Adsorptive capacity of spray-dried pH-treated bentonite and kaolin powders for ammonium removal

The effectiveness of ammonium (NH₄⁺) adsorption was investigated, using spray-dried, pH-treated bentonite, and kaolin as adsorbents. Each powder's adsorption capacity towards NH₄⁺ was examined after up to 120 min of sample exposure, and results were compared. The zeta potential values for bentonite samples were between ?1.1 and ?19.4 mV, while for kaolin samples, they were between ?35.7 and ?40.9 mV (pH range examined was 2–10). The adsorption isotherm for bentonite showed a fit with the Langmuir model. The pH 10-treated bentonite and as-received bentonite (dispersed as pH 10 in distilled water) showed the highest adsorption capacity towards NH₄⁺. Meanwhile, for kaolin, the adsorption capacity was low and observed only at low NH₄⁺ concentration (100 mg/L and 200 mg/L), with pH 10-treated kaolin showed the highest adsorption capacity.     

Experiment on and analysis of mobile content transformation using XSLT

Much attention is being paid to the services that are accessed via the Internet from mobile phones and PDAs. For such mobile Internet services, the WAP Forum issued the WAP 2.0 standard based on IETF/W3C standards. WAP 2.0 adopted the subset of eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standardized by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as its markup language. The i‐mode service in Japan was launched in February 1999, and has acquired over 40 million users, as of January 2004. The markup language adopted in the i‐mode service is called i‐mode HTML, and was designed around Compact HTML. To ease the migration from i‐mode HTML to the WAP 2.0 markup language, the functional compatibility of the languages should be assured. To this end, we proposed functions unique to i‐mode HTML to the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum accepted all of our proposals. For making the migration more cost‐effective, software tools that support the transformation of i‐mode HTML content to the WAP 2.0 equivalents must be established. There are two approaches to content transformation: software‐based and rule‐based. Since the software‐based approach has some drawbacks such as a lack of extensibility and a lack of accountability, we have taken the rule‐based approach. We focused on eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) as the content transformation technique, because XSLT has been standardized by W3C for rule‐based transformation between XML contents. To technically verify the applicability of XSLT for content transformation from i‐mode HTML to the WAP 2.0 markup language, we performed an extensive XSLT transformation experiment using existing i‐mode service contents. In this paper, we describe content transformation using XSLT, overview the content transformation system, and analyze the results of the content transformation experiment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

斜入射液晶空间光调制器的特性

用读出光斜入射到液晶空间光调制器(LC-SLM)的读出面,是一种有效的提高空间光调制器(SLM)读出效率的方法。测量了读出光以不同角度入射到液晶空间光调制器的读出面上时,相位调制深度与写入光强的关系、衍射效率与二值光栅对比度的关系。得到随着入射角度的增加,最大相位调制深度减小,而衍射效率变化并不明显。在45°时有最大相位调制深度2.0936π和35.4%的正一级衍射效率。     

SEQUENCE-INDEXED LINEAR-TIME TEMPORAL LOGIC: PROOF SYSTEM AND APPLICATION

We propose a proof system for reasoning on certain specifications of secure authentication systems. For this purpose, a new logic, sequence-indexed linear-time temporal logic (SLTL), is obtained semantically from standard linear-time temporal logic (LTL) by adding a sequence modal operator that represents a sequence of symbols. By this sequence modal operator, we can appropriately express message flows between clients and servers and states of servers in temporal reasoning. A Gentzen-type sequent calculus for SLTL is introduced, and the completeness and cut-elimination theorems for it are proved. SLTL is also shown to be PSPACE-complete and embeddable into LTL.     

