Study on reuse of metal oxide-promoted sulphated zirconia in acylation reactions

A series of sulphated zirconia samples (SZ) promoted with Al₂O₃, Ga₂O₃, and Fe₂O₃ were synthesized by co-precipitation at constant pH and aged under reflux conditions. Structural, surface and catalytic properties of the samples were investigated using N₂ adsorption/desorption, thermal analysis, in-situ FTIR spectroscopy, TPR–MS and EGA–MS measurements. The catalytic performance of promoted SZ in anisole acylation has been investigated. Promotion by either Fe₂O₃ or Ga₂O₃ was found to increase the catalytic activity (yield) after recycle of catalysts with respect un-promoted sample, whereas promotion by Al₂O₃ was observed to increase the conversion but not the yield. It is worth noting that all systems present high selectivity to the p-metoxyacetophenone product.     

The Jama Legal Narrative Part I: The JAMA Model and Narrative Interpretation Patterns

For the purposes of starting to tackle, within artificial intelligence (AI), the narrative aspects of legal narratives in a criminal evidence perspective, traditional AI models of narrative understanding can arguably supplement extant models of legal narratives from the scholarly literature of law, jury studies, or the semiotics of law. Not only: the literary (or cinematic) models prominent in a given culture impinge, with their poetic conventions, on the way members of the culture make sense of the world. This shows glaringly in the sample narrative from the Continent-the Jama murder, the inquiry, and the public outcry-we analyse in this paper. Apparently in the same racist crime category as the case of Stephen Lawrence's murder (in Greenwich on 22 April 1993) with the ensuing still current controversy in the UK, the Jama case (some 20 years ago) stood apart because of a very unusual element: the eyewitnesses identifying the suspects were a group of football referees and linesmen eating together at a restaurant, and seeing the sleeping man as he was set ablaze in a public park nearby. Professional background as witnesses-cum-factfinders in a mass sport, and public perceptions of their required characteristics, couldn't but feature prominently in the public perception of the case, even more so as the suspects were released by the magistrate conducting the inquiry. There are sides to this case that involve different expected effects in an inquisitorial criminal procedure system from the Continent, where an investigating magistrate leads the inquiry and prepares the prosecution case, as opposed to trial by jury under the Anglo-American adversarial system. In the JAMA prototype, we tried to approach the given case from the coign of vantage of narrative models from AI.     

Crested barrier in the tunnel stack of non-volatile memories

In this work a high-k insulating film is deposited on the SiO₂ tunnel oxide of MOS capacitors designed for non-volatile memory applications. The advantages of this approach derive from the asymmetric band diagram, which lowers the Fowler–Nordheim tunnel erase barrier, without affecting the program operation. This results in lower erase voltage and much shorter erase times. In fact, in the proposed structure the erase voltage is about 20% lower and the erase current three thousands times greater than in conventional MOS with pure-SiO₂ tunnel oxide and the same equivalent oxide thickness (15 nm). At the same time, the larger physical thickness prevents from charge loss, and guarantees data retention. The goal of such device is to improve the memory performances without degrading reliability.     

Evaluation of physicochemical properties and microbial counts of raw and cooked low-fat patties added with eggplant powder prepared with different drying methods

Effects of different drying methods and different addition levels of eggplant (EP) on product quality of low-fat patties (LFPs) were investigated during storage. EP was dried in an oven dryer at 60 °C or a freeze dryer at −50 °C. LFPs were prepared by replacing with 1.5% soy protein isolate (SPI). Six treatments were used in this study: (1) control (CTL), without addition of EP; (2) reference (REF), 0.1% ascorbic acid; (3) O1, 0.25% oven-dried (OD) EP; (4) O2, 0.5% ODEP; (5) F1, 0.25% freeze-dried (FD) EP; and (6) F2, 0.5% FDEP. Redness (a*) and lightness (L*) values in LFPs added with EP were lower than those of others (p < 0.05) and decreased with increasing storage time. Yellowness (b*) values of cooked patties were increased during storage time (p < 0.05), with control having the highest value. The addition of EP or ascorbic acid into LFPs lowered microbial counts than control (p < 0.05). Thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) was increased during storage, with REF having the lowest value, and patties added with EP had lower TBARS values than control during storage. Volatile basic nitrogen (VBN, mg%) contents of all patties also increased during storage time with O2 and F2 having lower values than control. Therefore, EP might have potential as a natural antioxidant in meat products during storage.     

Applicability of electrical resistance tomography to the analysis of fluid distribution in haemodialysis modules

This work aims to explore the applicability of electrical resistance tomography (ERT) in the analysis of fluid distribution in haemodialysis modules, which is not straightforward due to the complex geometry of the hollow fibre bundles and the small sizes of the modules. On the other hand, ERT is potentially a suitable and convenient technique for investigation in this field due to its cost-effectiveness and capacity to perform measurements in opaque systems. After a preliminary estimation of the fibre bundle local distribution, the assessment of the technique is performed by observing the time evolution of the measured conductivity maps during the module filling and emptying operations with water and air, which are alternatively fed inside or outside the fibre bundle. Reliable conductivity maps are obtained by placing the module vertically or horizontally. Additional experimental data collected by feeding liquid mixtures of different sodium chloride concentrations show that the technique is suitable for detecting concentration variations, due to the mass transfer through the fibres, and flow maldistribution, due to the specific geometry of the module. From the preliminary results collected in this work, the technique appears to be adequate for the collection of data that can support the optimization of the module geometry and computational model validation.     

