Are facial expressions of emotion produced by categorical affect programs or dynamically driven by appraisal?

The different assumptions made by discrete and componential emotion theories about the nature of the facial expression of emotion and the underlying mechanisms are reviewed. Explicit and implicit predictions are derived from each model. It is argued that experimental expression-production paradigms rather than recognition studies are required to critically test these differential predictions. Data from a large-scale actor portrayal study are reported to demonstrate the utility of this approach. The frequencies with which 12 professional actors use major facial muscle actions individually and in combination to express 14 major emotions show little evidence for emotion-specific prototypical affect programs. Rather, the results encourage empirical investigation of componential emotion model predictions of dynamic configurations of appraisal-driven adaptive facial actions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Buchbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Speed Control of Motor Based on Improved Glowworm Swarm Optimization

To better regulate the speed of brushless DC motors, an improved algorithm based on the original Glowworm Swarm Optimization is proposed. The proposed algorithm solves the problems of poor robustness, slow convergence, and low accuracy exhibited by traditional PID controllers. When selecting the glowworm neighborhood set, an optimization scheme based on the growth and competition behavior of weeds is applied to a single glowworm to prevent falling into a local optimal solution. After the glowworm’s position is updated, the league selection operator is introduced to search for the global optimal solution. Combining the local search ability of the invasive weed optimization with the global search ability of the league selection operator enhances the robustness of the algorithm and also accelerates the convergence speed of the algorithm. The mathematical model of the brushless DC motor is established, the PID parameters are tuned and optimized using improved Glowworm Swarm Optimization algorithm, and the speed of the brushless DC motor is adjusted. In a Simulink environment, a double closed-loop speed control model was established to simulate the speed control of a brushless DC motor, and this simulation was compared with a traditional PID control. The simulation results show that the model based on the improved Glowworm Swarm Optimization algorithm has good robustness and a steady-state response speed for motor speed control.     

A novel vacuum ultra violet lamp for metastable rare gas experiments

We report on a new design of a vacuum ultra violet (VUV) lamp for direct optical excitation of high laying atomic states, e.g., for excitation of metastable rare gas atoms. The lamp can be directly mounted to ultra-high vacuum vessels (p ≤ 10(-10)mbar). It is driven by a 2.45 GHz microwave source. For optimum operation, it requires powers of ~20 W. The VUV light is transmitted through a magnesium fluoride window, which is known to have a decreasing transmittance for VUV photons with time. In our special setup, after a run-time of the VUV lamp of 550 h the detected signal continuously decreased to 25% of its initial value. This corresponds to a lifetime increase of two orders of magnitude compared to previous setups or commercial lamps.     

Exploring Neighborhoods in the Metagenome Universe

The variety of metagenomes in current databases provides a rapidly growing source of information for comparative studies. However, the quantity and quality of supplementary metadata is still lagging behind. It is therefore important to be able to identify related metagenomes by means of the available sequence data alone. We have studied efficient sequence-based methods for large-scale identification of similar metagenomes within a database retrieval context. In a broad comparison of different profiling methods we found that vector-based distance measures are well-suitable for the detection of metagenomic neighbors. Our evaluation on more than 1700 publicly available metagenomes indicates that for a query metagenome from a particular habitat on average nine out of ten nearest neighbors represent the same habitat category independent of the utilized profiling method or distance measure. While for well-defined labels a neighborhood accuracy of 100% can be achieved, in general the neighbor detection is severely affected by a natural overlap of manually annotated categories. In addition, we present results of a novel visualization method that is able to reflect the similarity of metagenomes in a 2D scatter plot. The visualization method shows a similarly high accuracy in the reduced space as compared with the high-dimensional profile space. Our study suggests that for inspection of metagenome neighborhoods the profiling methods and distance measures can be chosen to provide a convenient interpretation of results in terms of the underlying features. Furthermore, supplementary metadata of metagenome samples in the future needs to comply with readily available ontologies for fine-grained and standardized annotation. To make profile-based k-nearest-neighbor search and the 2D-visualization of the metagenome universe available to the research community, we included the proposed methods in our CoMet-Universe server for comparative metagenome analysis.     

Biodegradable Elastic Sponge from Nanofibrous Biphasic Calcium Phosphate Ceramic as an Advanced Material for Regenerative Medicine

Biodegradable porous calcium phosphate (CaP) ceramics are widely used as synthetic graft substitutes for bone regeneration, owing to their chemical and structural similarity to bone and associated bioactivity in terms of bone-bonding, osteoconductive, and even osteoinductive properties. Nevertheless, the intrinsic brittleness and poor processability of porous CaP ceramics strongly impair their clinical applicability. Herein, a biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) sponge is developed that consists of a self-supporting network of seamlessly interwoven hydroxyapatite nanowires and β-tricalcium phosphate nanofibers and possesses a highly interconnected porous structure with open cell geometry and ultrahigh porosity. Owing to its unique properties, the ceramic sponge can be easily processed into various shapes and dimensions, such as cylindrical scaffolds and thin, flexible membranes. Moreover, the BCP sponge can be introduced into a bone defect in a compacted or folded state from a syringe and, upon wetting, expand to its original shape, thereby filling the cavity. The nanofibrous sponge gradually degrades in vitro and rapidly mineralizes when immersed in simulated body fluid. Moreover, it adsorbs significantly more proteins than a conventional porous BCP ceramic. Finally, the nanofibrous sponge supports the attachment, proliferation, and osteogenic differentiation of human mesenchymal stromal cells comparable to the conventional porous BCP ceramic.     

Efficient Automation Engineering of Modular Process Equipment Assemblies Using the Digital Twin

Modular process plants are a promising approach to accelerate the engineering of greenfield process plants. This is achieved by the combination of pre-engineered process equipment assemblies (PEAs) with a standardized interface for the integration in process control systems, the module type package (MTP). This standardized interface can be integrated in the engineering process to further improve the potential. In this paper existing standards are used to generate aspects of the MTP. For this purpose, the engineering process of conventional plants is adapted for the engineering of PEAs. Therefore, similarities and potential of the described aspects have been analyzed regarding shared fundamental standards and characterized by their location in the asset life cycle. To describe the interconnections of the different standards, exemplary rules are proposed, which can be used for a transformation.