In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance

An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.     

New Solution Approaches to the General Single- Machine Earliness-Tardiness Problem

This paper addresses the general single-machine earliness-tardiness problem with distinct release dates, due dates, and unit costs. The aim of this research is to obtain an exact nonpreemptive solution in which machine idle time is allowed. In a hybrid approach, we formulate and then solve the problem using dynamic programming (DP), while incorporating techniques from branch-and-bound (BB). This approach (DP-BB) has been proven to be effective in solving certain types of scheduling problems. We further propose a new adaptation of the approach to a general problem with a nonregular objective function. To address some shortcomings of DP-BB, we also apply a BB approach in which partial dynamic programming dominance (BB-PDP) is exploited. Computational experiments were conducted with randomly generated test instances in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the two approaches. The results clearly showed that our new approaches can solve all the instances with up to 40 jobs and most of the instances with 50 jobs, which outperforms those frequently used approaches in scheduling research.     

Non-contact measurement of the mechanical properties of materials using an all-optical technique

Describes an optically-based measurement mechanism which realizes a totally noncontact assessment of the most important mechanical properties of structural materials - namely effective stiffness and Poisson ratio. These parameters are sensitive indicators of material integrity. The technique uses laser generated broadband ultrasound as a probe and interferometric optical detection as the detector again exploiting the broadband capability of optics in both space and time. Both detection and excitation systems are most conveniently realized in practical systems through optical fiber linkages. Observing the coupled waveforms between source and detector as a function of source: detector separation after a space : time Fourier transform yields a set of dispersion curves for the ultrasonic (typically Lamb wave) transfer function of the sample. This, in turn, can be inverted using curve fitting routines to obtain effective values of modulus and stiffness. An initial assessment of this inversion process is presented and demonstrates that the effective modulus can be extracted with a confidence level of better than a few percent with slightly larger errors in the Poisson ratio.     

Kinetics and mechanism of carbothermic reduction of magnesia

The reaction between MgO and graphite powders under flowing argon atmosphere was studied using a dynamic thermogravimetric method. In the temperature range 293 to 1973 K, the effects of compacting pressure, magnesia/carbon ratio, heating rate, Ar carrier-gas flow rate, and CO-partial pressure were investigated. An experimentally determined reaction mechanism was proposed and discussed. The reduction process could be divided into two stages. The first stage includes the direct reaction between MgO and graphite particles and partial gas-solid reaction at relatively low temperature (below 1750 K). The overall reaction rate depends on the solid phase-boundary reaction between magnesia and carbon particles. The second stage is the gas-solid reaction between CO and MgO, which determines the overall reaction rate. The apparent activation energies of the two stages were estimated to be 208.29 and 374.13 kJ/mol, respectively.     

柳钢混铁炉炉衬结构及运行管理的技改实践

针对混铁炉使用过程中出现的各种侵蚀状况，设计采用砖砌十浇注复合炉衬结构，特别对前墙拐角和后墙中段等侵蚀快的关键部位作了有针对性的技术改进；在运行管理上，制定推行全新的工艺操作规程，取得了显著的使用效果。     

Red Wine Polyphenols for Cancer Prevention

Conventional cancer therapies, the second leading cause of death worldwide, result in serious side effects and, at best, merely extend the patient''s lifespan by a few years. Searching for effective prevention is of high priority in both basic and clinical sciences. In recent decades natural products have been considered to be an important source of cancer chemopreventive agents. Red wine polyphenols, which consisted of various powerful antioxidants such as flavonoids and stilbenes, have been implicated in cancer prevention and that promote human health without recognizable side effects. Since resveratrol, a major component of red wine polyphenols, has been studied and reviewed extensively for its chemopreventive activity to interfere with the multi-stage carcinogenesis, this review focuses on recent progress in studies on cancer chemopreventive activities of red wine polyphenol extracts and fractions as well as other red wine polyphenols, like procyanidin B5 analogues and myricetin.     

一种转移脉冲宽度可调的CCD驱动电路

本文以TCD132D线阵CCD为例,介绍了一种用循环计数器和拨码开关共同作用改变CCD转移脉冲的CCD驱动电路。该电路结构简单,工作可靠,调整方便。     

Bound for Minkowski metric or quadratic metric applied to VQcodeword search

A bound for a Minkowski metric based on L_p distortion measure is proposed and evaluated as a means to reduce the computation in vector quantisation. This bound provides a better criterion than the absolute error inequality (AEI) elimination rule on the Euclidean distortion measure. For the Minkowski metric of order n, this bound contributes the elimination criterion from the L₁ metric to L _n metric. This bound can also be an extended quadratic metric which can be a hidden Markov model (HMM) with a Gaussian mixture probability density function (PDF). In speech recognition, the HMM with the Gaussian mixture VQ codebook PDF has been shown to be a promising method     

Modeling and design of an AC to DC converter

A step-up/down single-phase AC-to-DC power converter without current sensor is proposed to achieve high performance and simple control logic. The power converter adopts a front-end diode rectifier so that only one active switch is required. The familiar state-space averaging technique for discontinuous mode DC-to-DC power converters is extended to model the proposed AC-to-DC converter. Unlike the existing model, which is valid only for a very low frequency range, namely below line frequency, the proposed model is applicable up to half switching frequency. The design of the controller is detailed. Selected experimental results are presented to verify the proposed theory