Rehabilitating oustees in the Narmada basin,India

The plan for 3155 water projects is absolutely necessary for the socioeconomic development of the neglected Narmada basin. However, neither the 45‐year development target nor its cost (Rs 200 billion) is realistic. The environmental cost associated with the rehabilitation of 1.31 million oustees within the valley should be fully internalized in the development plan. In this article, submergence effects are estimated by extrapolation, and a socioeconomic and cultural profile of the oustees is presented. The feasibility of four possible resettlement alternatives is examined, keeping in view the objectives of rehabilitation and the performance of completed and ongoing projects. Guidelines are suggested for the preparation of a rehabilitation plan.     

Routing of a hazmat truck in the presence of weather systems

This paper focuses on the effects of weather systems on hazmat routing. We start by analyzing the effects of a weather system on a vehicle traversing a single link. This helps characterize the time-dependent attributes of a link due to movement of the weather systems. This analysis is used as a building block for the problem of finding a least risk path for hazmat transportation on a network exposed to such weather systems. Several methods are offered to solve the underlying problem, and computational results are reported. We draw two conclusions from this paper. First, it is possible to determine the time-dependent attributes for links on a network provided that some assumptions on the nature of the weather system are made. Second, heuristics can provide effective solutions for practical size problems while allowing for parking the vehicle to avoid weather system effects.     

Least squares large margin distribution machine for regression

Better prediction ability is the main objective of any regression-based model. Large margin Distribution Machine for Regression (LDMR) is an efficient approach where it tries to reduce both loss functions, i.e. ε-insensitive and quadratic loss to diminish the effects of outliers. However, still, it has a significant drawback, i.e. high computational complexity. To achieve the improved generalization of the regression model with less computational cost, we propose an enhanced form of LDMR named as Least Squares Large margin Distribution Machine-based Regression (LS-LDMR) by transforming the inequality conditions alleviate to equality conditions. The elucidation is attained by handling a system of linear equations where we need to measure the inverse of the matrix only. Hence, there is no need to solve the large size of the quadratic programming problem, unlike in the case of other regression-based algorithms as SVR, Twin SVR, and LDMR. The numerical experiment has been performed on the benchmark real-life datasets along with synthetically generated datasets by using the linear and Gaussian kernel. All the experiments of presented LS-LDMR are analyzed with standard SVR, Twin SVR, primal least squares Twin SVR (PLSTSVR), ε-Huber SVR (ε-HSVR), ε-support vector quantile regression (ε-SVQR), minimum deviation regression (MDR), and LDMR, which shows the effectiveness and usability of LS-LDMR. This approach is also statistically validated and verified in terms of various metrics.

     

Studies in dyeing. II. Effect of crystal modification of disperse dyes on polyester dyeing at 130°C

Four commercial disperse dyes were purified and their different crystal forms were prepared by crystallizing from different solvents or precipitating from their solutions in glacial acetic acid by dilution with water. These forms were found to have different melting points. They were dyed on polyester fibers at 130°C to fiber saturation values by changing the dyebath every 15 min. The effect of pretreatment of the dyes in an aqueous environment at different temperatures (60°, 100°, and 130°C) for 15–60 min in the presence and absence of a dispersing agent on the dye uptake values was also studied. Such treatments are shown to reduce the dye uptake. The implication of these treatments in practical dyeing are pointed out.     

Studying single nanocrystals under high pressure using an x-ray nanoprobe

In this report, we demonstrate the feasibility of applying a 250-nm focused x-ray beam to study a single crystalline NbSe(3) nanobelt under high-pressure conditions in a diamond anvil cell. With such a small probe, we not only resolved the distribution and morphology of each individual nanobelt in the x-ray fluorescence maps but also obtained the diffraction patterns from individual crystalline nanobelts with thicknesses of less than 50 nm. Single crystalline diffraction measurements on NbSe(3) nanobelts were performed at pressures up to 20 GPa.     

Path Hitting in Acyclic Graphs

An instance of the path hitting problem consists of two families of paths, and ℋ, in a common undirected graph, where each path in ℋ is associated with a non-negative cost. We refer to and ℋ as the sets of demand and hitting paths, respectively. When p∈ℋ and share at least one mutual edge, we say that p hits q. The objective is to find a minimum cost subset of ℋ whose members collectively hit those of . In this paper we provide constant factor approximation algorithms for path hitting, confined to instances in which the underlying graph is a tree, a spider, or a star. Although such restricted settings may appear to be very simple, we demonstrate that they still capture some of the most basic covering problems in graphs. Our approach combines several novel ideas: We extend the algorithm of Garg, Vazirani and Yannakakis (Algorithmica, 18:3–20, 1997) for approximate multicuts and multicommodity flows in trees to prove new integrality properties; we present a reduction that involves multiple calls to this extended algorithm; and we introduce a polynomial-time solvable variant of the edge cover problem, which may be of independent interest. An extended abstract of this paper appeared in Proceedings of the 14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, 2006. This work is part of D. Segev’s Ph.D. thesis prepared at Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Refael Hassin.     

Camera distortion self-calibration using the plumb-line constraint and minimal Hough entropy

In this paper, we present a simple and robust method for self-correction of camera distortion using single images of scenes which contain straight lines. Since the most common distortion can be modelled as radial distortion, we illustrate the method using the Harris radial distortion model, but the method is applicable to any distortion model. The method is based on transforming the edgels of the distorted image to a 1-D angular Hough space, and optimizing the distortion correction parameters which minimize the entropy of the corresponding normalized histogram. Properly corrected imagery will have fewer curved lines, and therefore less spread in Hough space. Since the method does not rely on any image structure beyond the existence of edgels sharing some common orientations and does not use edge fitting, it is applicable to a wide variety of image types. For instance, it can be applied equally well to images of texture with weak but dominant orientations, or images with strong vanishing points. Finally, the method is performed on both synthetic and real data revealing that it is particularly robust to noise.     

Flow structure and scour around circular compound bridge piers – A review

Large amount of literature is presently available on the topic of scour around uniform piers and its control. However, relatively fewer studies have been carried out so far on the topic of flow field and scour around compound piers. The state of art on the topic of flow structure and scour around circular compound piers is presented herein. The available literature reveals that variations in foundation and pier geometry significantly affect the maximum depth of scour and its temporal variation. In case of compound piers the scour depth is highly sensitive to the change in elevation of the top surface of the foundation well. As compared to uniform piers, a reduction is observed in maximum depth of scour around compound pier when the top surface of the well is kept below the general level of river bed. These observations however are yet to be quantified. Results from an experimental study on flow field around the compound piers are also presented.     

Lessons and Challenges from Mining Retail E-Commerce Data

The architecture of Blue Martini Software's e-commerce suite has supported data collection, data transformation, and data mining since its inception. With clickstreams being collected at the application-server layer, high-level events being logged, and data automatically transformed into a data warehouse using meta-data, common problems plaguing data mining using weblogs (e.g., sessionization and conflating multi-sourced data) were obviated, thus allowing us to concentrate on actual data mining goals. The paper briefly reviews the architecture and discusses many lessons learned over the last four years and the challenges that still need to be addressed. The lessons and challenges are presented across two dimensions: business-level vs. technical, and throughout the data mining lifecycle stages of data collection, data warehouse construction, business intelligence, and deployment. The lessons and challenges are also widely applicable to data mining domains outside retail e-commerce.