Calcination of limestone in a tubular reactor

Theoretical expressions were developed for the design of a tubular reactor for the calcination of limestone, pneumatically conveyed by flue gas. The total residence time and the length of the reactor are affected in particular by the particle size, the excess thermal capacity of the gas and the heat transfer coefficient. High throughput can be achieved in relatively small reactors. An experimental investigation verified a theoretical prediction, that a considerable part of the decomposition takes place in the first few centimeters of the reactor length. The rate of heat transfer in this section was high, with Nusselt numbers of 9.9 to 31.7.     

The Jama Legal Narrative Part II: A Foray into Concepts of Improbability

In judicial decision making, the doctrine of chances takes explicitly into account the odds. There is more to forensic statistics, as well as various probabilistic approaches, which taken together form the object of an enduring controversy in the scholarship of legal evidence. In this paper, I reconsider the circumstances of the Jama murder and inquiry (dealt with in Part I of this paper: 'The JAMA Model and Narrative Interpretation Patterns'), to illustrate yet another kind of probability or improbability. What is improbable about the Jama story is actually a given, which contributes in terms of dramatic underlining. In literary theory, concepts of narratives being probable or improbable date back from the eighteenth century, when both prescientific and scientific probability were infiltrating several domains, including law. An understanding of such a backdrop throughout the history of ideas is, I claim, necessary for Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers who may be tempted to apply statistical methods to legal evidence. The debate for or against probability (and especially Bayesian probability) in accounts of evidence has been flourishing among legal scholars; nowadays both the Bayesians (e.g. Peter Tillers) and the Bayesio-skeptics (e.g. Ron Allen), among those legal scholars who are involved in the controversy, are willing to give AI research a chance to prove itself and strive towards models of plausibility that would go beyond probability as narrowly meant. This debate within law, in turn, has illustrious precedents: take Voltaire, he was critical of the application of probability even to litigation in civil cases; take Boole, he was a starry-eyed believer in probability applications to judicial decision making. Not unlike Boole, the founding father of computing, nowadays computer scientists approaching the field may happen to do so without full awareness of the pitfalls. Hence, the usefulness of the conceptual landscape I sketch here.     

Initial Beam Test Results from a Silicon-Strip Detector with VLSI Readout

Silicon detectors with 256 strips, having a pitch of 25 ?m, and connected to two 128 channel NMOS VLSI chips each (Microplex), have been tested in relativistic charged particle beams at CERN and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The readout chips have an input channel pitch of 47.5 ?m and a single multiplexed output which provides voltages proportional to the integrated charge from each strip. The most probable signal height from minimum ionizing tracks was 15 times the rms noise in any single channel. Two-track traversals with a separation of 100 ?m were cleanly resolved.     

Gain-adapted hidden Markov models for recognition of clean andnoisy speech

In applying hidden Markov modeling for recognition of speech signals, the matching of the energy contour of the signal to the energy contour of the model for that signal is normally achieved by appropriate normalization of each vector of the signal prior to both training and recognition. This approach, however, is not applicable when only noisy signals are available for recognition. A unified approach is developed for gain adaptation in recognition of clean and noisy signals. In this approach, hidden Markov models (HMMs) for gain-normalized clean signals are designed using maximum-likelihood (ML) estimates of the gain contours of the clean training sequences. The models are combined with ML estimates of the gain contours of the clean test signals, obtained from the given clean or noisy signals, in performing recognition using the maximum a posteriori decision rule. The gain-adapted training and recognition algorithms are developed for HMMs with Gaussian subsources using the expectation-minimization (EM) approach     

Single-Cell RNA Sequencing for the Detection of Clonotypic V(D)J Rearrangements in Multiple Myeloma

Multiple myeloma (MM) has a highly heterogeneous genetic background, which complicates its molecular tracking over time. Nevertheless, each MM patient’s malignant plasma cells (PCs) share unique V(D)J rearranged sequences at immunoglobulin loci, which represent ideal disease biomarkers. Because the tumor-specific V(D)J sequence is highly expressed in bulk RNA in MM patients, we wondered whether it can be identified by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). To this end we analyzed CD138⁺ cells purified from bone marrow aspirates of 19 samples with PC dyscrasias by both a standard method based on bulk DNA and by an implementation of the standard 10x Genomics protocol to detect expressed V(D)J sequences. A dominant clonotype was easily identified in each sample, accounting on average for 83.65% of V(D)J-rearranged cells. Compared with standard methods, scRNA-seq analysis proved highly concordant and even more effective in identifying clonal productive rearrangements, by-passing limitations related to the misannealing of consensus primers in hypermutated regions. We next validated its accuracy to track 5 clonal cells with absolute sensitivity in a virtual sample containing 3180 polyclonal cells. This shows that single-cell V(D)J analysis may be used to find rare clonal cells, laying the foundations for functional single-cell dissection of minimal residual disease.