Concurrent Cholesky factorization of positive definite banded Hermitian-matrices

First the Cholesky factorization is extended to cover uniformly partitioned banded positive definite matrices of rank n which may be real symmetric or Hermitian. Then two stratagems are given for the use of the algorithm in concurrent machines where the number of processing elements is less than required to factor the matrix in as few serial steps as possible, and where uniformly high efficiency is expected from all processing elements. Expressions are given for the efficiency factor e appearing in the speed-up expression g = eN, and these are specialized for the N node hypercube machine as a function of partition size s, the number N of processing elements of the hypercube machine, and the cost μ of interelement transmission relative to computation. It is shown that efficiency factor e is inversely proportional to μ/s, and that e is almost independent of N when N is large and μ/s = 0. The task is completed in n/s serial steps with no limit on n. The half bandwidth b of the matrix is 2Ns.     

Existentialism and epistemology.

Comments on B. Vandenberg's (see record 1992-12211-001) article on epistemology and an existential consideration of development, taking exception with both his definition of existentialism and his characterization of Piaget's work. Existentialism, it is argued, is not an alternative to epistemology, but a particular style of responding to philosophic questions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessment of the effectiveness of the educational environment supported by computer aided presentations at primary school level

The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of the educational environment supported by computer aided presentations at primary school. The effectiveness of the environment has been evaluated in terms of students’ learning and remembering what they have learnt. In the study, we have compared experimental group and control group in terms of learning and recalling what has been learned regarding the effect which computer aided learning environment imposes. Data have been collected through the control grouped pretest–final test model. During the experiment, we have prepared an achievement test, which explains behaviors the students should acquire. According to the findings obtained, a computer aided educational environment has been observed to be more effective than that of conventional education in terms of learning. However, in terms of the permanence of what has been learned, no meaningful difference between the educational environment supported by computer aided presentations and that of conventional education has come out. According to the results of the follow-up tests performed, even though students in the test group have forgotten more of what they have learnt, it has been concluded that students in both groups have forgotten on the same level. Consequently, it has been observed that though the educational environment supported by computer aided presentations has positive contributions to learning activity, it does not have effects on the permanence of what has been learnt.     

The road to chaos by time-asymmetric Hebbian learning in recurrent neural networks

This letter aims at studying the impact of iterative Hebbian learning algorithms on the recurrent neural network's underlying dynamics. First, an iterative supervised learning algorithm is discussed. An essential improvement of this algorithm consists of indexing the attractor information items by means of external stimuli rather than by using only initial conditions, as Hopfield originally proposed. Modifying the stimuli mainly results in a change of the entire internal dynamics, leading to an enlargement of the set of attractors and potential memory bags. The impact of the learning on the network's dynamics is the following: the more information to be stored as limit cycle attractors of the neural network, the more chaos prevails as the background dynamical regime of the network. In fact, the background chaos spreads widely and adopts a very unstructured shape similar to white noise. Next, we introduce a new form of supervised learning that is more plausible from a biological point of view: the network has to learn to react to an external stimulus by cycling through a sequence that is no longer specified a priori. Based on its spontaneous dynamics, the network decides "on its own" the dynamical patterns to be associated with the stimuli. Compared with classical supervised learning, huge enhancements in storing capacity and computational cost have been observed. Moreover, this new form of supervised learning, by being more "respectful" of the network intrinsic dynamics, maintains much more structure in the obtained chaos. It is still possible to observe the traces of the learned attractors in the chaotic regime. This complex but still very informative regime is referred to as "frustrated chaos."     

Weak state versus strong state: an analysis of a probabilistic state mechanism for dynamic networks

Network protocols coordinate their decision making using information about entities in remote locations. Such information is provided by state entries. To remain valid, the state information needs to be refreshed via control messages. When it refers to a dynamic entity, the state has to be refreshed at a high rate to prevent it from becoming stale. In capacity constrained networks, this may deteriorate the overall performance of the network. The concept of weak state has been proposed as a remedy to this problem in the context of routing in mobile ad-hoc networks. Weak state is characterized by probabilistic semantics and local refreshes as opposed to strong state that is interpreted as absolute truth. A measure of the probability that the state remains valid, i.e. confidence, accompanies the state. The confidence is decayed in time to adapt to dynamism and to capture the uncertainty in the state information. This way, weak state remains valid without explicit state refresh messages. We evaluate the consistency of weak state and strong state using two notions of distortion. Pure distortion measures the average difference between the actual value of the entity and the value that is provided by the remote state. Informed distortion captures both this difference and the effect of confidence value on state consistency. Using a mathematical analysis and simulations, we show that weak state reduces the distortion values when it provides information about highly dynamic entities and/or it is utilized for protocols that is required to incur a low amount of overhead.     

