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Runnin’ with the devil
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(ha-yeah!)
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Runnin’ with thg devil
(Woo! Woo!)
Runnin’ with the devil
(Ai-ha, yeah! Ah-ha, yeah! Ah-hah, yeah!)
Runnin’ with the devil (Woo!)

Free Download

]]>https://parsseh.com/138462/free-download-detroit-rock-city-van-halen-runnin-with-the-devil-lyrics.html/feed0Crowdsourcing big-data analysishttps://parsseh.com/138460/crowdsourcing-big-data-analysis.html https://parsseh.com/138460/crowdsourcing-big-data-analysis.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 20:40:56 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138460

“I think that the concept of massive and open data science can be really leveraged for areas where there’s a strong social impact but not necessarily a single profit-making or govement organization that is coordinating responses,” MIT graduate student Micah Smith says about FeatureHub.

Image: MIT News

Crowdsourcing big-data analysis

Web-based system automatically evaluates proposals from far-flung data scientists.

Larry Hardesty

In the analysis of big data sets, the first step is usually the identification of “features” — data points with particular predictive power or analytic utility. Choosing features usually requires some human intuition. For instance, a sales database might contain revenues and date ranges, but it might take a human to recognize that average revenues — revenues divided by the sizes of the ranges — is the really useful metric.

MIT researchers have developed a new collaboration tool, dubbed FeatureHub, intended to make feature identification more efficient and effective. With FeatureHub, data scientists and experts on particular topics could log on to a central site and spend an hour or two reviewing a problem and proposing features. Software then tests myriad combinations of features against target data, to determine which are most useful for a given predictive task.

In tests, the researchers recruited 32 analysts with data science experience, who spent five hours each with the system, familiarizing themselves with it and using it to propose candidate features for each of two data-science problems.

The predictive models produced by the system were tested against those submitted to a data-science competition called Kaggle. The Kaggle entries had been scored on a 100-point scale, and the FeatureHub models were within three and five points of the winning entries for the two problems.

But where the top-scoring entries were the result of weeks or even months of work, the FeatureHub entries were produced in a matter of days. And while 32 collaborators on a single data science project is a lot by today’s standards, Micah Smith, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who helped lead the project, has much larger ambitions.

FeatureHub — like its name — was inspired by GitHub, an online repository of open-source programming projects, some of which have drawn thousands of contributors. Smith hopes that FeatureHub might someday attain a similar scale.

“I do hope that we can facilitate having thousands of people working on a single solution for predicting where traffic accidents are most likely to strike in New York City or predicting which patients in a hospital are most likely to require some medical intervention,” he says. “I think that the concept of massive and open data science can be really leveraged for areas where there’s a strong social impact but not necessarily a single profit-making or govement organization that is coordinating responses.”

Smith and his colleagues presented a paper describing FeatureHub at the IEEE Inteational Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics. His coauthors on the paper are his thesis advisor, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and Roy Wedge, who began working with Veeramachaneni’s group as an MIT undergraduate and is now a software engineer at Feature Labs, a data science company based on the group’s work.

FeatureHub’s user interface is built on top of a common data-analysis software suite called the Jupyter Notebook, and the evaluation of feature sets is performed by standard machine-leaing software packages. Features must be written in the Python programming language, but their design has to follow a template that intentionally keeps the syntax simple. A typical feature might require between five and 10 lines of code.

The MIT researchers wrote code that mediates between the other software packages and manages data, pooling features submitted by many different users and tracking those collections of features that perform best on particular data analysis tasks.

In the past, Veeramachaneni’s group has developed software that automatically generates features by inferring relationships between data from the manner in which they’re organized. When that organizational information is missing, however, the approach is less effective.

Still, Smith imagines, automatic feature synthesis could be used in conjunction with FeatureHub, getting projects started before volunteers have begun to contribute to them, saving the grunt work of enumerating the obvious features, and augmenting the best-performing sets of features contributed by humans.

source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

]]>https://parsseh.com/138460/crowdsourcing-big-data-analysis.html/feed0A poem by Yosa Buson: Old wellhttps://parsseh.com/138456/a-poem-by-yosa-buson-old-well.html https://parsseh.com/138456/a-poem-by-yosa-buson-old-well.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 20:35:26 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138456

Old well

Old well,
a fish leaps–
dark sound.

Translated by Robert Hass

Yosa Buson

]]>https://parsseh.com/138456/a-poem-by-yosa-buson-old-well.html/feed0Research suggests American Indians are finding ‘image power’ with social mediahttps://parsseh.com/138455/research-suggests-american-indians-are-finding-image-power-with-social-media.html https://parsseh.com/138455/research-suggests-american-indians-are-finding-image-power-with-social-media.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 20:31:14 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138455

“There is an inherent limitation to my ability to understand, at a nuanced level, what the community is trying to say with an image,” Rich Caneba explained.

