Impacts of changing the minimum diameter of roundwood on the accumulation of logging residue in first thinnings of Scots pine and Norway spruce

The aim of this study was to examine the impacts of different minimum top diameters of roundwood on the accumulation of logging residue in first thinnings of Scots pine and Norway spruce. The aim was also to compare estimates of residue accumulation calculated by tree-specific models with field measurements from thinnings. Felling experiments were performed in young pine and spruce stands to evaluate the model calculations. The felling was performed by a harvester with a single-grip harvester head. Sample trees were felled and processed to a minimum diameter of 12, 10, 8 and 6 cm and the delimbed branches and stem wood between these cutting points were weighed. The mean relative masses of the tree tops of spruce were nearly doubled with each increment of 2 cm in the top diameter. Respectively in pine, the mean relative tree top mass was increased by 50-60% when the top diameter was increased by 2 cm. The mass of total residue (tree top and all delimbed branches) was similarly increased, but the differences were not as large. Compared to pine, smaller variation in the crown mass of the spruce sample resulted in a more accurate model prediction of the mass of tree tops and total residue. The results of this study suggest that the biomass quantity and distribution of a small amount of trees cannot be predicted very reliably, but when these results are generalized to stand-level, the model predictions can be improved to a practicable level.     

Common cause failure analysis of cyber–physical systems situated in constructed environments

While cyber–physical system sciences are developing methods for studying reliability that span domains such as mechanics, electronics and control, there remains a lack of methods for investigating the impact of the environment on the system. External conditions such as flooding, fire or toxic gas may damage equipment and failing to foresee such possibilities will result in invalid worst-case estimates of the safety and reliability of the system. Even if single component failures are anticipated, abnormal environmental conditions may result in common cause failures that cripple the system. This paper proposes a framework for modeling interactions between a cyber–physical system and its environment. The framework is limited to environments consisting of spaces with clear physical boundaries, such as power plants, buildings, mines and urban underground infrastructures. The purpose of the framework is to support simulation-based risk analysis of an initiating event such as an equipment failure or flooding. The functional failure identification and propagation (FFIP) framework is extended for this purpose, so that the simulation is able to detect component failures arising from abnormal environmental conditions and vice versa: Flooding could be caused by a failure in a pipe or valve component. As abnormal flow states propagate through the system and its environment, the goal of the simulation is to identify the system-wide cumulative effect of the initiating event and any related common cause failure scenario. FFIP determines this effect in terms of degradation or loss of the functionality of the system. The method is demonstrated with a nuclear reactor’s redundant coolant supply system.     

DBridges: Flexible floodless frame forwarding

Ethernet has become the de facto layer 2 transmission technology, partly due to ease of use and cost efficiency. The cores of most data centers around the world are based on Ethernet, and large access and core networks are built without IP routing. The inherent simplicity of Ethernet has several drawbacks, including the overhead of network-wide broadcasting and the use of the spanning tree protocol. The academia and the industry have presented numerous solutions to overcome the limitations of Ethernet. Many of these solutions have deployment constraints and often force a change of the whole network.     

The performance and efficacy of a two‐person operated portable PIT‐antenna for monitoring spatial distribution of stream fish populations

Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) technology has enabled the tracking of individual fish by using data‐logging stations and one‐person operated portable tracking units. Whereas data‐logging stations are fixed at a certain location, the portable units have traditionally been used in studies that require tracking operations at small spatial scales (<1000 m²) due to the time investment necessary to fully scan the stream channel. We developed a two‐person operated portable antenna that is stretched between the operators and the area in between is scanned for PIT‐tags. The antenna was five metres wide but can be customized to fit stream‐specific needs. The antenna can be used with existing Texas Instruments Series 2000 tracking units, and the detection distance ranged between 46 and 61 cm when using 23‐ or 32‐mm PIT‐tags, respectively (tag held parallel to the plane of the open coil inductor loop). To assess antenna performance in field trial, we compared the efficacy (% tags found) and time‐efficiency (time used to track a study site) between one‐ and two‐person antennae in three separate stream sites. The new antenna type proved to be very efficient (95.2–100%) for locating tags in all trials. However, the new antenna type might not perform adequately in areas with high structural complexity (e.g. logjams, overhanging vegetation) and a follow‐up with one‐person operated antenna is recommended in such complex habitats. The time consumption was always lower (10–53%) with the new antenna and significant time savings can be assumed especially in areas with a low density of PIT‐tagged individuals. Further, we have successfully used the new antenna type to track juvenile Atlantic salmon both in winter conditions (ice‐free) and warmer water (14°C) without causing fright responses. The new antenna type makes the use of PIT‐technology feasible not only at the micro/mesohabitat scale but also at the segment/reach scale and can thus be used to monitor behavioural responses of fish at the population level in wadable streams. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The behaviour of a modern cell structure subjected to compressive load

