The relationship between highly-cited papers and the frequency of citations to other papers within-issue among three top information science journals

Scientometrics - This study investigates a potential relationship between highly-cited scholarly papers and the number of citations received by other papers with which they share a journal issue....     

Impact of adhesive ingredients on adhesion between rubber and brass-plated steel wire in tire

Proficiency on underlying mechanism of rubber-metal adhesion has been increased significantly in the last few decades. Researchers have investigated the effect of various ingredients, such as hexamethoxymethyl melamine, resorcinol, cobalt stearate, and silica, on rubber-metal interface. The role of each ingredient on rubber-metal interfacial adhesion is still a subject of scrutiny. In this article, a typical belt skim compound of truck radial tire is selected and the effect of each adhesive ingredient on adhesion strength is explored. Out of these ingredients, the effect of cobalt stearate is found noteworthy. It has improved adhesion strength by 12% (without aging) and by 11% (humid-aged), respectively, over control compound. For detailed understanding of the effect of cobalt stearate on adhesion, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy are utilized to ascertain the rubber coverage and distribution of elements. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results helped us to understand the impact of Cu_XS layer depth on rubber-metal adhesion. The depth profile of the Cu_XS layer was found to be one of the dominant factors of rubber-metal adhesion retention. Thus, this study has made an attempt to find the impact of different adhesive ingredients on the formation of Cu_XS layer depth at rubber-metal interface and establish a correlation with adhesion strength simultaneously.     

Chromophore-Free Sealing and Repair of Soft Tissues Using Mid-Infrared Light-Activated Biosealants

Poor strength, infection, leakage, long procedure times, and inflammation limit the efficacy of common tissue sealing devices in surgeries and trauma. Light-activated sealing is attractive for tissue sealing and repair, and can be facilitated by the generation of local heat following absorption of nonionizing laser energy by chromophores. Here, the inherent ability of biomaterials is exploited to absorb nonionizing, mid-infrared (midIR) light in order to engender rapid photothermal sealing and repair of soft tissue wounds. In this approach, the biomaterial simultaneously acts as a photothermal convertor as well as a biosealant, which dispenses the need for exogeneous light-absorbing nanoparticles or dyes. Biomechanical recovery, mathematical modeling, histopathology analyses, tissue strain mapping using digital imaging correlation, and visualization of the biosealant-tissue interface using hyperspectral imaging indicate superior performance of midIR sealing in live mice compared to conventional sutures and glue. The midIR-biosealant approach demonstrates rapid sealing of soft tissues, improves cosmesis, lowers potential for scarring, obviates safety concerns because of the nonionizing light used, and allows adoption of a wide diversity of biomaterials. Taken together, the studies demonstrate a novel advance both in biomaterials for surgical sealing along with the use of nonionizing midIR light, with high potential for clinical translation.     

Night and Day: Are Siblings as Different in Temperament as Parents Say They Are?

Twin studies suggest that parent ratings of temperament exaggerate differences between twins. The present study examined whether such contrast effects also operate for nontwin siblings. The activity level (AL) and shyness of 95 nontwin sibling pairs (ages 3 to 8 years) were assessed via parent ratings and objective measures (actigraph and observer ratings). Siblings showed no resemblance in either parent-rated AL or shyness; however, sibling resemblance for actigraph AL and observer-rated shyness was substantial. Thus, parents do contrast their nontwin siblings when rating these 2 temperament dimensions. Moreover, the importance of sibling differences in temperament to the sibling relationship and differential maternal treatment varied across the different measures of AL and shyness, suggesting that parent perceptions may play a role in these associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A VLSI architecture for a half-edge-based corner detector

Corner detection is a low-level feature detection operator that is of great use in image processing applications, for example, optical flow and structure from motion by image correspondence. The detection of corners is a computationally intensive operation. Past implementations of corner detection techniques have been restricted to software. In this paper we propose an efficient very large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture for detection of corners in images. The corner detection technique is based on the half-edge concept and the first directional derivative of Gaussian. Apart from the location of the corner points, the algorithm also computes the corner orientation and the corner angle and outputs the edge map of the image. The symmetrical properties of the masks are utilized to reduce the number of convolutions effectively, from eight to two. Therefore, the number of multiplications required per pixel is reduced from 1800 to 392. Thus, the proposed architecture yields a speed-up factor of 4.6 over conventional convolution architectures. The architecture uses the principles of pipelining and parallelism and can be implemented in VLSI.     

FluNet: A hybrid internet simulator for fast queue regimes

Motivated by the scale and complexity of simulating large-scale networks, recent research has focused on hybrid fluid/packet simulators, where fluid models are combined with packet models in order to reduce simulation complexity as well as to track dynamics of end-sources accurately. However, these simulators still need to track the queuing dynamics of network routers, leading to considerable simulation complexity in a large-scale network model. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid simulator – FluNet – where queueing dynamics are not tracked, but instead, an equivalent rate-based model is used. The FluNet simulator is predicated on a fast-queueing regime at bottleneck routers, where the queue length fluctuates on a faster time-scale than end systems. This allows us to simulate large-scale systems, where the simulation “time step-size” is governed only by the time-scale of the end-systems, and not by that of the intermediate routers; whereas a queue-tracking based fluid simulator would require decreasingly smaller step-sizes as the system scale size increases. We validate our model using a ns-2 based implementation. Our results indicate a good match between packet systems and the associated FluNet system.     

A benchmark on the calculation of kinetic parameters based on reactivity effect experiments in the CROCUS reactor

Measurements in the CROCUS reactor at EPFL, Lausanne, are reported for the critical water level and the inverse reactor period for several different sets of delayed supercritical conditions. The experimental configurations were also calculated by four different calculation methods. For each of the supercritical configurations, the absolute reactivity value has been determined in two different ways, viz.: (i) through direct comparison of the multiplication factor obtained employing a given calculation method with the corresponding value for the critical case (calculated reactivity: ρ_calc); (ii) by application of the inhour equation using the kinetic parameters obtained for the critical configuration and the measured inverse reactor period (measured reactivity: ρ_meas). The calculated multiplication factors for the reference critical configuration, as well as ρ_calc for the supercritical cases, are found to be in good agreement. However, the values of ρ_meas produced by two of the applied calculation methods differ appreciably from the corresponding ρ_calc values, clearly indicating deficiencies in the kinetic parameters obtained from these methods.     

Effect of epitaxial realignment on the leakage behavior of arsenic-implanted,as-deposited polycrystalline Si-on-single crystal Si diodes

When dopants are indiffused from a heavily implanted polycrystalline silicon film deposited on a silicon substrate, high thermal budget annealing can cause the interfacial “native” oxide at the polycrystalline silicon-single crystal silicon interface to break up into oxide clusters, causing epitaxial realignment of the polycrystalline silicon layer with respect to the silicon substrate. Anomalous transient enhanced diffusion occurs during epitaxial realignment and this has adverse effects on the leakage characteristics of the shallow junctions formed in the silicon substrate using this technique. The degradation in the leakage current is mainly due to increased generation-recombination in the depletion region because of defect injection from the interface.