Sex role stereotyping is hard to kill: A field experiment measuring social responses to user characteristics and behavior in an online multiplayer first-person shooter game

Sex role stereotyping by players in first-person shooter games and other online gaming environments may encourage a social environment that marginalizes and alienates female players. Consistent with the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE), the anonymity of online games may engender endorsement of group-consistent attitudes and amplification of social stereotyping, such as the adherence to gender norms predicted by expectations states theory. A 2 × 3 × 2 virtual field experiment (N = 520) in an online first-person shooter video game examined effects of a confederate players’ sex, communication style, and skill on players’ compliance with subsequent online friend requests. We found support for the hypothesis that, in general, women would gain more compliance with friend requests than men. We also found support for the hypothesis that women making positive utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than women making negative utterances, whereas men making negative utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than men making positive utterances. The hypothesis that player skill (i.e., game scores) would predict compliance with friend requests was not supported. Implications for male and female game players and computer-mediated communication in online gaming environments are discussed.     

Screening of adhesive lactobacilli with antagonistic activity against Campylobacter jejuni

In the present study, 78 lactic acid bacteria (LAB) strains were screened for the antagonistic activity against Campylobacter jejuni and 15 LAB strains with high bactericidal capacity were selected for further study through the analysis of the inhibition zone of LAB spent culture supernatant on the growth of C. jejuni. Among these strains, four isolates, Lactobacillus plantarum N8, N9, ZL5 and Lactobacillus casei ZL4 exhibited high adhesion ability to HT-29 cells. All the cell free supernatant (CFS) of these four strains contained high concentration of organic acid and their inhibition effects against C. jejuni were pH sensitive. Furthermore, these four strains could strongly antagonize the adhesion and invasion of C. jejuni to HT-29 cells and showed good tolerance to artificial gastric and small intestinal juices. This study suggests that Lactobacillus strains N8, N9, ZL4 and ZL5 could be used as potential probiotics in food applications against C. jejuni infection.     

Vision-based action recognition of earthmoving equipment using spatio-temporal features and support vector machine classifiers

Video recordings of earthmoving construction operations provide understandable data that can be used for benchmarking and analyzing their performance. These recordings further support project managers to take corrective actions on performance deviations and in turn improve operational efficiency. Despite these benefits, manual stopwatch studies of previously recorded videos can be labor-intensive, may suffer from biases of the observers, and are impractical after substantial period of observations. This paper presents a new computer vision based algorithm for recognizing single actions of earthmoving construction equipment. This is particularly a challenging task as equipment can be partially occluded in site video streams and usually come in wide variety of sizes and appearances. The scale and pose of the equipment actions can also significantly vary based on the camera configurations. In the proposed method, a video is initially represented as a collection of spatio-temporal visual features by extracting space–time interest points and describing each feature with a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). The algorithm automatically learns the distributions of the spatio-temporal features and action categories using a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. This strategy handles noisy feature points arisen from typical dynamic backgrounds. Given a video sequence captured from a fixed camera, the multi-class SVM classifier recognizes and localizes equipment actions. For the purpose of evaluation, a new video dataset is introduced which contains 859 sequences from excavator and truck actions. This dataset contains large variations of equipment pose and scale, and has varied backgrounds and levels of occlusion. The experimental results with average accuracies of 86.33% and 98.33% show that our supervised method outperforms previous algorithms for excavator and truck action recognition. The results hold the promise for applicability of the proposed method for construction activity analysis.     

Theoretical investigations of elastic and thermodynamic properties of LiXH4 compounds for hydrogen storage

The clean and environmentally friendly energy demand increases rapidly over the years. Hydrogen has been recognised as one of the best options to satisfy this demand. Utilisation of hydrogen as an energy carrier requires a number of steps especially for on-board applications, namely, production, transportation and storage. Storage of hydrogen brings a great challenge for the researchers among others. Current technologies include high-pressure compression, liquefaction and solid state storage of hydrogen. Solid state storage of hydrogen seems to be more applicable due to being much safer and denser. Metal hydrides are accepted as good candidates for solid state storage of hydrogen. In this regard, this study focuses on revealing dynamical and mechanical properties of new hydrogen reservoirs with high gravimetric hydrogen density, Li-X-H (X = C, N) using first principle calculations. First principle calculations have been proven to be a great tool to reveal extensive physical and chemical properties of the materials as well as mechanical and dynamical stability without synthesising them. Thus, this study adopts this tool to compute several physical and thermodynamic properties of Li-X-H such as bulk modulus, Young Modules, Shear Modulus, elastic constants, Poisson's ratio, Debye Temperature and so on for the first time. Based on the mechanical stability evaluation of compounds using elastic constants, both compounds are found to be mechanically stable. In addition, according to Pugh's criteria, the compounds have ductile nature. The computation of anisotropy revealed that the compounds are anisotropic at all planes. Also, the specific heat capacities of compounds seem to reach to Dulong-Petit limit at high temperatures.     