Image: iStock Photo / bpperry

Research suggests American Indians are finding ‘image power’ with social media

Erin Cassidy Hendrick

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Throughout the United States’ history, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities have struggled with misrepresented portrayals in media and entertainment, ranging from silly characterizations to harmful stereotypes.

To understand how these communities are taking action on their own behalf, researchers in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) are exploring ways AIAN communities are using social media platforms like Instagram to reclaim “image power” — the ability to visually craft their own narratives about their culture. Instagram is particularly interesting because it emphasizes images.

Rich Caneba, a doctoral student in IST, is working to understand how members of AIAN communities self-represent their culture, in part because “the visual representation of American Indians by this broader Weste society hasn’t typically been done by the American Indian community itself.”

This was highlighted for him during a previous research effort, when Caneba interviewed an American Indian man and asked him what he wanted people outside of his reservation to know about him and his culture.

The subject, a 64-year old former truck driver who hasn’t had a drink in 40 years, said, “I’d like them to know we’re not all drunks. Sure every society has one or two. But when they assume everyone is, that’s just wrong.”

Topical examples ranging from the names and logos used with sports teams like the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins, to popular films like Disney’s “Pocahontas,” demonstrate how the community’s narrative and visual identity is largely constructed by those exteal to the AIAN communities.

“These images are especially powerful in today’s media environment, where we can share images more easily,” Caneba explained.

To conduct his research, Caneba explored how AIAN populations represent themselves on Instagram as a way to uncover not only how these populations want to be viewed from a broader societal perspective, but also how they perceive themselves.

The result is his study, “Native American Cultural Identity through Imagery: An Activity Theory Approach to Image-Power,” which was co-authored with Carleen Maitland, associate professor of IST, and was recently published in the Proceedings of the 2017 Information and Communication Technologies and Development.

In a qualitative effort, Caneba and Maitland identified 29 Instagram accounts, and fully examined seven that were determined to be appropriate advocates for the AIAN community.

Through their results, Caneba said these advocates were able to portray “a more complete, nuanced picture of their community. [Through Instagram], that image representation is shared broadly, not just with their community, so it does a play a powerful role in our awareness of what a group is.”

The examples he found most poignant were photos surrounding the recent protests related to the construction of the Keystone Access Pipeline.

“While I was conducting the analysis, I could see it playing out in front of my eyes,” Caneba said. “You would see the emotions, the anger, the hope — these were all conveyed through powerful imagery by members within these communities. And those images, shared on social media, become incorporated into a broader awareness.”

By posting about their experiences, AIAN advocates are able to provide a window into their culture, rather than being resigned to the stereotypes foisted upon them by exteal groups.

Caneba also readily admits his background, as ethnically Filipino, doesn’t fully inform his research into the AIAN communities.

“There is an inherent limitation to my ability to understand, at a nuanced level, what the community is trying to say with an image,” he explained. “That’s not to say there’s no value in what a cultural outsider can bring to analysis, but it’s important to be forthcoming.”

As the use of social media grows, Caneba believes these communities will be able to wield more control over their image power.

“Where this effect has been strongest is with its youngest members,” he said. “Instagram will continue to be useful going forward, as these advocates become older and have more to say.”

Caneba and Maitland plan to present their research at the Inteational Conference on Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), which will be held Nov. 16-19 in Pakistan.

source: The Pennsylvania State University

]]>https://parsseh.com/138455/research-suggests-american-indians-are-finding-image-power-with-social-media.html/feed0Society of tomorrow based on biomasshttps://parsseh.com/138449/society-of-tomorrow-based-on-biomass.html https://parsseh.com/138449/society-of-tomorrow-based-on-biomass.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 18:32:48 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138449

Society of tomorrow based on biomass

By Marianne Vang Ryde

Biological material that would otherwise be regarded as waste can be put to far better use. We simply have to decide to do it,” says Lene Lange, DTU’s expert in the National Bioeconomic Panel.

Environment and Food Minister Esben Lunde Larsen recently reinstigated The National Bioeconomic Panel, which was first established in 2013. Among the committee’s first tasks will be to look at how Danish protein resources can be better developed so that imports of soya in animal feed from South America can be reduced.

One of the few repeat panel participants is Professor Lene Lang from DTU Chemical Engineering who has worked with bioeconomics for nearly 30 years—20 years at Novozymes, then at the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University—and now at DTU. Her explanation of the concept of the bioeconomy goes like this:

“Most people probably associate the concept with converting straw into ethanol, but you can refine an infinite number of biological materials currently regarded as waste—from household waste to different by-products of animal production. Even sludge from treatment plants can be upgraded. This is where a large proportion of our limited phosphorus resources ends up, but with microorganisms we can recover the phosphorus, and once recovered, you can cultivate bacteria on the rest and use these bacteria to create biopolymers.

