Bit Impact Factor: Towards making fair vulnerability comparison

Reliability is becoming a major design concern in contemporary microprocessors since soft error rate is increasing due to technology scaling. Therefore, design time system vulnerability estimation is of paramount importance. Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) is an early vulnerability estimation methodology. However, AVF considers that the value of a bit in a clock cycle is either required for Architecturally Correct Execution (i.e. ACE-bit) or not (i.e. unACE-bit); therefore, AVF cannot distinguish the vulnerability impact level of an ACE-bit. In this study, we present a new dimension which takes into account the vulnerability impact level of a bit. We introduce Bit Impact Factor metric which, we believe, will be helpful for extending AVF evaluation to provide a more accurate vulnerability analysis.     

Effect of steam curing on class C high-volume fly ash concrete mixtures

The effect of steam curing on concrete incorporating ASTM Class C fly ash (FA), which is widely available in Turkey, was investigated. Cement was replaced with up to 70% fly ash, and concrete mixtures with 360 kg/m³ cementitious content and a constant water/binder ratio of 0.4 were made. Compressive strength of concrete, volume stability of mortar bar specimens, and setting times of pastes were investigated. Test results indicate that, under standard curing conditions, only 1-day strength of fly ash concrete was low. At later ages, the strength values of even 50% and 60% fly ash concretes were satisfactory. Steam curing accelerated the 1-day strength but the long-term strength was greatly reduced. Setting time of fly ash-cement pastes and volume stability of mortars with 50% or less fly ash content were found to be satisfactory for standard specimens. In addition, for steam curing, this properties were acceptable for all replacement ratios.     

Detecting emotional state of a child in a conversational computer game

The automatic recognition of user’s communicative style within a spoken dialog system framework, including the affective aspects, has received increased attention in the past few years. For dialog systems, it is important to know not only what was said but also how something was communicated, so that the system can engage the user in a richer and more natural interaction. This paper addresses the problem of automatically detecting “frustration”, “politeness”, and “neutral” attitudes from a child’s speech communication cues, elicited in spontaneous dialog interactions with computer characters. Several information sources such as acoustic, lexical, and contextual features, as well as, their combinations are used for this purpose. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog corpus of 103 children, 7–14 years of age, playing a voice activated computer game. Three-way classification experiments, as well as, pairwise classification between polite vs. others and frustrated vs. others were performed. Experimental results show that lexical information has more discriminative power than acoustic and contextual cues for detection of politeness, whereas context and acoustic features perform best for frustration detection. Furthermore, the fusion of acoustic, lexical and contextual information provided significantly better classification results. Results also showed that classification performance varies with age and gender. Specifically, for the “politeness” detection task, higher classification accuracy was achieved for females and 10–11 years-olds, compared to males and other age groups, respectively.     

Forecasting model of Shanghai and CRB commodity indexes

This paper examines the long-run relationship between the Shanghai index and CRB commodity index. We run our vector error correction model (VECM) for two sub-samples as pre-crisis period and post-crisis period. In pre-crisis period, there is strong bidirectional causality link between the Shanghai and CRB. In post-crisis period, there is no causality between the indices. In the second part of the article, we employ Fuzzy System Modeling (FSM) to increase the performances of root mean-square error, R² and Adjusted R². We show the results of our analysis for both Shanghai and CRB indexes. We have demonstrated the results for a good number of our investigations ANFIS, GENFIS, Classical LSE and three versions of support vector regression. For both Shanghai and CRB indexes, our FSMIFF with LSE obtains better results than all other models we have investigated and thus are more suitable for forecasting stable and unstable stock market behavior.     

Ammonia borane as hydrogen storage materials

Ammonia borane is an appropriate solid hydrogen storage material because of its high hydrogen content of 19.6% wt., high stability under ambient conditions, nontoxicity, and high solubility in common solvents. Hydrolysis of ammonia borane appears to be the most efficient way of releasing hydrogen stored in it. Since ammonia borane is relatively stable against hydrolysis in aqueous solution, its hydrolytic dehydrogenation can be achieved at an appreciable rate only in the presence of suitable catalyst at room temperature. Metal(0) nanoparticles have high initial catalytic activity in releasing H₂ from ammonia borane. Thermodynamically instable metal(0) nanoparticles can kinetically be stabilized against agglomeration either by using ligands in solution or by supporting on the surface of solid materials with large surface area in solid state. Examples of both type of stabilization are presented from our own studies. The results show that metal(0) nanoparticles dispersed in solution or supported on suitable solid materials with large surface area can catalyze the release of H₂ from ammonia borane at room temperature. Dispersion of metal(0) nanoparticles, stabilized in liquid phase by anions or polymers, seems advantageous as providing more active sites compared to the metal nanoparticles supported on a solid surface. However, the supported metal nanoparticles are found to be more stable against agglomeration than the ones dispersed in liquid phase. Therefore, metal nanoparticles supported on solid materials have usually longer lifetime than the ones dispersed in solution. Examples are given from the own literature to show how to improve the catalytic activity and durability of metal nanoparticles by selecting suitable stabilizer or supporting materials for certain metal. For the time being, nanoceria supported rhodium(0) nanoparticles are the most active catalyst providing a turnover frequency of 2010 min^?1 in releasing H₂ from ammonia borane at room temperature.     

