Evolutionary Scheduling: A Review

Early and seminal work which applied evolutionary computing methods to scheduling problems from 1985 onwards laid a strong and exciting foundation for the work which has been reported over the past decade or so. A survey of the current state-of-the-art was produced in 1999 for the European Network of Excellence on Evolutionary Computing EVONET—this paper provides a more up-to-date overview of the area, reporting on current trends, achievements, and suggesting the way forward.     

Large‐area spatial atomic layer deposition of amorphous oxide semiconductors at atmospheric pressure

Indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) is deposited using plasma‐enhanced spatial atomic layer deposition (sALD) on substrates as large as 32 × 35 cm². Excellent uniformity and thickness control leads to high‐performing and stable coplanar top‐gate self‐aligned (SA) thin‐film transistors (TFTs). The integration of a sALD‐deposited aluminum oxide buffer layer into the TFT stack further improves uniformity and stability. The results demonstrate the viability of atmospheric sALD as a novel deposition technique for the flat‐panel display industry.     

Improving the peer review process: a proposed market system

Scientometrics - The current peer review system suffers from two key problems: promotion of an in-crowd whose methods, opinions and innovations it protects; and failure to represent the opinions...     

Gitaloxin poisoning in a child

Gitaloxin is a digitalis glycoside used for the same indications as digoxin and digitoxin. The successful outcome for a 2 1/2-year-old boy who accidentally ingested 3 mg of gitaloxin (100 times the normal therapeutic dose) is reported. At admission the child presented with irregular heart rhythm. He subsequently started vomiting, even after continuous gastric feeding. Only 48 h after ingestion of gitaloxin he became somnolent and developed bradyarrhythmia. The symptoms disappeared 96 h later; the bradyarrhythmia, however, (second-degree atrioventricular block) decreased progressively only after 120 h. The initial clinical presentation of gitaloxin poisoning may be misleading and careful observation in a pediatric intensive care unit is mandatory. A cross-reaction between the fluorescence polarization immunoassay for digitoxin and the radioimmunoassay for gitaloxin was found and was used as a helpful, but rough, estimate of the severity of gitaloxin poisoning, in the absence of a specific measurement of gitaloxin.     

A new evolutionary approach to the degree-constrained minimumspanning tree problem

Finding the degree-constrained minimum spanning tree (d-MST) of a graph is a well-studied NP-hard problem of importance in communications network design and other network-related problems. In this paper we describe some previously proposed algorithms for solving the problem, and then introduce a novel tree construction algorithm called the randomized primal method (RPM) which builds degree-constrained trees of low cost from solution vectors taken as input. RPM is applied in three stochastic iterative search methods: simulated annealing, multistart hillclimbing, and a genetic algorithm. While other researchers have mainly concentrated on finding spanning trees in Euclidean graphs, we consider the more general case of random graph problems. We describe two random graph generators which produce particularly challenging d-MST problems. On these and other problems we find that the genetic algorithm employing RPM outperforms simulated annealing and multistart hillclimbing. Our experimental results provide strong evidence that the genetic algorithm employing RPM finds significantly lower-cost solutions to random graph d-MST problems than rival methods     

厌氧-好氧法处理漂白和染色废水

荷兰帕克公司应用厌氧-好氧连续工艺，成功处理了荷兰Ten Cate纺织厂的漂白和染色废水。该水处理工艺应用了容积为70m^3的厌氧反应器和容积为450m^3的好氧曝气池，废水色度去除率达80％-95％，且大部分色度是在预酸化池和厌氧反应器中去除的。经厌氧-好氧处理后的废水，对生物发光细菌Vibro fisheri无毒性。若使一部分废水不经过厌氧直接进入好氧进行处理，结果表明，好氧出水毒性增加，且色度去除率大大降低。这说明，厌氧处理对于废水的脱色和毒性去除起着重要的作用。     

Severe encephalopathy in a child: an uncommon cause

We report the unusual fixed cutaneous variety of sporotrichosis in a patient hailing from Uttarkashi (Uttar Pradesh) in the north-western part of India.