Detection of electrode asymmetry in electrochemical noise analysis

The electrochemical noise resistance is a calculation that can be used for estimating the rate of corrosion of a pair of metal samples purely from the electrochemical noise that they generate. Ideally these metal samples (electrodes) would be identical, but it is not uncommon, for various reasons, for the electrodes to be significantly different. In that case, the theory linking the noise resistance to the more conventional electrochemical parameter, the polarisation resistance, breaks down. This link is important because it is only via the polarisation resistance that noise resistance can be used for corrosion rate estimation. It is therefore important to be able to detect an asymmetric electrode pair. This paper describes how the cross correlation between voltage and current noise can be used to detect an asymmetr

Tracking-Optimized Quantization for H.264 Compression in Transportation Video Surveillance Applications

We propose a tracking-aware system that removes video components of low tracking interest and optimizes the quantization during compression of frequency coefficients, particularly those that most influence trackers, significantly reducing bitrate while maintaining comparable tracking accuracy. We utilize tracking accuracy as our compression criterion in lieu of mean squared error metrics. The process of optimizing quantization tables suitable for automated tracking can be executed online or offline. The online implementation initializes the encoding procedure for a specific scene, but introduces delay. On the other hand, the offline procedure produces globally optimum quantization tables where the optimization occurs for a collection of video sequences. Our proposed system is designed with low processing power and memory requirements in mind, and as such can be deployed on remote nodes. Using H.264/AVC video coding and a commonly used state-of-the-art tracker we show that while maintaining comparable tracking accuracy our system allows for over 50% bitrate savings on top of existing savings from previous work

Mass distributions for nuclear disintegration from fission to evaporation

By a proper choice of the excitation energy per nucleon we analyze the mass distributions of the nuclear fragmentation at various excitation energies. Starting from low energies (between 0.1 and 1 MeV/nucleon) up to higher energies about 12 MeV/n, we classified the mass yield characteristics for heavy nuclei (A>200) on the basis of Statistical Multifragmentation Model. The evaluation of fragment distribution with the excitation energy show that the present results exhibit the same trend as the experimental ones.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

The efficacy of endogenous gibberellic acid for parthenocarpy in eggplant (Solanum melongena L.)

Eggplants are generally grown by winter in Mediterranean areas. Therefore, growers prefer to use parthenocarpic fruit and plant growth regulators. This study determined the relationship between flower development and gibberellic acid (GA3) levels in parthenocarpic and non-parthenocarpic eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) genotypes. A single crop was grown in an unheated greenhouse at the Bati Akdeniz Agricultural Research Institute, Antalya, Turkey, and samples were collected from November to March, GA3 levels were measured with reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography at five different stages between small buds and small fruits. The results showed that there was no relationship between flower development and GA3 levels in parthenocarpic and non-parthenocarpic eggplant genotypes.Key words: HPLC, relation, cultivation, greenhouse, genotype, flower

A 3D scanner for transparent glass

Many practical tasks in industry, such as automatic inspection or robot vision, often require the scanning of three-dimensional shapes by use of non-contact techniques. However, few methods have been proposed to measure three-dimensional shapes of transparent objects because of the difficulty of dealing with transparency and specularity of the surface. This paper presents a 3D scanner for transparent glass objects based on Scanning From Heating (SFH), a new method that makes use of local surface heating and thermal imaging

Challenges of measuring residual stresses in large girth welded pipe spools by neutron diffraction

In this paper, welding induced residual stresses in a welded API 5L X65 girth pipe spools are discussed in as-welded and in local post weld heat treated conditions. Stress measurements were carried out non-destructively using the neutron diffraction technique. For such large-scale components residual stress measurements require significant preparation and planning. First of all, a choice of stress free lattice spacing value, discussed extensively, is of great importance for the evaluation of residual strains and stresses correctly. Besides, the use of a virtual instrument (SSCANSS software) can optimize measurements for distorted or undistorted large components with or without complex details. Moreover, the well-planned “window” cut through the thickness greatly reduced measurement time. A number of points were measured across the weld, HAZ and the parent material. Measurement results showed that residual stresses in the as-welded condition was lower than the yield strength of the material, and significant relaxation was also observed in the post weld heat treated samples

New insights into microbial ecology through subtle nucleotide variation

© The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Frontiers in Microbiology 7 (2016): 1318, doi:10.3389/fmicb.2016.01318.Characterizing the community structure of naturally occurring microbes through marker gene amplicons has gained widespread acceptance for profiling microbial populations. The 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene provides a suitable target for most studies since (1) it meets the criteria for robust markers of evolution, e.g., both conserved and rapidly evolving regions that do not undergo horizontal gene transfer, (2) microbial ecologists have identified widely adopted primers and protocols for generating amplicons for sequencing, (3) analyses of both cultivars and environmental DNA have generated well-curated databases for taxonomic profiling, and (4) bioinformaticians and computational biologists have published comprehensive software tools for interpreting the data and generating publication-ready figures. Since the initial descriptions of high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons to survey microbial diversity, we have witnessed an explosion of association-based inferences of interactions between microbes and their environment.AME was supported by the University of Chicago and the Marine Biological Laboratory collaboration award