Starting, Travelling & Colliding Vortices: DBD Plasma in Quiescent Air

Development and interaction of starting vortices initiated by Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma actuators in quiescent air are illustrated in the attached fluid dynamics videos. These include a series of smoke flow visualisations, showing the starting vortices moving parallel or normal to the wall at several different actuator configurations.Comment: 1 page, hyperlinked to two fluid mechanics videos MPEG fomat

Improving femtosecond laser pulse delivery through a hollow core photonic crystal fiber for temporally focused two-photon endomicroscopy

In this paper, we present a strategy to improve delivery of femtosecond laser pulses from a regenerative amplifier through a hollow core photonic crystal fiber for temporally focused wide-field two-photon endomicroscopy. For endomicroscope application, wide-field two-photon excitation has the advantage of requiring no scanning in the distal end. However, wide-field two-photon excitation requires peak power that is 10[superscript 4]–10[superscript 5] times higher than the point scanning approach corresponding to femtosecond pulses with energy on the order of 1–10 μJ at the specimen plane. The transmission of these high energy pulses through a single mode fiber into the microendoscope is a significant challenge. Two approaches were pursued to partially overcome this limitation. First, a single high energy pulse is split into a train of pulses with energy below the fiber damage threshold better utilizing the available laser energy. Second, stretching the pulse width in time by introducing negative dispersion was shown to have the dual benefit of reducing fiber damage probability and compensating for the positive group velocity dispersion induced by the fiber. With these strategy applied, 11 fold increase in the two photon excitation signal has been demonstrated.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (9P41EB015871-26A1)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (5R01EY017656-02)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (5R01 NS051320)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (4R44EB012415-02)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CBET-0939511)Singapore-MIT AllianceSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and TechnologySkolkovo Institute of Science and TechnologyHamamatsu CorporationDavid H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Bridge Project Initiativ

BUTERLI D3.14 Report

Final actuator hardware producing a spanwise row of wall-normal jet

Direct Virtual Memory Access from FPGA for High-Productivity Heterogeneous Computing

Heterogeneous computing utilizing both CPU and FPGA requires access to data in the main memory from both devices. While a typical system relies on software executing on the CPU to orchestrate all data movements between the FPGA and the main memory, our demo presents a complementary FPGA-centric approach that allows gateware to directly access the virtual memory space as part of the executing process without involving the CPU. A caching address translation buffer was implemented alongside the user FPGA gateware to provide runtime mapping between virtual and physical memory addresses. The system was implemented on a commercial off-the-shelf FPGA add-on card to demonstrate the viability of such approach in low-cost systems. Experiment demonstrated reasonable performance improvement when compared to a typical software-centric implementation; while the number of context switches between FPGA and CPU in both kernel and user mode was significantly reduced, freeing the CPU for other concurrent user tasks. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

China

Economic development processes in post-1949 China can be divided into two periods. In the first, 1950-70, the economy was extensively and intensively controlled by the state with a priority for developing heavy industries. In the second, since the 80s and known as the \u27reform period,\u27 the Chinese economy has increasingly been integrated with the world economy and relying on light (rural) industries as the prime motor of economic growth. Yet, in both these periods, Chinese policymakers shared the same \u27developmental\u27 philosophy in which social costs, that is the reproduction costs of human labour and nature, are largely ignored. The following is a critical sketch of government policies and their impact on the domestic population in these two periods

Family violence accounts for 25% of homicides in Hong Kong

Letters to the editorpublished_or_final_versio