1,374 research outputs found

    Conceptual design of single turbofan engine powered light aircraft

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    The conceptual design of a four place single turbofan engine powered light aircraft was accomplished utilizing contemporary light aircraft conventional design techniques as a means of evaluating the NASA-Ames General Aviation Synthesis Program (GASP) as a preliminary design tool. In certain areas, disagreement or exclusion were found to exist between the results of the conventional design and GASP processes. Detail discussion of these points along with the associated contemporary design methodology are presented

    THE EPIDERMIS AND CYCLIC AMP

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    Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73687/1/j.1365-2133.1974.tb06390.x.pd

    Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions

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    Eliciting relevance judgments for ranking evaluation is labor-intensive and costly, motivating careful selection of which documents to judge. Unlike traditional approaches that make this selection deterministically, probabilistic sampling has shown intriguing promise since it enables the design of estimators that are provably unbiased even when reusing data with missing judgments. In this paper, we first unify and extend these sampling approaches by viewing the evaluation problem as a Monte Carlo estimation task that applies to a large number of common IR metrics. Drawing on the theoretical clarity that this view offers, we tackle three practical evaluation scenarios: comparing two systems, comparing kk systems against a baseline, and ranking kk systems. For each scenario, we derive an estimator and a variance-optimizing sampling distribution while retaining the strengths of sampling-based evaluation, including unbiasedness, reusability despite missing data, and ease of use in practice. In addition to the theoretical contribution, we empirically evaluate our methods against previously used sampling heuristics and find that they generally cut the number of required relevance judgments at least in half.Comment: Under review; 10 page

    Hydralazine-enhanced Selective Heating of Transmissible Venereal Tumor Implants in Dogs

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    This study was designed to test the hypothesis that vasodilator drugs can enhance selective heating of solid tumors by producing a favorable redistribution of blood flow between tumor and normal tissues. Subcutaneous transmissible venereal tumor implants were heated by inductive diathermy using Helmholtz coils in 8 dogs. The temperature rise in tumor and adjacent muscle was measured before and after giving hydralazine (0.5 mg/kg i.v.). Blood flow to the tumors and underlying muscle was measured with radioactive tracer microspheres. Before hydralazine treatment mean muscle blood flow was about one-third tumor blood flow (0.11 0.02 vs. 0.28 0.09 ml/min/g), and tumor and normal muscle temperatures were not significantly different (40.0 0.6 vs. 39.7 0.l oC). After hydralazine tumor blood flow decreased and muscle blood flow increased in every dog, and selective heating of the tumors became possible. Muscle blood flow averaged 0.67 0.13 ml/min/g, 17 times greater than tumor blood flow, which decreased to 0.04 0.02 ml/min/g. Core tumor temperature was 48.0 0.9 vs. 38.5 0.5 oC for underlying muscle. Blood pressure was maintained at 80 5.7 mmHg. These results demonstrate that adjuvant treatment with vasodilators is a promising technique to increase the temperature difference between tumors and surrounding normal tissues during local heat therapy

    A Study of Snippet Length and Informativeness: Behaviour, Performance and User Experience

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    The design and presentation of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has been subject to much research. With many contemporary aspects of the SERP now under scrutiny, work still remains in investigating more traditional SERP components, such as the result summary. Prior studies have examined a variety of different aspects of result summaries, but in this paper we investigate the influence of result summary length on search behaviour, performance and user experience. To this end, we designed and conducted a within-subjects experiment using the TREC AQUAINT news collection with 53 participants. Using Kullback-Leibler distance as a measure of information gain, we examined result summaries of different lengths and selected four conditions where the change in information gain was the greatest: (i) title only; (ii) title plus one snippet; (iii) title plus two snippets; and (iv) title plus four snippets. Findings show that participants broadly preferred longer result summaries, as they were perceived to be more informative. However, their performance in terms of correctly identifying relevant documents was similar across all four conditions. Furthermore, while the participants felt that longer summaries were more informative, empirical observations suggest otherwise; while participants were more likely to click on relevant items given longer summaries, they also were more likely to click on non-relevant items. This shows that longer is not necessarily better, though participants perceived that to be the case - and second, they reveal a positive relationship between the length and informativeness of summaries and their attractiveness (i.e. clickthrough rates). These findings show that there are tensions between perception and performance when designing result summaries that need to be taken into account

