1,374 research outputs found
Conceptual design of single turbofan engine powered light aircraft
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
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73687/1/j.1365-2133.1974.tb06390.x.pd
Unbiased Comparative Evaluation of Ranking Functions
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 systems against a baseline, and ranking 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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