Polyurethane–urea anionomer dispersions. I

Polyurethane–urea anionomer dispersions with different stoichiometric DMPA/polyol and NCO/OH ratios were preapred from poly(oxypropylene)glycol, toluene diisocyanate (TDI), dimethylolpropionic acid (DMPA), and ethylenediamine (EDA). The dispersion-cast films were prepared and characterized by mechanical properties, dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Increasing the hard-segment content by either increasing the DMPA/polyol or the NCO/OH ratios affects the glass transition temperature (T_g) of the soft segments. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Synthesis and Polymerization of Cationic bis(cyclopentadienyliron)arene Complexes Containing Arylazo Dyes

The synthesis of the title complexes was achieved via the reaction of -p-dichlorobenzene- -cyclopentadienyliron cations with 4,4′-bis(4-hydroxyphenyl)valeric acid to produce the diiron complexes which were then reacted with a number of arylazo dyes to give cationic bis(cyclopentadienyliron)arene complexes containing the arylazo dyes. These iron-containing monomers were subsequently polymerized via nucleophilic aromatic substitution using 1,8-octanedithiol, 4,4′-thiobisbenzenethiol, or bisphenol A to produce the desired coloured cationic organoiron polymers. The weight – average molecular weights were estimated to range from 11,800 to 31,600. UV–vis studies conducted in dimethylformamide (DMF) showed that the metallated polymers exhibited of 412–491 nm. Addition of HCl to the polymer solution caused a bathochromic shift into the range of 515–530 nm. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) revealed that the iron moieties were cleaved between 205 and 248 °C while the polyether/thioether backbone degraded between 380 and 613 °C. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) showed that the polymers exhibited glass transition temperatures (Tg) ranging from 106 to 184°C.This paper is dedicated to Professor Richard J. Puddephatt in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of metal-containing polymers.     

TBC experience in land- based gas turbines

This paper summarizes prior and on-going machine evaluations of thermal barrier coatings (TBC) for power generation, that is large industrial gas turbine applications. Rainbow testing of TBCs on turbine nozzles, shrouds, and buckets are described along with a test of combustor liners. General Electric Power Generation has conducted more than IS machine tests on TBC turbine nozzles with various coatings. TBC performance has been quite good, and additional testing, including TBCs on shrouds and buckets, is continuing. Included is a brief comparison of TBC requirements for power generation and aircraft turbines.     

Understanding student participation in undergraduate course communities: A case study

Participation is the cornerstone of any community. Promoting, understanding and properly managing it allows not only keeping the community sustainable, but also providing personalized services to its members and managers. This article presents a case study in which student participation in a course community was motivated using two different extrinsic mechanisms, and mediated by a software platform. The results were compared with a baseline community of the same course, in which participation was not motivated by external means. The analysis of these results indicates that managing a partially virtual course community requires the introduction of monitoring services, community managers and extrinsic mechanisms to motivate participation. These findings allow community managers to improve their capability for promoting participation and keeping the community sustainable. The findings also raise several implications that should be considered in the design of software supporting this kind of community, when managing the participation of its members.     

Detecting off-topic pages within TimeMaps in Web archives

Web archives have become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Archival integrity and accuracy is a precondition for future cultural research. Currently, there are no quantitative or content-based tools that allow archivists to judge the quality of the Web archive captures. In this paper, we address the problems of detecting when a particular page in a Web archive collection has gone off-topic relative to its first archived copy. We do not delete off-topic pages (they remain part of the collection), but they are flagged as off-topic so they can be excluded for consideration for downstream services, such as collection summarization and thumbnail generation. We propose different methods (cosine similarity, Jaccard similarity, intersection of the 20 most frequent terms, Web-based kernel function, and the change in size using the number of words and content length) to detect when a page has gone off-topic. Those predicted off-topic pages will be presented to the collection’s curator for possible elimination from the collection or cessation of crawling. We created a gold standard data set from three Archive-It collections to evaluate the proposed methods at different thresholds. We found that combining cosine similarity at threshold 0.10 and change in size using word count at threshold ?0.85 performs the best with accuracy = 0.987, \(F_{1}\) score = 0.906, and AUC \(=\) 0.968. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method on several Archive-It collections. The average precision of detecting off-topic pages in the collections is 0.89.     

Mass spectrometric immunoassay and MRM as targeted MS-based quantitative approaches in biomarker development: Potential applications to cardiovascular disease and diabetes

Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD)—the leading cause of death in the United States. Yet not all subjects with T2DM are at equal risk for CVD complications; the challenge lies in identifying those at greatest risk. Therapies directed toward treating conventional risk factors have failed to significantly reduce this residual risk in T2DM patients. Thus newer targets and markers are needed for the development and testing of novel therapies. Herein we review two complementary MS-based approaches—mass spectrometric immunoassay (MSIA) and MS/MS as MRM—for the analysis of plasma proteins and PTMs of relevance to T2DM and CVD. Together, these complementary approaches allow for high-throughput monitoring of many PTMs and the absolute quantification of proteins near the low picomolar range. In this review article, we discuss the clinical relevance of the high density lipoprotein (HDL) proteome and Apolipoprotein A-I PTMs to T2DM and CVD as well as provide illustrative MSIA and MRM data on HDL proteins from T2DM patients to provide examples of how these MS approaches can be applied to gain new insight regarding cardiovascular risk factors. Also discussed are the reproducibility, interpretation, and limitations of each technique with an emphasis on their capacities to facilitate the translation of new biomarkers into clinical practice.     

