Color preferences for different topics in connection to personal characteristics

Studies on color preferences are dependent on the topic and the relationships with personal characteristics, particularly personality, but these are seldom studied in one population. Therefore a questionnaire was collected from 1095 Dutch people asking for color preferences about different topics and relating them to personal characteristics. Color preferences regarding different topics show different patterns and significant differences were found between gender, age, education and personality such as being technical, being emotional or being a team player. Also, different colors were mentioned when asked for colors that stimulate to be quiet, energetic, and able to focus or creative. Probably, due to unconsciousness of contexts, many people had no color preference, a result that in the literature seldom is mentioned. Blue was the overall favorite color; however, most males chose for blue (25%) while most females had no color preference (18%). Black was the overall favorite color for clothing, mainly chosen by females (40%), while males primarily chose blue (27%). For building interiors subjects preferred white. For moods, subjects preferred white for being quiet or being able to focus, red for being energetic and had no color preference for being creative. It is concluded that color preferences are dependent upon the topic, and personal characteristics. The findings are important for architects, interior designers, fashion designers and product designers to have a basic idea of preferred colors for different objects by different types of people. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 62–71, 2015     

Effect of ZnO layer thickness upon optoelectrical properties of NiO/ ZnO heterojunction prepared at room temperature

In this work, p-NiO/n-ZnO heterostructures were successfully prepared at room temperature using RF sputtering technique. The influence of ZnO layer thickness on the performance of the heterojunction was investigated. The deposited ZnO layers have a hexagonal Wurtzite structure with preferable growth orientations along (002) and (103) for thinner films. Increasing the thickness results in more crystallographic orientation randomness. The current–voltage measurements of the realized heterojunctions showed a clear rectifying behavior. The measured ideality factor varies from 2.5 to 1.6 according to the thickness of ZnO layer. The series resistance of the device is enlarged with increasing ZnO thickness. The deduced parameters from the I–V characteristics suggest that 200 nm is the optimal thickness of the ZnO layer according to our experimental conditions. We attribute the relatively better performance of this thickness to achieving reasonable compensation between serial resistance and ideality factor. The best heterojunction was tested and successfully used as a UV detector.     

Cross-Layer Optimization of Dynamic Packet Assignment for Video Transmission Over IEEE 802.11e Networks

Video transmission over IEEE 802.11e wireless networks still shows poor performance for large bandwidth demand and frequently changed environments. Thus, several enhancements of IEEE 802.11e were proposed. On the other hand, big frames and simultaneous sending of adjacent frames always cause packet dropping for buffer overflow. In the past, we proposed an IEEE 802.11e enhancement named DFAA and a content aware mechanism to solve the above problems. The motivation of this paper is to find a proper way to integrate these two mechanisms. A DFAA enhancement (DFAA-E) is proposed to make up the insufficiency of content aware mechanism. Experiments results show that the combination of DFAA-E and content aware mechanism improves the video decoded quality greatly. And its performance can be further enhanced by selecting the suitable settings of certain parameters.     

In situ measurements of human cough aerosol hygroscopicity

The airborne dynamics of respiratory droplets, and the transmission routes of pathogens embedded within them, are governed primarily by the diameter of the particles. These particles are composed of the fluid which lines the respiratory tract, and is primarily mucins and salts, which will interact with the atmosphere and evaporate to reach an equilibrium diameter. Measuring organic volume fraction (OVF) of cough aerosol has proved challenging due to large variability and low material volume produced after coughing. Here, the diametric hygroscopic growth factors (GF) of the cough aerosol produced by healthy participants were measured in situ using a rotating aerosol suspension chamber and a humidification tandem differential mobility analyser. Using hygroscopicity models, it was estimated that the average OVF in the evaporated cough aerosol was 0.88 ± 0.07 and the average GF at 90% relative humidity (RH) was 1.31 ± 0.03. To reach equilibrium in dry air the droplets will reduce in diameter by a factor of approximately 2.8 with an evaporation factor of 0.36 ± 0.05. Hysteresis was observed in cough aerosol at RH = ∼35% and RH = ∼65% for efflorescence and deliquescence, respectively, and may depend on the OVF. The same behaviour and GF were observed in nebulized bovine bronchoalveolar lavage fluid.     

Reoptimization framework and policy analysis for maritime inventory routing under uncertainty

We study a maritime inventory routing problem, in which shipments between production and consumption nodes are carried out by a fleet of vessels. The vessels have specific capacities and can be chartered under different agreements. The inventory levels of all consumption nodes and some production nodes should be maintained within specified bounds; for the remaining production nodes, orders should be picked up within pre-defined time windows. We propose a discrete-time mixed-integer programming model. In the face of new information and uncertainty, this optimization model has to be re-solved, as the horizon is rolled forward. We discuss how to account for different sources of uncertainty. We present a rolling-horizon reoptimization framework that allows us to study different policies that impact the quality of the implemented solution, so we can identify the optimal set of policies.     

The day of the week when you were born in 700 ms: Calendar computation in an autistic savant.

Some individuals are able to determine the weekday of a given date in a few seconds (finding for instance that June 12, 1900, was a Tuesday). This ability has fascinated scientists for many years because it is predominantly observed in people with limited intelligence and may appear very early in life. Exceptional visual memory, exceptional concentration abilities, or privileged access to lower levels of information not normally available through introspection have been advanced to explain such phenomena. In the present article, the authors show that a simple cognitive model can explain all aspects of the performance of Donny, a young autistic savant who is possibly the fastest and most accurate calendar prodigy ever described. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

E. H. Dirksens Beiträge zu den Grundlagen der Analysis

Enno Heeren Dirksen (1788–1850) was one of several mathematicians originating from Eastern Frisia at the end of the eighteenth century to acquire prominence in neohumanist reformed Prussia. While striving—like so many of his contemporaries—for more rigour in the foundations of calculus, his work is significant due to his unusual emphasis on the semiotic aspects of the basic concepts. As a clear-sighted propagator of Cauchy's conceptual innovations in Germany, his achievements in improving sign expressions of such concepts enabled him to clarify hitherto not differentiated multiple limit processes—although less successfully in constructive concept formation itself. The contribution is based on the analysis of Dirksen's published texts and on the numerous texts which remained drafts for his projected voluminousOrganon der gesamten Analysis.

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Menso Folkerts zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet     

On the origin of strain hardening in glassy polymers

The influence of network density on the strain hardening behaviour of amorphous polymers is studied. The network density of polystyrene is altered by blending with poly(2,6-dimethyl-1,4-phenylene-oxide) and by cross-linking during polymerisation. The network density is derived from the rubber-plateau modulus determined by dynamic mechanical thermal analysis. Subsequently uniaxial compression tests are performed to obtain the intrinsic deformation behaviour and, in particular, the strain hardening modulus. At room temperature, the strain hardening modulus proves to be proportional to the network density, irrespective of the nature of the network, i.e. physical entanglements or chemical cross-links. With increasing temperature, the strain hardening modulus is observed to decrease. This decrease appears to be related to the influence of thermal mobility of the chains, determined by the distance to the glass-transition temperature (T−T_g).