Failure of greenstone, jasper and cataclasite aggregate in bituminous concrete due to studded tyres: Similarities and differences

In wintertime, the use of studded tyres is common in the Nordic countries, steeply in creasing road wear. Apart from reducing surface quality and durability, the airborne dust presents a potential health hazard. To reduce road wear and dust release, there is a tendency to use harder and more wear-resistant aggregate materials.On the roads in and around Trondheim, mid-Norway, three types of aggregate material are common: greenstone, jasper and ‘mylonite’, in fact a cataclasite. Extensive laboratory testing suggests that cataclasite aggregate has better wear resistance than greenstone, but less than jasper [Erichsen E, Schiellerup H, Gautneb, H, Ottesen RT, Broekmans M. Road dust in Trondheim — analysis of the mineral content of airborne dust. (In Norwegian.) Geological Survey of Norway, NGU-report 2004. 037; 2004. p. 73]. However , observations on fluorescence-impregnated plane and thin sections demonstrate that in practice, cataclasite wears faster than greenstone, which may be attributed to its oriented fabric, as opposed to the random fabric in greenstone and jasper. The original article by Rosiwal from 1896 [Rosiwal A. Neue Untersuchungser gebnisse über die Härte von Mineralien und Gesteine. Verhandlungen der kaiserlich-königlichen geologischen Reichsanstalt, vol. 17/18; 1896. p. 475–491] on abrasion hardness and anisotropy provides an elegant explanation for the field observations.     

Photonic Demodulator With Sensitivity Control

A current assisted photonic demodulator for use as a pixel in a 3-D time-of-flight imager shows nearly 100% static demodulator contrast and is operable beyond 30 MHz. An integrated tunable sensitivity control is also presented for increasing the distance measurement range and avoiding unwanted saturation during integration periods. This is achieved by application of a voltage on a dedicated drain tap showing a quenching of sensor sensitivity to below 1%     

Allogeneic sibling umbilical-cord-blood transplantation in children with malignant and non-malignant disease

Allogeneic bone marrow transplantation is limited by the availability of suitable marrow donors and risk of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and opportunistic infection. In an attempt to ameliorate these limitations, umbilical cord blood has been postulated as an alternative source of allogeneic haemopoietic stem cells for transplantation. From September, 1994, umbilical cord blood from sibling donors has been used to reconstitute haemapoiesis in 44 children with acquired or congenital lympho-haemapoietic disorders, neuroblastoma, or metabolic diseases. Patients who had HLA-identical and HLA-1 antigen disparate grafts, had a probability of engraftment at 50 days after transplantation of 85%. No patient had late graft failure. The probability of grade II-IV GVHD at 100 days was 3% and the probability of chronic GVHD at one year was 6%. With a median follow-up of 1.6 years, the probability of survival for recipients of HLA-identical or HLA-1 antigen disparate grafts is 72%. We conclude that umbilical cord blood is a sufficient source of transplantable haemopoietic stem cells for children with HLA-identical or HLA-1 antigen disparate sibling donors with very low risk of acute or extensive chronic GVHD. The feasibility of umbilical-cord-blood transplantation with HLA-2 and HLA-3 antigen disparate sibling donors remains to be determined.     

Analysis of Caching and Replication Strategies for Web Applications

Developers often use replication and caching mechanisms to enhance Web application performance. The authors present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of state-of-the art replication and caching techniques used to host Web applications. Their analysis shows that selecting the best mechanism depends heavily on data workload and requires a careful review of the application's characteristics. They also propose a technique for Web practitioners to compare different mechanisms' performance on their own     

Design of noise and period-time robust high-order repetitive control, with application to optical storage

Repetitive control is useful if periodic disturbances or setpoints act on a control system. Perfect (asymptotic) disturbance rejection is achieved if the period time is exactly known. The improved disturbance rejection at the periodic frequency and its harmonics is achieved at the expense of a degraded system sensitivity at intermediate frequencies. A convex optimization problem is defined for the design of high-order repetitive controllers, where a trade-off can be made between robustness for changes in the period time and for reduction of the error spectrum in-between the harmonic frequencies. The high-order repetitive control algorithms are successfully applied in experiments with the tracking control of a CD-player system.     

Luminescent Amphiphilic Aminoglycoside Probes to Study Transfection

We report the characterization of amphiphilic aminoglycoside conjugates containing luminophores with aggregation-induced emission properties as transfection reagents. These inherently luminescent transfection vectors are capable of binding plasmid DNA through electrostatic interactions; this binding results in an emission “on” signal due to restriction of intramolecular motion of the luminophore core. The luminescent cationic amphiphiles effectively transferred plasmid DNA into mammalian cells (HeLa, HEK 293T), as proven by expression of a red fluorescent protein marker. The morphologies of the aggregates were investigated by microscopy as well as ζ-potential and dynamic light-scattering measurements. The transfection efficiencies using luminescent cationic amphiphiles were similar to that of the gold-standard transfection reagent Lipofectamine® 2000.     

An analysis of XQuery benchmarks

This paper presents a survey and an analysis of the XQuery benchmark publicly available in 2006—XMach-1, XMark, X007, the Michigan benchmark, and XBench—from different perspectives. We address three simple questions about these benchmarks: How are they used? What do they measure? What can one learn from using them? One focus of our analysis is to determine whether the benchmarks can be used for micro-benchmarking. Our conclusions are based on an usage analysis, on an in-depth analysis of the benchmark queries, and on experiments run on four XQuery engines: Galax, SaxonB, Qizx/Open, and MonetDB/XQuery.