Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A substance or device, such as a piezoelectric crystal, microphone, or photoelectric cell, that converts input energy of one form into output energy of another.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
device thatconverts energy from oneform into another. - noun computing theory A
state machine that generatesoutput based on a giveninput .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an electrical device that converts one form of energy into another
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The human ear cannot hear these echoes, so a special wand called a transducer is used.
Ultrasound 2010
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The technician skidded a rodlike device, called a transducer, across my abdomen and pictures of my uterus were flashed onto the monitor.
Mothering Twins LINDA ALBI 1993
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The major breakthrough was Martin Rodbell's realization that there was a switch between these two steps, and that this switch, which he called the transducer, could be turned on by a high-energy compound, guanosine triphosphate.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1994 - Presentation Speech 1997
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Then he or she will move a device called a transducer over your abdomen, and images of your liver will be transmitted via the transducer to a video screen.
DR. SANJIV CHOPRA’S LIVER BOOK Sanjiv Chopra 2001
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The technician skidded a rodlike device, called a transducer, across my abdomen and pictures of my uterus were flashed onto the monitor.
Mothering Twins LINDA ALBI 1993
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The technician skidded a rodlike device, called a transducer, across my abdomen and pictures of my uterus were flashed onto the monitor.
Mothering Twins LINDA ALBI 1993
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The petty officer paid close attention to the cable and halted the winch when the transducer was a hundred feet down.
Red Storm Rising Clancy, Tom, 1947- 1986
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An object called a transducer is carried along the body, usually around the stomach when it comes to pregnancy.
Recently Uploaded Slideshows guestb18950 2010
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Conventional ultrasonic testing uses the principle of sending a pulsed beam of high ultrasound from a handheld transducer, which is placed upon the surface of the weld being tested.
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Pelvic floor physiotherapist Anne Patterson, said the transducer was a piece of equipment that would enable she and her colleagues to do their job better.
The Border Mail 2009
awils1 commented on the word transducer
Quoted from Notebooks by Cosma Shalezi (2004).
The basic idea of a transducer is that it turns one sort of quantity, its inputs, into another, its outputs. The general case to consider is one where both inputs and outputs are time-series, and the current output is a function not just of the current input but of the whole history of previous inputs (when the output is a ‘functional’ of the input series). One way of representing this is to say that the transducer itself has internal or hidden states. The output is a function of the state of the transducer, and that hidden state is in turn a function of the input history. We don’t have to do things this way, but it can potentially give us a better handle on the structure of the transduction process, and especially on the way the transducer stores and processes information—what (to anthropomorphize a little) it cares about in the input and remembers about the past.
Finite-state transducers are a computer science idea; they also call them ‘sequential machines’, though I don’t see why that name wouldn’t also apply to many other things they study. In this case both the input and the output series consist of sequences of symbols from (possibly distinct) finite alphabets. Moreover there are only a finite number of internal states. The two main formalisms (which can be shown to be equivalent) differ only on whether the next output is a function of the current state alone, or is a function of the current state and the next input. While you can describe a huge chunk of electronic technology using this formalism, CS textbooks are curiously reluctant to give it much attention.
December 14, 2008