Lene Lange

Denmark is at the cutting edge of biological production, where microorganisms are used to produce new products. Novo Nordisk, Novozymes, and Danisco DuPont are all good examples with their production of insulin, enzymes, and ingredients, respectively. Arla utilizes whey, a by-product from cheese, in the production of special protein-rich diet for infants, athletes, and people who are ill. And through its DC Ingredients unit, Danish Crown is examining how more parts of the slaughtered animals—blood, among other things—can be utilized.

However, bioeconomic thinking must permeate all parts of society, and I’m therefore delighted that the minister has now reinstigated the National Bioeconomic Panel. One of the first issues to address is how we can better develop Danish protein resources, thereby reducing the import of soya in animal feed from South America. We must become better at utilizing the resources instead of wasting half—and ensure that as much as possible of the refinement process takes place where the raw materials are. This is what the circular economy is all about.”

You talk about replacing some of our co fields out with grass and clover. Why?

“Our co fields are yellow from the last week of July—and after that they don’t make particularly good use of the sun’s rays. Grass and clover can be harvested several times a year, the young plants have a high protein content, and their root system utilizes the nutrients better all year round—so it would give fewer problems in connection with the leaching of nitrogen, for example. You would also be able to reduce the use of pesticides by replacing some of the vast co fields with a mixture of clover and grass, which almost don’t share any diseases and which also have less time to be sick in due to the shorter growing season.”

What do the farmers have to say about it?

“I meet a lot of farmers who are interested in the new ideas. I’m not suggesting that all co fields should be converted into grass and clover, but the current practice can make it difficult to comply with the EU’s Water Framework Directive. There’s talk of more setting aside, but instead we could tu some of the fields into grass and clover for high protein animal feed, food ingredients, and nutrients to be retued to the soil. This could provide truly sustainability—environmentally, socially, and economically—through biorefinery job creation.

Experiments are also underway with hemp, sunflower, broad beans, and new types of rapeseed—and we’re looking into whether we can identify individual components in the protein of particular benefit to humans. Once we grow accustomed to harvesting something that must be refined, the possibilities are limitless.”

How can DTU contribute to this agenda?

“Bioeconomic thinking is rooted in a basic technical understanding of biological conversion, separation, membranes, filtration, stabilization, etc. We can contribute with knowledge about how the individual chemical components must be handled, sensors, monitoring, life cycle assessments, and IT.” Bioeconomy has recently been named a new sector development area at DTU with Group Leader Simon Bolvig from DTU Management as section head.”

source: Technical University of Denmark

]]>https://parsseh.com/138449/society-of-tomorrow-based-on-biomass.html/feed0Henry VIII – Act 5, SCENE V. The palace by William Shakespearehttps://parsseh.com/138448/henry-viii-act-5-scene-v-the-palace-by-william-shakespeare.html https://parsseh.com/138448/henry-viii-act-5-scene-v-the-palace-by-william-shakespeare.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 18:30:44 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138448

Henry VIII

Act 5, SCENE V. The palace.

.

Enter trumpets, sounding; then two Aldermen, Lord Mayor, Garter, CRANMER, NORFOLK with his marshal’s staff, SUFFOLK, two Noblemen bearing great standing-bowls for the christening-gifts; then four Noblemen bearing a canopy, under which the Duchess of Norfolk, godmother, bearing the child richly habited in a mantle, & c., train boe by a Lady; then follows the Marchioness Dorset, the other godmother, and Ladies. The troop pass once about the stage, and Garter speaks

Garter

Heaven, from thy endless goodness, send prosperous
life, long, and ever happy, to the high and mighty
princess of England, Elizabeth!

Flourish. Enter KING HENRY VIII and Guard

CRANMER

[Kneeling] And to your royal grace, and the good queen,
My noble partners, and myself, thus pray:
All comfort, joy, in this most gracious lady,
Heaven ever laid up to make parents happy,
May hourly fall upon ye!

KING HENRY VIII

Thank you, good lord archbishop:
What is her name?

CRANMER

Elizabeth.

KING HENRY VIII

Stand up, lord.

KING HENRY VIII kisses the child

With this kiss take my blessing: God protect thee!
Into whose hand I give thy life.

CRANMER

Amen.

KING HENRY VIII

My noble gossips, ye have been too prodigal:
I thank ye heartily; so shall this lady,
When she has so much English.

CRANMER

Let me speak, sir,
For heaven now bids me; and the words I utter
Let none think flattery, for they’ll find ’em truth.
This royal infant–heaven still move about her!–
Though in her cradle, yet now promises
Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings,
Which time shall bring to ripeness: she shall be–
But few now living can behold that goodness–
A patte to all princes living with her,
And all that shall succeed: Saba was never
More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue
Than this pure soul shall be: all princely graces,
That mould up such a mighty piece as this is,
With all the virtues that attend the good,
Shall still be doubled on her: truth shall nurse her,
Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her:
She shall be loved and fear’d: her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten co,
And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her:
In her days every man shall eat in safety,
Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:
God shall be truly known; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.
Nor shall this peace sleep with her: but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix’d: peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him:
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations: he shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him: our children’s children
Shall see this, and bless heaven.

