From Superman, created in 1938, to the transmedia DC and Marvel universes of today, superheroes have always been sexy. And their sexiness has always been controversial, inspiring censorship and moral ...panic. Yet though it has inspired jokes and innuendos, accusations of moral depravity, and sporadic academic discourse, the topic of superhero sexuality is like superhero sexuality itself—seemingly obvious yet conspicuously absent. Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero is the first scholarly book specifically devoted to unpacking the superhero genre’s complicated relationship with sexuality.Exploring sexual themes and imagery within mainstream comic books, television shows, and films as well as independent and explicitly pornographic productions catering to various orientations and kinks, Supersex offers a fresh—and lascivious—perspective on the superhero genre’s historical and contemporary popularity. Across fourteen essays touching on Superman, Batman, the X-Men, and many others, Anna F. Peppard and her contributors present superhero sexuality as both dangerously exciting and excitingly dangerous, encapsulating the superhero genre’s worst impulses and its most productively rebellious ones. Supersex argues that sex is at the heart of our fascination with superheroes, even—and sometimes especially—when the capes and tights stay on.
•A dual electrochemical channel-based biosensor has been developed.•The dual channel Sensor can simultaneously measure the glucose and ketone with only one blood drop.•The dual channel sensor has the ...acceptable accuracy as compared to the clinical biochemical analyzer.•It paved the way for clinical point of care identification of diabetic ketoacidosis.
The traditional design of enzymatic test strip has single electrochemicalreaction, which can only measure one single biochemical parameter. We present one disposable electrochemical test strip with dual enzymatic reaction channel which is capable of simultaneously measuring glucose and blood ketone by one fingertip whole blood drop for clinical identification of diabetic ketosis (DK) and diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). The blood glucose was measured in the 1st channel while blood ketone was measured in the 2th channel. The proposed test strip fulfils the rigid demand for diabetic patients with DK/DKA without double pricking the finger to determine the blood glucose and blood ketone, respectively. The results of clinical identification of diabetic ketoacidosis by the proposed test strip was verified by the clinical test with good consistency. The proposed test strip provides a cost effective and fast solution for clinical point of care identification of diabetic ketoacidosis.
The strip shape inheritance model is widely applied to improve the strip shape quality in tandem cold rolling (TCR). However, the inheritance mechanism is still currently unclear. To bridge this gap, ...this paper presents a new numerical method for calculating the strip crown inheritance factor. In addition, the effects of the entry strip crown on exit strip crown and flatness were quantitatively analysed at each stand in the TCR using a novel three-dimensional (3D) multi-stand elastic–plastic finite element (FE) model. The results show that the strip crown inheritance factor increases slowly from S1 (stand 1) to S3 (stand 3), while rising sharply from S3 to S5 (stand 5), reaching a peak value of 0.495 μm/μm at S5. This trend coincides with that of strip plastic rigidity, which verifies that the strip crown inheritance factor is dependent on the strip plastic rigidity. Furthermore, the variation of strip crown and flatness under different entry strip crowns from S1 to S5 is jointly influenced by the pass reduction and strip plastic rigidity. Moreover, the strip crown inheritance factor increases with the deformation resistance of the strip at both S1 and S5. These findings not only offer a fresh perspective to understand the mechanism of strip crown inheritance, but also provide an important basis for optimising the strip shape control in the TCR process.
Jad traces the transformation of the Palestinian women’s movement from the 1930s to the post-Oslo period and through the Second Intifada to examine the often-fraught relationship between women and ...nationalism in Palestine. Offering one of the first intensive studies of Islamist women’s activism, Jad also explores the impact of emerging feminist NGOs in depoliticizing the secular Palestinian women’s movement. Studying these two developments together illuminates the nature of women’s engagement in the Palestinian space, challenging myths of gender roles’ "immutability" under Islamand the supposed "modernizing" benefits of Western-style activism.
Feeding a cold steel strip into continuous casting (CC) mold is an effective method to improve the quality of large round bloom. However, it is difficult to assess the correlation between the bloom ...quality and the initial temperature of the strip. Therefore, a three‐phase mixed columnar–equiaxed solidification model is developed to evaluate the effect of feeding strip temperature on macrosegregation and solidification structure in a large vertical CC round bloom. The results show that feeding the steel strip induces “crystal rain” in the liquid core of the bloom and increases the volume fraction of the equiaxed phase. After feeding a strip, the flow direction of molten steel is changed, and the flow velocity is increased in the liquid core of the bloom. Furthermore, with initial temperature of the strip decreases, the production efficiency is improved. Compared to the four conditions investigated, the carbon distribution in the bloom is the most uniform, the negative segregation at the centerline of the bloom is the weakest with the value of −35.50%, and the extreme value difference of the macrosegregation index at 20 m below the meniscus is the smallest with the value of 38.35% under the condition of
T
initial
= 500 K.
