Gasification of waste tires in a circulating fixed-bed reactor within the scope of waste to energy

Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy - Thermochemical decomposition of waste tires was evaluated in order to produce solid and gaseous products within the aim of waste-to-energy concept....     

Lead levels in deciduous teeth of children from urban and suburban regions in Ankara (Turkey)

PURPOSE: To determine whether hyperglycemia affects pancreatic islet microcirculation in vivo and whether nitric oxide is a mediator. METHODS: Islet blood flow was measured before and after infusion of glucose during in vivo microscopy of mouse pancreatic islet. The pancreas of male BALB/c mice was exteriorized and viewed under the microscope utilizing monochromatic transmitted light. The carotid artery and tail vein were cannulated and systemic blood pressure was monitored continuously. Under fluorescent light, a 0.02 mL bolus of 2% fluorescein isothyocyanate (FITC-albumin) was injected intra-arterially and the first pulse of FITC-albumin through an islet capillary was videorecorded. Following equilibration, either glucose or normal saline 300 mg/g of body weight was given intravenously. Five minutes later, a second bolus was given and the second pulse was videorecorded. The study was repeated in the presence of N omega-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME). The FITC-albumin bolus mean transit time (TT) and observed cross time (OCT) through the islet were calculated using slow-motion video analysis of the recorded images. RESULTS: Infusion of glucose resulted in a significant increase in islet blood flow with no change in systemic blood pressure: baseline TT was 20 +/- 1.3 pixel/0.03 sec and baseline OCT was 0.6 +/- 0.04 seconds; during hyperglycemia, TT was 16.1 +/- 1 pixel/0.03 sec, and OCT was 0.48 +/- 0.03 seconds (n = 11, P < 0.05 versus basal via paired t-test). Continuous infusion of L-NAME negated the effect of hyperglycemia on islet blood flow: baseline TT was 20 +/- 1.8 pixel/0.03 sec and OCT was and 0.6 +/- 0.05 seconds; during hyperglycemia, TT was 20 +/- 1.1 pixel/0.03 sec and OCT was 0.6 +/- 0.33 seconds (n = 10; P < 0.05 versus glucose via unpaired t-test).     

Effective methods for increasing aggregate diversity in recommender systems

In order to make a recommendation, a recommender system typically first predicts a user’s ratings for items and then recommends a list of items to the user which have high predicted ratings. Quality of predictions is measured by accuracy, that is, how close the predicted ratings are to actual ratings. On the other hand, quality of recommendation lists is evaluated from more than one perspective. Since accuracy of predicted ratings is not enough for customer satisfaction, metrics such as novelty, serendipity, and diversity are also used to measure the quality of the recommendation lists. Aggregate diversity is one of these metrics which measures the diversity of items across the recommendation lists of all users. Increasing aggregate diversity is important because it leads a more even distribution of items in the recommendation lists which prevents the long-tail problem. In this study, we propose two novel methods to increase aggregate diversity of a recommender system. The first method is a reranking approach which takes a ranked list of recommendations of a user and reranks it to increase aggregate diversity. While the reranking approach is applied after model generation as a wrapper the second method is applied in model generation phase which has the advantage of being more efficient in the generation of recommendation lists. We compare our methods with the well-known methods in the field and show the superiority of our methods using real-world datasets.     

Time and Frequency Synchronization with Channel Estimation for SC-FDMA Systems Over Time-Varying Channels

The constant amplitude zero autocorrelation sequence based synchronization and its usage in the block-type channel estimation for the single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems are vulnerable to the time-varying channels. Therefore, the channel estimation errors limit the performance of SC-FDMA systems in fast fading environments and result an irreducible error floor. In this paper, cyclic prefix based maximum likelihood estimator of time/frequency synchronization with comb-type channel estimation for the SC-FDMA systems are proposed to track the channel variations. Moreover, the residual time/frequency offsets calculations are derived for SC-FDMA systems. Simulation results confirm and illustrate that the proposed receiver is capable of tracking fast fading channel parameters and improving the overall performance as compared with the conventional receiver.     

Clustering-based diversity improvement in top-N recommendation

The major aim of recommender algorithms has been to predict accurately the rating value of items. However, it has been recognized that accurate prediction of rating values is not the only requirement for achieving user satisfaction. One other requirement, which has gained importance recently, is the diversity of recommendation lists. Being able to recommend a diverse set of items is important for user satisfaction since it gives the user a richer set of items to choose from and increases the chance of discovering new items. In this study, we propose a novel method which can be used to give each user an option to adjust the diversity levels of their own recommendation lists. Experiments show that the method effectively increases the diversity levels of recommendation lists with little decrease in accuracy. Compared to the existing methods, the proposed method, while achieving similar diversification performance, has a very low computational time complexity, which makes it highly scalable and allows it to be used in the online phase of the recommendation process.     

Construction of an amperometric pyruvate oxidase enzyme electrode for determination of pyruvate and phosphate

In this study an amperometric biosensor based on pyruvate oxidase was developed for the determination of pyruvate and phosphate. For construction of the biosensor pyruvate oxidase was immobilized with gelatin and insolubilized in film by forming cross-linked bonds with glutaraldehyde. The film was fixed on a YSI type dissolved oxygen (DO) probe, covered with a teflon membrane which is high-sensitive for oxygen. The working principle of the biosensor depends on detection of consumed DO concentration related to pyruvate concentration which is used in enzymatic reaction catalyzed by pyruvate oxidase. The biosensor response shows a linearity with pyruvate concentration between 0.0025 and 0.05 μM and also response time of the biosensor is 3 min. In the optimization studies of the biosensor the most suitable enzyme activity was found as 2.5 U/cm² for pyruvate oxidase, and also phosphate buffer (pH 7.0; 50 mM) and 35 °C were established as providing the optimum working conditions. In the characterization studies of the biosensor some parameters such as reproducibility, substrate specificity, operational stability, determination of phosphate, and interference effects of some compounds on the pyruvate determination were investigated. Finally, the concentration of pyruvate was determined by using spectrophotometric method and the results obtained were compared to results obtained by the biosensor.