Interacting with sexist men triggers social identity threat among female engineers.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 97(4) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2009-16971-002). The affiliation for William von Hippel is incorrect. The affiliation should have been University of Queensland.] Social identity threat is the notion that one of a person’s many social identities may be at risk of being devalued in a particular context (C. M. Steele, S. J. Spencer, & J. Aronson, 2002). The authors suggest that in domains in which women are already negatively stereotyped, interacting with a sexist man can trigger social identity threat, undermining women’s performance. In Study 1, male engineering students who scored highly on a subtle measure of sexism behaved in a dominant and sexually interested way toward an ostensible female classmate. In Studies 2 and 3, female engineering students who interacted with such sexist men, or with confederates trained to behave in the same way, performed worse on an engineering test than did women who interacted with nonsexist men. Study 4 replicated this finding and showed that women’s underperformance did not extend to an English test, an area in which women are not negatively stereotyped. Study 5 showed that interacting with sexist men leads women to suppress concerns about gender stereotypes, an established mechanism of stereotype threat. Discussion addresses implications for social identity threat and for women’s performance in school and at work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

WASTE MINIMIZATION IN BATCH VESSEL CLEANING

Although the cleaning of processing vessels has always been a significant source of waste, only recently have fundamental studies been undertaken to understand the cleaning process. The study described here began with a review of the literature on industrial cleaning practices. The literature was found to be mainly empirical. In order to provide a practical direction for research into the cleaning process, observations were made of a commercial batch processing facility. Based on these observations, short-term process improvements are suggested, and a new area for fundamental research is identified. @KEYWORDS Waste minimization Reflux cleaning Reactor Batch vessel.     

View Definition and Positioning in DOOD Systems

Because there is no difference between derivation rules and view definitions, DOOD systems are the best candidates to support an object-oriented view mechanism. Yet, to combine expressive power (i.e. no restriction on queries defining views), reusability and modeling accuracy (i.e. insertion of views into the generalization hierarchy), and consistency (stability in oid generation) is still an open challenging domain for OO research. This paper is a contribution to improve existing solutions while simplifying the task of users in the view definition process.     

Processing of magnetic properties of nearly zero magnetostrictive glass-coated microwires by current annealing

The effect of dc current annealing (with length up to 80 min and current density j up to 250 A/mm/sup 2/), with or without dc axial magnetic field, on the magnetic properties of Co/sub 55.7/Fe/sub 5.9/Ni/sub 9.9/B/sub 17.7/Si/sub 10.8/ and Co/sub 68/Mn/sub 7/Si/sub 10/B/sub 15/ glass-coated microwires has been studied. Such thermal treatments, especially performed under magnetic field, modify the magnetic parameters, such as coercivity, remanent magnetization, magnetic permeability, and overall shape of the hysteresis loops. Such phenomenology can be interpreted by considering the noticeable longitudinal magnetic anisotropy induced by the combined effects of the magnetic field and internal stresses arising from the coating during the thermal treatment.     

Decomposed software pipelining: A new perspective and a new approach

Software pipelining is an efficient instruction-level loop scheduling technique, but existing software pipelining approaches have not been widely used in practical and commercial compilers. This is mainly because resource constraints and the cyclic data dependencies make software pipelining very complicated and difficult to apply. In this paper we present a new perspective on software pipelining in which it is decomposed into two subproblems—one is free from cyclic data dependencies and can be effectively solved by the list scheduling technique, and the other is free from resource constraints and can be easily solved by classical polynomial-time algorithms of graph theory. Based on this new perspective, we develop a new instruction-level loop scheduling approach, call DEcomposed Software Pipelining (DESP).     

Preliminary laboratory investigation of disinfection by-product precursor removal using an advanced oxidation process

Natural organic matter (NOM) is ubiquitous in surface and ground waters throughout the world. During drinking water treatment, the NOM that remains in treated water can react with chlorine to form disinfection by‐products. It has been shown that titanium dioxide photocatalysis can achieve over 96% reduction in ultraviolet (UV)₂₅₄ absorbing species such as hydrophobic NOM and over 81% reduction in dissolved organic carbon (DOC). However, an additional filtration stage is required to recover the suspended catalyst before it is suitable for municipal drinking water application. To overcome this problem, we have used immobilised catalysts prepared using chemical sol–gels, and their performance has been assessed during bench‐scale experiments. An immobilised catalyst enables in situ regeneration using UV light and subsequent reuse of the catalyst. In this research, titanium dioxide sol–gels have been used to coat substrates at a laboratory scale. Results showed that the various coatings prepared had different removal efficiencies for both DOC and UV₂₅₄ absorbance. Maximum removals were 1.336 g/m² and 89%, respectively.     

