It's about bits of machines & stuff:why girls don't 'do' engineering

This paper draws upon part of the findings of an ethnographic study in which two seventeen year old girls were employed to interview their peer about engineering as a study and career choice. It argues that whilst girls do view engineering as being generally masculine in nature, other factors such as a lack of female role models and an emphasis on physics and maths act as barriers to young women entering the discipline. The paper concludes by noting that engineering has much to offer young women, the problem is, they simply don't know this is the case! Copyright © 2013 Jane Andrews & Robin Clark.

It’s about bits of machines & stuff:why girls don’t ‘do’ engineering

This paper draws upon part of the findings of an ethnographic study in which two seventeen year old girls were employed to interview their peer about engineering as a study and career choice. It argues that whilst girls do view engineering as being generally masculine in nature, other factors such as a lack of female role models and an emphasis on physics and maths act as barriers to young women entering the discipline. The paper concludes by noting that engineering has much to offer young women, the problem is, they simply don’t know this is the case!

Support vector machines to detect physiological patterns for EEG and EMG-based human-computer interaction:a review

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are widely used classifiers for detecting physiological patterns in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Their success is due to their versatility, robustness and large availability of free dedicated toolboxes. Frequently in the literature, insufficient details about the SVM implementation and/or parameters selection are reported, making it impossible to reproduce study analysis and results. In order to perform an optimized classification and report a proper description of the results, it is necessary to have a comprehensive critical overview of the application of SVM. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the usage of SVM in the determination of brain and muscle patterns for HCI, by focusing on electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) techniques. In particular, an overview of the basic principles of SVM theory is outlined, together with a description of several relevant literature implementations. Furthermore, details concerning reviewed papers are listed in tables, and statistics of SVM use in the literature are presented. Suitability of SVM for HCI is discussed and critical comparisons with other classifiers are reported.

Non-invasive winding fault detection for induction machines based on stray flux magnetic sensors

Non-intrusive monitoring of health state of induction machines within industrial process and harsh environments poses a technical challenge. In the field, winding failures are a major fault accounting for over 45% of total machine failures. In the literature, many condition monitoring techniques based on different failure mechanisms and fault indicators have been developed where the machine current signature analysis (MCSA) is a very popular and effective method at this stage. However, it is extremely difficult to distinguish different types of failures and hard to obtain local information if a non-intrusive method is adopted. Typically, some sensors need to be installed inside the machines for collecting key information, which leads to disruption to the machine operation and additional costs. This paper presents a new non-invasive monitoring method based on GMRs to measure stray flux leaked from the machines. It is focused on the influence of potential winding failures on the stray magnetic flux in induction machines. Finite element analysis and experimental tests on a 1.5-kW machine are presented to validate the proposed method. With time-frequency spectrogram analysis, it is proven to be effective to detect several winding faults by referencing stray flux information. The novelty lies in the implement of GMR sensing and analysis of machine faults.