Experimental study of a micro-scale sloped solar chimney power plant

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - Solar chimney power plants (SCPP) are structures that have the potential to generate a significant amount of electrical energy without harming the...     

Performance evaluation of a submerged membrane bioreactor for the treatment of brackish oil and natural gas field produced water

Produced water, which is co-produced during oil and gas manufacturing, represents one of the largest sources of oily wastewaters. Therefore, treatment of this produced water may improve the economic viability and lead to a new source of water for beneficial use. In this study a submerged hollow fiber membrane bioreactor (MBR) has been studied experimentally for the treatment of brackish oil and natural gas field produced water. This type of wastewater is also characterized with relatively moderate to high amount of salt, oil and total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH). However, the bacteria which are growing in conventional activated sludge and MBR cannot survive at these strict conditions, therefore acclimation of the bacteria is of vital importance. The performance of the biological system, membrane permeability, the rate and extent of TPH biodegradability have been investigated under different sludge age and F/M ratios. The results obtained by gas chromatography analyses showed that the MBR system could be very effective in the removal of TPH from produced water and a significant improvement in the effluent quality was achieved.     

DTN routing using explicit and probabilistic routing table states

Routing in communication networks involves the indirection from a persistent name (ID) to a locator. The locator specifies how packets are delivered to a destination with a particular ID. Such a mapping is provided by a routing table entry, i.e. state. In a DTN, it is hard to maintain routing state because intermittent connectivity prevents protocols from refreshing states when they become inaccurate. In prior work, per-destination state mostly corresponds to utilities, where a high utility value about a destination implies that the probability to encounter the destination for the node maintaining the state is high. This approach depends on a particular mobility pattern in which nodes that met frequently in the past are likely to encounter in the future. In this paper, we use the concept of weak state that does not rely on external messages to remain valid (Acer et al. in MobiCom ’07: proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on mobile computing and networking, pp 290–301, 2007). Our weak state realization provides probabilistic yet explicit information about where the destination is located. We build Weak State Routing protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks (WSR-D) that exploits the direction of node mobility in forwarding. It provides an osmosis mechanism to disseminate the state information to the network. With osmosis, a node has consistent information about a portion of the nodes that are located in regions relevant to its direction of mobility. Through simulations, we show that WSR-D achieves a higher delivery ratio with smaller average delay, and reduces the number of message transfers in comparison to Spray & Wait (Spyropoulos et al. in Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2005 workshops: conference on computer communications, pp 252–259, 2005) and Spray & Focus (Spyropoulos et al. in IEEE/ACM Trans Netw, 16(1):77–90, 2008), a stateless and a utility based protocol, respectively.     

Effects of liquid smoke on quality characteristics of Turkish standard smoked beef tongue

The purpose of this research was to determine some quality characteristics of beef tongues processed with liquid and vaporous (traditional) smoke. The tongues were divided into two groups; traditional (vaporous) smoking and liquid smoke application groups, and the processed tongues were vacuum packaged and monitored for quality during 30 days of storage at 4±1?°C. All the smoked tongue samples were subjected to chemical, microbiological and organoleptic analysis at 0, 5, 10, 15 and 30 days of storage. The results indicated that despite some favorable results attributed to traditional smoking, liquid smoke application of beef tongue is also possible without causing any major acceptability problems in terms of quality.     

Design of a 3D aligned myocardial tissue construct from biodegradable polyesters

The heart does not regenerate new functional tissue when myocardium dies following coronary artery occlusion, or if it is defective. Ventricular restoration involves excising the infarct and replacing it with a cardiac patch to restore the heart to a more healthy condition. The goal of this study was to design and develop a clinically applicable myocardial patch to replace myocardial infarcts and improve long-term heart function. A basic design composed of 3D microfibrous mats that house mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) was developed from human umbilical cord matrix (Wharton’s Jelly) cells aligned in parallel to each other mimicking the native myocardium. Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) (PHBV), poly(L-D,L-lactic acid) (P(L-D,L)LA) and poly(glycerol sebacate) (PGS) were blended and electrospun into aligned fiber mats with fiber diameter ranging between 1.10 and 1.25 μm. The micron-sized parallel fibers of the polymer blend were effective in cell alignment and cells have penetrated deep within the mat through the fiber interstices, occupying the whole structure; 8–9 cell layers were obtained. Biodegradable macroporous tubings were introduced to serve as nutrient delivery route. It was possible to create a thick myocardial patch with structure similar to the native tissue and with a capability to grow.