Spherical sample holders to improve the susceptibility measurement of superparamagnetic materials

The design of two custom sample holders with a spherical cavity for commercial vibrating sample magnetometer systems is described. For such cavities, the magnetization M[over ->] and the internal magnetic field H(i)[over ->] of a sample are both homogeneous. Consequently, the material parameter M(H(i)) of a sample can be determined even for liquids and powders with a high magnetic susceptibility.     

Intelligent product search with soft-boundary preference relaxation

This paper proposes a novel method for preference relaxation in online product search, which enables consumers to make quality choices without suffering from the commonly experienced information overload. In online shopping scenarios that involve multi-attribute choice tasks, it can be difficult for consumers to process the vast amounts of information available and to make satisfactory buying decisions. In such situations consumers are likely to eliminate potentially good choices early on, using hard-constraint filtering tools. Our approach uses edge sets to identify the alternatives on the soft boundary and the principle of alternative domination to suppress the alternatives on this boundary that are irrelevant. We demonstrate how our approach outperforms existing methods for product search in a set of simulations using two sets of 2650 car advertisements and 1813 digital cameras gathered from a popular online store.     

Correlations of the craze profile in PMMA with Dugdale's plastic zone profile

The craze opening profile in PMMA has been determined as a function of stress intensity using interference optics and a special wedge loading device. An attempt was made to correlate the craze profile with the corresponding parameters (crack opening displacement and plastic zone length) predicted by the Dugdale model. Over the mid-range of stress intensities (K _I=0.4 to 1.0 MPa m^1/2), samples which were annealed after precracking were found to exhibit a profile similar in shape but smaller than that predicted by the Dugdale model. The lower limit of this range marks the critical stress intensity for crazing in PMMA. Both the craze length and the opening at the craze-crack interface increase with increasing stress intensity and, due to strain-hardening of the craze material, reach maximum values of about 40m and 3m respectively atK _I=1.0 MPa m^1/2. Experimental uncertainties cannot account for the profile difference and it is therefore concluded that the Dugdale model is not fully adequate to describe craze geometries in PMMA. The discrepency between the Dugdale model and the experimental data is suggested to be due to either fibril strain-hardening and/or the formation of a plane strain plastic zone ahead of the craze.     

Bioactive ceramic coatings containing carbon nanotubes on metallic substrates by electrophoretic deposition

A range of potentially bioactive ceramic coatings, based on combinations of either hydroxyapatite (HA) or titanium oxide nanoparticles with carbon nanotubes (CNTs), have been deposited on metallic substrates, using electrophoretic deposition (EPD). Sol–gel derived, ultrafine HA powders (10–70 nm) were dispersed in multi-wall nanotube-containing ethanol suspensions maintained at pH = ∼3.5 and successfully coated onto Ti alloy wires at 20 V for 1–3 min For TiO₂/CNT coatings, commercially available titania nanopowders and surface-treated CNTs in aqueous suspensions were co-deposited on stainless steel planar substrates. A field strength of 20 V/cm and deposition time of 4 min were used working at pH = 5. Although the co-deposition mechanism was not investigated in detail, the evidence suggests that co-deposition occurs due to the opposite signs of the surface charges (zeta potentials) of the particles, at the working pH. Electrostatic attraction between CNTs and TiO₂ particles leads to the creation of composite particles in suspension, consisting of TiO₂ particles homogenously attached onto the surface of individual CNTs. Under the applied electric field, these net negatively charged “composite TiO₂/CNT” elements migrate to and deposit on the anode (working electrode). The process of EPD at constant voltage conditions was optimised in both systems to achieve homogeneous and reasonably adhered deposits of varying thicknesses on the metallic substrates_.     

城市污水回用于电站锅炉补给水的动态模拟试验研究

用经深度处理后再经二级除盐系统处理的城市污水作为试验水源，动态模拟电站锅炉的运行工况，考查其在高温高压条件下水汽品质的变化情况。结果．表明：虽然经二级除盐处理后的再生污水，其水质指标完全满足锅炉补充水的水质标准，但在高温高压工况下仍有低分子有机酸等分解产物出现，故认为利用城市污水作为锅炉补给水水源仍需谨慎。     

Scenario-oriented design for single-chip heterogeneous multiprocessors

Single-chip heterogeneous multiprocessors (SCHMs) are arising to meet the computational demands of portable and handheld devices. These computing systems are not fully custom designs traditionally targeted by the design automation community, general-purpose designs traditionally targeted by the computer architecture community, nor pure embedded designs traditionally targeted by the real-time community. An entirely new design philosophy will be needed for this hybrid class of computing. The programming of the device will be drawn from a narrower set of applications with execution that persists in the system over a longer period of time than for general-purpose programming. However, the devices will still be programmable, not only at the level of the individual processing element, but across multiple processing elements and even the entire chip. The design of other programmable single chip computers has enjoyed an era where the design tradeoffs could be captured in simulators such as SimpleScalar and performance could be evaluated to the SPEC benchmarks. Motivated by this, we describe new benchmark-based design strategies for SCHMs which we refer to as scenario-oriented design. We include an example and results.     

Performance of Alcohol and Safer Sex Change Rulers Compared With Readiness to Change Questionnaires.

As part of a larger intervention study, the authors hypothesized that change rulers created for alcohol and safer sex would be equivalent to longer questionnaires. Ninety-six male college students completed rulers and questionnaires for assessing behavior change readiness. Participants' scores on the rulers significantly correlated with their scores on the questionnaires (r = .77 for alcohol; r = .77 for safer sex). In both domains, the rulers outperformed the questionnaires in predicting behavioral intentions, suggesting that the rulers had at least comparable concurrent criterion validity. This finding is the first of its kind in the safe sex literature and suggests that quick assessments of readiness to change are possible. Because the rulers are a continuous measure, the results are consistent with the idea that the change process is continuous rather than a series of discrete stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)