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_.     

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)     

Citius altius fortius: Lessons learned from the Theorem Prover Waldmeister

In the last years, the development of automated theorem provers has been advancing in a so to speak Olympic spirit, following the motto “faster, higher, stronger”; and the Waldmeister system has been a part of that endeavour. We will survey the concepts underlying this prover, which implements Knuth-Bendix completion in its unfailing variant. The system architecture is based on a strict separation of active and passive facts, and is realized via specifically tailored representations for each of the central data structures: indexing for the active facts, set-based compression for the passive facts, successor sets for the conjectures. In order to cope with large search spaces, specialized redundancy criteria are employed, and the empirically gained control knowledge is integrated to ease the use of the system. We conclude with a discussion of strengths and weaknesses, and a view of future prospects.     

Remotely sensed indicators of habitat heterogeneity: Use of synthetic aperture radar in mapping vegetation structure and bird habitat

An integrated remote sensing/field ecology project linked the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and aerial photography to studies of landscape spatial heterogeneity and bird community ecology. P-, L-, and C-band SAR data, collected over a section of Kakadu National Park in Australia's Northern Territory during the Joint NASA/Australia DC-8 data acquisition campaign, were analyzed in light of field data integrating vegetation structure and floristics with bird abundances across a heterogeneous study site. Results indicate that SAR data are able to discern structural differences relevant to bird habitat quality within floristically homogeneous stands, while multispectral sensors successfully identified floristic differences among habitat types. Simplifying indices of bird diversity showed ambiguous changes across the site; however, the abundances of individual species were observed to change significantly across both floristic and structural gradients. These results suggest that efforts to map bird diversity should focus on species-specific habitat relationships and that some measure of vegetation structure is needed to understand bird habitat. The approach employed here advances the use of SAR data in the three-dimensional mapping of animal habitats from remotely sensed data, and extends current capabilities for mapping and modeling large-scale patterns in the distribution of biological diversity.