Safety approach in the EU test blanket systems design

This paper reveals the safety strategy and approach developed and followed in the design of the two EU TBS describing its objectives, components and implementation. Addressing the safety in the early stage of the conceptual design of nuclear facilities is a well recognized international practice and industrial project-level requirement for the successful completion of the licensing process within expected project cost and schedule. The impact of the early development of the safety approach, its implementation and monitoring in the design of nuclear device like the TBS is not limited to the safety assessment and licensing activities only. Safety approach plays indispensible role in reducing the overall project risk. It infiltrates the entire design process through the unavoidable interfaces between the design features and its safety level. In reality the entire process of the TBS development, design, technological demonstration and implementation is affected by the project team safety culture.     

Power efficient SDS motion estimation architecture using dynamic iteration control and hierarchical adder compressors for real time HDTV video coding

This paper presents a high performance, power efficient and low hardware cost architecture for motion estimation (ME) targeting portable consumer applications. This hardware uses the Sub-sampled Diamond Search algorithm (SDS) with a Dynamic Iteration Control (DIC). The SDS–DIC algorithm can significantly reduce the number of SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) calculations for block matching, thus enabling the development of an efficient hardware design for the ME. The DIC technique allows for the required throughput to be achieved with a restriction in the number of iterations, which contributes to the reduction in the overall number of clock cycles needed for the motion vector calculation. The processing units (PU) of the ME were developed by using efficient hierarchical adder-compressors, where simultaneous additions of more than two operands can be performed. The results we present show that, by using both the adder compressors in the PU and the DIC technique, it is possible to obtain an efficient ME architecture with higher performance and reduced power consumption. The architecture that implements this algorithm and the PUs was described in VHDL. Hardware synthesis results are presented for a 0.18 μm CMOS standard cell library. The architecture can reach real time for HDTV 1080p with less than 40 mW of power consumption.     

A mathematical model for the prediction of water vapour transmission rate at different temperature and relative humidity combinations

A simple mathematical procedure for the estimation of water vapour transmission rate under different conditions is presented and discussed. The ASTM dynamic and gravimetric methods were used for measuring the water vapour transmission rate of four thin plastic films (PET 19 μm, PVC 16 μm, EVA 15 μm and LDPE 23 μm) under 38 different conditions of temperature and relative humidity and the corresponding permeance values were drawn. On the basis of the Clausius Clapeyron's relationship between temperature and water vapour pressure, a simple equation was derived for a rapid transformation of water vapour transmission rate data. The mathematical procedure was applied to the data collected for the four thin films and good agreement was found between observed and predicted values for the PET and LDPE films, while for the PVC and EVA films the equation developed led to an overestimate of water vapour transmission at the lower temperatures.     

A new signalling format for optical communications

A combined pulse-amplitude/pulse-position modulation tachnique is proposed for digital optical communication systems. Evaluations of its behaviour in terms of coding efficiency, spectral density, timing information content, and error probability are summarised. Alternative receiving schemes are devised to improve system performance.     

Cholesterol cholelithiasis. A clinical case

The Authors present a case of cholesterinic cholelithiasis, in a patient 13 years of age. The case is interesting because the cholesterol gallstones are uncommon in childhood, with women showing a higher prevalence than men.     

Aggression and social experience in domesticated rats.

Conducted an experiment with 48 male and 28 female Long-Evans rats. Small colonies were established, using adult Ss that had either received continuous social experience or had been isolated since weaning. Unfamiliar intruder rats-with or without postweaning social experience-were exposed individually to the colonies for a 21-hr period. Behavioral observations and an assessment of the intruder's physical condition indicated that serious fighting, physical injuries, and large weight losses occurred only when an isolation-reared intruder was placed into a colony of socially experienced Ss. Results demonstrate that aggression is a joint function of the rearing history of both the colony and the intruder and that social experience plays an important role in the behavioral development of this species. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Evaluating two implementations of the component responsible for decoding video and audio in the Brazilian digital TV middleware

The project Ginga Code Development Network (GingaCDN) was created to implement a reference version of Ginga, the Brazilian Digital Television System (SBTVD) middleware, supporting the declarative GingaNCL and the procedural GingaJ environments in the same middleware. To reach that, a common core is being implemented, named Ginga Common Core (GingaCC). One of the main components of the GingaCC is the one responsible to decode audio and video streams, called Media Processing. In this work, two Media Processing implementations using libVLC and Xine graphical libraries are investigated. Performance tests and results of both Media Processing implementations running in two different desktop architectures are discussed.     

Pollution of mussels by particulate lead from sea water

Summary The accumulation of > 0.8 gm lead containing, suspended particles from polluted sea water in mussel (Mytillus galloprovincialis Lamarck) was studied. Lead was determined in the ash of the edible part of the mussel by a voltammetric macromethod. Atomic absorption spectroscopy was used for determining particulate lead in sea water. The statistically significant linear regression, observed for lead in mussel on lead in sea water, indicates that a fraction of lead found in the mollusc has a particulate origin, with an enrichment factor of about 2300.

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Verunreinigungen von Miesmuscheln durch bleihaltige Partikel aus Seewasser

Zusammenfassung Die Aufnahme von bleihaltigen Partikeln aus verunreinigtem Seewasser durch Miesmuscheln (Mytilus galloprorincialis Lamarck) wurde untersucht. Der Bleigehalt wurde in der Asche des Muschelfleisches durch eine voltammetrische Methode sowie in (> 0.8 m Partikeln) aus Seewasser durch Atomabsorptionsspektroskopie bestimmt. Der Bleigehalt der Miesmuscheln korreliert mit dem Bleigehalt des Seewassers, wobei der Anreicherungsfaktor ungefähr 2300 beträgt.

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Research performed with the financial support of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Roma), Contract n. 77.00009.10-115.38.04.     

How natural is a natural interface? An evaluation procedure based on action breakdowns

This paper describes an issue-based method to evaluate the naturalness of an interface. The method consists of the execution of a series of tasks on that interface, which is subsequently systematically analyzed to identify breakdowns in the users’ actions. The systematic analysis of breakdowns is allowed by the support of video-coding software (The Observer by Noldus). This method is described on its theoretical bases and then applied to the evaluation of a natural interface, a walk-in-place locomotion system for virtual spaces called Superfeet. The procedure is comparative, since Superfeet is compared to two locomotion devices, Superfeet enhanced with headtracker and a more traditional Joypad. The test involves 36 participants (mean age = 23.68, SD = 3.14). The outcomes of the breakdown analysis are illustrated at a progressively finer level of granularity from the amount and length of breakdowns, to the circumstances of the breakdowns, to the type of actions involved in the breakdowns. The potential of this procedure for usability studies is finally synthesized.     

Amplitude vs intensity Bayesian despeckling in the wavelet domain for SAR images

In this paper, the problem of despeckling SAR images when the input data is either an intensity or an amplitude signal is revisited. State-of-the-art despeckling methods based on Bayesian estimators in the wavelet domain, recently proposed in the literature, are taken into consideration. First, how these methods proposed for one format (e.g., intensity) can be adapted to the other format (e.g., amplitude) is investigated. Second, the performance of such algorithms in both cases is analyzed. Experimental results carried out on simulated speckled images and on true SAR data are presented and discussed in order to assess the best strategy. From these results, it can be observed that filtering in the amplitude domain yields better performances in terms of objective quality indexes, such as preservation of structural details, as well as in terms of visual inspection of the filtered SAR data.