An investigation of carbon nanotube jet grinding

Since their observation in 1976 and 1991, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have generated much interest due to their properties and potential applications. CNTs are tubular carbon molecules with remarkable mechanical, electrical, chemical and thermal properties, which make them useful in various applications. Industries producing CNTs via the fluidized bed chemical vapor deposition technique face challenges related to the size of CNT bundles. The two main challenges are agglomeration and agglomerate size distribution control. A solution to these challenges involves the use of jet mills to grind the CNT agglomerates. The goal of this study was to determine whether the nanotubes could be ground with air jets using a commercial jet mill and apply a two-parameter model to describe the grinding process. The present study has indicated that air-jet grinding of CNTs is feasible with a typical commercial jet mill. This paper presents the effect of operational parameters on the arithmetic mean diameter of the ground product. Sonic velocity through the grinding nozzles was required to obtain reasonable grinding rates and relatively narrow particle size distributions. This occurs at high air to solids feedrate ratios. Additionally, a simple attrition model can describe the grinding process in the spiral jet mill.     

Does social dominance generate prejudice? Integrating individual and contextual determinants of intergroup cognitions.

Social dominance orientation (SDO) has been proposed as an important variable in the explanation of prejudice. We distinguish between three conceptualizations of SDO: SDO as a personality trait (personality model), SDO as a moderator of the effects of situational variables (Person X Situation model), and SDO as a mediator of the effect of social position on prejudice (group socialization model [GSM]). Four studies (N = 1,657) looking at the relations between social positions, SDO, and prejudice in a natural setting and in a laboratory setting provide strong support for the GSM. In contrast to previous correlational findings, there is evidence of a cause (dominant social position), an effect (prejudice increases), and a mediator (SDO). These results suggest new perspectives on the integration of individual and contextual determinants of prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark

International Journal of Computer Vision - Can our video understanding systems perceive objects when a heavy occlusion exists in a scene? To answer this question, we collect a large-scale dataset...     

Principles of adjustable autonomy: a framework for resilient human–machine cooperation

Unmanned ground vehicles tend to be more and more autonomous, but both complete teleoperation and full autonomy are not efficient enough to deal with all possible situations. To be efficient, the human–robot system must be able to anticipate, react and recover from errors of different kinds, i.e., to be resilient. From this observation, this paper proposes a survey on the resilience of a human–machine system and the means to control the resilience. The resilience of a system can be defined as the ability to maintain or recover a stable state when subject to disturbance. Adjustable autonomy and human–machine cooperation are considered as means of resilience for the system. This paper then proposes three indicators to assess different meanings of resilience of the system: foresight and avoidance of events, reaction to events and recovery from occurrence of events. The third of these metrics takes into consideration the concept of affordances that allows a common representation for the opportunities of action between the automated system and its environment.     

A Proof-Planning Framework with explicit Abstractions based on Indexed Formulas

A major motivation of proof-planning is to bridge the gap between high-level, cognitively adequate reasoning for specific domains, and calculus-level reasoning to ensure soundness. For high reasoning levels the cognitive adequacy of representation and reasoning techniques is a major issue, while for lower reasoning levels the adequacy wrt. the modelled domain is important. Furthermore, proof construction is an engineering task and there is a need to support the design and application of proof-search engineering methods. To this end we present a framework to explicitly support different reasoning levels. To structure reasoning levels the framework allows for an explicit representation of abstractions and proof-search refinement techniques. In order to ensure soundness within a reasoning level, we use techniques developed in the context of matrix characterisation relying on the notion of indexed formulas. Furthermore, we introduce a uniform concept for contextual reasoning, and sketch basic tacticals for the definition of tactics to organise the overall proof-search inside and across different reasoning levels.     

Effective discrepancy and numerical experiments

Many problems require the computation of a high dimensional integral, typically with a few tens of input factors, with a low number of integrand evaluations. To avoid the curse of dimensionality, we reduce the dimension before applying the Quasi-Monte Carlo method. We will show how to reduce the dimension by computing approximate Sobol indices of the variables with a two-levels fractional factorial design. Then, we will use the Sobol indices to define the effective discrepancy, which turns out to be correlated with the QMC error and thus enables one to choose a good sequence for the integral estimation.