508 research outputs found
Multidisciplinary “Boot Camp” Training in Cellular Bioengineering to Accelerate Research Immersion for REU Participants
No full textResearch Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) sites widely serve as the first major research gateway for undergraduates seeking a structured research experience. Given their lack of prior research skills, and the highly compressed duration of the REU programs, these students frequently encounter barriers to a seamless transition into a new laboratory environment. We hypothesized that the design of a unified short course on laboratory and analysis techniques could serve as a pivotal orientation experience. Our goal was to rapidly align student expertise to their summer research goals while also integrating the student participants into a cohesive learning community. This article discusses the design and outcomes of a Cellular Bioengineering Boot Camp, which is offered at the outset of the 10-week REU site at Rutgers. The Boot Camp provides hands-on, supervised training for techniques and procedures that are common among projects. The training establishes a common language and baseline for the REU students and allows their first laboratory experiences to be with each other, and creates an immediate network of peers and mentors. Surveys before and after the Boot Camp and at the end of the summer indicated a significant improvement in student proficiency in the techniques that was retained throughout the summer. We believe that the Boot Camp approach can be tailored to the specifics of each REU site and its associated projects and research foci.Peer reviewe
Gender and technology in the East Midlands boot and shoe industry : 1850-1911
No full textMany scholars now consider that gender is an important category in historical study,
but unfortunately many do not practice what they preach. Feminists have recognised
for some time the importance of some form of historical analysis to feminism, or at
least what Judith Allen calls 'a historically grounded feminism'. The protagonists in
the debate disagree considerably, however, over the methodology which feminist
historians should adopt. The various positions taken up have led to a schism between
those who believe the feminist challenge to mainstream, or what Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese calls 'official' history, should be mounted from within the discipline of
history or from outside it. Judith Allen claims that the work which has been done in
women's history to date serves to raise considerable doubt that accepting the
discipline of history as presently constituted is a viable option for feminism. She sees
the phallocentric characteristics of history as an obstacle to feminists using history.
Allen feels that 'no less than Marxism, feminism is opposed by professional historians
as an ahistorical grid of abstraction and prescription, threatening the integrity of the
historical evidence.
Improving rubber concrete strength and toughness by plasma-induced end-of-life tire rubber surface modification
No full textThis study evaluates the effectiveness of using different plasma treatments to favor the compatibility between rubber and a cement matrix in composites,
thus leading to a different surface reactivity of the rubber component. Plasmatreated rubbers were introduced into two d ifferent types of concr ete.
Mechanical tests highlighted that Portland concrete composites filled with N2/H2 plasmatreated rubber had increased flexural strength, toughness, and
compression strength compared to composites containing untreated rubber. A scaling law is also proposed to qualitatively discriminate between
related effects due to topological/roughness or intrinsic/chemical adhesion modifications. Plasma treatment can improve both intrinsic adhesion
and roughness of the rubber–cement interface and thus the overall concrete strength and toughness
Lessons Learned from NSF I-Corps Boot Camp
No full textAudience Response System, (ARS), has proven its values as a tool to enhance students' engagement and participation in the classroom. Since 2011, the author was working on to creating a web based application, Click2Text, to incorporate cell phones and smart phones in traditional and online classes to replace ARS. Several web-based solutions were tested and launched, however, it was hard to convince fellow faculty members for its adoption. It is also a known fact that most academic researchers in universities and college have little or no previous knowledge of entrepreneurial process nor do they possess the entrepreneurial mindset and related skills. So, when in the winter of 2016, the author was presented with an opportunity to participated in the NSF I-Corps introduction to customer discovery course, boot camp at Wayne State University, it was seen as a great opportunity to learn entrepreneurial process and skill. This paper documents how I-Corps boot camp helped in refining author’s research on Click2Text by identifying right customer segments and their needs and using them to create feature list that will eventually contribute to popularizing Click2Text within the university. The study also document lessons learned that would help new and young academic researchers making the intelligent decision of choosing to participate in I-Corps activities and how to get the most benefit of the boot camp. Keywords: NSF, I-Corps, customer requirements, product design, commercializatio
A Research-Based Study of Spring Boot Security: Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of JWT Authentication
No full textA Research-Based Study of Spring Boot Security: Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of JWT Authentication is a study, a practical and research-based thesis of Spring Boot Security and a mathematical formula implemented in a security algorithm. This Thesis contains an in-depth analysis and study of Spring Boot security with a clear understanding of security algorithms along with mathematical methods, a case study, and post-quantum. The thesis includes breaking down complex code into a mathematical solution, creating a robust, deep understanding of how security, encoding/decoding, and password hashing work, which results in making the backend secure and authenticated.
The paper has three primary divisions: case studies, research theory, and practical approaches. The case study section focuses on the analysis of several real-world security breaches to identify their main causes: misconfigurations, weak credential management, and routine mistakes. The research-theory section is therefore an intensive study of different types of attacks, crypto graphic algorithms, token structures, and the very basic concepts of authentication, authorization, and validation. In this regard, it also deals with advanced topics like quantum computing, Bloch sphere theory, Mosca’s theorem, the workflow of algorithms, and their related mathematical formulations. It suggests possible strategies for security threats and methods that would enhance the security of Spring Boot applications. Finally, the section on practical approaches goes on to illustrate the practical side of things: the implementation of mathematical expressions, algorithmic functions, and code examples with including post-quantum configuration in Spring Boot.
