I agree --- gnuplot is great for quick plots (once you've got the syntax down), but the simple output is fairly spartan, from an aesthetic point of view.
To tweak the labels and make things pretty I find that I need to export plots to LaTeX via the PSLatex driver. My officemates (not LaTeX people) seem to get good results using XFig to doll up their gnuplot output, too.
As a female chemistry grad student, I am involved in some science/engineering/technology activities for girls and young women, such as the Expanding Your Horizons conferences for middle-school girls.
The intent is not to deprive boys of fun science activities, but rather: 1. To give the girls a "safe" place to explore SET ideas. When I say "safe" I mean free from the well-documented behavioral differences that result in teacher face-time being dominated by boys. 2. To counteract, if you like, the accumulation of signals that girls recieve from their peers and adults. Namely, science and math are for boys. When you first evinced interest in science &c., did the adults around you look happy or did they say "ew, science is awfully difficult." Your answer correlates very strongly with your gender. SET activities for girls both demonstrate female role models _and_ show the girls that they are not alone among their peers in liking science.
A good read, with lots of references to the sociology literature, is Virginia Valian's book _Why So Slow_. She discusses which observed sex differences are biological and which are social (and therefore potentially reparable). Near the end, she discusses some actual case studies.
I think many/. readers would be suprised at the discriminatory messages that Valian documents and I definitely can relate to.
Ceramics is likely just the closest familiar idea. The overwhelming majority of the good bulk thermoelectrics (and all of the nanostructured ones I'm aware of) are made of semiconductors. Not Si or GaAs, but more exotic ones like bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3), bismuth antimony (Bi-Sb, an alloy), &c. In general they come from the bottom right f the periodic table and are pretty toxic and expensive to make -- about equivalent to the CdTe in solar cells.
That said, there are already thermoelectric devices being used to reclaim waste heat in power plants. Also, the NASA Voyager space probes use thermoelectric devices coupled to a radioactive Pu source to generate their juice - mostly because thermoelectrics are pretty reliable devices.
More applications are in cooling -- using the opposite physical effect for localized cooling, especially for applications where vibration or noise are problematic. Laser diodes and some other IC devices use thermoelectrics for cooling (or at least temperature regulation). Larger applications, like household refrigeration, aren't practical (despite the environmental benefits) because the efficiency is ~10%, compared to 30% or so for your fridge and ~90% for the enormous air conditioners in office buildings.
Current research is largely driven by electronics folks -- wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those noisy, bulky fans in your computer?- and is focusing on, of course, nanotechnology as the answer for improving the thermoelectric figure of merit.
--Janell
Is it really obvious this is the subject of my (ongoing) chemistry PhD work?
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I agree --- gnuplot is great for quick plots (once you've got the syntax down), but the simple output is fairly spartan, from an aesthetic point of view.
To tweak the labels and make things pretty I find that I need to export plots to LaTeX via the PSLatex driver. My officemates (not LaTeX people) seem to get good results using XFig to doll up their gnuplot output, too.
As a female chemistry grad student, I am involved in some science/engineering/technology activities for girls and young women, such as the Expanding Your Horizons conferences for middle-school girls.
/. readers would be suprised at the discriminatory messages that Valian documents and I definitely can relate to.
The intent is not to deprive boys of fun science activities, but rather:
1. To give the girls a "safe" place to explore SET ideas. When I say "safe" I mean free from the well-documented behavioral differences that result in teacher face-time being dominated by boys.
2. To counteract, if you like, the accumulation of signals that girls recieve from their peers and adults. Namely, science and math are for boys. When you first evinced interest in science &c., did the adults around you look happy or did they say "ew, science is awfully difficult." Your answer correlates very strongly with your gender. SET activities for girls both demonstrate female role models _and_ show the girls that they are not alone among their peers in liking science.
A good read, with lots of references to the sociology literature, is Virginia Valian's book _Why So Slow_. She discusses which observed sex differences are biological and which are social (and therefore potentially reparable). Near the end, she discusses some actual case studies.
I think many
Ceramics is likely just the closest familiar idea. The overwhelming majority of the good bulk thermoelectrics (and all of the nanostructured ones I'm aware of) are made of semiconductors. Not Si or GaAs, but more exotic ones like bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3), bismuth antimony (Bi-Sb, an alloy), &c. In general they come from the bottom right f the periodic table and are pretty toxic and expensive to make -- about equivalent to the CdTe in solar cells.
That said, there are already thermoelectric devices being used to reclaim waste heat in power plants. Also, the NASA Voyager space probes use thermoelectric devices coupled to a radioactive Pu source to generate their juice - mostly because thermoelectrics are pretty reliable devices.
More applications are in cooling -- using the opposite physical effect for localized cooling, especially for applications where vibration or noise are problematic. Laser diodes and some other IC devices use thermoelectrics for cooling (or at least temperature regulation). Larger applications, like household refrigeration, aren't practical (despite the environmental benefits) because the efficiency is ~10%, compared to 30% or so for your fridge and ~90% for the enormous air conditioners in office buildings.
Current research is largely driven by electronics folks -- wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those noisy, bulky fans in your computer?- and is focusing on, of course, nanotechnology as the answer for improving the thermoelectric figure of merit.
--Janell
Is it really obvious this is the subject of my (ongoing) chemistry PhD work?