KING HENRY VIII

Thou speakest wonders.

CRANMER

She shall be, to the happiness of England,
An aged princess; many days shall see her,
And yet no day without a deed to crown it.
Would I had known no more! but she must die,
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted lily shall she pass
To the ground, and all the world shall mou her.

KING HENRY VIII

O lord archbishop,
Thou hast made me now a man! never, before
This happy child, did I get any thing:
This oracle of comfort has so pleased me,
That when I am in heaven I shall desire
To see what this child does, and praise my Maker.
I thank ye all. To you, my good lord mayor,
And your good brethren, I am much beholding;
I have received much honour by your presence,
And ye shall find me thankful. Lead the way, lords:
Ye must all see the queen, and she must thank ye,
She will be sick else. This day, no man think
Has business at his house; for all shall stay:
This little one shall make it holiday.

Exeunt

EPILOGUE

‘Tis ten to one this play can never please
All that are here: some come to take their ease,
And sleep an act or two; but those, we fear,
We have frighted with our trumpets; so, ’tis clear,
They’ll say ’tis naught: others, to hear the city
Abused extremely, and to cry ‘That’s witty!’
Which we have not done neither: that, I fear,
All the expected good we’re like to hear
For this play at this time, is only in
The merciful construction of good women;
For such a one we show’d ’em: if they smile,
And say ’twill do, I know, within a while
All the best men are ours; for ’tis ill hap,
If they hold when their ladies bid ’em clap.

William Shakespeare

]]>https://parsseh.com/138448/henry-viii-act-5-scene-v-the-palace-by-william-shakespeare.html/feed0Hitler’s role in the artshttps://parsseh.com/138442/hitlers-role-in-the-arts.html https://parsseh.com/138442/hitlers-role-in-the-arts.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 16:46:39 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138442

The infamous Nazi death camp sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” — German for “Work Sets You Free” — which spans the entrance of Auschwitz

What I’m working on: Hitler’s role in the arts

Art historian Paul Jaskot, who joined the Duke faculty earlier this year, examines art’s relationship with the Nazis and other brutal regimes

By Eric Ferreri

Paul Jaskot believes there’s much to lea where politics and art history intersect.

For more than two decades, the art historian has examined that interplay — primarily the cultural impact of Nazi Germany prior to, during and after World War II.

A DePaul University faculty member for 22 years, Jaskot this summer moved to Durham, where he is now an art history professor and director of Duke’s Wired! Lab for Digital Art History and Visual Culture.

New to the South, Jaskot considers himself a blank slate of sorts, and is creating a North Carolina-centric class project that he hopes will help him lea a bit about his new home.

Paul Jaskot

Here, he chats with Duke Today about his work and plans at Duke.

Your work has focused at the intersection of art, politics and history. Where does that interest come from?

In my graduate work I kept being drawn to questions of art and revolution, particularly 19th century France. But I realized there was a hole in terms of how the extreme right has also been involved in art. A lot of artists were looking at the left. But very few were looking at the other extreme – how does the right wing get involved?

That led me to a course at Northweste comparing Hitler and Stalin as art patrons. It became very clear to me, in trying to do my own work on this topic, that there was very little literature on Hitler’s role in the arts. That was outrageous to me, because he was one of the most significant figures of the 20th century, and art historians had very little to say about it.

I still think the Holocaust and the Nazi period, from the perpetrator’s perspective, isn’t fully understood in terms of culture and cultural policy. There are thousands of books on the SS and the war and Jewish life and survivors. But if you look at the books on artists at the time, they are few and far between.

Is that because people don’t make that connection?

Yes. In the mode world we see art as benevolent, as helping the human spirit. That is, of course, opposed by Nazism and fascist states. But when you look at any period of art, you see connections between art and oppression. Look at the Egyptians using slaves to build the pyramids.

Your new project involves public buildings in North Carolina. How, exactly?

A lot of my work is in architecture. Next semester I’m teaching a class here about the history of political architecture. I’ve taught that in Chicago, but I need to know more about it in North Carolina. So a student of mine and I are working on a database about every public building in the state.

That sounds like a lot of work.

It’s a lifetime of work. So we have to break it down and look at different types of public buildings. We’re starting with the prison system. Prisons have always been important political and architectural buildings. Easte State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, for example, is the largest and most expensive building in antebellum America. It’s still there. It’s not a prison, but it’s still there.

North Carolina didn’t get a state penitentiary until after the Civil War. The first was Central Prison in Raleigh. We just found out that it was built by the prisoners. They were paid very little. “I wouldn’t call if slave labor or forced labor, but it was still labor under duress and oppressive conditions.”

So it’s more than the look of a building that you’re interested in. It’s the history behind how it was built and where the materials came from?

It’s both. The appearance of the building, the aesthetic, you make those choices. But the aesthetics have deep ramifications about the production of the building. Where do the materials come from? Who does the work?

