Measurement of surface roughness slope

Instrument, consisting of isolator, differentiator, absolute value circuit, and integrator, uses output signal from surface texture analyzer profile-amplifier to calculate surface roughness slope. Calculations provide accurate, instantaneous value of the slope. Instrument is inexpensive and applicable to any commerical surface texture analyzer

Fiduciary Duties of Directors When Managing Intellectual Property

The law covering corporate director duties pertaining to management of intellectual property assets is evolving, making it important for directors to remain up-to-date on any and all changes in management procedures and best practices. Generally, courts treat intellectual property assets like any other corporate asset, which means directors must approach intellectual property with the same due care as they would any other asset. For example, directors must be informed of the value of their intellectual property and always remember their duty of loyalty to their shareholders. Similarly, courts require directors to implement necessary internal controls to protect their corporation’s intellectual property assets. Finally, directors must refrain from misappropriating intellectual property. Recent cases include DuPont v. Medtronic Vascular, where the Superior Court of Delaware acknowledged that corporate officers and directors may have an affirmative duty to monetize their corporation’s intellectual property, including the use of litigation if necessary.Furthermore, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently filed a complaint against CytoGenix Corporation, its president, Lex Cowsert, and a board member, Christopher Plummer, claiming the defendants lied to investors by issuing false press releases associated with an influenza vaccine’s development when the corporation had already lost all of its patents in a prior lawsuit

Post-training load-related changes of auditory working memory: An EEG study

Working memory (WM) refers to the temporary retention and manipulation of information, and its capacity is highly susceptible to training. Yet, the neural mechanisms that allow for increased performance under demanding conditions are not fully understood. We expected that post-training efficiency in WM performance modulates neural processing during high load tasks. We tested this hypothesis, using electroencephalography (EEG) (N = 39), by comparing source space spectral power of healthy adults performing low and high load auditory WM tasks. Prior to the assessment, participants either underwent a modality-specific auditory WM training, or a modality-irrelevant tactile WM training, or were not trained (active control). After a modality-specific training participants showed higher behavioral performance, compared to the control. EEG data analysis revealed general effects of WM load, across all training groups, in the theta-, alpha-, and beta-frequency bands. With increased load theta-band power increased over frontal, and decreased over parietal areas. Centro-parietal alpha-band power and central beta-band power decreased with load. Interestingly, in the high load condition a tendency toward reduced beta-band power in the right medial temporal lobe was observed in the modality-specific WM training group compared to the modality-irrelevant and active control groups. Our finding that WM processing during the high load condition changed after modality-specific WM training, showing reduced beta-band activity in voice-selective regions, possibly indicates a more efficient maintenance of task-relevant stimuli. The general load effects suggest that WM performance at high load demands involves complementary mechanisms, combining a strengthening of task-relevant and a suppression of task-irrelevant processing

Evaluation of hyperelastic models for unidirectional short fibre reinforced materials using a representative volume element with refined boundary conditions

The simulation of a short fibre reinforced structure by means of the FEM requires the knowledge of the material behaviour at every Gauss point. In order to obtain such information, a representative volume element (RVE) containing unidirectional short fibres is analysed in the presented work. In order to cover the complete anisotropic effect of the fibres, deformations with different angles to the fibre direction have to be conducted. In contrast to other works, this task is tackled using the application of periodic boundary conditions to the RVE in tensorial form, which enables a simple access to consider varying fibre angles with one and the same RVE. As the RVE’s average response represents the homogenised behaviour at a macroscopic material point, the material models’ parameters can be identified by fitting them to stress-strain curves obtained from simulations with the RVE. The findings of these analyses are used to assess the applicability of several hyperelastic models describing transversal isotropic materials under consideration of large deformations. For example it is shown, that the formulation of mixed invariants with the isochoric right Cauchy-Green tensor is insufficient to reproduce the RVE’s behaviour at purely volumetric deformations. Both the modelling and the calculations are carried out with the commercial FEMsoftware ABAQUS. Insight is given to the implementation of the boundary conditions as well as the underlying constitutive equations