Synchronization between audiovisual and haptic feeling for constructing edutainment systems

Virtual reality (VR) technology has become more and more mature over the last decade. Development of a virtual environment for training purpose is considered to be one of the most practical applications of the VR technology. Since the VR technology involves all kinds of sensors in exchanging information between the real world and the virtual environment, it is computationally intensive in terms of data processing at an individual sensor and information integration among all the sensors. In general, the information integration has to be well synchronized in order to meet the training needs. At the same time, real-time processing capability is also considered to be critical. Many more practical issues could be uncovered only when a virtual training environment is actually being developed. Based on this belief, this study experiments on the development of a virtual environment for training billiards players. The technical difficulties encountered and the corresponding resolutions are considered beneficial to the development of other practical virtual training environments. This paper summarizes the design and implementation details about our experimental virtual training environment for edutainment systems such as virtual billiard game, virtual air hockey game and virtual drum performance with the algorithms for the synchronization of the information from different sources.     

Collaborative capturing, interpreting, and sharing of experiences

This paper proposes a notion of interaction corpus, a captured collection of human behaviors and interactions among humans and artifacts. Digital multimedia and ubiquitous sensor technologies create a venue to capture and store interactions that are automatically annotated. A very large-scale accumulated corpus provides an important infrastructure for a future digital society for both humans and computers to understand verbal/non-verbal mechanisms of human interactions. The interaction corpus can also be used as a well-structured stored experience, which is shared with other people for communication and creation of further experiences. Our approach employs wearable and ubiquitous sensors, such as video cameras, microphones, and tracking tags, to capture all of the events from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. We demonstrate an application of generating a video-based experience summary that is reconfigured automatically from the interaction corpus.

Quadruped virtual robot simulation in a virtual environment obeying physical laws

In the development of a robot, the validation of that robot with the use of real machinery takes a considerable amount of time and money. In particular, it is difficult to validate a robot’s behavior in an unsafe place. The developers also have to pay attention to virtual debugging. Using a program validated in VR space makes the verification of a real machine’s behavior more efficient. In this research, we make a virtual robot walk on a road autonomously by using a program where the virtual robot tracks a line in a virtual environment.     

Electrostatic separation of plastics by friction mixer with rotary blades

A mixture of plastic pellets or waste plastic pieces is electrostatically separated. The mixture is charged by friction in a mixer and falls through a horizontal electric field of 4 kV/cm into three zones under the field. A mixture of two kinds of plastic pellets is separated with a purity of not less than 90%. A mixture of three kinds of pellets is separated to some extent in the zones at the extreme ends in the first separation, according to the locations of the different kinds of pellets in the triboelectric charging sequence. This mixture will be separated in successive separations following the first one into the respective pellet types. A mixer made of suitable plastic material and adapted to enhance the friction between different kinds of pellets assures easy and reliable separation. Proper mixing time, a high rotational speed of the mixer, and low humidity increase the purity of the separated pellets. Since the effect of blended additives of pellets on charging characteristics appears with good reproducibility, pellets and waste plastic pieces with such additives may likewise be successively separated into the respective plastics. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Electr Eng Jpn, 127(3): 33–40, 1999     

Thermal degradation of poly(diethyl vinylphosphonate) and its copolymer

Thermal degradation of poly(diethyl vinylphosphonate) and diethyl vinylphosphonate/vinyl alcohol copolymer was investigated using thermogravimetry, infra-red spectroscopy and g.c.-mass spectrometry. For poly(diethyl vinylphosphonate), little chain scission occurred and the high stability may be attributed to POP crosslinkages between phsophonate units. With the diethyl vinylphosphonate/vinyl alcohol copolymer, the presence of hydroxyl groups in the polymer chains inhibited the formation of the POP crosslinkages. The main degradation products from the copolymer were aldehydes having the general formula HC(O)(CHCH)_nCH₃ and methyl ketones having the formula H₃CC(O)(CHCH)_nCH₃ and CH₃C(O)(CHCH)_nCHCH₂, where n = 1, 2, 3. The introduction of phosphonate unit into poly(vinyl alcohol) is less effective than that of phosphate unit in enhancement of thermal stability.