Calcium-sensing receptor gene polymorphisms and cardiac valvular calcification in patients with chronic renal failure: A pilot study

Cardiac valvular calcification (VC) is a frequent finding in chronic hemodialysis patients. In addition to demographic and metabolic factors, genetic susceptibility may also influence the occurrence and severity of these abnormalities and account for interindividual variability among patients. In this report, we studied the relation of calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) gene polymorphisms to the development of VC in chronic hemodialysis patients. A total of 41 chronic hemodialysis patients (26 male, mean age 47.23 ± 11.36 years vs. 15 females, mean age 48.13 ± 14.66 years) undergoing treatment for more than 1 year were evaluated with transthoracic echocardiography. In patients with and without VC, CaSR gene polymorphisms (A990G, C1011G) were investigated by PCR, using allele-specific primers. In randomly chosen subjects, PCR analysis was verified by DNA sequencing. Cardiac valve calcification was detected in 21 patients (51.2%). Five of these patients (12.2%) had mitral valve calcification, 4 (9.75%) had aortic valve calcification, and 12 (29.27%) had both. In patients with VC, the frequency of the A/G genotype was slightly higher than those with no VC with a borderline P value (42.9% vs. 15%, χ²=3.840, P=0.050). The frequency of the C/C genotype was similar in patients with and without VC (90.5% vs. 85%, P>0.05). The results of this study are not enough to prove the role of CaSR gene polymorphisms in the development of VC. There is a need for large-scale studies on this topic.     

The effects of ethanol–unleaded gasoline blends on engine performance and exhaust emissions in a spark-ignition engine

Alcohols have been used as a fuel for engines since 19th century. Among the various alcohols, ethanol is known as the most suited renewable, bio-based and ecofriendly fuel for spark-ignition (SI) engines. The most attractive properties of ethanol as an SI engine fuel are that it can be produced from renewable energy sources such as sugar, cane, cassava, many types of waste biomass materials, corn and barley. In addition, ethanol has higher evaporation heat, octane number and flammability temperature therefore it has positive influence on engine performance and reduces exhaust emissions. In this study, the effects of unleaded gasoline (E0) and unleaded gasoline–ethanol blends (E50 and E85) on engine performance and pollutant emissions were investigated experimentally in a single cylinder four-stroke spark-ignition engine at two compression ratios (10:1 and 11:1). The engine speed was changed from 1500 to 5000 rpm at wide open throttle (WOT). The results of the engine test showed that ethanol addition to unleaded gasoline increase the engine torque, power and fuel consumption and reduce carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and hydrocarbon (HC) emissions. It was also found that ethanol–gasoline blends allow increasing compression ratio (CR) without knock occurrence.     

Effects of cysteine and different incubation temperatures on the microflora,chemical composition and sensory characteristics of bio-yogurt made from goat’s milk

Yogurt and bio-yogurts were made from goat’s milk using a starter culture and probiotic culture, with or without cysteine addition (0.5%). Incubation was carried out at 37 and 42 °C until pH 4.6 was reached and yogurts were stored 4 ± 1 °C for 14 days. Yogurts were analysed 1, 7 and 14 days after production. The addition of cysteine, incubation temperature and storage time significantly influenced overall properties of the samples. During storage, whey separation, pH and acetaldehyde decreased, while lactic acid increased. Viable bacterial counts in all bio-yogurts were above 10⁷ cfu g⁻¹ at the end of storage. Whey separation, titratable acidity and lactic acid contents were lower, while acetaldehyde and viable bacterial counts were higher in the bio-yogurts incubated at 37 °C and supplemented with cysteine, in comparison to other samples. This indicates that lower temperature incubation and addition of cysteine can be used satisfactorily for the manufacture of bio-yogurt.     

Parametric analysis of flare edge rolling throat bending and asymmetric flare effects for H-plane horn radiator

In this paper, radiation characteristics of H-plane sectoral horn antenna are treated systematically by investigation of main structural design parameters and, flare edge rolling, throat bending and asymmetric flare effects. The analytical regularization method (ARM) is used to solve the problem of E-polarized wave diffraction in a fast and accurate way. The numerical procedure is initially verified by the analytical solutions, and then the calculated directivity gain patterns are demonstrated for the modeled horn antenna configurations. Proper choices of the antenna parameters, such as horn depth, aperture length, feeder waveguide width, flare angle, wall thickness, flare edge rolling and throat bending are proposed for the designers to reach high directivity gain, narrow beam width, suppressed side lobe levels, increased front-to back ratio and improved aperture efficiency.