Two C60O Structures and Their Relative Stabilities: AM1 Computations

C₆₀O is studied by means of the AM1 quantum-chemical method. Full geometry optimization of its C_s and C_2v structures, and harmonic vibrational analysis, are employed in the evaluation of the temperature dependence of their relative stabilities. The C_2v structure remains a minor component of the equilibrium gas-phase mixture even at high temperatures.     

Eosinophilic pleurisy (a study of 27 cases)

After reviewing the specific literature mainly on cytokines role in eosinophilic pleural chemotaxis, the study on 27 cases of eosinophilic pleurisy is presented. Only 3 cases were malignant pleurisies. The ratio between blood and pleural fluid eosinophils has no semiologic significance. Tuberculosis and parasitoses have no special significance. Autonomous eosinophilic pleurisies are regarded as a distinct nosologic entity. Their prognosis is favourable. The glucocorticoids are the choice treatment.     

Titanium-nickel shape memory clamps in small bone surgery

The therapeutic applications of titanium-nickel (TiNi) shape memory clamps with optimized structural characteristics for fixation of small bone fragments in 64 patients are presented. Our fixative makes compressive stabilization possible and enables a patient to start rehabilitation very soon after surgery. The supporting splint immobilization never exceeded 12 days. Three aspects were studied: bone union, wound healing problems and histology. Non-union occurred in 4 patients treated with only one fixative. Two clamps implanted in non-parallel planes seem to be advisable to exclude the need for longer immobilization. Neither toxic manifestation nor episodes of an allergic reaction occurred. No suppuration appeared when a heat stimulus was supplied by using a contact resistance heater. Histological evaluation of the tissue covering the implants in 22 patients did not reveal any adverse reaction. Our study suggests that by using TiNi clamps in an appropriate way, satisfactory outcomes could be achieved with respect to both biofunctionality and biocompatibility.     

Supercritical fluid extraction of alkaloids from Ilex paraguariensis St. Hil.

In this work a study about extracts obtained from Ilex paraguariensis St. Hil. leaves with supercritical CO₂ was carried out. Experiments were performed in a pilot-scale extractor with capacity of 1 L at pressure of 120, 150, 170 and 200 bar for four temperature conditions, 313.15, 323.15, 333.15 and 343.15 K. The experimental data were fitted using a mathematical model characterized by the existence of two distinct periods of extraction. Numerical results for the adjusted parameters correlated very well the supercritical extraction experimental data. The confidence of results obtained from mathematical model and experiments was assured through the chi-square test.     

The influence of wort aeration and yeast preoxygenation on beer staling processes

The influence of oxygen on the beer staling process is considered to be of major importance. Therefore, the impact of wort aeration, which is thought to cause wort oxidation processes, on beer ageing, has been examined. Pilsner and ale beers were produced with the classical wort aeration technique or by the use of the yeast preoxygenation process, in which yeast cells are exposed to oxygen before fermentation. The staling of these beers was studied using P&T GC–MS and sensory analysis. GC–MS analyses of the natural and forced aged beers showed no significant differences between the two treatments. Sensory evaluation of natural and forced beers confirmed these results. Thus, normal wort aeration (8 mg/l) does not appear to determine flavour stability in a direct manner. This is probably due to the short contact of the wort with oxygen at low temperatures before the onset of fermentation.     

Combining laser chemical processing and aerosol jet printing: a laboratory scale feasibility study

First results showing the viability of combining laser chemical processing (LCP) and aerosol jet printing (AJP) technologies to produce a high‐efficiency front side for silicon solar cells are presented. LCP simultaneously opens the anti‐reflection coating (ARC) and highly dopes the underlying silicon to create a selective emitter, while AJP is the first in a two‐step fine‐line contact formation procedure. The electrical properties as well as the morphology of the resulting structures are presented. Performance similar to that achieved with evaporated TiPdAg metallization is demonstrated. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A flexible,reliable, and adaptive timeslot‐based advance bandwidth‐reservation mechanism for media delivery services

