Facts and values in risk assessment

Risk, as commonly understood, is a complex melange of facts, values, and fears. While this complexity of public risk perception is now broadly recognized, its implications are insufficiently explored. Public risk perceptions offer p poor guide for public policymaking. Popular assessments of risk are tainted by misinformation and unreliable heuristics. While subjective considerations, often called values, play a role in public perception of risk, those ‘values’ are often inappropriate for government decisionmaking. Reliance on public perceptions of risk means more premature deaths. Public risk perception also is systematically skewed contrary to the interests of the disadvantaged. Strict probabilistic risk measures generally provide a superior guide for government regulatory policy.     

Responses to interpersonal transgressions in families: Forgivingness, forgivability, and relationship-specific effects.

Social relations analyses examined the relative importance of forgivingness (disposition to forgive others), forgivability (tendency to obtain forgiveness from others), and relationship effects in determining family members' transgression-related interpersonal motivations (TRIMs) and their perceptions of others' TRIMs toward them (PTRIMs). In 2 studies, the individual and dyadic predictors of these components and their relative importance differed by family role (father, mother, or early adolescent child). Dispositional tendencies accounted for the most variance in father and child forgiveness, whereas mothers' TRIMs and PTRIMs were more strongly determined by relationship and partner effects. Personality correlates of forgivingness and forgivability were moderated by family role. The findings point to the need to embed the study of forgiveness in more complex psychosocial contexts. The theoretical, methodological, and applied implications of this conclusion are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

High frequency lateral tape motion and the dynamics of tape edge contact

Lateral motion of magnetic tape is investigated on roller and porous air-bearing type tape drives. The lateral tape motion signal is high-pass filtered and the spectral components are analyzed. Time-frequency analysis is also performed. The effect of dynamic tension changes during high frequency lateral motion events is examined, and the tension difference across the tape head is found to be correlated to the lateral motion of tape near the head. The effect of lateral motion of tape on tape pack winding is investigated and the frequencies observed during edge contact are analyzed.     

粘度：是敌人还是朋友？

本文简要分析了水平定向钻（HDD）用泥浆粘度升高的原因，以及过高的泥浆粘度对泥浆设备和泥浆性能的影响。     

Management and enterprise architecture click: The FAD(E)E framework

Enterprises are living things. They constantly need to be (re-)architected in order to achieve the necessary agility, alignment and integration. This paper gives a high-level overview of how companies can go about doing ‘enterprise architecture’ in the context of both the classic (isolated) enterprise and the Extended Enterprise. By discussing the goals that are pursued in an enterprise architecture effort we reveal some basic requirements that can be put on the process of architecting the enterprise. The relationship between managing and architecting the enterprise is discussed and clarified in the FAD(E)E, the Framework for the Architectural Development of the (Extended) Enterprise. Frank G. Goethals completed his Master studies in economics (option informatics), at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2000. He is presently researching for a Ph.D. under the theme of `Managing data in the Extended Enterprise'. This research is conducted at the K.U.Leuven under the guidance of professor J. Vandenbulcke, and is financed by SAP Belgium. Frank has a strong interest in coordination and dependency theory and Enterprise Architecture. Monique Snoeck obtained her Ph.D. in May 1995 from The Department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with a thesis that lays the formal foundations of the object-oriented business modelling method MERODE. Since then she has done further research in the area of formal methods for object-oriented conceptual modelling. She now is Full Professor with the Management Information Systems Group of the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. She has been involved in several industrial conceptual modelling projects. Her research interests are object oriented conceptual modelling, software architecture and software quality. Wilfried Lemahieu holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Economic Sciences of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (1999). At present, he is associate professor at the Management Informatics research group of the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics. His teaching includes Database Management, Data Storage Architectures and Management Informatics. His research interests comprise distributed object architectures and web services, object-relational and object-oriented database systems and hypermedia systems. Jacques A. Vandenbulcke is professor at the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests are in Database management, Data modelling, and Business Information Systems. He is co-ordinator of the Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS) and holder of the SAP-chair on ‘Extended enterprise infrastructures’. He is president of ‘Studiecentrum voor Automatische Informatieverwerking (SAI)’, the largest society for computer professionals in Belgium, and co-founder of the ‘Production and Inventory Control Society (PICS)’ in Belgium.     

Dyeing of wool with antibiotics to develop novel infection resistance materials for extracorporeal end use

Two antibiotics, doxycycline (Doxy) and ciprofloxacin (Cipro), were applied under a variety of conditions to wool and to hydrolyzed wool at 40°C. Nylon was used as a synthetic control. Sorption of Doxy was much higher in wool than in nylon, whereas sorption of Cipro was similar in both fibers. FTIR spectroscopy confirmed that a drastic increase in sorption of antibiotics by hydrolyzed wool was attributed to an increase in polar functional groups by peptide scission and in oxidized sulfur groups by cystine oxidation. Both sorption and zone of inhibition (ZOI) values were improved by hydrolysis of wool. Wool hydrolyzed for 20 or 40 min at 40°C and dyed with Doxy at 45°C for 3.5 h maintained around 30 mm of ZOI after 24 h of challenge by a simulated flow of blood. Wool hydrolyzed for 60 min at 40°C and dyed with Cipro at 45°C for 3.5 h also maintained its antibiotic activity for an extended time. For the most part, ZOI values for nylon dyed by both antibiotics were zero within 24 h. This technique produced infection‐resistant biomaterials of potential use in extra‐corporeal biomedical and biological applications. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 92: 3343–3354, 2004     

Measurements with multi-point microprobes: Effect of suspended solids on the hydrodynamics of bubble columns for application in chemical and biotechnological processes

Many experimental studies reveal that suspended solids considerably alter the coalescence behaviour and hydrodynamic functions of wo-phase flow. But no systematic efforts have yet been undertaken to separate the effects of different particle properties on local gas hold-up, bubble size and interfacial area gas/liquid. The aim of this paper is to present the local values of these parameters in three-phase fluidized beds of different solids, using miniaturized optical fiber and conductivity needle probes. It is shown that particle concentration, size and, in particular, density are decisive for the change in coalescence behaviour. Ranges of normal (?_S > ?_L) and inverse fluidization (?_S < ?_L) must be distinguished and the flow regime also exerts a strong influence on the interactions between the dispersed phases, the transition point itself being a function of particle properties can be observed, This effect is evaluated for different column diameters, between 0.1 and 0.3 m.     

Visualization of Back Pain Data—A 3-D Solution

Traditional approaches to gathering and visualizing pain data rely on two-dimensional (2-D) human body models, where different types of sensation are recorded with various monochrome symbols. We propose an alternative that uses a three-dimensional (3-D) representation of the human body, which can be marked in color to visualize and record pain data.     

Reflex-oscillations in evolved single leg neurocontrollers for walking machines

As a prerequisite for developing neural control for walking machines that are able to autonomously navigate through rough terrain, artificial structure evolution is used to generate various single leg controllers. The structure and dynamical properties of the evolved (recurrent) neural networks are then analysed to identify elementary mechanisms of sensor-driven walking behaviour. Based on the biological understanding that legged locomotion implies a highly decentralised and modular control, neuromodules for single, morphological distinct legs of a hexapod walking machine were developed by using a physical simulation. Each of the legs has three degrees of freedom (DOF). The presented results demonstrate how extremely small reflex-oscillators, which inherently rely on the sensorimotor loop and e.g. hysteresis effects, generate effective locomotion. Varying the fitness function by randomly changing the environmental conditions during evolution, neural control mechanisms are identified which allow for robust and adaptive locomotion. Relations to biological findings are discussed.