To comprehensively understand the effect of oscillation on cooling capacity of steel strip, a mathematical model is proposed to investigate the distribution of temperature fields in continuous cast ...slabs, taking into account the oscillatory feeding process. Strip oscillation results in a periodic variation of nearby molten steel flow. It intensifies the turbulence of surrounding molten steel and enhances the interfacial heat transfer. During the feeding process, the morphology of strip undergoes three stages: upheaval, fluctuation, and disappearance. As the strip oscillation frequency increases, the maximum cross‐sectional area of the strip gradually decreases during the upheaval stage, the fluctuation stage gradually disappears, and the strip disappearance speed gradually increases during the disappearance stage. These observations suggest that an increase in the oscillation frequency accelerates the melting of the strip, which is caused by the enhanced heat transfer between the strip and molten steel. This results in a gradual growth of strip's cooling capacity and a decrement in the liquid fraction of molten steel surrounding the strip. In addition, feeding strip is advantageous in preventing the jet from impinging onto narrow surfaces of slab. The blocking effect initially increases and then remains almost unchanged as the strip oscillation frequency increases.
The cooling capacity of strip gradually increases with an increment in the oscillation frequency. As feeding strip oscillation frequency increases, the area of the low‐liquid‐fraction region gradually increases, which is beneficial in promoting central nucleation and grain growth during the actual production process.
In this paper, the effect of strip spacing on the aerodynamic performance of a high-speed pantograph with a double-strip is numerically studied using a shear stress transport turbulence model. Seven ...different strip spacings varied from 100 to 700 mm are considered. The errors in pantograph resistance between numerical simulation and wind tunnel test are within 5% in both knuckle-downstream and knuckle-upstream operating conditions. The drag and lift forces of the strip increase with the strip spacing when the train's running speed is 350 km/h. By considering the two strips individually, it is interesting to find that the lift force on the first strip tends to be stable as the spacing reaches up to 600 mm in both operating conditions, whereas the lift force on the second strip increases continuously with the spacing in the whole range of 100-700 mm. Furthermore, the aerodynamic coefficient of the strip is a nearly constant value at different running speeds, which increases with the strip spacing, suggesting that the relationship between the aerodynamic forces and the spacing of strips obtained in the current study can be extended to any speed level in the range of 200-350 km/h.
•The defect detection samples of steel strip are complex and changeable.•Anchor-Free is used to detect targets with large scale difference.•The Dense structure provides a significant improvement in ...high resolution data.
During steel strip production, mechanical forces and environmental factors cause surface defects of the steel strip. Therefore, detection of such defects is key to the production of high quality products. Moreover, surface defects of the steel strip cause great economic losses to the high-tech industry. So far, few studies have explored methods of identifying the defects, and most of the currently available algorithms are not sufficiently effective. Therefore, we developed an end-to-end defect detection model based on YOLO-V3. Briefly, the anchor-free feature selection mechanism was utilized to select an ideal feature scale for model training, replace the anchor-based structure, and shorten the computing time. Next, specially designed dense convolution blocks were introduced into the model to extract rich feature information, which effectively improves feature reuse, feature propagation, and enhances the characterization ability of the network. The experimental results show that, compared with other comparison models, the improved model proposed in this study has higher performance. For instance, the proposed model yielded 71.3% mAP on the GC10-DET dataset, and 72.2% mAP on the NEU-DET dataset.
The industrial process monitoring and operating performance assessment techniques are of great significance to ensure the safety and efficiency of the production and to improve the comprehensive ...economic benefits for the modern enterprises. In this paper, a new key performance indicator (KPI) oriented nonlinear process monitoring and operating performance assessment method is proposed based on the improved Hessian locally linear embedding (HLLE), in view of the problems of strong nonlinearity, high dimension and information redundancy in actual industrial process data. Firstly, in order to characterise the similarities of samples in both temporal and spatial dimensions, a new measurement, based on Finite Markov theory, is defined to replace the Euclidean distance in traditional HLLE. Secondly, by mining the relationships between process variables and the key performance indicator, the KPI oriented feature extraction method is developed. On this basis, the monitoring statistics is constructed and the corresponding control limit is determined for the real-time fault detection. After that, a new operating performance assessment approach based on sliding window Kullback-Leibler divergence is put forward to facilitate maintenance or adjustments. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the hot strip mill process, and the results show the effectiveness.