Media‐centric networks deal with exchanging large media files between geographical distributed locations with strict deadlines. In such networks, resources need to be available at predetermined timeslots in the future and thus need to be reserved in advance, based on either flexible or fixed timeslot sizes. Reliability of the transfers is also important and can be attained by advance provisioning of redundant reservations. This, however, imposes additional costs, because redundant reservations are rarely in use, causing network resources to be wasted. Further adaptation and network utilization can be achieved at runtime by reutilizing unused reservations for transferring extra data as long as no failure has been detected. In this article, we design, implement, and evaluate a resilient advance bandwidth‐reservation approach based on flexible timeslots, in combination with a runtime adaptation approach. We take into account the specific characteristics of media transfers. Quality and complexity of the proposed approach have been extensively compared with that of a fixed timeslot algorithm. Our simulation results reveal that the highest admittance ratio and percentage of fully transferred requests in case of failures are almost always achieved by flexible timeslots, while the execution time of this approach is up to 17.5 times lower, compared with the approaches with fixed timeslot sizes.     

Toward an Aqueous Solar Battery: Direct Electrochemical Storage of Solar Energy in Carbon Nitrides

Graphitic carbon nitrides have emerged as an earth‐abundant family of polymeric materials for solar energy conversion. Herein, a 2D cyanamide‐functionalized polyheptazine imide (NCN‐PHI) is reported, which for the first time enables the synergistic coupling of two key functions of energy conversion within one single material: light harvesting and electrical energy storage. Photo‐electrochemical measurements in aqueous electrolytes reveal the underlying mechanism of this “solar battery” material: the charge storage in NCN‐PHI is based on the photoreduction of the carbon nitride backbone and charge compensation is realized by adsorption of alkali metal ions within the NCN‐PHI layers and at the solution interface. The photoreduced carbon nitride can thus be described as a battery anode operating as a pseudocapacitor, which can store light‐induced charge in the form of long‐lived, “trapped” electrons for hours. Importantly, the potential window of this process is not limited by the water reduction reaction due to the high intrinsic overpotential of carbon nitrides for hydrogen evolution, potentially enabling new applications for aqueous batteries. Thus, the feasibility of light‐induced electrical energy storage and release on demand by a one‐component light‐charged battery anode is demonstrated, which provides a sustainable solution to overcome the intermittency of solar radiation.     

Quantitative fine-grained human evaluation of machine translation systems: a case study on English to Croatian

This paper presents a quantitative fine-grained manual evaluation approach to comparing the performance of different machine translation (MT) systems. We build upon the well-established multidimensional quality metrics (MQM) error taxonomy and implement a novel method that assesses whether the differences in performance for MQM error types between different MT systems are statistically significant. We conduct a case study for English-to-Croatian, a language direction that involves translating into a morphologically rich language, for which we compare three MT systems belonging to different paradigms: pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural. First, we design an MQM-compliant error taxonomy tailored to the relevant linguistic phenomena of Slavic languages, which made the annotation process feasible and accurate. Errors in MT outputs were then annotated by two annotators following this taxonomy. Subsequently, we carried out a statistical analysis which showed that the best-performing system (neural) reduces the errors produced by the worst system (pure phrase-based) by more than half (54%). Moreover, we conducted an additional analysis of agreement errors in which we distinguished between short (phrase-level) and long distance (sentence-level) errors. We discovered that phrase-based MT approaches are of limited use for long distance agreement phenomena, for which neural MT was found to be especially effective.     

Updated Taxonomy for the Network and Service Management Research Field

Network and service management is an established research field within the general area of computer networks. A few years ago, an initial taxonomy, organizing a comprehensive list of terms and topics, was established through interviews with experts from both industry and academia. This taxonomy has since been used to better partition standardization efforts, identify classes of managed objects and improve the assignment of reviewers to papers submitted in the field. Because the field of network and service management is rapidly evolving, a biyearly update of the taxonomy was proposed. In this paper, a large-scale questionnaire is presented which was answered by experts in the field, evaluating the relevance of each individual topic for the next five years. Missing topics, which are likely to become relevant over the next few years, are identified as well. Furthermore, an analysis is performed of the records of papers submitted to major conferences in the area. Based on the obtained results, an updated version of the taxonomy is proposed.