The combining of sodium chloride and calcium chloride by a number of different hardened cement pastes

A non-destructive method is presented to study the combining properties of a number of hardened cement pastes for NaCl and CaCl₂. Cements hardened with solutions of NaCl and of CaCl₂ are equilibrated in solutions of these electrolytes in a special way. To interpret the results, the equilibrium between the pore solution and the hardened cement is taken as a general solid/solution equilibrium. The equilibrium between the pore solution and the equilibrating solution is considered to be a liquid/liquid equilibrium. That means that the equilibrium concentrations in the equilibrating solution and the pore solution are equaL. Thus it is possible to calculate the dependence of the amount of chloride combined by the cement on the total amount added to the cement.     

L波段微波功率合成技术研究

无人机机载功率放大器的性能一直是限制无人机技术发展的主要因素,为此提出了将功率合成技术应用于无人机数据系统的方法解决上述问题。利用微带线技术结合系统性的电路调试方法,辅以Advanced Design System仿真软件优化设计,同时采用实频技术法进行宽带功放设计,成功研制了频段在1.3 GHz~1.7 GHz的功率放大器,单路功率放大器采用级联的技术输出功率为8 W,两路合成后,实测总输出功率为15.67 W,合成效率达97%,性能稳定,达到实用水平。     

Trust-based group services selection in web-based service-oriented environments

Multi-agent technologies have been widely employed for the development of web-based systems, including web-based e-markets, web-based grid computing, e-governments and service-oriented software systems. In these service-oriented systems, service provider agents and service consumer agents are autonomous and rational entities, which can enter and leave the environments freely. For simplicity, we use terms ‘provider’ and ‘consumer’ to represent this two types of agents. How to select the most suitable service providers according to a service request from a consumer in such an open environment is a very challenging issue. In this paper, we propose an innovative trust model, called the GTrust model, for service group selection in general service-oriented environments. In the GTrust model, the trust evaluation for a service group is based on the functionality coverage of the group, the dependency relationships among individual services in the group, the ratings of individual services on the attributes of the service request and a similarity measurement of the extent to which reference reports can reflect the service request in terms of the priority distribution of attributes. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate the good performance of the GTrust model on the service group selection in service-oriented environments.     

Optimizing content placement in a peer-assisted VoD architecture

Recently, a new peer-assisted architecture to build content delivery systems has been presented. This architecture is based on the use of the storage capacity of end-users’ set-top boxes (STBs), connected in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner in order to help the content servers in the delivery process. In these systems, the contents are usually split into a set of smaller pieces, called sub-streams, which are randomly injected at the STBs. The present paper is focused on Video on Demand (VoD) streaming and it is assumed that the STB-based content delivery system is deployed over the global Internet, where the clients are distributed over different ISP networks. In this scenario, three different strategies are studied for increasing the percentage of data uploaded by peers, in order to offload the content servers as much as possible. First of all, a new mechanism is presented which determines which sub-stream has to be placed at which STB by a Non-Linear Programming (NLP) formulation. A different strategy for reducing the content server load is to take advantage of the available bandwidth in the different ISP networks. In this sense, two new mechanisms for forwarding the VoD requests to different ISP networks are presented. Finally, the present paper also shows that in some situations the available uplink bandwidth is associated with STBs that do not have the required sub-streams. Regarding this concern, a new mechanism has been designed that dynamically re-allocates some streams, which are being transmitted from specific STBs, to different STBs, in order to find the necessary resources to start new streaming sessions.     

Fractal dimension applied to plant identification

This article discusses methods to identify plants by analysing leaf complexity based on estimating their fractal dimension. Leaves were analyzed according to the complexity of their internal and external shapes. A computational program was developed to process, analyze and extract the features of leaf images, thereby allowing for automatic plant identification. Results are presented from two experiments, the first to identify plant species from the Brazilian Atlantic forest and Brazilian Cerrado scrublands, using fifty leaf samples from ten different species, and the second to identify four different species from genus Passiflora, using twenty leaf samples for each class. A comparison is made of two methods to estimate fractal dimension (box-counting and multiscale Minkowski). The results are discussed to determine the best approach to analyze shape complexity based on the performance of the technique, when estimating fractal dimension and identifying plants.