The main aim of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive study of the mathematical expression behind the coding line and cryptographic algorithms. Additionally, the author's aim is to aware security threats due to a lack of developer practices and possible solutions to overcome those situations. Additionally, the author is addressing potential threats that might arise during the evolution of quantum computing by explaining achievable post-quantum core information and configuration in Spring Boot. Finally, the author aims to demonstrate how mathematical expression and post-quantum configurations can be effectively applied
Ski Boot Soles Based on a Glass Fiber/Rubber Composite with Improved Grip on Icy Surfaces
No full textAbstractA study on the effect of glass fibers/rubber composites on the grip on ice has been conducted in order to develop new materials for ski boot soles with increased grip in winter environments. The study has been conducted analyzing the friction of a composite material and of a ski boot sole containing an insert made of the composite material and comparing the results with those obtained using rubber and a thermoplastic elastomer. The analysis of the morphology of the composite surface, by Scanning Electron Microscopy, shows a homogenous distribution of glass fibers of approximately 10μm of diameter in the rubber matrix. Moreover, the measure of the contact angle shows that the composite material has a higher water repellency compared to the rubber matrix. The measure of the coefficient of friction indicates a significant effect of the glass fibers on the grip on icy surfaces. The increased grip can be ascribed to the stiffness of the glass fibers that are able to have a mechanical grip on the ice surface and to the increased contact angle and water repellency of the composite that decrease the formation of a water layer below the sole
Incontri artistici in spazi estremi. Solar di Ian McEwan e il progetto Cape Farewell
No full textCape Farewell is an international not-for-profit programme based in the UK which brings creatives, scientists and informers together to see global warming with their own eyes, with the aim to engage and inspire a sustainable future society and instigate a cultural response to the climate challenge. This chapter analyses two artistic experiences which stemmed from the Cape Farewell project: the one of the novelist Ian McEwan and the one of the choreographer Siobhan Davies, both members of the 2005 Cape Farewell Expedition to Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard, in the Artic Sea. While Davies’s response to her experience is a work embodying the idea of fragility of the body she had experienced in the Artic, McEwan writes a satirical and allegorical novel about a greedy and selfish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Davies’s artistic work took the form of a projection titled Endangered Species, in which a ballerina dances inside a museum display case, wearing a costume made of long bending rods, suggesting the dramatic uneasiness of the body in the extreme spaces of the North Pole. The key element of McEwan’s novel, on the contrary, is irony, which is used to make fun of the Cape Farewell Expedition crew, and above all to depict the anti-hero Micheal Beard, who takes part to the Expedition but is actually shocked by the entire experience, insomuch as to imagine, while dreading to die from hypothermia, one of his colleagues proclaiming his obituary on TV by saying “He went to see global warming for himself”. Both works focus on the vulnerability and unsuitableness of the human body in extreme conditions, aiming at highlighting that it is time for humans to understand they do not belong to such spaces. To do this, both artists use the trope of metaphor: Davies makes use of the metaphor of the ‘endangered animal’ in a cage, out of place, while McEwan uses the metaphor of the boot room, which the crew is unable to keep tidy responsibly, concluding «How were they to save the earth [...] when it was so much larger than the boot room?». Thanks to the use McEwan makes of irony, he manages to rise in the reader an awareness towards two great faults of humanity: egoism and incoherence, which are among the main causes of most environmental issues. Both artists present planet Earth as an autonomous ecosystem whose functioning does not depend on humans, but which humans must respect if they are to survive
Model checking boot code from AWS data centers
No full text© 2020, The Author(s). This paper describes our experience with symbolic model checking in an industrial setting. We have proved that the initial boot code running in data centers at Amazon Web Services is memory safe, an essential step in establishing the security of any data center. Standard static analysis tools cannot be easily used on boot code without modification owing to issues not commonly found in higher-level code, including memory-mapped device interfaces, byte-level memory access, and linker scripts. This paper describes automated solutions to these issues and their implementation in the C Bounded Model Checker (CBMC). CBMC is now the first source-level static analysis tool to extract the memory layout described in a linker script for use in its analysis
Identifying hardware during boot-time system verification
No full textThesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-90).Modern systems measure the software loaded at boot-time to ensure the machine starts in a trusted state. Such measurements, however, do not include any information about the underlying hardware of the machine. Recent DRAM-based attacks and the growing complexity of the supply chain attest to the importance of measuring hardware at boot. In this thesis, we propose a technique for designing measurement schemes for hardware components. We then apply this technique to designing and implementing a hardware measurement scheme for DRAM on a real system without hardware modifications. Finally, we evaluate our DRAM hardware measurement scheme and demonstrate that it achieves 89% accuracy in mapping a DRAM measurement to the manufacturing process from which that DRAM was produced.by Berj Krikor Chilingirian.M. Eng
A new convective model of the Weddell Polyny: Deep convection in the Southern Ocean
No full textThe Weddell Polynya, a large hole in the Antarctic sea ice, reappeared in 2017. The polynya forms due to deep convection, which is caused by static instability of the water column. Observations and model studies show periodic heat accumulation in the subsurface layer prior to a polynya. This heat accumulation could be caused by internal ocean dynamics: the Southern Ocean Mode. Periodic subsurface heat and salt accumulation could be the major driver in causing periodic deep convection, which is in contrast with earlier studies. These studies focus on surface processes, and see the polynya as an irregular event. In this study a simple convective model is used to look into this contrast. Model simulations excluding and including periodic subsurface heat and salt fluxes have been performed. Multiple polynya events were only simulated in the model set up including subsurface fluxes. The dominant frequency for polynya events in these simulations equals the frequency of the subsurface heat and salt accumulation. This frequency is still visible in runs with white noise added to the freshwater flux, showing the importance and dominance of the subsurface forcing. In combination with earlier studies, this study suggests that periodic subsurface processes are most dominant and govern the initial formation and periodicity of the Weddell Polynya
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