An assessment of simple referee methods for the prediction of lean in pig carcasses

A study was carried out in which carcass characteristics of 36 gilts were evaluated: 18 originated from the Hungarian 'Hungahyb' cross-breed, another 18, with undefined genetic background, from small private household plots. Two, rather simple substitute reference methods, called referee methods, were evaluated: measurement of carcass weight without skin and subcutaneous fat ('meat + bone'), and measurement of carcass weight without skin, subcutaneous fat and bone ('boneless meat'). Both methods gave a rather close relationship with the Kulmbach reference lean; however, removal of bone had presumably a beneficial effect on stability of prediction. The importance of preliminary information in quantitative form, giving a theoretical background for prediction equations, was presented as an example. Simple material balances could be formulated between reference lean and 'meat + bone' or 'boneless meat' content. Such material balances could not be set up with the indirect, rapid surrogate methods using mainly linear measurements (e.g. fat and muscle thickness, etc.) For this reason, as several other publications demonstrated, these latter methods seem to be more susceptible to bias than the referee methods. By determining the lipid content of the homogenised 'boneless meat' component, a 'lean' value adjusted to 3% fat content could be calculated from data which was compared to the dissected reference lean standardised also to contain 3% fat. These relationships, for several reasons discussed in this paper, were not as close as expected. So, further studies are needed to reveal these discrepancies.     

On minimum cost isolated failure immune networks

A telecommunications network is isolated failure immune (IFI) if and only if communication between operative sites can be completed as long as network failures are isolated. It is known that the class of minimal IFI networks is equivalent to the class of spanning 2-trees. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first computational study dealing with the construction of a minimum cost IFI network. The problem is known to be NP-complete. We develop a tabu search based heuristic for solving the minimum cost spanning 2-tree (MCS2T) problem. The complex structure of 2-trees makes the tabu search heuristic highly dependent on the starting solution. We develop four heuristic algorithms to obtain diversified good starting solutions. They are: completion of a 2-tree from a spanning tree, two greedy approaches, and a method based on the recursive definition of a 2-tree. We also formulate an integer programming problem (IP) whose objective function value is a lower bound to the MCS2T problem. We solve the IP by developing a constraint generation scheme. The algorithms were tested on complete random graphs with Euclidean distances and on two real data sets (Civil Aeronautics Board) with instances of 10, 15, 20 and 25 nodes. As a result of this research for small problems (10 and 15 nodes), the heuristic solutions are on average within 0.8% from the optimal solution and for large problems (20 and 25 nodes), the average error is less than 2.8%.     

Automatic three-dimensional spectrogoniometer for determination of optical properties and surface parameters

An automatic three-dimensional spectrogoniometer is presented. The wavelength of ligth and angles of incidence and observation are variable, making it capable of performing different optical characterizations in an integrated way.     

Plasma-enhanced fluorination of YBa2Cu3O7−δ ceramics

The radiofrequency plasma technique involving mixtures of CF₄+O₂ gases has been applied to the surface treatment of high T_c superconducting oxides (YBa₂Cu₃O_7–). Investigation of the various experimental parameters of the process has shown that the improvement of the critical current density, J _c, mainly depends on the inlet precursor composition CF₄+%O₂, on the total pressure and on the reaction time. The presence of fluorine in the bulk of the ceramics has been observed from electron microprobe analysis, together with an increase of the Cu³⁺ content. The plasma-enhanced fluorination (PEF) treatment improves the superconducting properties of the materials: both values of the resistivity in the normal state and of the superconducting transition width are reduced and the critical transition temperature is improved by about 1 K.     

Phosphofructokinase from mantle tissue of Mytilus galloprovincialis. Purification and effects of phosphorylation on the enzymatic activity

Phosphofructokinase purified from mantle tissue of the sea mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis, was phosphorylated "in vitro" by the catalytic subunit of cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase. The incorporation of phosphate gave rise to an activation of the enzyme by increasing its affinity for fructose-6-phosphate, by decreasing its sensitivity to the inhibition by ATP and by enhancing the effect of allosteric activators (5'-AMP and fructose-2,6-bisphosphate). In addition, the effects of phosphorylation on the catalytic activity are pH-dependent.     

Network flow and 2-satisfiability

We present two algorithms for network flow on networks with infinite capacities and finite integer supplies and demands. The first algorithm runs inO(mK) time on networks withm edges, whereK=O(m²/log⁴ m) is the value of the optimal flow, and can also be applied to the capacitated case by lettingK be the sum of thefinite capacities alone. The second algorithm runs inO(wm logK) time for arbitraryK, where w is a new parameter, thewidth of the network. These algorithms as well as other uses of the notion of width lead to results for several questions on the 2-satisfiability problem: minimizing the weight of a solution, finding the transitive closure, recognizing partial solutions, enumerating all solutions. The results have applications to stable matching, wherew corresponds to the number of people andm to the instance size (usuallym w²).     

3D-line clipping algorithms — a comparative study

Some well-known line-polyhedron intersection methods are summed up and new accelerating modifications presented. Results of comparison of known and newly developed methods are included. New methods use the fact that each line can be described as the intersection of two planes.     

Valence band density of states of small cobalt particles on Si(111) substrate

Small Co particles were prepared by sputter etching of a 4–5 nm thick island-like Co film deposited on Si(111) substrate. The density of states (DOS) of the valence band was measured by means of ultraviolet photoemission (UPS) during the sputter etching to monitor the formation of small Co particles. It was found that at a given thickness of the Co island the Fermi level was shifted by 1.8-1.9 eV toward higher binding energy and theDOS decreased or no states were detectable at the Fermi level. This effect was explained by the formation of small Co particles with electronic structure which is significantly different from that of the bulk Co.     

Minimum cost design of laterally loaded welded rectangular cellular plates

Material and fabrication costs are included in the cost function. The fabrication cost is calculated by three formulae relating to the preparation, welding and additional costs. The design constraints are related to bending stresses, the local buckling of ribs due to bending and shear and to the limitation of the plate thicknesses. The local buckling of the compressed face plate elements is considered by an effective width calculation. In the numerical examples, the variables are the plate dimensions and the numbers of ribs in two directions. The optimization is carried out for steel Fe 360 and Fe 510 and for various values of the fabrication cost factor. The computations are performed by using the backtrack discrete combinatorial method, Rosenbrock's Hillclimb method and the FSQP method developed by Zhou and Tits (1992), and the results are compared with each other.Partly presented at the international conference Structural Optimization '93, Rio de Janeiro, August 2–6, 1993.     

Hydrogenation of aromatics under mild conditions on transition metal complexes in zeolites. A cooperative effect of molecular sieves

The hydrogenation of aromatics, i.e. benzene, toluene, -methylstyrene, anisole, and ethyl benzoate, can be carried out under a very low (1/12000) catalyst to substrate ratio, and mild reaction conditions (80°C, 6 atm of H₂O), on Rh and Ni organometallic complexes anchored on USY zeolites. A strong cooperative effect between the faujasite surface and the transition metal surface complex is thought to be responsible for the simultaneous enhancement of concentrations of arene and H₂ in the neighborhood of the catalytic centers, and for the observed electronic effects.