The same questions of labor and working conditions are very much in play these days in the Gulf states. They’re known for their massive hotels and other buildings. They’re glamorous and they’re tall. They require, basically, indentured labor. That labor is not being monitored. There are horrible practices.

It’s not the same as Hitler’s Germany or 1870s North Carolina. They’re all different systems, economies and politics. But the question about aesthetic choices and the political economy is the same question.

What will be the public good to come from this project?

I see this as a multi-year project involving dozens of students. I’ll be able to do talks and publications from what we lea. And we’ll also, hopefully, have something to say about North Carolina. Every county has a courthouse. There are a lot of prisons. So it’s a way to get to a lot of questions about rural economies — rural aesthetics and history and politics outside of metropolitan areas.

Given the current political climate, does your work exploring art and fascism have particular relevance?

The questions become more and more relevant because people are interested in how democracies fail and how authoritarianism is implemented. People like me who work on this area are always asking these questions.

The historical comparison that interests people now is with the late Weimar Republic. There’s this moment then after the depression, with an economic crisis, and then an election where Hitler comes to power. And there were far right, far left, and moderate forces all involved. I think the way it collapsed into the Nazi state is very instructive for anyone who wants to think about Democracies and how they can fail.

source: Duke University

]]>https://parsseh.com/138442/hitlers-role-in-the-arts.html/feed0Disparities in influenza outcomeshttps://parsseh.com/138434/disparities-in-influenza-outcomes.html https://parsseh.com/138434/disparities-in-influenza-outcomes.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 16:33:43 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138434

Disparities in influenza outcomes

by Leigh MacMillan

Influenza infections kill between 3,000 and 49,000 people each year in the United States. Understanding risk factors for severe influenza outcomes, such as hospitalization, can help guide vaccination programs and reduce disease burden.

Rameela Chandrasekhar, Ph.D., and colleagues evaluated whether neighborhood determinants – represented by census tract data – contribute to the risk of influenza hospitalization. They analyzed 33,515 laboratory-confirmed influenza hospitalizations from 14 sites over a 5-year period and found that both individual (age, race, ethnicity) and census tract-based factors were associated with hospitalization for influenza.

The odds of being hospitalized were higher for census tracts with the highest levels of poverty, household crowding and female head of household. Overall, the investigators found that census tract-based determinants account for 11 percent of the variability in influenza hospitalization.

The findings, reported in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, suggest that individual interventions, such as vaccinations, could be prioritized to high risk census tracts to reduce disparities in severe influenza outcomes.

Vanderbilt investigators who participated in the research included Edward Mitchel, Danielle Ndi, Tiffanie Markus, Ph.D., William Schaffner, M.D., and Mary Lou Lindegren, M.D., MPH.

This research was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging Infections Program Cooperative Agreement with Tennessee (U50CK000198).

source: Vanderbilt University – Nashville, Tennessee

]]>https://parsseh.com/138434/disparities-in-influenza-outcomes.html/feed03-D-printed device builds better nanofibershttps://parsseh.com/138433/3-d-printed-device-builds-better-nanofibers.html https://parsseh.com/138433/3-d-printed-device-builds-better-nanofibers.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 16:25:25 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138433

A 3-D-printed manufacturing device can extrude fibers that are only 75 nanometers in diameter, or one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Image: Luis Feando Velásquez-García

3-D-printed device builds better nanofibers

Printed nozzle system could make uniform, versatile fibers at much lower cost.

Larry Hardesty

Meshes made from fibers with nanometer-scale diameters have a wide range of potential applications, including tissue engineering, water filtration, solar cells, and even body armor. But their commercialization has been hampered by inefficient manufacturing techniques.

In the latest issue of the joual Nanotechnology, MIT researchers describe a new device for producing nanofiber meshes, which matches the production rate and power efficiency of its best-performing predecessor — but significantly reduces variation in the fibers’ diameters, an important consideration in most applications.

But whereas the predecessor device, from the same MIT group, was etched into silicon through a complex process that required an airlocked “clean room,” the new device was built using a $3,500 commercial 3-D printer. The work thus points toward nanofiber manufacture that is not only more reliable but also much cheaper.

The new device consists of an array of small nozzles through which a fluid containing particles of a polymer are pumped. As such, it is what’s known as a microfluidic device.

“My personal opinion is that in the next few years, nobody is going to be doing microfluidics in the clean room,” says Luis Feando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and senior author on the new paper. “There’s no reason to do so. 3-D printing is a technology that can do it so much better — with better choice of materials, with the possibility to really make the structure that you would like to make. When you go to the clean room, many times you sacrifice the geometry you want to make. And the second problem is that it is incredibly expensive.”

Velásquez-García is joined on the paper by two postdocs in his group, Erika García-López and Daniel Olvera-Trejo. Both received their PhDs from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico and worked with Velásquez-García through MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey’s nanotech research partnership.