Regional aboveground forest biomass using airborne and spaceborne LiDAR in Québec

Aboveground dry biomass was estimated for the 1.3 M km² forested area south of the treeline in the eastern Canadian province of Québec by combining data from an airborne and spaceborne LiDAR, a Landsat ETM+ land cover map, a Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) digital elevation model, ground inventory plots, and vegetation zone maps. Plot-level biomass was calculated using allometric relationships between tree attributes and biomass. A small footprint portable laser profiler then flew over these inventory plots to develop a generic airborne LiDAR-based biomass equation (R² = 0.65, n = 207). The same airborne LiDAR system flew along four portions of orbits of the ICESat Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS). A square-root transformed equation was developed to predict airborne profiling LiDAR estimates of aboveground dry biomass from GLAS waveform parameters combined with an SRTM slope index (R² = 0.59, n = 1325).Using the 104,044 quality-filtered GLAS pulses obtained during autumn 2003 from 97 orbits over the study area, we then predicted aboveground dry biomass for the main vegetation areas of Québec as well as for the entire Province south of the treeline. Including cover type covariances both within and between GLAS orbits increased standard errors of the estimates by two to five times at the vegetation zone level and as much as threefold at the provincial level. Aboveground biomass for the whole study area averaged 39.0 ± 2.2 (standard error) Mg ha^? 1 and totalled 4.9 ± 0.3 Pg. Biomass distributions were 12.6% northern hardwoods, 12.6% northern mixedwood, 38.4% commercial boreal, 13% non-commercial boreal, 14.2% taiga, and 9.2% treed tundra. Non-commercial forests represented 36% of the estimated aboveground biomass, thus highlighting the importance of remote northern forests to C sequestration. This study has shown that space-based forest inventories of northern forests could be an efficient way of estimating the amount, distribution, and uncertainty of aboveground biomass and carbon stocks at large spatial scales.     

On the complexity of bandwidth allocation in radio networks

We define and study an optimization problem that is motivated by bandwidth allocation in radio networks. Because radio transmissions are subject to interference constraints in radio networks, physical space is a common resource that the nodes have to share in such a way, that concurrent transmissions do not interfere. The bandwidth allocation problem we study under these constraints is the following. Given bandwidth (traffic) demands between the nodes of the network, the objective is to schedule the radio transmissions in such a way that the traffic demands are satisfied. The problem is similar to a multicommodity flow problem, where the capacity constraints are replaced by the more complex notion of non-interfering transmissions. We provide a formal specification of the problem that we call round weighting  . By modeling non-interfering radio transmissions as independent sets, we relate the complexity of round weighting to the complexity of various independent set problems (e.g. maximum weight independent set, vertex coloring, fractional coloring). From this relation, we deduce that in general, round weighting is hard to approximate within n^1−ε$n^{1-\epsilon }$ (n$n$ being the size of the radio network). We also provide polynomial (exact or approximation) algorithms e.g. in the following two cases: (a) when the interference constraints are specific (for instance for a network whose vertices belong to the Euclidean space), or (b) when the traffic demands are directed towards a unique node in the network (also called gathering, analogous to single commodity flow).     

Scale cross-ambiguity and target resolution

We derive the correct formulation of the Doppler problem in which the received signal is scaled in time by a scale factor dependent on the relative radial velocity of the transmitter and the receiver, normalized by the propagation speed in the transmission medium. For sine waves, the conventional Doppler model in which the received signal is translated in frequency is equivalent to the scale model. However, for signals with non zero bandwidth, the difference can be quite significant, as we demonstrate. We further demonstrate simple methods, based on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and phase differentiation of the scale CAF, by which delay and scale may be accurately estimated.     

A Six-Axis MEMS Force–Torque Sensor With Micro-Newton and Nano-Newtonmeter Resolution

This paper describes the design of a six-axis microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) force-torque sensor. A movable body is suspended by flexures that allow deflections and rotations along the x-, y-, and z-axes. The orientation of this movable body is sensed by seven capacitors. Transverse sensing is used for all capacitors, resulting in a high sensitivity. A batch fabrication process is described as capable of fabricating these multiaxis sensors with a high yield. The force sensor is experimentally investigated, and a multiaxis calibration method is described. Measurements show that the resolution is on the order of a micro-Newton and nano-Newtonmeter. This is the first six-axis MEMS force sensor that has been successfully developed.