DSP Implementation of Antenna Array Algorithms for OFDM-Based Wireless LAN

Motivated by the theoretical results on multi-antenna signal processing techniques promising substantial performance gains, a feasible reconfigurable hardware architecture for OFDM-based Wireless LANs is presented in this paper. The ultimate objective of the platform is to support single-antenna links, as well as antenna arrays at the receiver and/or at the transmitter, taking into account the limitations caused by a real-time implementation. After a brief overview of the implemented multi-antenna algorithms, we present the hardware platform that has been built based on both fixed point and floating point DSPs from Texas Instruments, together with the evaluation of the complexity associated to the operations, and their scheduling. The performance indicates that a multi-antenna architecture supporting up to four antennas at the receiver side might accomplish the real-time requirements.     

Losses in gross brain volume and cerebral blood flow account for age-related differences in speed but not in fluid intelligence.

Age-related gross head size; adjusted age-related change in brain volume and carotid and basilar blood flow; as well as scores on 3 tests of fluid intelligence (gf), 2 tests of information-processing speed, 2 memory tests, and 3 tests of executive function were obtained from 69 volunteers aged from 62 to 84 years. Brain volume negatively predicted scores on all 10 cognitive tasks, accounting for up to 78% of age-related variance in scores on the speed tasks and on 1 executive task. Cerebral blood flow (CBF) negatively predicted scores on 8 cognitive tasks, accounting for up to 36% of age-related variance in speed scores. However, neither brain volume nor CBF accounted for significant age-related variance between individuals on any of 3 gf tests. We conclude that speed, but not gf, is an exceptionally sensitive behavioral index of the progress of gross brain changes that affect cognition in old age and that speed and gf do not reflect integrity of the same functional systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Corrosion resistance of stainless steel coatings elaborated by solar cladding process

The resistance to corrosion of stainless steel coatings deposited onto carbon steel substrate with a solar processing is analyzed. The solar cladding consists in melting the powder of stainless steel AISI 316 under a beam of concentrated solar energy, followed by a rapid solidification. A continuous scanning process is performed by moving the specimen at controlled speed, according to the solar direct normal irradiation. The solar processing is carried out in a small scale solar furnace of CNRS at Odeillo, France. The experiments are carried out in vacuum, under an average flux density of 13400 kW/m². Various laws of velocity are used: 0.8 mm/s, 1.6 mm/s and 1.8 mm/s. Strips 55 mm in length and 6 mm in width of dense solid layer are obtained. The adhesion at the interface between the coating and the substrate is correct. The research work focuses on the characterization of the layer with respect to the operating parameters. The distribution of composition within the layers is observed with EDX analysis. In all cases Cr and Ni contents are lower than those of the initial powder (17% Cr and 12% Ni). Using high velocity scanning process yields to dendritic austenitic microstructure observed by optic microscopy and by SEM. The corrosion behaviour is analyzed using anodic polarization test in a 0.6 M NaCl solution. A passive layer is formed, thus offering a very good resistance to corrosion.     

Secretion and glycosylation of Clostridium thermocellum endoglucanase A encoded by the celA gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The Clostridium thermocellum celA gene encoding endoglucanase A is expressed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae but the enzyme produced from the native celA gene is not secreted. After removal of the bacterial signal peptide-coding sequence, the gene was fused to the promoter and prepro segment of the S. cerevisiae MF alpha 1 gene. This construction directs secretion of active endoglucanase A into the culture medium when introduced in yeast on either replicating or integrating vectors. Secretion of endoglucanase A required growth of transformants on rich medium. The secreted enzyme is a 97,000 Da glycoprotein containing about half of its molecular weight as carbohydrate. This new gene fusion could facilitate further research on protein secretion in yeast by using a cellulase as a marker enzyme.