Hollowed out

Nanofibers are useful for any application that benefits from a high ratio of surface area to volume — such as solar cells, which try to maximize exposure to sunlight, or fuel cell electrodes, which catalyze reactions at their surfaces. Nanofibers can also yield materials that are permeable only at very small scales, such as water filters, or that are remarkably tough for their weight, such as body armor.

With their staggered spacing, the emitters can produce tightly packed but “aligned” nanofibers, meaning that they can be collected on a rotating drum without overlapping each other.

Image: Luis Feando Velásquez-García

Most such applications depend on fibers with regular diameters. “The performance of the fibers strongly depends on their diameter,” Velásquez-García says. “If you have a significant spread, what that really means is that only a few percent are really working. Example: You have a filter, and the filter has pores between 50 nanometers and 1 micron. That’s really a 1-micron filter.”

Because the group’s earlier device was etched in silicon, it was “exteally fed,” meaning that an electric field drew a polymer solution up the sides of the individual emitters. The fluid flow was regulated by rectangular columns etched into the sides of the emitters, but it was still erratic enough to yield fibers of irregular diameter.

The new emitters, by contrast, are “inteally fed”: They have holes bored through them, and hydraulic pressure pushes fluid into the bores until they’re filled. Only then does an electric field draw the fluid out into tiny fibers.

Beneath the emitters, the channels that feed the bores are wrapped into coils, and they gradually taper along their length. That taper is key to regulating the diameter of the nanofibers, and it would be virtually impossible to achieve with clean-room microfabrication techniques. “Microfabrication is really meant to make straight cuts,” Velásquez-García says.

Fast iteration

In the new device, the nozzles are arranged into two rows, which are slightly offset from each other. That’s because the device was engineered to demonstrate aligned nanofibers — nanofibers that preserve their relative position as they’re collected by a rotating drum. Aligned nanofibers are particularly useful in some applications, such as tissue scaffolding. For applications in which unaligned fibers are adequate, the nozzles could be arranged in a grid, increasing output rate.

Besides cost and design flexibility, Velásquez-García says, another advantage of 3-D printing is the ability to rapidly test and revise designs. With his group’s microfabricated devices, he says, it typically takes two years to go from theoretical modeling to a published paper, and in the interim, he and his colleagues might be able to test two or three variations on their basic design. With the new device, he says, the process took closer to a year, and they were able to test 70 iterations of the design.

“A way to deterministically engineer the position and size of electrospun fibers allows you to start to think about being able to control mechanical properties of materials that are made from these fibers. It allows you to think about preferential cell growth along particular directions in the fibers — lots of good potential opportunities there,” says Mark Allen, the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in electrical and systems engineering and mechanical engineering and applied mechanics. “I anticipate that somebody’s going to take this technology and use it in very creative ways. If you have the need for this type of deterministically engineered fiber network, I think it’s a very elegant way to achieve that goal.”

source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

]]>https://parsseh.com/138433/3-d-printed-device-builds-better-nanofibers.html/feed0New Studies on Disordered Cathodes May Provide Much-Needed Jolt to Lithium Batterieshttps://parsseh.com/138428/new-studies-on-disordered-cathodes-may-provide-much-needed-jolt-to-lithium-batteries.html https://parsseh.com/138428/new-studies-on-disordered-cathodes-may-provide-much-needed-jolt-to-lithium-batteries.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 16:00:06 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138428

Berkeley Lab researcher Gerd Ceder (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab)

New Studies on Disordered Cathodes May Provide Much-Needed Jolt to Lithium Batteries

Berkeley Lab reports major progress in realizing new type of lithium cathode

Julie Chao

Today’s lithium-ion battery was invented so long ago, there are not many more efficiencies to wring out of it. Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) report major progress in cathodes made with so-called “disordered” materials, a promising new type of lithium battery.

In a pair of papers published this month in Nature Communications and Physical Review Letters (PRL), a team of scientists led by Gerbrand Ceder has come up with a set of rules for making new disordered materials, a process that had previously been driven by trial-and-error. They also found a way to incorporate fluorine, which makes the material both more stable and have higher capacity.

“This really seems to be an interesting new direction for making high energy density cathodes,” said Ceder, a Senior Faculty Scientist at Berkeley Lab who also has an appointment at UC Berkeley’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “It’s remarkable that all the disordered rock salts people have come up with so far have very high battery capacity. In the PRL paper we give a guideline for how to more systematically make these materials.”

The benefits of disorder

The cathode material in lithium batteries is typically “ordered,” meaning the lithium and transition metal atoms are arranged in neat layers, allowing lithium to move in and out of the layers. A few years ago, Ceder’s group discovered that certain types of disordered material could store even more lithium, giving batteries higher capacity.

The lead author of the PRL paper, “The electronic-structure origin of cation disorder in transition-metal oxides,” is Alexander Urban, a Berkeley Lab postdoctoral fellow.

