Vehicle speed measurement: Cosine error correction

Although laser devices are commonly used to measure distances and vehicle speed in traffic safety-related studies, they suffer from a drawback known as the cosine effect. Furthermore, such traffic safety studies analyze both vehicle speed and a large amount of geographical data. As such, the development of efficient and cost-effective techniques for correcting the cosine error and managing the data involved in vehicle speed studies are needed. This paper presents an algorithm for correcting cosine error based on a Geographic Information System (GIS) that makes use of vehicle speed measurements and Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates. An experiment using more than 350 vehicle speeds was conducted to test the algorithm, and the case study shows that controlling the quality of laser-measured speeds in order to suppress low quality data or correct measurement errors due to the cosine effect is very useful.     

Gal3 Plays a Deleterious Role in a Mouse Model of Endotoxemia

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced endotoxemia induces an acute systemic inflammatory response that mimics some important features of sepsis, the disease with the highest mortality rate worldwide. In this work, we have analyzed a murine model of endotoxemia based on a single intraperitoneal injection of 5 mg/kg of LPS. We took advantage of galectin-3 (Gal3) knockout mice and found that the absence of Gal3 decreased the mortality rate oflethal endotoxemia in the first 80 h after the administration of LPS, along with a reduction in the tissular damage in several organs measured by electron microscopy. Using flow cytometry, we demonstrated that, in control conditions, peripheral immune cells, especially monocytes, exhibited high levels of Gal3, which were early depleted in response to LPS injection, thus suggesting Gal3 release under endotoxemia conditions. However, serum levels of Gal3 early decreased in response to LPS challenge (1 h), an indication that Gal3 may be extravasated to peripheral organs. Indeed, analysis of Gal3 in peripheral organs revealed a robust up-regulation of Gal3 36 h after LPS injection. Taken together, these results demonstrate the important role that Gal3 could play in the development of systemic inflammation, a well-established feature of sepsis, thus opening new and promising therapeutic options for these harmful conditions.     

Linking Drought Indicators to Policy Actions in the Tagus Basin Drought Management Plan

One crucial aspect of drought management plans is to establish a link between basin drought state and management actions. Basin state is described by a drought indicator system that includes variables like precipitation, streamflow, reservoir inflow, reservoir storage and groundwater piezometric levels. Basin policy consists on a catalogue of management actions, ranging from enforcing demand reduction strategies to establishing priority of users to allocate scarce water or approving emergency works. In this paper, the methodology applied in the Tagus Basin Drought Management Plan to link operational drought indicators to policy actions in regulated water supply systems is presented. The methodology is based on the evaluation of the probability of not being able to satisfy system demands for a given time horizon. A simplified model of every water resources system in the basin was built to evaluate the threshold of reservoir volume that is required to overcome the drought situation without deficit. For each reservoir level, a set of policy actions is proposed with the goal of guaranteeing essential demands during drought conditions. The methodology was validated with a simulation of system behavior for 60 years of historic streamflow series, finding acceptable results in most systems.     

English speakers attend more strongly than Spanish speakers to manner of motion when classifying novel objects and events.

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in a Spanish-speaking context at sorting novel, animated objects and events into categories on the basis of manner of motion, an attribute that is prominently marked in English but not in Spanish. In contrast, English and Spanish speakers performed similarly at classifying on the basis of path, an attribute that is prominently marked in both languages. Similar results were obtained regardless of whether categories were labeled by novel words or numbered, suggesting that an English-speaking tendency to focus on manner of motion is a general phenomenon and not limited to word learning. Effects of age of acquisition of English were also observed on the performance of bilinguals, with early bilinguals performing similarly in the 2 language contexts and later bilinguals showing greater contextual variation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

User-generated contents and reasoning-based personalization: Ingredients for a novel model of mobile TV

During the last years, we have witnessed the boom of the digital market due to the proliferation of emergent audiovisual services and the increasing number of broadband networks. In this scenario, users insistently demand innovative services for exchanging and sharing their own audiovisual contents. In order to meet these needs, in this paper we propose a system that broadcasts user-generated audiovisual contents for handheld devices in a mobile network based on the DVB-H broadcasting standard. Besides, our system offers diverse added-value services to these new active users, such as: (i) multi modal access (via Web or by client applications running locally in handheld devices) to digital contents, (ii) exploitation of return channels to transmit interactive contents that enhance the user’s experience, and (iii) annotation, sharing and personalized distribution of audiovisual contents. To achieve these goals, our system adopts well-known technologies for broadcasting and semantic annotation of audiovisual contents, as well as emergent technology from the so-called Web 2.0. A prototype of our system has been experimentally evaluated with a group of students from the University of Vigo, who were enthusiastic about the personalization capabilities offered by our TV system for a mobile setting.     

Palynological and physicochemical data characterisation of honeys produced in the Entre‐Douro e Minho region of Portugal

Honey legislation has been addressed to establish the minimum marketing level of the product and the need for consumer protection through correct denominations. Research oriented toward assessment of floral origin and physicochemical properties may increase the commercial value of these products. The characteristics of thirty‐one honeys produced in the Entre‐Douro e Minho region in Portugal were studied. Pollen features and some physicochemical parameters (moisture, ash, pH, free acidity, electrical conductivity, hydroxymethylfurfural contain, apparent sucrose, reducing sugars and diastase activity) were determined. The samples were found to meet international honey specifications. The present study found a linear regression between the ash content of honeys and their specific conductivity. Five samples are listed as Eucalyptus honey, one sample as Citrus honey, and twenty‐five samples as multifloral honeys. Of the total, 87.1% exceeded the quality parameters and should be labelled as ‘virgin’ honey.     

Effect of low nitrogen content on work hardening and microstructural evolution in Hadfield steel

Nitrogen content in austenitic manganese steels is usually not reported nor standardized. The present work has found that it typically ranges between 130 ppm and 200 ppm in solution. Microstructural evolution has been studied by optical microscopy, using mainly differential interference contrast mode. Work hardening was analyzed under compression conditions using Hollomon's fitting and Vickers microindentation hardness measurements at different deformation levels. Even low contents of nitrogen in solution exhibit a significant effect on the slope of stress–strain curves, with strain-hardening exponent values of 0.7, 0.57 and 0.41 for 720 ppm, 130 ppm and 71 ppm of nitrogen, respectively. It was also found that the nitrogen content influences the microstructure of deformed coarse grained polycrystalline austenite, leading to twining and shear bands at the upper level of nitrogen, while it was not clearly found in the samples with lower nitrogen content.