Fabrication of Multilayered Polymer Composite Fibers for Enhanced Functionalities

Carbon nanoparticles-based polymer composites have wide applications across different fields for their unique functional properties, durability, and chemical stability. When combining nanoparticle morphologies with micro- or macro-scale morphologies, the hierarchal structure often would greatly enhance the composites’ functionalities. Here in this work, a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) and graphene nanoplatelets (GnPs) based multilayered fiber is fabricated through the combination of dry-jet-wet spinning, based on an in-house designed spinneret which accommodates three layers spinning solution, and hot isostatic pressing (HIP), at 220 °C. The multilayered spinneret enables the spinnability of a high GnPs loaded spinning dope, highly elastic, with great mechanical strength, elongation, and flexibility. The HIP process resulted in superior electrical properties as well as a newly emerged fourth hollow layer. Together, such a scalable fabrication method promotes a piezoresistive sensor that is sensitive to uniaxial strain and radial air pressure. The hollow fiber is characterized based on surface morphologies, layer formation, percolation threshold, piezoresistive gauge factor, mechanical stability and reversibility, and air-pressure sensitivity and reversibility. Such facile fabrication methods and unique structures have combined the mechanically robust outer shell with a highly conductive middle sensing layer for a new sensor with great potentials in wearable, robotics, biomedical, and other areas.

Class Consciousness and Socio-Economical Conflict: A Cogitation of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House”

“Class Consciousness and Socio-Economical Conflict: A Cognition of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House”” is an attempt to explore class consciousness and socio-economical conflict and prejudice insinuated in Mansfield’s short story, “The Doll’s Hose”. Mansfield lived between 14th October 1888 and 9th January 1923 in New Zealand and is New Zealand’s famous writer. The present research paper investigates the notion of class conflict and class prejudice seen Mansfield’s society through the socio-economic status of the Kelveys and Burnells. The Kelveys are portrayed as underprivileged and the Burnells are depicted as socially and economically affluent. The social hierarchal structure dealt in the story renders a space to trace the conflicts existing between the classes. The present paper traces the distinct lines that is draw between these two classes. It analyses what made the young minds to prioritize class discrimination and what is the cause behind it. Besides, it ventures to discover the position of grownups in class discrimination and class conflict and their contribution to such social evils.

Sharing tacit knowledge in public sector :

Tacit knowledge – experiences, skills, judgment and even intuition of the employees – as organizational resource, has recently gained significant attention from the organizational researchers. While such knowledge is difficult to identify, exhibit and describe, it can often determine the manner in which public administrators implement public policies. Taking a qualitative strategy of enquiry, this paper aims at identifying the pattern of tacit knowledge sharing among the local government officials in Bangladesh. The key findings suggest that majority of the local government officials are aware of the significance of tacit knowledge. Trust, both cognition-based trust and affect-based trust, determine their knowledge sharing behaviour. The ‘senior-junior’ relationship within the hierarchal structure is perceived to be the key channel of tacit knowledge transfer. In the context of inadequate formal sharing channels, officials perceived trainings to be the key formal mechanism of tacit knowledge sharing within public sector organizations in Bangladesh.

Implementation of Block Chain Technology and Internet of Things: An Introduction

Internet of things or internet of everywhere is considered as the modern weapon used to control monitor or access anything anywhere at any time. Internets of things works on the principle of receive, analyse, monitor and respond to and from things connected to it. Anything which is connected to the internet that can receive and send information is considered as Internet of things (IoT). Internet keeps a record of Information which is received from different sources and amount of information being transferred to the network. IoT works follows the distributed computing concept in which information is been shared and stored at different places for a backup. Block chain technology is the concept of collection and storing of information called blocks and are hierarchal structure which generates a hash code of its type to secure the transaction and also to store the information in a secure way. Block chain follows the mechanism of linking the document one to second and list to other records to create chain of network called block chain. The use of block chain technology in Internet of Things generates a new form of model which comprises of connection of networks which monitors the networks chain of transaction so that the security and authenticity of the network can be maintained. The network cannot be manipulated and data cannot be changed. If the data is changed or is been manipulated or the sequence of data is changed it reflects the whole network resulting in mismatch of the data and data can easily been identified of change. Block chain works with the principle of hash code, every transaction that happened will generate a hash code and based on the previous transactions code the nest transaction takes place. This creates a chain in custody of transaction in block chain. So it helps in making a track of information and transaction in internet of things, as the data is shared and is distributes the data can be stored in the form of block chain and no venerability can happen to the data in terms of breaching.

Sustainable Development Performance for Small and Medium Enterprises Using a Fuzzy Synthetic Method-DEMATEL

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are forced to adhere to sustainable development (SD) regulations and standards. However, SMEs encounter difficulty in assessing their performance due to the lack of an efficient and effective approach to deal with the uncertainties in hierarchical relationships and interrelationships. Moreover, interrelations exist among the proposed attributes that increase the difficulty of the assessment. To overcome these issues, exploratory factor analysis is used to screen out the less important attributes and build a hierarchal structure. The fuzzy synthetic method addresses the hierarchical structure and decision-making, and a trial evaluation laboratory assesses the interrelationships among the attributes by providing a visual interrelationship map. The results indicate that strategic and financial management are the major problems for SMEs. SD relies on enhancing sustainable supply chain performance, sustainable human resources and environmental management. This study contributes by not only filling the information gap for SD for SMEs but also providing a guideline for improvement. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Introducing ‘The bdverse’: a family of R packages for biodiversity data