“Despite their attractive properties, discovering new disordered materials has been mostly driven by trial-and-error and by relying on human intuition,” Urban said. “Now we have for the first time identified a simple design criterion to predict novel disordered compositions. The new understanding establishes a relationship between the chemical species, local distortions of the crystal structure, and the tendency to form disordered phases.”

The other advantage of using disordered materials is the ability to avoid the use of cobalt, a limited resource, with more than half the world’s supply existing in politically unstable countries. By moving to disordered rock salts, battery designers could be free to use a wider range of chemistries. For example, disordered materials have been made using chromium, titanium, and molybdenum.

“We want the ability to have more compositional freedom, so we can tune other parameters,” Ceder said. “There are so many properties to optimize – the voltage, the long-term stability, whether it’s easy to synthesize – there’s so much that goes into taking a battery material to a commercial stage. Now we have a recipe for how to make these materials.”

How and why to fluorinate batteries

Another major advance in lithium-ion batteries is reported in the Nature Communications paper, “Mitigating oxygen loss to improve the cycling performance of high capacity cation-disordered cathode materials,” which shows that disordered materials can be fluorinated, unlike other battery materials. Fluorination confers two advantages: it allows more capacity and makes the material more stable. In a battery, the increased stability would translate into a device with long cycle life and that is less likely to catch fire.

The lead author of the paper, Jinhyuk Lee, formerly a Berkeley Lab researcher, worked with scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), a source of X-ray beams for scientific research, to conduct in situ experiments. “The ALS was really important to understand the mechanism by which we get higher capacity,” Ceder said. “What’s really cool is you can look at the battery while it’s operating, and look at the electronic structure of the cathodes. So you lea how it charges and discharges, where the electrons go, which is a crucial aspect of charge storage.”

ALS scientists Shawn Sallis and Wanli Yang are co-authors, as is Bryan McCloskey of Berkeley Lab. “His group was crucial in showing these materials are more stable and don’t lose oxygen,” Ceder said.

Now that they have demonstrated the concept, Ceder plans to follow up by trying to add even more fluorine to the materials.

“New cathode materials is the hottest direction in Li-ion batteries,” Ceder said. “The field is a bit stuck. To get more improvements in energy storage there are only a few directions to go. One is solid-state batteries, and the other is to keep improving the energy density of electrode materials. The two are not mutually exclusive. This research line is definitely not exhausted yet.”

Other co-authors of the Nature Communications paper are Joseph Papp, Raphaele Clement, Deok-Hwang Kwon, and Tan Shi of UC Berkeley. Other co-authors on the PRL paper are Aziz Abdellahi and Stephen Dacek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nongnuch Artrith of UC Berkeley.

The research was supported in part by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. The Molecular Foundry and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), both at Berkeley Lab, were used in the research. The ALS, Molecular Foundry, and NERSC are DOE Office of Science User Facilities.

source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

]]>https://parsseh.com/138428/new-studies-on-disordered-cathodes-may-provide-much-needed-jolt-to-lithium-batteries.html/feed0An AI professor explains: three conces about granting citizenship to robot Sophiahttps://parsseh.com/138429/an-ai-professor-explains-three-conces-about-granting-citizenship-to-robot-sophia.html https://parsseh.com/138429/an-ai-professor-explains-three-conces-about-granting-citizenship-to-robot-sophia.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 15:46:52 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138429

Photo: Flickr/ITU/R. Farrell CC BY 2.0

An AI professor explains: three conces about granting citizenship to robot Sophia

Hussain Abbass

Granting Saudi Arabian citizenship to the robot ‘Sophia’ raises social and ethical conces that we are not yet ready to manage, writes Hussain Abbass.

OPINION: I was surprised to hear that a robot named Sophia was granted citizenship by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The announcement last week followed the Kingdom’s commitment of UA$500 billion to build a new city powered by robotics and renewables.

One of the most honourable concepts for a human being, to be a citizen and all that brings with it, has been given to a machine. As a professor who works daily on making AI and autonomous systems more trustworthy, I don’t believe human society is ready for citizen robots yet.

To grant a robot citizenship is a declaration of trust in a technology that I believe is not yet trustworthy. It brings social and ethical conces that we as humans are not yet ready to manage.

Who is Sophia?

Sophia is a robot developed by the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia has a female face that can display emotions. Sophia speaks English. Sophia makes jokes. You could have a reasonably intelligent conversation with Sophia.

Sophia’s creator is Dr David Hanson, a 2007 PhD graduate from the University of Texas.

Sophia is reminiscent of “Johnny 5”, the first robot to become a US citizen in the 1986 movie Short Circuit. But Johnny 5 was a mere idea, something dreamt up by comic science fiction writers S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock.

Did the writers imagine that in around 30 years their fiction would become a reality?

Risk to citizenship

Citizenship – in my opinion, the most honourable status a country grants for its people – is facing an existential risk.

As a researcher who advocates for designing autonomous systems that are trustworthy, I know the technology is not ready yet.

