect hard negative pairs so as to suboptimal performance. To tackle the above problems, we propose a dual alignment framework, Partial negative and Soft-label Alignment (PASA), which includes the partial negative alignment (PA) strategy and the Soft-label Alignment (SA) strategy. Specifically, PA pushes far away the hard negatives in the triplet loss by considering a certain amount of negatives within each mini-batch as hard negatives, preventing the distraction to the positive text–image pairs. Based on PA, SA further achieves the alignment between the similarity distribution on these hard negatives by the manner of soft-label, as well as the alignment between inter-modal and intra-modal. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid, demonstrate that our proposed PASA method can consistently improve the performance of text-to-image person retrieval, and achieve new state-of-the-art results on the above three datasets
Two-stage depressed collector with enhanced efficiency for Ka-band TWTs
Get PDFHigh efficiency is a key requirement for power amplifiers in transmitters for terrestrial and non-terrestrial wireless links. Traveling wave tubes (TWTs) have intrinsically higher efficiency than solid state power amplifiers (SSPAs) thanks to their working mechanism where a substantial portion of the spent beam energy is recovered by the collector. In back-off condition, the total efficiency and the energy spread of electrons reduce, posing challenges to the collector design. This article presents a realistic design of a two-stage single-ceramic depressed collector based on a novel simulation approach where the depressed collector is modeled as a separate component, without any assumptions or dimensionality reduction in the data provided as input to the collector design. The electrons backstreaming from the collector electrodes towards the slow wave structure (SWS) have been thoroughly analyzed. The role that the different categories of backstreaming electrons play on the efficiency of the collector has been investigated and presented in this work. As a reference, the study is based on data from a Ka-band TWT operating in the 27.5-29.5 GHz frequency range. A two-stage collector with an efficiency better than 86% over the considered frequency band is discussed. Thermal analysis has also been carried out to determine the temperature distribution at different operating regimes of the TWT, an important parameter for housing and deployment. The achieved high efficiency of the two- stage collector in back-off permits producing TWTs with high total efficiency and low complexity power supply suitable for enabling long range high capacity wireless links
Micromechanical investigation of fracture behaviour in compacted graphite iron using the discrete element method
No full textCompacted graphite iron (CGI) is widely used in engineering applications due to its excellent mechanical properties, thermal conductivity, and wear resistance. However, its heterogeneous microstructure, which consists of worm-like graphite embedded within a ferritic-pearlitic matrix, presents significant challenges in accurately predicting fracture behaviour and damage evolution. To address this gap, we develop a micromechanical simulation framework based on the discrete element method (DEM) for the first systematic investigation of tensile deformation and fracture in CGI. The model incorporates image-based microstructural reconstruction and is quantitatively validated against experimental results in terms of stress–strain response and crack path morphology. Based on this validated model, a comprehensive parametric study is performed to evaluate the influence of graphite morphology and spatial distribution. The results reveal that increasing graphite volume fraction and misaligned orientations are the dominant factors reducing strength, while larger aspect ratios and particle sizes promote damage localization. Furthermore, under microstructural randomness, particle size remains a key factor affecting failure modes. These findings provide mechanistic insights into microstructure-sensitive fracture of CGI that are difficult to obtain experimentally, and demonstrate the potential of DEM as a predictive tool for understanding microstructure-sensitive failure and guiding the design of high-performance cast iron components
First measurement of differential cross sections for muon neutrino charged current interactions on argon with a two-proton final state using the MicroBooNE detector
Get PDFWe present the first measurement of differential cross sections for charged-current muon neutrino interactions on argon with one muon, two protons, and no pions in the final state. These final states are dominated by two-nucleon knockout interactions, which are complicated to model and for which there is currently limited information about the characteristics of these interactions in existing neutrino-nucleus scattering data. Detailed investigations of two-nucleon knockout are vital to support upcoming experiments exploring the nature of the neutrino. Among the different kinematic quantities measured, the opening angle between the two protons, the angle between the total proton momentum and the muon, and the total transverse momentum of the final state system are most sensitive to the underlying physics processes as embodied in various theoretical models
Planetary Memory in the Anthropocene : Toward a Monument for a New Geological Epoch
No full textThe abstract explores the evolving role of contemporary art in engaging with the challenges of the Anthropocene era. It discusses the concept of counter-monuments, which prioritize fluidity and interaction over solidity, and advocates for the creation of new communicative memory. The essay highlights the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art, emphasizing its ability to provoke critical thinking and dialogue on complex social and ecological issues. It also examines the role of technology in shaping artistic expression and advocates for a distributed critique approach that acknowledges the relevance of non-human entities. Finally, the abstract emphasizes the need for a counter-monumental approach to marking the Anthropocene, one that generates imaginative, discursive spaces for fluid, communicative memory
Politics in professional service firms : discursive control and struggle through the lens of hegemony
Get PDFThe transformation of professional service firms (PSFs) has attracted considerable scholarly attention, particularly as these organizations navigate tensions between traditional professional values and emerging managerial controls. While prior studies have mapped these shifts using frameworks such as archetypes, logics, and dyads, these accounts tend to understate the internal politics and related discursive struggles through which change is constructed, resisted, and reconfigured. This paper addresses that gap by introducing a discourse-theoretical perspective grounded in Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) theory of hegemony. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a UK law firm, we examine how firm leaders sought to stabilize a managerial framing of professional success through certain metrics and rankings, and how professionals responded by reinterpreting or challenging these framings in ways that reasserted professional values. The analysis reframes PSFs as arenas of ongoing struggle over the meanings and measures of success. In doing so, the paper highlights the discursive struggles that underlie hegemonic projects of organizational transformation in PSFs and calls for renewed attention to how hybrid forms are enacted and contested in professional contexts