Quasiperiodic graphs: structural design, scaling and entropic properties

A novel class of graphs, here named quasiperiodic, are constructed via application of the Horizontal Visibility algorithm to the time series generated along the quasiperiodic route to chaos. We show how the hierarchy of mode-locked regions represented by the Farey tree is inherited by their associated graphs. We are able to establish, via Renormalization Group (RG) theory, the architecture of the quasiperiodic graphs produced by irrational winding numbers with pure periodic continued fraction. And finally, we demonstrate that the RG fixed-point degree distributions are recovered via optimization of a suitably defined graph entropy

Water and health. [Chapter 6 of 'Sustainable water: chemical science priorities summary report']

Water transports contaminants, including inorganic, organic and biological materials, from various sources both natural and man-made. Such contaminants can enter the human body via water by ingestion, inhalation of water droplets and contact, particularly with broken skin. Water borne diseases have historically had the greatest impact upon human health and continue to contribute to millions of deaths globally per year. Water use and sanitation in the form of hygiene practices act as an important barrier to disease transmission. Disease incidences in countries without basic water and sanitation services are estimated to be eleven times higher for than those in areas with clean water, hygiene practices, and the safe disposal of human wastes. Naturally occurring arsenic compounds (in particular toxic organic species) contaminate substantial groundwater sources. The most seriously affected areas in Sustainable Water: Chemical Science Priorities Royal Society of Chemistry report the world are in India and Bangladesh. Here, 60–100 million people are currently at risk of poisoning as a result of drinking contaminated groundwater where the arsenic arises from the natural bedrock geology. There is a need for portable field-testing kits that are quick, accurate, cheap and reliable that can support remediation efforts. Additionally there is a need for arsenic mitigation technologies that are effective and appropriate for use by local populations. There is also a growing problem with uranium contamination of groundwater, particularly in Eastern Europe. Society is reliant upon man-made chemicals, particularly for food and health, and inevitably such chemicals end up in water systems. Typically these chemical contaminants are either neurotoxins, pharmaceutically active or endocrine disruptors. Additionally there is growing concern over multiple chemical sensitivity1, although scientific evidence is insufficient to prove or disprove this theory at this time. There are two specific problems with man-made chemicals in wastewater: firstly, treatment plants are not designed to remove these chemical products; secondly, chemicals entrained in sediments can be mobilised by chemical and biological processes. Traditionally, pollution by man-made chemicals is reduced by either dilution or through end of pipe remediation technologies. This can be minimised by adopting good practice and integrated pollution prevention and control. This would include measures such as minimising the quantity of materials used and recovering unused materials. Additionally, industrial waste streams should be concentrated as far as possible and mixtures of materials should be avoided, as this will require additional treatment steps and effort

Control of Visual Selection during Visual Search in the Human Brain

How do we find a target object in a cluttered visual scene? Targets carrying unique salient features can be found in parallel without directing attention, whereas targets defined by feature conjunctions or non-salient features need to be scrutinized in a serial attentional process in order to be identified. In this article, we review a series of experiments in which we used fMRI to probe the neural basis of this active search process in the human brain. In all experiments, we compared the fMRI signal between a difficult and an easy visual search (each performed without eye movements) in order to isolate neural activity reflecting the search process from other components such as stimulus responses and movement-related activity. The difficult search was either a conjunction search or a hard feature search and compared with an easy feature search, matched in visual stimulation and motor requirements. During both, the conjunction search and the hard feature search the frontal eye fields (FEF) and three parietal regions located in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) were differentially activated: the anterior and posterior part of the intraparietal sulcus (AIPS, PIPS) as well as the junction of the intraparietal with the transverse occipital sulcus (IPTO). Only in PIPS, the modulation strength was most indistinguishable between conjunction and hard feature search. In a further experiment we showed that AIPS and IPTO are involved in visual conjunction search even in the absence of distractors; by contrast, the involvement of PIPS seems to depend on the presence of distractors. Taken together, these findings from these experiments demonstrate that all four key nodes of the human ’frontoparietal attention network’ are generally engaged in the covert selection process of visual search. But they also suggest that these areas play differential roles, perhaps reflecting different sub-processes in active search. We conclude by discussing a number of such sub-processes, such as the direction of spatial attention, visual feature binding, and the active suppression of distractors