Cyclamate intake and cyclohexylamine excretion are not related to male fertility in humans

Cyclamate and its metabolite cyclohexylamine affect male fertility in high dose animal studies, but this affect has not been investigated in epidemiological studies. This paper reports the first epidemiological study designed to investigate the possibility of a relationship between cyclamate and cyclohexylamine and male fertility in humans, in which 405 cases of clinically defined infertility in men and 379 controls were surveyed. Semen evaluation, urine analysis for cyclamate and cyclohexylamine and dietary questionnaires were compared between cases and controls. No evidence was found of a significant association between cyclamate intake and male infertility; neither high cyclamate nor high cyclohexylamine excretion were associated with elevated risk. The lack of association remained after adjusting by age, area of residence, education, total energy intake and other variables. No significant correlations were observed between cyclamate intake, metabolism or excretion, and sperm count and motility. The results demonstrate no effect of cyclamate or cyclohexylamine on male fertility at the present levels of cyclamate consumption.     

Scalable semantic brokering over dynamic heterogeneous data sources in InfoSleuth/spl trade/

InfoSleuth is an agent-based system for information discovery and retrieval in a dynamic, open environment. Brokering in InfoSleuth is a matchmaking process, recommending agents that provide services to agents requesting services. This paper discusses InfoSleuth's distributed multibroker design and implementation. InfoSleuth's brokering function combines reasoning over both the syntax and semantics of agents in the domain. This means the broker must reason over explicitly advertised information about agent capabilities to determine which agent can best provide the requested services. Robustness and scalability issues dictate that brokering must be distributable across collaborating agents. Our multibroker design is a peer-to-peer system that requires brokers to advertise to and receive advertisements from other brokers. Brokers collaborate during matchmaking to give a collective response to requests initiated by nonbroker agents. This results in a robust, scalable brokering system.     

Analysing inaccurate artifact usages in workflow specifications

Although many workflow models have been proposed, analyses on artifacts are seldom discussed. A workflow application with well structured and adequate resources may still fail or yield unexpected results in execution due to inaccurate artifact manipulation, for example, inconsistency between data flow and control flow, or contradictions between artifact operations. Thus, artifact analysis is very important since activities cannot be executed properly without accurate information. This paper presents a three-layer workflow model for designing a workflow and characterises the behaviour of an artifact by its state transition diagram. By abstracting common usages of artifacts, six types of inaccurate artifact usage affecting workflow execution are identified and a set of algorithms to detect these inaccurate usages in workflow specifications is presented. An example is demonstrated and then related works are compared.     

Biaxiale Ermüdung reibrührgeschweißter Strukturelemente

Biaxial fatigue of friction stir welded stiffened panels Within the framework of the European WelAir project, cruciform specimens made from stiffening FSW overlap joints were fatigued in the DLR biaxial test rig. To resemble the loading situation of pressurized fuselage structures, proportional loading without any phase shift, but with different load ratios λ between the loading components in both directions was applied.Natural crack initiation and subsequent crack growth were governed by the stiffness gradient caused by introducing the stringer. Cracks initiated and propagated at run‐in and run‐out locations in a direction perpendicular to the weld seam. The shortest fatigue life was observed for uniaxial loading in welding direction (λ = 0). An additional stress component perpendicular to the joint line (λ > 0) resulted in a higher number of cycles to failure. Similar to single stringer panels, increasing the load ratio also increased the number of cycles to failure for FSW clip‐stringer structural members, but additionally gives a different location of the fatal crack.     

ESR Refining Potential for Titanium Alloys using a CaF2‐based Active Slag

Since the end of the Cold War and due to the needs to produce titanium more cost‐efficient and thus more attractive for its civilian use, the electroslag remelting (ESR) process has become an increasingly important topic of international research programmes, because titanium and titanium aluminides can be chemically refined by ESR in some degree. Using ESR, titanium turnings from machining steps and scrap from foundries can be remelted, refined and provided as secondary titanium for the market at relatively favourable prices. This article investigates the removability of the main impurities out of titanium and titanium‐aluminium alloys by electroslag remelting using the active slag system CaF₂‐Ca‐(CaO). Thermochemical and kinetic aspects of the ESR process are considered.     

Symmetric BEM formulations for 2-D steady-state and transit potential problems

This paper presents a new concept for symmetric boundary element method (SBEM) applicable to 2-D steady-state and transit potential problems. Two kinds of SBEM formulations are derived. Symmetry is obtained simply through matrix manipulation, and no hypersingularity appears. Therefore, SBEM is much easier than the traditional symmetric Galerkin BEM. Compared with the traditional asymmetric BEM, the present SBEM can reduce the computational cost for time domain problems only. However, when applied to BEM/FEM coupling procedure, SBEM can reduce the computational cost for both steady-state and time domain problems. Three numerical examples are included to illustrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the present formulations.     

Polygonal extrusion

A sweeping operation called polygonal extrusion is defined to improve the modeling power of CSG-based modeling. It is assumed that a 2D cross-sectional polygon (sweeping polygon) moves in space while its containing plane is kept orthogonal to the tangent direction of the trajectory curve, a planar polygonal chain having no self-intersections. The objective of the paper is to compute the boundary of the swept volume of the sweeping polygon as a set of polygons (or triangles). The most significant challenge to accomplishing this objective is the problem of trimming the swept volume. To solve the trimming problem, 2D-curve offsetting methods are employed. Two algorithms are presented for polygonal extrusion that are based on different offsetting methods, the Voronoi diagram and PWID offset. The proposed algorithms have been implemented and tested with various examples. Published online: 28 January 2003     

A novel fuzzy clustering algorithm for the analysis of axillary lymph node tissue sections

Recently Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopic imaging has been used as a tool to detect the changes in cellular composition that may reflect the onset of a disease. This approach has been investigated as a mean of monitoring the change of the biochemical composition of cells and providing a diagnostic tool for various human cancers and other diseases. The discrimination between different types of tissue based upon spectroscopic data is often achieved using various multivariate clustering techniques. However, the number of clusters is a common unknown feature for the clustering methods, such as hierarchical cluster analysis, k-means and fuzzy c-means. In this study, we apply a FCM based clustering algorithm to obtain the best number of clusters as given by the minimum validity index value. This often results in an excessive number of clusters being created due to the complexity of this biochemical system. A novel method to automatically merge clusters was developed to try to address this problem. Three lymph node tissue sections were examined to evaluate our new method. These results showed that this approach can merge the clusters which have similar biochemistry. Consequently, the overall algorithm automatically identifies clusters that accurately match the main tissue types that are independently determined by the clinician.