Effects of preparation conditions on the morphology and performance of palladium nanostructures

Three-dimensional palladium nanoflowers (PdNF) composed of ultrathin Pd nanosheets had been synthesized by a solvothermal approach in our previous work. Here, the effects of preparation conditions on the morphology and electrochemical performance of palladium nanostructures were investigated. The explored conditions are as follows: the ratio of reducing agent to capping agent, the concentration of PdCl₂ precursor, the amount of HCl (used for PdCl₂ dissolution), the reaction temperature and time. Only when these conditions are strictly controlled, the obtained Pd material displays a uniformly nanoflower-like morphology, otherwise the Pd samples with nanoparticles or incomplete flowers can only be obtained. Then, the relationship between the morphology of Pd and its electrocatalytic activity was further studied. The results indicate that the Pd with perfect nanoflowers morphology possesses superior activity for formic acid electro-oxidation, while the Pd with incomplete flowers and ordinary (or irregular) particle morphology shows moderate and inferior activity. Therefore, the morphology-dependent electrocatalytic activity has been demonstrated in this work.     

Correlating indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity in a sample of buildings in tropical climates

The incidence of several respiratory viral infections has been shown to be related to climate. Because humans spend most of their time indoors, measures of indoor climate, rather than outdoor climate, may be better predictors of disease incidence and transmission. Therefore, understanding the relationship between indoor and outdoor climate will help illuminate their influence on the seasonality of diseases caused by respiratory viruses. Indoor-outdoor relationships between temperature and humidity have been documented in temperate regions, but little information is available for tropical regions, where seasonal patterns of respiratory viral diseases differ. We have examined indoor-outdoor correlations of temperature, relative humidity (RH), and absolute humidity (AH) over a 1-year period in each of seven tropical cities. Across all cities, the average monthly indoor temperature was 25 ± 3°C (mean ± standard deviation) with a range of 20–30°C. The average monthly indoor RH was 66 ± 9% with a range of 50–78%, and the average monthly indoor AH was 15 ± 3 g/m³ with a range of 10–23 g/m³. Indoor AH and RH were linearly correlated with outdoor AH when the air conditioning (AC) was off, suggesting that outdoor AH may be a good proxy of indoor humidity in the absence of AC. All indoor measurements were more strongly correlated with outdoor measurements as distance from the equator increased. Such correlations were weaker during the wet season, especially when AC was in operation. These correlations will provide insight for assessing the seasonality of respiratory viral infections using outdoor climate data, which is more widely available than indoor data, even though transmission of these diseases mainly occurs indoors.     

Advances in healing-on-demand polymers and polymer composites

Healing-on-demand materials exhibit the capability to close cracks and heal the closed/narrowed cracks when needed and to recover functionality using intrinsic or extrinsic resources. In this paper, advances in healing-on-demand polymers and polymer composites in the past decade are reviewed, covering different schemes and technologies used to trigger crack closure and to heal molecularly. A balanced review on non-load-bearing polymers and polymer composites as well as load-carrying polymers and polymer composites is presented. The progress in self-healing polymers and polymer composites has been well discussed recently in the literatures. In this review, therefore, less attention has been paid on what has been widely reported; we primarily focus on healing-on-demand materials concerned with large volume damage healing by a close-then-heal (CTH) strategy. The healing-on-demand material by the CTH approach undergoes a process of crack closure, followed by crack healing with healing agents. Healing theories, including those within the continuum damage mechanics framework, and healing efficiency evaluations are also reviewed. Perspectives on future development in this emerging research area are discussed.     

Open loop wind turbine emulator

A new wind turbine emulator (WTE) is presented, which is able to simulate the turbine power curves without using a closed loop control system. The state of the art emulators use DC or AC motors, closed loop controlled by processors with the turbine power curves recorded. The presented emulator has a DC voltage source, a power resistor and a DC motor with independent excitation. The motor power curve has a shape similar to a wind turbine power curve for a given wind speed; the wind speed variations can be emulated by the variations of the DC voltage source. The open loop emulator is completely different and new, because it works in open loop and does not require the presence of a processor.The following elements are included: the theoretical foundations of the emulator, the emulator power curves adjustment procedure to simulate a commercial wind turbine and the experimental tests.     

Wireless telemetry system for real-time estimation of ship air wakes with UAVs

This paper presents a wireless instrumentation system developed for real-time estimation of air turbulence patterns arising from the interaction of wind with any structure under consideration, which is an important study in the aerospace industry. In particular, this paper focuses on the application of the proposed system in a naval research problem for off-board measurement of ship air wake patterns using an instrumented radio controlled (RC) helicopter. We propose the use of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) as a sensor to measure air wake in the form of induced vibrations on the helicopter while it maneuvers through regions of active air wake. The proposed system makes use of Back Propagation Neural Networks to compensate for the vibrational noise contributed by pilot inputs. The instrumentation system was integrated and tested on a modified training vessel in the Chesapeake Bay, which provided a wide range of wind conditions.     

Transient dual interface measurement of junction-to-case thermal resistance in AlGaN/GaN HEMT utilizing an improved infrared microscope

The junction-to-case thermal resistance (R_θJC) of a GaN/AlGaN HEMT is measured by Transient Dual Interface Method (TDIM). Different from other works about TDIM, an improved transient infrared microscope is used to measure the cooling curves, other than the traditional electrical method. Z_th curves are used to determine the R_θJC following the procedure of JESD51-14. The results demonstrate that the R_θJC at 40 W power dissipation are about 0.791 K/W. In order to validate the method, measurements following MIL Std 833 have been done, and the results are consistent with the existing papers.