Perceived stress management skill mediates the relationship between optimism and positive mood following radical prostatectomy.

This study evaluated relations among optimism, perceived stress management skills (PSMS), and positive mood in 46 men who had surgical treatment for localized prostate cancer. The authors found that optimism, PSMS, and positive mood scores were positively correlated. Positive mood was unrelated to demographic and disease-related control variables. In a hierarchical regression model controlling for PSMS, the relationship between optimism and positive mood became nonsignificant, whereas PSMS remained a correlate of positive mood. Results suggest that the relationship between optimism and positive mood may be mediated by belief in being able to use stress management techniques effectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonuniformity of phase structure in immiscible polymer blends

This article is focused on the phase structure development in immiscible polymer blends during melt mixing. Nonuniformity of the phase structure, i.e., the coexistence of areas containing particles with markedly different size distribution, was detected in quenched and compression molded samples of a number of various blends prepared by long and intensive mixing in the chamber of a Plasticorder. The same effect was found also for polystyrene/polyamide blends prepared in a twin‐screw extruder. It was shown that neglecting nonuniformity of the phase structure can lead to considerable error in evaluation of the effect of system parameters on the blend morphology. The reasons for the effect were discussed and it was found that inhomogeneous flow field in mixers is a plausible explanation of the nonuniform phase structure. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2008. © 2008 Society of Plastics Engineers     

A Surprise Party (on Your Computer)?

Iv?n Arce of Core Security Technologies looks at the current state of malware and introduces the articles he selected for this special issue.     

Information-Based Evaluation Criterion for Classifier's Performance

In the past few years many systems for learning decision rules from examples were developed. As different systems allow different types of answers when classifying new instances, it is difficult to appropriately evaluate the systems' classification power in comparison with other classification systems or in comparison with human experts. Classification accuracy is usually used as a measure of classification performance. This measure is, however, known to have several defects. A fair evaluation criterion should exclude the influence of the class probabilities which may enable a completely uninformed classifier to trivially achieve high classification accuracy. In this paper a method for evaluating the information score of a classifier's answers is proposed. It excludes the influence of prior probabilities, deals with various types of imperfect or probabilistic answers and can be used also for comparing the performance in different domains.     

A review of the metallurgy of heat treatment of welded joints

This paper deals with the metallurgical changes which occur during heat treatment of welded joints. Stress relieving heat treatment in the temperature range below A₁, the normalizing heat treatment and the heat treatment in the intercritical range A₁–A₃, are all considered. The thermal regime of welding is described. The practice of intercover of the weldment before applying PWHT to ambient temperature is described. It is stressed that the aim of stress-relieving heat treatment is not only to relax internal stresses but also to improve the microstructure and impact properties of HAZ and weld metal, to improve dimensional stability and increase resistance against stress corrosion. Examples are given of the effect of annealing in the intercritical range A₁–A₃ on the improvement in toughness of electroslag welded joints. Changes in dislocation distribution and density, precipitation processes and grain sizes during PWHT are described.     

An Extended Quadratic Frobenius Primality Test with Average- and Worst-Case Error Estimate

We present an Extended Quadratic Frobenius Primality Test (EQFT), which is related to the Miller-Rabin test and to several other known probabilistic tests. EQFT takes time equivalent to about two or three Miller-Rabin tests, but has a much smaller error probability, namely 256/331776^t for t iterations of the test in the worst case. We also give bounds on the average-case behaviour of the test: consider the algorithm that repeatedly chooses random odd k bit numbers, subjects them to t iterations of our test and outputs the first one found that passes all tests. We obtain numeric upper bounds for the error probability of this algorithm as well as a general closed expression bounding the error. For instance, it is at most 2^-155 for k = 500, t = 2. Compared with earlier similar results for the Miller-Rabin test, the results indicate that our test in the average case has the effect of nine Miller-Rabin tests. We also give bounds for the error in case a prime is sought by incremental search from a random starting point.     

Production of phosphoric acid with low content of impurities

The present work is to study the possibility for controlled distribution of the impurities when they are decomposed by sulphuric acid to wet phosphoric acid and phosphogypsum, as well as generating technological conditions for production of clean wet phosphoric acid and its derivatives - phosphoric fertilizers, food phosphates and other phosphoric products.A coefficient of distribution D_A is introduced as a general criterion for elements dispersion. The study includes relationships between the weight ratio sulphuric acid/natural phosphate and D_A; the period of decomposition and D_A; the particle's size content of the natural phosphate and D_A. The obtained experimental data and relationships about the influence of the above discussed technological parameters on dispersion of more than 23 elements allow for control of that process in wet phosphoric acid and phosphogypsum by selecting specific technological conditions. Thus, depending on the requirements of acid's consumers and procedures for secondary processing of phosphogypsum to end-products, a selective decomposition of the natural phosphates to phosphoric acid and phosphogypsum can be carried out with content of the impurities in those products varying in narrow limits.     

A Survey on the Numerics and Computations for the Landau-Lifshitz Equation of Micromagnetism

The Landau-Lifshitz (LL)equation of micromagnetism governs rich variety of the evolution of magnetization patterns in ferromagnetic media. This is due to the complexity of physical quantities appearing in the LL equation. This complexity causes also an interesting mathematical properties of the LL equation: nonlocal character for some quantities,nonconvex side-constraints, strongly nonlinear terms. These effects influence also the numerical approximations. In this work, recent developments on the approximation of weak solutions, together with the overview of well-known methods for strong solutions,are addressed. Author is supported by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders FWO (Belgium).