Field observations on the occurrence of new indicators of disinfection efficiency

This paper summarizes studies on the presence of acid-fast and yeast organisms in wastewater and water treatment plants and in surface water. These organisms were found to satisfy three of Bonde's criteria for indicator organisms: presence whenever pathogens are likely to be present; resistance at least equal to that of pathogens; and lack of regrowth in the post-treatment environment. This, plus prior data, indicates that these organisms are at least as acceptable as indicators of disinfection efficiency than the coliform group.     

Markov decision processes with delays and asynchronous cost collection

Markov decision processes (MDPs) may involve three types of delays. First, state information, rather than being available instantaneously, may arrive with a delay (observation delay). Second, an action may take effect at a later decision stage rather than immediately (action delay). Third, the cost induced by an action may be collected after a number of stages (cost delay). We de rive two results, one for constant and one for random delays, for reducing an MDP with delays to an MDP without delays, which differs only in the size of the state space. The results are based on the intuition that costs may be collected asynchronously, i.e., at a stage other than the one in which they are induced, as long as they are discounted properly.     

Opportunities in the electrowinning of molten titanium from titanium dioxide

The value chain of titanium products shows that the difference between the cost of titanium ingot and titanium dioxide is about $9/kg titanium. In contrast, the price of aluminum, which is produced in a similar way, is only about $1.7/kg. Electrowinning of molten titanium from titanium dioxide is therefore believed to have significant potential to reduce the cost of titanium products. The process is hampered by the high operating temperatures and sophisticated materials of construction required; the high affinity of titanium for carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen; and physical and chemical properties of the different titanium oxide species when reducing titanium from Ti₄₊ to metallic titanium. For more information, contact D.S. van Vuuren, CSIR, Materials and Manufacturing Technology Department, Meiring Naude Road, Pretoria, Gauteng 0181, South Africa; +27 12-841 2375; fax +27 841 2135; e-mail dvvuuren@csir.co.za.     

Additive Manufacturing of Hard Magnetic Passive Shims to Increase Field Homogeneity of a Halbach Magnet

Obtaining a highly homogeneous magnetic field is desired for field-controlled applications. For example, the resolution of magnetic analysis methods can be improved by generating a stronger and more homogeneous field over the region of interest (ROI). A set of 3D-printed passive shims is fabricated using additive manufacturing to improve the magnetic field homogeneity of a Halbach magnet assembly. The feedstock is a custom acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)-hard magnet composite filament filled with 60% wt. isotropic NdFeB. Additionally, a method for investigating the remanence is developed and validated. The result reveals a good agreement between the new method and existing measurement techniques for the remanence of permanent magnets. It is also shown that the additive manufacturing procedure has negligible effects on the magnetic properties. Performing a parametric study over a rectangular ROI, an optimized shim configuration is achieved. In the optimized and 3D-printed configuration, the average norm of the magnetic flux density, B_norm, is increased by 13% and, more importantly, a 43% increase in the magnetic uniformity is obtained. These results highlight the great potential of freeform manufacturing, namely, additive manufacturing, to tailor the properties of magnet structures.     

Making it easier for older people to talk to smart homes: the effect of early help prompts

It is well known that help prompts shape how users talk to spoken dialogue systems. This study investigated the effect of help prompt placement on older users’ interaction with a smart home interface. In the dynamic help condition, help was only given in response to system errors; in the inherent help condition, it was also given at the start of each task. Fifteen older and sixteen younger users interacted with a smart home system using two different scenarios. Each scenario consisted of several tasks. The linguistic style users employed to communicate with the system (interaction style) was measured using the ratio of commands to the overall utterance length (keyword ratio) and the percentage of content words in the user’s utterance that could be understood by the system (shared vocabulary). While the timing of help prompts did not affect the interaction style of younger users, it was early task-specific help supported older users in adapting their interaction style to the system’s capabilities. Well-placed help prompts can significantly increase the usability of spoken dialogue systems for older people.     

Clustering data in an uncertain environment using an artificial immune system

Clustering of data in an uncertain environment can result into different partitions of the data at different points in time. Therefore, the initial formed clusters of non-stationary data can adapt over time which means that feature vectors associated with different clusters can follow different migration types to and from other clusters. This paper investigates different data migration types and proposes a technique to generate artificial non-stationary data which follows different migration types. Furthermore, the paper proposes clustering performance measures which are more applicable to measure the clustering quality in a non-stationary environment compared to the clustering performance measures for stationary environments. The proposed clustering performance measures in this paper are then used to compare the clustering results of three network based artificial immune models, since the adaptability and self-organising behaviour of the natural immune system inspired the modelling of network based artificial immune models for clustering of non-stationary data.     

A new pruning heuristic based on variance analysis of sensitivityinformation

Architecture selection is a very important aspect in the design of neural networks (NNs) to optimally tune performance and computational complexity. Sensitivity analysis has been used successfully to prune irrelevant parameters from feedforward NNs. This paper presents a new pruning algorithm that uses the sensitivity analysis to quantify the relevance of input and hidden units. A new statistical pruning heuristic is proposed, based on the variance analysis, to decide which units to prune. The basic idea is that a parameter with a variance in sensitivity not significantly different from zero, is irrelevant and can be removed. Experimental results show that the new pruning algorithm correctly prunes irrelevant input and hidden units. The new pruning algorithm is also compared with standard pruning algorithms.     

Schrifttumsberichte

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Intracondylar knee joint prosthesis with rotation capacity- Endo model

The St. Georg total knee prosthesis has been modified to incorporate axial rotation of the tibial component. The kinematics approximate more those of the normal knee and the stress imposed at the bone-cement interface are attenuated, thus reducing the risk of mechanical failure. The construction and laboratory testing are described.     

Sensitivity Analysis for Decision Boundaries

A novel approach is presented to visualize and analyze decision boundaries for feedforward neural networks. First order sensitivity analysis of the neural network output function with respect to input perturbations is used to visualize the position of decision boundaries over input space. Similarly, sensitivity analysis of each hidden unit activation function reveals which boundary is implemented by which hidden unit. The paper shows how these sensitivity analysis models can be used to better understand the data being modelled, and to visually identify irrelevant input and hidden units.