Etude structurale et magnetique d'une phase non stoechiometrique lamellaire du systeme Ga2S3-Cr2S3, de composition

We investigated hopelessness at 3 age levels (8-, 12-, and 17-year-olds) in 210 children and adolescents from a community sample derived from public school listings of 4,810 children in a midwestern college town. The sample included 105 boys and 105 girls, and there were 70 subjects in each age group. The major finding was that children with high hopelessness scores are at greater risk not only for suicide and depression as revealed by the Child Assessment Schedule and the Birleson Depression Scale but also for overall psychopathology. This study suggests that hopelessness does not increase from preadolescence to adolescence in a general population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Levels of hopelessness in children and adolescents: A developmental perspective.

We investigated hopelessness at 3 age levels (8-, 12-, and 17-year-olds) in 210 children and adolescents from a community sample derived from public school listings of 4,810 children in a midwestern college town. The sample included 105 boys and 105 girls, and there were 70 subjects in each age group. The major finding was that children with high hopelessness scores are at greater risk not only for suicide and depression as revealed by the Child Assessment Schedule and the Birleson Depression Scale but also for overall psychopathology. This study suggests that hopelessness does not increase from preadolescence to adolescence in a general population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

KINETICS OF THE CLAY ROOFING TILE CONVECTION DRYING

Kinetics of the convection drying process of flat tile has been investigated experimentally in an industrial tunnel dryer. Several velocities of wet tile movement through the dryer were tested to obtain maximum allowable drying rate curve. As there are various models to describe the kinetics of convection drying, finding a model that would fairly well approximate the kinetics of the whole drying process was part of the research. Especially the polynomial and exponential models were tested.

It was found that exponential model of the type: B(t) = (a-B_e. EXP(-bt²) +B_et (-dB(t)/dt) = 2bt(B(t)-B_e significantly correlates the kinetics of the whole tile drying process.

Applying the maximum allowable drying rate curve obtained for flat tile in the first period of drying, a grapho-analytic model for the optimal conducting of the process has been developed.     

Artificial neural networks for flexible manufacturing systems scheduling

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are information processing systems motivated by the goals of reproducing the cognitive processes and organizational models of neurobiological systems. By virtue of their computational structure, ANN's feature attractive characteristics such as graceful degradation, robust recall with noisy and fragmented data, parallel distributed processing, generalization to patterns outside of the training set, nonlinear modeling capabilities, and learning. These computational features could provide enhanced inferencing functionality and real-time capabilities to develop approaches for traditional difficult problems such as flexible manufacturing system (FMS) scheduling. In this paper three different schemes of ANN's are applied to the FMS scheduling problem. These include a) relaxation-based networks, b) competitive-based schemes, and c) adaptive pattern recognition scheduling.     

Changes in in vivo metabolism of bile acids in rat after treatment with phenobarbital

The influence of phenobarbital on pool size and turnover of bile acids in rats have been investigated by administration of [24-¹⁴C] cholic acid and tritium labeled chenodeoxycholic acid. Phenobarbital treated rats had a smaller cholic acid pool compared to control rats (6.08±2.09 mg and 23.60±7.66 mg, respectively). The pool size of chenodeoxycholic acid, plus its metabolites (α- and β-muricholic acids), was of the same magnitude in the two groups of animals. Also the daily production of cholic acid was decreased in phenobarbital treated rats compared to control rats (2.12±0.46 mg and 7.24±1.66 mg, respectively). No significant difference was observed between the synthesis of chenodeoxycholic acid in the two groups of animals.     

Rigorous parameter reconstruction for differential equations with noisy data

We present a method that-given a data set, a finitely parametrized system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and a search space of parameters-discards portions of the search space that are inconsistent with the model ODE and data. The method is completely rigorous as it is based on validated integration of the vector field. As a consequence, no consistent parameters can be lost during the pruning phase. For data sets with moderate levels of noise, this yields a good reconstruction of the underlying parameters. Several examples are included to illustrate the merits of the method.     

