Contemporary Golden-Like Lusters on Ceramics: Morphological, Chemical, and Structural Properties

This paper describes an investigation on contemporary luster layers produced by a Spanish craftsman who is working on reproducing the traditional Islamic recipes. Various analytical investigations (AFM, HR-SEM, PIXE, RBS, TEM, XPS, GIXRD) were carried out. The aim of this study is to establish the chemical nature and physical structure of the luster layer constituted by silver and copper particles of nanometric dimensions. This information is used to expand on a formation model of a luster layer.     

Stellungnahme zur Präimplantationsdiagnostik

Ethik in der Medizin -     

Perceptions of and satisfaction with retirement: A comparison of six European Union countries.

The main aim of this study was to assess perceptions of and satisfaction with retirement among 1,686 recently retired people from 6 European Union countries. The authors compared their responses to a set of questions taken from the Retirement Satisfaction Inventory (F. J. Floyd et al., 1992). The first significant result was that Belgian, British, Finnish, French, and Spanish retirees all expressed very similar assessments of life satisfaction, whereas Portuguese retirees expressed a lower level of satisfaction. The 2nd result was that the major determinants of overall satisfaction in the 6 countries were (a) health and resources and (b) anticipated satisfaction. Finally, the data revealed that cultural background only accounted for a limited amount of variance in overall satisfaction with retirement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resolvent Representation for Regular Differential Ideals

 We show that the generic zeros of a differential ideal [A]:H ^∞ _A defined by a differential chain A are birationally equivalent to the general zeros of a single regular differential polynomial. This provides a generalization of both the cyclic vector construction for system of linear differential equations and the rational univariate representation of algebraic zero dimensional radical ideals. In order to achieve generality, we prove new results on differential dimension and relative orders which are of independent interest. Received: June 13, 2001; revised version: May 2, 2002 Key words: Differential algebra, Differential primitive element, Cyclic vector, Computer algebra, Resolvent.     

On the power of traps and diversions in a document preparation language

This note illustrates the power of software interrupts (traps) and text diversions in document preparation languages by considering three difficult problems in typesetting: figure placement; setting text in arbitrary shapes; and balancing final columns in multi-column layout. The solution of each of these in the nroff document preparation system is discussed, and an Appendix gives the nroff macros which accomplish the tasks.     

Mechanically Proving Termination Using Polynomial Interpretations

For a long time, term orderings defined by polynomial interpretations were scarcely used in computer-aided termination proof of TRSs. But recently, the introduction of the dependency pairs approach achieved considerable progress w.r.t. automated termination proof, in particular by requiring from the underlying ordering much weaker properties than the classical approach. As a consequence, the noticeable power of a combination dependency pairs/polynomial orderings yielded a regain of interest for these interpretations. We describe criteria on polynomial interpretations for them to define weakly monotonic orderings. From these criteria, we obtain new techniques both for mechanically checking termination using a given polynomial interpretation and for finding such interpretations with full automation. With regard to automated search, we propose an original method for solving Diophantine constraints. We implemented these techniques into the CiME rewrite tool, and we provide some experimental results that show how useful polynomial orderings actually are in practice.