    Evaluating Variable-Length Multiple-Option Lists in Chatbots and Mobile Search

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    In recent years, the proliferation of smart mobile devices has lead to the gradual integration of search functionality within mobile platforms. This has created an incentive to move away from the "ten blue links'' metaphor, as mobile users are less likely to click on them, expecting to get the answer directly from the snippets. In turn, this has revived the interest in Question Answering. Then, along came chatbots, conversational systems, and messaging platforms, where the user needs could be better served with the system asking follow-up questions in order to better understand the user's intent. While typically a user would expect a single response at any utterance, a system could also return multiple options for the user to select from, based on different system understandings of the user's intent. However, this possibility should not be overused, as this practice could confuse and/or annoy the user. How to produce good variable-length lists, given the conflicting objectives of staying short while maximizing the likelihood of having a correct answer included in the list, is an underexplored problem. It is also unclear how to evaluate a system that tries to do that. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we define some necessary and some optional properties that an evaluation measure fit for this purpose should have. We further show that existing evaluation measures from the IR tradition are not entirely suitable for this setup, and we propose novel evaluation measures that address it satisfactorily.Comment: 4 pages, in Proceeding of SIGIR 201

    Theory and Application of Dissociative Electron Capture in Molecular Identification

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    The coupling of an electron monochromator (EM) to a mass spectrometer (MS) has created a new analytical technique, EM-MS, for the investigation of electrophilic compounds. This method provides a powerful tool for molecular identification of compounds contained in complex matrices, such as environmental samples. EM-MS expands the application and selectivity of traditional MS through the inclusion of a new dimension in the space of molecular characteristics--the electron resonance energy spectrum. However, before this tool can realize its full potential, it will be necessary to create a library of resonance energy scans from standards of the molecules for which EM-MS offers a practical means of detection. Here, an approach supplementing direct measurement with chemical inference and quantum scattering theory is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of directly calculating resonance energy spectra. This approach makes use of the symmetry of the transition-matrix element of the captured electron to discriminate between the spectra of isomers. As a way of validating this approach, the resonance values for twenty-five nitrated aromatic compounds were measured along with their relative abundance. Subsequently, the spectra for the isomers of nitrotoluene were shown to be consistent with the symmetry-based model. The initial success of this treatment suggests that it might be possible to predict negative ion resonances and thus create a library of EM-MS standards.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

    Development of small scale soft x-ray lasers: Aspects of data interpretation

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    The widespread application of soft x-ray laser technology is contingent on the development of small scale soft x-ray lasers that do not require large laser facilities. Progress in the development of soft x-ray lasers pumped by a Nd laser of energy 6-12J is reported below. Some aspects of data interpretation and gain measurements in such systems are discussed. 11 refs., 11 figs

    Viscoelasticity and metastability limit in supercooled liquids

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    A supercooled liquid is said to have a kinetic spinodal if a temperature Tsp exists below which the liquid relaxation time exceeds the crystal nucleation time. We revisit classical nucleation theory taking into account the viscoelastic response of the liquid to the formation of crystal nuclei and find that the kinetic spinodal is strongly influenced by elastic effects. We introduce a dimensionless parameter \lambda, which is essentially the ratio between the infinite frequency shear modulus and the enthalpy of fusion of the crystal. In systems where \lambda is larger than a critical value \lambda_c the metastability limit is totally suppressed, independently of the surface tension. On the other hand, if \lambda < \lambda_c a kinetic spinodal is present and the time needed to experimentally observe it scales as exp[\omega/(\lambda_c-\lambda)^2], where \omega is roughly the ratio between surface tension and enthalpy of fusion

    Regional blood flow during cardiopulmonary resuscitation in dogs

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    To determine differences in regional blood flow during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) versus normal cardiac function, we measured regional blood flow to sev~ral organs in 19 pentobarbital-anesthetized dogs (6-12 kg). Regional blood flow was measured during sinus rhythm in 5 dogs and during electrically induced ventricular fibrillation with CPR in the other 14 dogs. Regional blood flow and cardiac output were measured using radioactively labelled polystyrene microspheres of 15 ±3P diameter, injected into the left ventricle. Adequacy of microsphere mixing at low cardiac outputs was verified by comparing flow rates to paired organs. Cardiac output was 175 ml/kg/min during sinus rhythm versus 47 ml/kg/min during CPR. Flow to all organs sampled was less during CPR, but the relative decrease varied widely. The ratios of regional blood flow during CPR to regional blood flow during sinus rhythm were 90% for brain, 35% for heart, 15% for kidneys, 17% for adrenal glands, 14% for pancreas, 3% for spleen, and 33% for small intestine. These results provide baseline values for regional blood flow during CPR which can be used to evaluate alternative CPR techniques and/or drugs which may improve perfusion of vital organs during CPR
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