Data acquisition schemes for continuous two-particle time-of-flight coincidence experiments

Three data acquisition schemes for two-particle coincidence experiments with a continuous source are discussed. The single-start/single-stop technique, implemented with a time-to-pulse-height converter, results in a complicated spectrum and breaks down severely at high count rates. The single-start/multiple-stop setup, based on a time-to-digital converter and the first choice in today's similar coincidence experiments, performs significantly better at high count rates, but its performance is still hampered if the time-of-flight range is large, and the false coincidence background is variable if the event frequency and the collection efficiency of the starts are both high. A straightforward, multistart/multistop setup is proposed for coincidence experiments. By collecting all detector data, it ensures the highest signal-to-noise ratio, constant background, and fast data acquisition and can now be easily constructed with commercially available time-to-digital converters. Analytical and numerically evaluated formulas are derived to characterize the performance of each setup in a variety of environments. Computer simulated spectra are presented to illustrate the analytically predicted features of the various raw time-of-flight distributions obtained with each technique.     

DropCircuit : A Modular Regularizer for Parallel Circuit Networks

How to design and train increasingly large neural network models is a topic that has been actively researched for several years. However, while there exists a large number of studies on training deeper and/or wider models, there is relatively little systematic research particularly on the effective usage of wide modular neural networks. Addressing this gap, and in an attempt to solve the problem of lengthy training times, we proposed Parallel Circuits (PCs), a biologically inspired architecture based on the design of the retina. In previous work we showed that this approach fails to maintain generalization performance in spite of achieving sharp speed gains. To address this issue, and motivated by the way dropout prevents node co-adaptation, in this paper, we suggest an improvement by extending dropout to the parallel-circuit architecture. The paper provides empirical proof and multiple insights into this combination. Experiments show promising results in which improved error rates are achieved in most cases, whilst maintaining the speed advantage of the PC approach.     

Efficient Depth of Field Rasterization Using a Tile Test Based on Half‐Space Culling

For depth of field (DOF) rasterization, it is often desired to have an efficient tile versus triangle test, which can conservatively compute which samples on the lens that need to execute the sample‐in‐triangle test. We present a novel test for this, which is optimal in the sense that the region on the lens cannot be further reduced. Our test is based on removing half‐space regions of the (u, v) ‐space on the lens, from where the triangle definitely cannot be seen through a tile of pixels. We find the intersection of all such regions exactly, and the resulting region can be used to reduce the number of sample‐in‐triangle tests that need to be performed. Our main contribution is that the theory we develop provides a limit for how efficient a practical tile versus defocused triangle test ever can become. To verify our work, we also develop a conceptual implementation for DOF rasterization based on our new theory. We show that the number of arithmetic operations involved in the rasterization process can be reduced. More importantly, with a tile test, multi‐sampling anti‐aliasing can be used which may reduce shader executions and the related memory bandwidth usage substantially. In general, this can be translated to a performance increase and/or power savings.     

Investigation of viruses in Diporeia spp. from the Laurentian Great Lakes and Owasco Lake as potential stressors of declining populations

The benthic amphipod Diporeia is an ecologically and biogeochemically important constituent of deep freshwater lakes in North America. The proliferation of dreissenid mussels in the mid-1990s coincided with a sharp decrease in Diporeia populations in several Laurentian Great Lakes; however the ultimate cause and mechanisms of their decline are still unknown. Here we examined the composition of DNA viruses associated with Diporeia collected from populations of Lake Michigan that had declined and stable populations in Lake Superior and Owasco Lake (Finger Lake in central New York State). Viral metagenomic libraries from Owasco Lake and Lake Superior were comprised primarily of bacteriophages, which may infect bacteria within the amphipod microbiome. In contrast, the metagenomic library from Lake Michigan contained well-represented ssDNA circular viral genomes. The prevalence and viral load of one putative Type V ssDNA circular virus (LM29173) that recruited almost 30% of total viral sequence reads in the Lake Michigan library was analyzed by quantitative PCR. The prevalence of LM29173 was over two orders of magnitude greater in Lake Michigan compared to the other two lakes. Although further research is necessary to establish the pathology and epidemiological extent of viral-Diporeia interactions, our data suggest that viruses may be numerically significant constituents of the Diporeia microbiome, and if pathogenic some of these viruses may be a stressor of Great Lakes Diporeia populations. Our data further indicate that special attention should be given to the circovirus that was prevalent in the declining Michigan population but uncommon in the other two lakes.