Mobile Fair Diary: hybrid interface for taking,browsing and sharing context-aware notes

This paper describes the Mobile Fair Diary (MFD), which is designed to allow a housing fair customer to make a personalized digital recording of his/her visit to a hectic fairground for later use. The MFD is a hybrid interface service comprising of an application for a camera equipped smart phone and a website accessed by a PC. The smart phone application is used for taking context-aware notes such as visual codes, photos, dictations and text. The notes are uploaded onto a website, where they can be viewed with a PC in a contextually ordered view for browsing, organizing and sharing. The MFD was empirically evaluated in a real-life environment of use with genuine end users by a large-scale field trial at a national housing fair. The results testify to the very successful design of the MFD with high usefulness.     

Transactive memory systems.

The literature on transactive memory (TM) continues to grow in several interrelated scholarly fields. Although this increased interest in TM systems has been beneficial, it has also led to a plurality and confusing interpretation of TM theory. To identify gaps and ambiguities in TM literature, this article provides a comprehensive overview of TM theory, distinguishes TM systems from related cognitive concepts, and reviews theory extensions and research in dyads, groups, and teams. Suggested areas for future research and theory extensions are face-to-face communication influencing TM systems, social interaction processes related to expert inferences, task context and levels of analysis, and extension of research to work teams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Printable and flexible macroporous organosilica film with high protein adsorption capacity

An approach for creating a flexible and macroporous silsesquioxane film using phase separation method is described. The porous film was prepared by a simple coating method where sol-gel solution containing polyacrylic acid (PAA) and 1,6-bis(trimethoxysilyl)hexane in water was applied on boehmite silica coated polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) film. After drying, the water soluble PAA template was removed by washing the film with water revealing the porous film. With certain ratios of PAA and water, fully co-continuous pore system with open surface was obtained. Porous films with 3-4 μm thickness were found to be highly flexible. The biocompatibility of the porous film was tested by immobilizing a high affinity biotin-binding chimeric avidin (ChiAVD(I117Y)) into the porous matrix The porous film was found to adsorb higher amounts of functional chimeric avidin compared to the pure PMMA film or a boehmite silica coated PMMA film.     

Remote sensing and GIS for detecting changes in the aquatic vegetation of a rehabilitated lake

Remote sensing and geographical information system (GIS) methods combined with ground estimations were used to assess the effects of rehabilitation on the aquatic vegetation of a shallow, eutrophic lake in Finland. Aerial photograph interpretation was used to study the distribution of aquatic vegetation before (1953, 1996) and after (2001) rehabilitation in 1997. A digital elevation model was derived to relate the change in the aquatic vegetation to water depth. In addition, changes in the biomass of the most abundant species of the lake, Common Club-rush (Schoenoplectus lacustris), were studied by means of a regression analysis relating the ground estimations to the reflectance values (R ²=0.889, p@lt;0.001). The results indicated that the objective of the rehabilitation--to stop the overgrowth process--has at least temporarily been achieved. After rehabilitation the most noticeable change had taken place in the area covered by floating-leaved vegetation. Greater proportional changes in the aquatic vegetation areas had occurred in the deep rather than in the shallow areas. A decrease in biomass of Common Club-rush was estimated to be 30% due to rehabilitation. The use of remote sensing and GIS provided valuable information on temporal and spatial changes in the aquatic vegetation, and the methods could be applied more extensively for lake monitoring purposes.     

Antarctic ice sheet and sea ice regional albedo and temperature change, 1981-2000, from AVHRR Polar Pathfinder data

Spring-summer (November, December, January) ice sheet and sea ice regional surface albedo, surface temperature, sea ice concentration and sea ice extent averages and trends from 1981 to 2000 have been calculated for the Antarctic area. In this research the AVHRR Polar Pathfinder 5-km EASE-Grid Composites and the combined SMMR and SSMI data sets from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado have been employed. A regional analysis has been made for five longitudinal sectors around Antarctica: the Weddell Sea (WS), the Indian Ocean (IO), the Pacific Ocean (PO), the Ross Sea (RS) and the Bellingshausen-Amundsen Sea (BS). The IO and PO sectors show ice sheet albedos of 0.85 and temperatures of − 25 °C. The corresponding values in the RS and BS sectors are 0.80 and − 16 °C respectively. The sea ice albedo is about 0.60 in the RS, BS and WS sectors and 0.55 in the IO and PO sectors. The average sea ice temperature varies around − 12 °C. All the sectors show slight increasing spring-summer albedo trends and decreasing spring-summer temperature trends and similar interannual variability in albedo and surface temperature. The steepest ice sheet albedo trend of 0.0019 ± 0.0009/yr is found in the RS sector. The steepest sea ice albedo trend of 0.0044 ± 0.0017 /yr occurs in the PO sector. The steepest temperature trends for both the ice sheet and sea ice occur in the BS sector, having values of − 0.075 ± 0.040 °C/yr and − 0.107 ± 0.027 °C/yr respectively. The sea ice concentration shows slight increasing trends, the highest being in the PO sector (0.3 ± 0.12%/yr), whereas the sea ice extent trends are near zero with the exception of the RS sector (14,700 ±8600 km²/yr) and the BS sector (− 13,000 ± 6400 km²/yr).     

Quality index framework for plant-wide performance evaluation

The complexity of industrial production plants results in difficulties in obtaining an overall view of plant performance and in finding the weak links that deteriorate performance and product quality. While control loop performance assessment is a popular subject, few authors address the problem of combining low-level performance indices into subsystem and plant level indices. This paper presents a performance assessment framework enabling the creation of different views to plant performance. In the proposed method, low-level performance indices are scaled to the same interval so that their interpretation, comparison, and combination are more straightforward. Different methods for combining low-level indices to create subsystem and plant level performance measures are studied. Implementation in a large-scale industrial process is described.     

Elastic-plastic finite element analysis of dynamic fracture

Recent evidence has pointed to the possible inadequacy of elastodynamic treatments of rapid crack propagation and crack arrest. This paper describes the development of a dynamic elastic-plastic finite element capability designed to address this concern by taking direct account of crack tip plasticity. Comparisons with known dynamic fracture mechanics solutions and with experimental data are made to demonstrate the fidelity of the approach. A comparison with an elastodynamic solution in an impact loaded 4340 steel bend specimen is also made. This result reveals that a significant effect of crack tip plasticity may exist even for high strength materials.