We have many challenges that we need to overcome before we can truly trust these systems. For example, we don’t yet have reliable mechanisms to assure us that these intelligent systems will always behave ethically and in accordance with our moral values, or to protect us against them taking a wrong action with catastrophic consequences.

Here are three reasons I think it is a premature decision to grant Sophia citizenship.

1. Defining identity

Citizenship is granted to a unique identity.

Each of us, humans I mean, possesses a unique signature that distinguishes us from any other human. When we get through customs without talking to a human, our identity is automatically established using an image of our face, iris and fingerprint. My PhD student establishes human identity by analysing humans’ brain waves.

What gives Sophia her identity? Her MAC address? A barcode, a unique skin mark, an audio mark in her voice, an electromagnetic signature similar to human brain waves?

These and other technological identity management protocols are all possible, but they do not establish Sophia’s identity – they can only establish hardware identity. What then is Sophia’s identity?

To me, identity is a multidimensional construct. It sits at the intersection of who we are biologically, cognitively, and as defined by every experience, culture, and environment we encountered. It’s not clear where Sophia fits in this description.

2. Legal rights

For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that Sophia the citizen robot is able to vote. But who is making the decision on voting day – Sophia or the manufacturer?

Presumably also Sophia the citizen is “liable” to pay income taxes because Sophia has a legal identity independent of its creator, the company.

Sophia must also have the right for equal protection similar to other citizens by law.

Consider this hypothetical scenario: a policeman sees Sophia and a woman each being attacked by a person. That policeman can only protect one of them: who should it be? Is it right if the policeman chooses Sophia because Sophia walks on wheels and has no skills for self-defence?

Today, the artificial intelligence (AI) community is still debating what principles should gove the design and use of AI, let alone what the laws should be.

The most recent list proposes 23 principles known as the Asilomar AI Principles. Examples of these include: Failure Transparency (ascertaining the cause if an AI system causes harm); Value Alignment (aligning the AI system’s goals with human values); and Recursive Self-Improvement (subjecting AI systems with abilities to self-replicate to strict safety and control measures).

3. Social rights

Let’s talk about relationships and reproduction.

As a citizen, will Sophia, the humanoid emotional robot, be allowed to “marry” or “breed” if Sophia chooses to? Students from North Dakota State University have taken steps to create a robot that self-replicates using 3D printing technologies.

If more robots join Sophia as citizens of the world, perhaps they too could claim their rights to self-replicate into other robots. These robots would also become citizens. With no resource constraints on how many children each of these robots could have, they could easily exceed the human population of a nation.

The ConversationAs voting citizens, these robots could create societal change. Laws might change, and suddenly humans could find themselves in a place they hadn’t imagined.

Hussein Abbass is Professor, School of Engineering & IT at UNSW Canberra.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

source: The University of New South Wales

]]>https://parsseh.com/138429/an-ai-professor-explains-three-conces-about-granting-citizenship-to-robot-sophia.html/feed0Free Download: Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet 2 in A, Op.68https://parsseh.com/138415/free-download-dmitri-shostakovich-string-quartet-2-in-a-op-68.html https://parsseh.com/138415/free-download-dmitri-shostakovich-string-quartet-2-in-a-op-68.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 11:30:09 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138415

Free Download: Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet 2 in A, Op.68

Classical
Album

Free Download

]]>https://parsseh.com/138415/free-download-dmitri-shostakovich-string-quartet-2-in-a-op-68.html/feed0Chipotle Shredded Beefhttps://parsseh.com/138421/chipotle-shredded-beef.html https://parsseh.com/138421/chipotle-shredded-beef.html#respondMon, 30 Oct 2017 10:30:52 +0000https://parsseh.com/?p=138421

Chipotle Shredded Beef

This beef is delicious all rolled up in a tortilla, served with co salsa and eaten as a burrito. I recommend a smoky cheese, like gouda. It is a staple recipe and a client favorite. You could also serve it over rice or mashed potatoes or in buns.

Ready in 45 minutes
Serves : 6

Ingredients:

1 small onion; chopped
1 teaspoon canola oil
1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1/4 cup cider vinegar
6 garlic cloves; minced
2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce; chopped
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons adobo sauce
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 boneless beef chuck roast; (2-1/2 pounds)
5 cups cooked brown rice

Instructions:

In a large skillet coated with cooking spray, saute onion in oil until tender.

Stir in the tomatoes, vinegar, garlic, peppers, brown sugar, bay leaves, adobo sauce and seasonings.

Bring to a boil; reduce heat, simmer, uncovered for 4-6 minutes or until thickened.

Place roast in a 5-qt. slow cooker; add tomato mixture.

Cover and cook on low heat for 8-9 hours or until meat is tender.

Discard bay leaves.

Remove meat and shred with two forks.

Skim fat from juices; retu meat to slow cooker.

Using a slotted spoon, serve meat with rice.

Top with reduced fat shredded cheddar cheese and reduced fat sour cream if desired.

By Sara Tipton

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