Is the List of Incomplete Open Cubes Complete?

Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes is the major project by the twentieth-century conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. In this paper we interpret the enumerative component of the project as embeddings of graphs. This formulation permits use of an algorithm to check the completeness of the list of the structures produced by the artist. Our conclusion is that the artist found the correct number of structures (that is, 122), but that his list contains a mistake in the presentation of a pair of incomplete cubes, a discovery that appears not to have been noted before.     

Regulation of sensory nerve conduction velocity of human bodies responding to annual temperature variations in natural environments

The extensive research interests in environmental temperature can be linked to human productivity / performance as well as comfort and health; while the mechanisms of physiological indices responding to temperature variations remain incompletely understood. This study adopted a physiological sensory nerve conduction velocity (SCV) as a temperature‐sensitive biomarker to explore the thermoregulatory mechanisms of human responding to annual temperatures. The measurements of subjects’ SCV (over 600 samples) were conducted in a naturally ventilated environment over all four seasons. The results showed a positive correlation between SCV and annual temperatures and a Boltzmann model was adopted to depict the S‐shaped trend of SCV with operative temperatures from 5°C to 40°C. The SCV increased linearly with operative temperatures from 14.28°C to 20.5°C and responded sensitively for 10.19°C‐24.59°C, while tended to be stable beyond that. The subjects’ thermal sensations were linearly related to SCV, elaborating the relation between human physiological regulations and subjective thermal perception variations. The findings reveal the body SCV regulatory characteristics in different operative temperature intervals, thereby giving a deeper insight into human autonomic thermoregulation and benefiting for built environment designs, meantime minimizing the temperature‐invoked risks to human health and well‐being.     

增效过磷酸钙的增效机制及其对玉米生长的影响

利用猪毛、风化煤和腐植酸钠的水解液为增效剂制备了一种增效过磷酸钙,探讨了增效过磷酸钙的增效机制及其对玉米生长的影响。结果表明,蒸馏水浸提条件下,增效过磷酸钙能减缓水溶磷的释放,具备较高的pH值缓冲性。与普通过磷酸钙相比,增效过磷酸钙处理的玉米生物量平均增加了41.9%,吸磷量和吸钙量分别增加了61.7%和27.8%,根系活力增加了24.3%。该研究结果对过磷酸钙生产的技术改进具有指导意义。     

Semantic word shifts in a scientific domain

Understanding semantic word shifts in scientific domains is essential for facilitating interdisciplinary communication. Using a data set of published papers in the field of information retrieval (IR), this paper studies the semantic shifts of words in IR based on mining per-word topic distribution over time. We propose that semantic word shifts not only occur over time, but also over topics. The shifts are examined from two perspectives, the topic-level and the context-level. According to the over-time word-topic distribution, stable words and unstable words are recognized. The diverging and converging trends in the unstable type reveal characteristics of the topic evolution process. The context-level shifts are further detected by similarities between word vectors. Our work associates semantic word shifts with the evolving of topics, which facilitates a better understanding of semantic word shifts from both topics and contexts.     

Do funded papers attract more usage?

Research funding has been seen as one of the most important resource in the reward system of science. And usage of publications denotes an interesting perspective of user behavior in scientific communication. This study aims to address the relationship between funding and Usage Count, which is a new metrics item established on the platform of Web of Science. Full records of 300,010 articles published in 2013 were downloaded in October 2015, and divided into six disciplines, including information science library science, education educational research, economics, computer science, materials science, and chemistry. Seven indicators were proposed to measure the impact, including Funding rate, Citation per paper, Usage rate, Usage per paper, Citation difference, Usage difference, and Conversion rate. It concluded funding has impact on usage and citation, and funded papers attract more usage, but varying in different disciplines. Usage Count can be used in the extension of citation metrics but with limits. This study originally engages with usage metrics and detected that there is positive correlation between usage and funding.     

A multi-criteria context-sensitive approach for social image collection summarization

Recent increase in the number of digital photos in the content sharing and social networking websites has created an endless demand for techniques to analyze, navigate, and summarize these images. In this paper, we focus on image collection summarization. Earlier methods in image collection summarization consider representativeness and diversity criteria while recent ones also consider other criteria such as image quality, aesthetic or appeal. In this paper, we propose a multi-criteria context-sensitive approach for social image collection summarization. In the proposed method, two different sets of features are combined while each one looks at different criteria for image collection summarization: social attractiveness features and semantic features. The first feature set considers different aspects that make an image appealing such as image quality, aesthetic, and emotion to create attractiveness score for input images while the second one covers semantic content of images and assigns semantic score to them. We use social network infrastructure to identify attractiveness features and domain ontology for extracting ontology features. The final summarization is provided by integrating the attractiveness and semantic features of input images. The experimental results on a collection of human generated summaries on a set of Flickr images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image collection summarization approach.     

Efficient PL Emission from p-type Porous Silicon: A Comparative Study for Selection of Effective Anodization Parameters

The physical mechanism of highly efficient photoluminescence (PL) emission from p-type silicon is described by a comparative study of the effectiveness of the etching parameters in an electrochemical anodization technique. Two series of porous silicon samples were prepared in a combination of anodization current and time, to maintain the total amount of anodic charge transfer constant. Photoluminescence studies show that irrespective of the amount of charge transfer, the samples prepared with comparatively higher current density show an efficient PL as well as stronger blueshift in the emission energy vis-à-vis the samples prepared for longer durations. An overall decrease in crystallite size, as estimated by Raman spectral analysis, was observed for both series of samples with the progress of charge transfer. Comparative analysis shows a marginal difference in crystallite size for both series of samples in the initial state of charge transfer, whereas major differences arise at higher values. This is explained with the formation of silicon suboxide on the porous surface at higher current density, leading to initiation of side wall reaction, and higher reduction rate in crystallite size as well as strong luminescence due to the carrier quantum confinement effect.