Work Standardization at High-Tech Enterprises in the Digital Era

Russian Engineering Research - Work standardization at Russian high-tech enterprises is considered, in the digital era. The new possibilities created by the digital economy permit increased...     

Neuro-semantic prediction of user decisions to contribute content to online social networks

Neural Computing and Applications - Understanding at microscopic level the generation of contents in an online social network (OSN) is highly desirable for an improved management of the OSN and the...     

Key factors that influence the UX of a dual-player game for the cognitive stimulation and motor rehabilitation of older adults

Universal Access in the Information Society - In this work, the results of usability and user experience (UX) evaluation of a serious video game for the cognitive stimulation and motor...     

Execution profiling blueprints

Although traditional approaches to code profiling help locate performance bottlenecks, they offer only limited support for removing these bottlenecks. The main reason is the lack of detailed visual runtime information to identify and eliminate computation redundancy. We provide three profiling blueprints that help identify and remove performance bottlenecks. The structural distribution blueprint graphically represents the CPU consumption share for each method and class of an application. The behavioral distribution blueprint depicts the distribution of CPU consumption along method invocations and hints at method candidates for caching optimizations. The behavioral evolution blueprint compares profiles of different versions of a software system and highlights performance‐critical changes in the system. These three blueprints helped us to significantly optimize Mondrian, an open source visualization engine. Our implementation is freely available for the Pharo development environment and has been evaluated in a number of different scenarios. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental study and analytical modeling of an alkaline water electrolysis cell

A traditional alkaline aqueous electrolyzer is investigated by using a 3‐electode structure that enables the reaction resistance of each individual electrode to be accurately monitored. Combining experimental observations with resistance‐based model analysis, we establish a quantitative relationship between current density and key voltage losses, including losses due to thermodynamics, kinetics, ohmic, and mass transport. These results demonstrate that the oxygen evolution reaction and bubble effects play crucial roles in determining electrolyzer performance. By varying the distance between electrodes, 2 effective OH^? conductivities in 0.4M KOH are found to be 0.1333 and 0.9650 second cm^?1, depending on bubble formation and release rate at the electrode interface. Moreover, bubble coverage on electrode surface achieves a steady state of 96% when current density is above 0.1 A cm^?2. In the study of various electrolyte concentrations, all the model predictions show good agreement with experimental results, confirming its ability to capture actual cell performance. This newly presented empirical resistance‐based model provides a practical framework to simulate complicated electrolysis reactions, serving as a comprehensive guide for continuous improvement of water electrolysis.     

GAS holdup and RTD measurement in an industrial flotation cell

In this work, the measurement of the axial gas holdup profile and gas residence time distribution (RTD), in a 130 m³ self-aerated flotation cell, is presented. For this purpose, a radioactive tracer gas was activated in the Nuclear Reactor of the Chilean Commission of Nuclear Energy.The gas tracer, Freon 13B1, was injected as an impulse signal at the gas (air) inlet point, located at the top of the cell, from which the gas tracer circulates first through the rotor, where the bubble dispersion occurs, and then the gas becomes well distributed over the whole cross-sectional area before leaving the cell.The axial gas holdup profile was estimated from the transient gas concentration measurement at different depths inside the cell. From these experiments it was found that the air entering the cell was preferentially distributed in the upper half of the cell, while the gas entrainment into tailings was negligible. The mean gas holdup was 8.8%, and consequently the effective pulp volume of collection zone was 91.2%.The gas concentration on top of froth was recorded for RTD measurement of the gas leaving the cell. It was found that the mean gas residence time was around 42 s and the mixing condition for gas and pulp was similar.     

Interpolating datasets with trends: A modified median polish approach

This article investigates an alternative method to deal with data sets in the presence of trends. Median polish kriging (MPK) was introduced as an alternative solution to universal kriging or intrinsic random functions of order k (IRF-k) for estimation in the presence of trends. The maps obtained using the original MPK algorithm show banding artefacts which do not appear in the reference data set. A modified version of MPK was introduced to attempt to remove the banding artefacts. The results confirm the improvement in quality of estimate using the modified version of MPK (called MPKm), which takes into account the problems of clustered samples and boundary effect associated with the re-addition of the trend along bands. The variation introduced in the median polish algorithm proved to be satisfactory in eliminating the artefacts.     

On the notion of architectural hybridisation in Latin America

The notions of hybridity and of hybridisation have been used in so many contexts, and in such diverse senses that their definition has become unclear. They are associated with the inevitable process of cultural merging that results from the simultaneity of our global culture. They are also associated with debates on migration, diaspora, global economy, and information technology. Although hybridisation is not the only term that has been used to describe and to analyse transcultural processes, it appears to be adequate to examine the nature and dynamics of the current situation of Latin American architecture. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the notion of hybridisation has been thoroughly mistaken within recent architectural debates in Latin America. This is mainly due to the fact that theorists have limited themselves largely to an architectural field, and have failed to engage sufficiently with a broader range of cultural issues. As a consequence, the notion of hybridisation has lost political efficacy and has been reduced to a problem of aesthetic syncretism, which is exactly what architectural hybridisation, as a cultural concept, is not.