Elastic and Strength Properties of Thermoplasts Randomly Reinforced with Short Carbon Fibres

The linearity of the modulus of elasticity of a randomly reinforced composite as a function of the volume content of fibre filler is experimentally established. The basic factors that determine the modulus of elasticity of the thermoplastic composite are determined: the modulus of elasticity, shape, and volume content of filler. The modulus of elasticity of the composite is not a function of the adhesion of the fibre filler to the matrix. Realization of the strength of fibre fillers in randomly reinforced composites should obey the mechanisms that hold for unidirectional, continuously reinforced composites with consideration of the effect of the filler and process parameters on the rheology and morphology of the binder.     

Assessment of the types of public building maintenance contracts in Saudi Arabia

The study revealed that Fixed Price, Cost Plus and Purchased Labour contracts are the top three maintenance contracts adopted whilst Unit Price, Cost Plus A Percentage Fee contracts are alternatives used in the Kingdom. Some other types of maintenance contract were thought to be inappropriate by ministry departments.     

Photo Sequencing

A group of people taking pictures of a dynamic event with their mobile phones is a popular sight. The set of still images obtained this way is rich in dynamic content but lacks accurate temporal information. We propose a method for photo-sequencing—temporally ordering a set of still images taken asynchronously by a set of uncalibrated cameras. Photo-sequencing is an essential tool in analyzing (or visualizing) a dynamic scene captured by still images. The first step of the method detects sets of corresponding static and dynamic feature points across images. The static features are used to determine the epipolar geometry between pairs of images, and each dynamic feature votes for the temporal order of the images in which it appears. The partial orders provided by the dynamic features are not necessarily consistent, and we use rank aggregation to combine them into a globally consistent temporal order of images. We demonstrate successful photo-sequencing on several challenging collections of images taken using a number of mobile phones.     

2-Transitivity is Insufficient for Local Testability

A basic goal in property testing is to identify a minimal set of features that make a property testable. For the case when the property to be tested is membership in a binary linear error-correcting code, Alon et al. (Trans Inf Theory, 51(11):4032–4039, 2005) had conjectured that the presence of a single low-weight codeword in the dual, and “2-transitivity” of the code (i.e., the code being invariant under a 2-transitive group of permutations on the coordinates of the code) suffice to get local testability. We refute this conjecture by giving a family of error-correcting codes where the coordinates of the codewords form a large field of characteristic two, and the code is invariant under affine transformations of the domain. This class of properties was introduced by Kaufman & Sudan (STOC, 2008) as a setting where many results in algebraic property testing generalize. Our result shows a complementary virtue: This family also can be useful in producing counterexamples to natural conjectures.     

On the Effective Deployment of Functional Formal Verification

We examine IBM's exploitation of formal verification using RuleBase—a formal verification tool developed by the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. The goal of the paper is methodological. We identify an integrated methodology for the deployment of formal verification which involves three complementary modes: architectural verification, block-level verification, and design exploration.     

Languages, scripts, and the environment: Factors in developing concepts of print.

Preschool children bilingual in English and Hebrew were investigated for their understanding of concepts of print by means of two tasks. In the first, children had to understand that a printed word did not change its meaning if it moved to a new location. In the second, children had to make judgments about word length and ignore the size of the named objects. Previous research had shown bilingual French–English and Chinese–English children to excel in the first task, but only older Chinese–English bilinguals had an advantage in the second. The present study extended those results by investigating the effect of writing system in more detail. The study also examined the effect of the language of the environment by conducting parallel studies in environments in which either English or Hebrew was the community language. The results show that the bilingual children in both settings were more advanced than the monolinguals in both tasks and in both settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interaction of electromagnetic waves with granular agricultural product and insects.

The basic correlation is defined which characterizes an influence of electromagnetic radiation on a system of individual particles of ellipsoidal geometry dispersed into some volume (chaotic arrangement) of another medium. The field intensity inside one isolated particle is determined depending on the parameters of the external (relative to the volume) electromagnetic field. Energy loss in an isolated particle is calculated. The shielding effect of a field in an isolated particle by other surrounding particles is taken into account. The relative dielectric permittivity and the relative loss tangent as a function of grain moisture content are measured. Drying and disinfestation of wheat grain by electromagnetic methods are observed.     

Determination of hot spots on a heated wavy wall in channel flow

The present study deals with the effects of wall geometry on the fluid flow and heat transfer in a channel with a wavy wall heated with constant heat dissipation. The waviness is characterized by wave amplitude and period. A detailed parametric numerical investigation of the effect of waviness on the local heat transfer parameters is performed for different turbulent flow conditions and compared with the literature.The effect of flow and geometry parameters is assessed quantitatively. Generalization is done based on the Reynolds number, Re_A, which uses doubled wave amplitude, or height, A = 2a, as the characteristic length, and on the geometry parameter, A/λ, which essentially is the amplitude-to-wavelength ratio. A dimensionless location of the hottest spot on the wavy wall is shown to be dependent on these two dimensionless parameters. A correlation which encompasses the hottest spot locations for all the cases studied in the work is suggested.In order to obtain generalization for the hottest spot temperature, the Nusselt number is introduced based on the constant (uniform) heat flux and variable temperature difference, with wave amplitude as the characteristic length. It is shown that, for all cases studied herein, the hottest temperature is represented as Nu_A,min(Re_A, A/λ). Accordingly, a correlation for the minimum Nusselt number is suggested. A further generalization for the hottest spot temperature is attempted for the conjugate problem with a conducting wall. It includes wall-to-fluid thermal conductivity ratio, k_s/k_l, as the additional dimensionless parameter which determines the Nusselt number.     

通州门楼 中国北京

正在距北京三十英里的地方,一个由200多名具有国际知名度的中国艺术家组成的社区,缺乏一个互动吸引点、艺术展示区或接待场所。一个由艺术家、评论家和代理人组成的财团收购了一处地产,准备为通州的艺术组织建设一个这样的项目。这是一个分期项目,已完工的首期是门楼,包括定居在此的艺术家们的住房和工作室。项目场址被一堵现有的砖墙隔开,一边是一片树林,另一边是一片贫瘠的工业场