The bdverse is a collection of packages that form a general framework for facilitating biodiversity science in R. We build it to serve as a sustainable and agile infrastructure that enhances the value of biodiversity data by allowing users to conveniently employ R, for data exploration, quality assessment, data cleaning, and standardization. The bdverse supports users with and without programming capabilities. It includes six unique packages in a hierarchal structure — representing different functionality levels (Fig. 1). Major features of three core packages will be highlighted and demonstrated: (i) bdDwC provides an interactive Shiny app and a set of functions for standardizing field names in compliance with Darwin Core (DwC) format; (ii) bdchecks is an infrastructure for performing, filtering and managing various biodiversity data checks; (iii) bdclean is a user-friendly data cleaning Shiny app for the inexperienced R user. It provides features to manage complete workflow for biodiversity data cleaning, including data upload; user input - in order to adjust cleaning procedures; data cleaning; and finally, generation of various reports and versions of the data. We are now working on submitting the bdverse packages to rOpenSci software review, and as soon as the packages meet core requirements, we will officially release the bdverse. The bdverse project won the 2nd prize in the 2018 Ebbe Nielsen Challenge.

Scientific Analogies and Hierarchical Thinking

What do insects have to do with human cognition? A look at how we think about societies of insects can serve to place analogies and human cognition within a social, cultural, and political context. Scientific analogies and their popularization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed support for ideas of hierarchical social organization in Western culture. As ideas of human social organization changed, so did the analogies of insect societies change to reflect self-organizing rather than hierarchal structure. These scientific analogies from the West are not shared by all other cultures. Instead, social insects may feature in nonhierarchical analogies or may not be viewed as significant to use in analogies at all. The case of social insect analogies provides unique evidence on the cultural and political shaping of cognitive patterns. Examining this case through cognitive sociology explains the dynamic and contextual qualities of analogical reasoning.

STRUCTURAL SYNTHESIS OF SELF-ALIGNING GEARS OF INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS WITH PARALLEL KINEMATICS

The aim of this work is an analysis of excess ties in handler closed kinematics and development of the structural synthesis procedure for self-aligning gears of industrial robots with parallel kinematics. The design of a structure flowchart of a gear without excess ties in the procedure offered is carried out by means of prototype mechanism updating and includes the following stages: the reveal and analysis of excess ties, excess ties elimination, correctness checkup of excess ties elimination. For the excess ties analysis and solution check-up a structural analysis is carried out. At that a handler is presented as a hierarchal structure described by some structural models. The ways for excess ties elimination: the substitution of one kinematic pair for another one with a higher number of mobility; the introduction of an additional link and one kinematic pair into a kinematics; the elimination from the kinematics an extra link with two kinematic pairs; the substitution in the kinematics a flat hinge parallelogram for a forward pair. There are developed some versions of structural diagrams of self-aligning handlers on the basis of an ortho- glide gear. The procedure offered allows defining the number and a type of excess ties in the kinematics of a gear, eliminating excess ties and forming structural diagrams of self-aligning gears with the conservation of basic operating properties on the alternative basis. The application of structural diagrams of handlers without contour excess ties is one of the ways to increase reliability and manufacturability of designs of industrial robots with parallel kinematics.

Task Difficulty Makes ‘No’ Response Different From ‘Yes’ Response in Detection of Fragmented Object Contours

Two-alternative forced choice tasks are often used in object detection, which regards detecting an object as a ‘yes’ response and detecting no object as a ‘no’ response. Previous studies have suggested that the processing of yes/no responses arises from identical or similar processing. In this study, we investigated the difference of processing between detecting an object (‘yes’ response) and not detecting any object (‘no’ response) by controlling the task difficulty in terms of fragment length and stimulus duration. The results indicated that a ‘yes’ response depends on accurate and stable decisions through grouping processing, and a ‘no’ response might involve two distinct processing, including accurate decisions and intuitive decisions. Accurate decisions of ‘no’ may arise after the rejection of a ‘yes’ response with grouping processing, which is an accurate but slow response in an easy task. Intuitive decisions of ‘no’ arise as the result of breaking down the decision process when the received information was insufficient for grouping processing in a difficult task. Therefore, intuitive decisions of ‘no’ arise quickly but are inaccurate. The different processes associated with yes/no responses were discussed in terms of the hierarchal structure of object recognition, especially with respect to receiving information and grouping.

Panoptic Pranksters: Power, Space and Visibility in the Information Panopticon in Scare Campaign

Foucault, in his seminal work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) discusses Bentham’s architectural design of the Panopticon as a means to exercise power and enforce discipline. He extends this metaphor to speak of Panopticism as a social phenomenon used to discipline work forces through covert strategies. Shoshana Zuboff, in In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) contextualizes Foucault’s discussion in an age where the work culture uses Information Systems extensively for surveillance. She calls such a structure an “Information Panopticon”. This paper aims to bring out the various nuances of the Information Panopticon in Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ film Scare Campaign (2016) and how it facilitates the exercise of power. The paper firstly looks at Zuboff’s Information Panopticon in light of Foucault’s discussion before evaluating the Information Panopticon created in the film and its hierarchal structure. Next it endeavours to demonstrate how the Information Panopticon in the film is not solely reliant on literal visibility. It wraps up with a discussion on the relation between spatiality, visibility and power in the film’s Information Panopticon.