A novel manufacturing process of lightweight cell structures is based on laser cutting and punch pressing techniques. The process based on turret punch press with laser is flexible and, therefore, the cell structure is easy to tailor. The punch press process enables even the cost effective one-off production. The new kind cell structure is considerably simpler than conventional ones. The studied cell structure consists of two plates. Both plates are manufactured using punch pressing and laser cutting. Truncated cones are formed with forming tools of a turret punch press. The flat shape of truncated cone is essential for joining the plates together. Joining methods to be used depend on the nature of the loads and other requirements. This manufacturing method gives an opportunity to tailor the cell structure. For example, the rigidity of the cell structure can be altered by changing the number and location of the embosses. Furthermore, the shape of the embosses can be varied, as well as their height, width and length. This feature makes it possible to manufacture even tapered cells in thickness direction. Formed cell structures are rather new constructions. Therefore, these kinds of structures need studying. The aim of this work is to study the behaviour of a cell structure subjected to compressive load. Main results of the study will be presented in this paper.     

Semi-supervised context adaptation: case study of audience excitement recognition

To recognise just the same human reaction (for example, a strong excitement) in different contexts, customary behaviours in these contexts have to be taken into account; e.g. a happy sport audience may be cheering for long time, while a happy theatrical audience may produce only short bursts of laughter in order to not interrupt the performance. Tailoring recognition algorithms to contexts can be achieved by building either a context-specific or a generic system. The former is individually trained for each context to recognise sets of characteristic responses, whereas the latter??in contrast to the context-specific one??adapts to the context via significantly more lightweight modification of parameters. This paper follows the latter way and proposes a simple modification of a hidden Markov model (HMM) classifier that enables end users to adapt the generic system to a context or a personal perception of an annotator by labelling a fairly small number of data samples of each context. For better adaptability to the limited number of the user??s annotations, the proposed semi-supervised HMM classifier employs the maximum posterior marginal, rather than the more conventional maximum a posteriori decision rule. The proposed user- and context-adaptable semi-supervised HMM classifier was tested on recognising excitement of a show audience in three contexts (a concert hall, a circus, and a sport event), differing in how the excitement is expressed. In our experiments the proposed classifier recognised reactions of a non-neutral audience with 10% higher accuracy than the conventional HMM and support vector machine based classifiers.     

Stability and amino acid preferences of type VIII reverse turn: the most common turn in peptides?

Free energies of the     

可持续发展的城市与建筑

一.可持续发展的城市如果一个城市不与周围乡村结合,它永远不可能是可持续发展的。为可持续发展的未来进行规划,必须同时考虑城市和乡村的文脉。对于这个目标来说,自治市可能是合适的规划区域。对于可持续发展规划,自治市的边界并不总是合适的区域,但如果你开始你的自治市规划,就必须与周边的自治市合作。     

Quaternary Diamond‐Like Chalcogenidometalate Networks as Efficient Anode Material in Lithium‐Ion Batteries

An improvement of lithium‐ion batteries with regard to their reversible capacity, cycling stability, rate performance, and safety under repetitive charge and discharge still requires considerable research activity. However, graphite has remained the unexcelled material for the anode so far. Here, it is shown that two novel quaternary lithium‐chalcogenidometalate phases, Li₄MnGe₂S₇ ( 1 ) and Li₄MnSn₂Se₇ ( 2 ), represent very promising new anode materials for lithium‐ion cells in that they achieve specific lithium storage capacities higher than that of the commercially used graphite, and display an excellent stability during cycling. These properties are based on the structural peculiarities of the phases, which adopt Wurtzite‐related topologies and provide high structural flexibility of the metal sulfide or selenide bonds as advantageous pre‐requisitions for a large ion accessible volume.