Effects of sampling, follow-up letters, and commitment to participation on mail attitude survey response.

Conducted 3 studies investigating differences in response rate to mail surveys. Study 1 contrasted response rates for 4 surveys sent to 4,991 employees of a large manufacturing company, representing all members of 2 populations, with rates for 4 similar surveys sent to 2,156 employees, representing systematic samples of 2 comparable populations. Study 2 contrasted rates of response in 3 populations from 1,906 employees who received a follow-up reminder with 3 populations from 3,525 employees who received no follow-up. Study 3 contrasted rates of response of 2,547 employees-half receiving a postcard requesting an immediate participation commitment and half receiving no postcard. Significantly greater response occurred with (a) sampling, (b) follow-ups, and (c) precommitted participation on postcards. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibitoren der Korrosion 7 (1) Nachweis gemeinsamer Wirkungsprinzipien bei der Inhibierung der Säurekorrosion von Eisen,Zink, Aluminium (und Raney-Nickel)

Identification of mechanisms common to the inhibition of the acid corrosion of iron, zinc, aluminium (and Raney nickel) The dissolution of powder and chips of the above metals in diluted and deaerated hydrochloric acid is well inhibited by dibenzyl sulfoxide, benzyl quinolinium bromide and diphenylphosphonium chloride; triphenyl arsine chloride and tribenzylsulfonium hydrogen sulfate are less effective, while diphenyldithiophosphinic acid, thiourea, O-tolyl thiourea and mercaptobenzthiazol in low concentrations act as accelerators.     

A Portable Operating System Interface and Utility Library

OSSI provides the interface missing between Modula-2 and system-dependent I/O operations. It can be ported between systems with minimal changes.     

Inhibitoren der Korrosion (9) Nachweis der Sekundärinhibitoren bei einigen Sulfoxiden,Triphenylarsinoxid und einigen Sulfoniumsalzen

Demonstration of secondary inhibitors of some sulfoxides, triphenyl arsene oxide and some sulfonium salts The inhibition values of some dibenzyl sulfoxide and structurally related com-pounds, and of triphenyl ursine oxide are determined. Sulfoxides and ursine oxides are (a) displaced, after protona-tion, into the cathodic regions and (b) converted, after electron acception, into secondary inhibitors which are liable to coordination (thioethers and tertarsines). The secondary inhibitors are either ad-sorbed by the metal and then suppress the dissolution of iron, or they are not fixed on the metal (e. g. diphenyl sul-fide) and have no protective action in that case. In the case Of dibenzyl sulf- oxide about 90% of the compound can be obtained by dissolution from the iron surface as dibenzyl sulfide, while the solution still contains 16% of non-converted dibenzyl sulfoxide. In the be found on the iron surface as tri-phenyl arsine, the rest is in solution as protonated triphenyl ursine oxide. From case of triphenyl ursine oxide 70% can the four sulfonium salts studied, only tribenzyl sulfonium hydrogen sulfate is subject to reduction to any greater ex-tent, the three other sulfonium salts can be isolated from the testmedium up to 90% without having undergone a transformation. Diphenyl allyl salfo-nium tetrafluoborate yields in the test medium, as the result of a reductive de-composition, 1 to 2% of a propenepro-pane mixture.     

Dampfstrahl-Vakuumpumpen bei der Stahlentgasung

Steam jet vacuum pumps for steel degassing The vacuum steel degassing is necessary for the production of particular steel qualities. This process requires high suction capacity and robustness of the applied vacuum pumps. This leads to the preferential application of steam jet vacuum pumps.     

Lateralized auditory spatial perception and the contralaterality of cortical processing as studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) were used to study the relationships between lateralized auditory perception in humans and the contralaterality of processing in auditory cortex. Subjects listened to rapidly presented streams of short FM-sweep tone bursts to detect infrequent, slightly deviant tone bursts. The stimulus streams consisted of either monaural stimuli to one ear or the other or binaural stimuli with brief interaural onset delays. The onset delay gives the binaural sounds a lateralized auditory perception and is thought to be a key component of how our brains localize sounds in space. For the monaural stimuli, fMRI revealed a clear contralaterality in auditory cortex, with a contralaterality index (contralateral activity divided by the sum of contralateral and ipsilateral activity) of 67%. In contrast, the fMRI activations from the laterally perceived binaural stimuli indicated little or no contralaterality (index of 51%). The MEG recordings from the same subjects performing the same task converged qualitatively with the fMRI data, confirming a clear monaural contralaterality, with no contralaterality for the laterally perceived binaurals. However, the MEG monaural contralaterality (55%) was less than the fMRI and decreased across the several hundred millisecond poststimulus time period, going from 57% in the M50 latency range (20-70 ms) to 53% in the M200 range (170-250 ms). These data sets provide both quantification of the degree of contralaterality in the auditory pathways and insight into the locus and mechanism of the lateralized perception of spatially lateralized sounds.     

Enzymatic determination of inulin and fructooligosaccharides in food

Inulin and fructooligosaccharides (FOS) are widely distributed throughout the plant kingdom. They have been increasingly used in various foods due to their beneficial nutritional attributes. An enzymatic method was developed for rapid and accurate determination of inulin and/or FOS in food. ß-Fructofuranosidase heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli was used as a hydrolyzing enzyme. After extraction with water, filtration and appropriate dilution, inulin was hydrolyzed using ß-fructofuranosidase and the liberated sugars were determined enzymatically. The average recovery of inulin and/or FOS in food matrixes was 97% with a coefficient of variation of 5%. The method provided an inexpensive technique requiring only standard laboratory equipment for determining inulin and/or FOS with high accuracy and precision.     

A 1.3-GOPS parallel DSP for high-performance image-processingapplications

A programmable digital signal processor (DSP) for real-time image processing is presented that combines the concepts of single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) and very long instruction word with a high utilization of parallel resources on instruction and data level. The SIMD approach has been extended with autonomous instruction selection capabilities (ASIMD), which offers to control four parallel datapaths with low area overhead. The memory concept is adapted to image-processing requirements and follows two basic rules: shared data have to be accessed regularly in the shape of a matrix and are stored in the matrix memory. As soon as data are accessed irregularly, they are stored in the private cache memories. The matrix memory allows parallel, conflict-free access from all datapaths in a single clock cycle. The DSP achieves 1.3-GOPS performance at 66 MHz. A first prototype in 0.5-μm CMOS technology has been fabricated