A metaheuristic analysis of heat transfer rates through porous fins of tapered and step profiles: a comparative study

Neural Computing and Applications - The advanced high-end gadgets and sophisticated machines require effective mechanism of transferring heat away from the sources. In a large number of...     

Nonlinear static and dynamic analysis of circular plates and shallow spherical shells using the collocation method

The present work investigates the efficacy and applicability of interior global orthogonal point collocation method to the axisymmetric nonlinear analysis of elastic circular plates and shallow spherical shells subjected to uniformly distributed transverse load. Spacewise discretisation has been carried out using a polynomial expansion with the zeros of a Chebyshev polynomial as collocation points. Timewise integration has been carried out with Newmark k-β scheme corresponding to average acceleration method. The static response and snap-through buckling results, as well as, the dynamic response and dynamic buckling results under a uniformly distributed step load have been obtained and found to agree closely with the available results.     

Mechanomyography and oxygen consumption during incremental cycle ergometry

Brucella abortus strain RB51 was recently approved as an official brucellosis calfhood vaccine for cattle by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service branch of the United States Department of Agriculture. Currently available serologic surveillance tests for B. abortus do not detect seroconversion following SRB51 vaccination. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a dot-blot assay using gamma-irradiated strain RB51 bacteria for its specificity and sensitivity to detect antibody responses of cattle vaccinated with strain RB51. Dot-blot titers of sera at a recommended dosage (10(10) colony-forming units) were similar to those of sera from cattle vaccinated with similar numbers of B. abortus strain 19 and greater (P < 0.05) than titers of nonvaccinated cattle. In the first 12 weeks after vaccination with 10(10) colony-forming units of strain RB51, the RB51 dot-blot assay had 100% specificity for titers of 80 or less and a 53% sensitivity for titers of 160 or greater. Sensitivity of the RB51 dot-blot assay peaked at 4 weeks after vaccination with 10(10) colony-forming units of strain RB51. Dot-blot responses of sera from cattle vaccinated with a reduced dosage of strain RB51 (10(9) colony-forming units) did not differ (P > 0.05) from titers of sera from nonvaccinated cattle. Following intraconjunctival challenge with B. abortus strain 2308, titers on the RB51 dot-blot assay did not differ (P > 0.05) between nonvaccinated cattle and cattle vaccinated at calfhood with strain 19 or strain RB51.     

Sidestream tobacco smoke exposure acutely alters human nasal mucociliary clearance

Nasal mucociliary clearance (NMC) is a biomarker of nasal mucosal function. Tobacco smokers have been shown to have abnormal NMC, but the acute effect of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) on nonsmokers is unknown. This study evaluated acute tobacco smoke-induced alterations in NMC in 12 healthy adults. Subjects were studied on 2 days, separated by at least 1 week. Subjects underwent a 60-min controlled exposure at rest to air or sidestream tobacco smoke (SS) (15 ppm CO) in a controlled environmental chamber. One hour after the exposure, 99mTc-sulfur colloid was aerosolized throughout the nasal passage and counts were measured with a scintillation detector. Six out of 12 subjects showed more rapid clearance after smoke exposure than after air exposure, and 3/12 had rapid clearance on both days. However, substantial decreases in clearance occurred in 3/12 subjects, all of whom had a history of ETS rhinitis. In two subjects, more than 90% of the tracer remained 1 hr after tracer administration (2 hr after smoke exposure). Understanding the basis for biologic variability in the acute effect of tobacco smoke on NMC may advance our understanding of pathogenesis of chronic effects of ETS.     

An efficient clustering scheme using support vector methods

Support vector clustering involves three steps—solving an optimization problem, identification of clusters and tuning of hyper-parameters. In this paper, we introduce a pre-processing step that eliminates data points from the training data that are not crucial for clustering. Pre-processing is efficiently implemented using the R*-tree data structure. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that pre-processing drastically decreases the run-time of the clustering algorithm. Also, in many cases reduction in the number of support vectors is achieved. Further, we suggest an improvement for the step of identification of clusters.