4,777 research outputs found
Poly Pelletizer: Recycled Pet Pellets From Water Bottles
Plastic water bottles comprise a large amount of waste worldwide. The goal of the Poly Pelletizer project is to create a system that will turn water bottles into polyethylene terephthalate (PET) pellets compatible with extruders to produce 3-D printer lament, along with other recycling applications.The system promotes a sustainable solution to plastic pollution by giving manufactures, particularly in developing nations, the means to produce their own bulk materials using waste plastic. Shrinking industrial recycling processes to a workbench scale gives individuals the ability to convert excess bottles into seemingly limitless products. The system works by using a dual heating and pressure system to both evenly mix and melt the plastic before pushing the resin through a die. The Poly Pelletizer successfully created pellets using various mixtures of virgin PET and shredded water bottles
Team QCRI-MIT at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Propaganda Analysis Meets Hyperpartisan News Detection
In this paper, we describe our submission to SemEval-2019 Task 4 on
Hyperpartisan News Detection. Our system relies on a variety of engineered
features originally used to detect propaganda. This is based on the assumption
that biased messages are propagandistic in the sense that they promote a
particular political cause or viewpoint. We trained a logistic regression model
with features ranging from simple bag-of-words to vocabulary richness and text
readability features. Our system achieved 72.9% accuracy on the test data that
is annotated manually and 60.8% on the test data that is annotated with distant
supervision. Additional experiments showed that significant performance
improvements can be achieved with better feature pre-processing.Comment: Hyperpartisanship, propaganda, news media, fake news, SemEval-201
Parameters affecting ion intensities in transmission-mode Direct Analysis in Real-Time mass spectrometry
A survey of the effect of temperature, transmission module material and analysis time on ion intensities in transmission mode direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry is presented. Ion intensity profiles obtained for two related compounds are similar when analysed separately but are very different when analysed as a mixture
Are sexual media exposure, parental restrictions on media use and co-viewing TV and DVDs with parents and friends associated with teenagers' early sexual behaviour?
Sexual content in teenagers' media diets is known to predict early sexual behaviour. Research on sexual content has not allowed for the social context of media use, which may affect selection and processing of content. This study investigated whether sexual media content and/or contextual factors (co-viewing, parental media restrictions) were associated with early sexual behaviour using 2251 14–15 year-olds from Scotland, UK. A third (<i>n</i> = 733) reported sexual intercourse. In multivariable analysis the likelihood of intercourse was lower with parental restriction of sexual media and same-sex peer co-viewing; but higher with mixed-sex peer co-viewing. Parental co-viewing, other parental restrictions on media and sexual film content exposure were not associated with intercourse. Findings suggest the context of media use may influence early sexual behaviour. Specific parental restrictions on sexual media may offer more protection against early sex than other restrictions or parental co-viewing. Further research is required to establish causal mechanisms
Building a Center of Excellence for Robotic Surgery Through a Referral Provider Network (RPN)
An improved land mask for the SSM/I grid
This paper discusses the development of a new land/ocean/coastline mask for use with Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) data, and other types of data which are mapped to the polar stereographic SSM/I grid. Pre-existing land masks were found to disagree, to lack certain land features, and to disagree with land boundaries that are visible in high resolution sensor imagery, such as imagery from the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) on the Earth Resources Satellite (ERS-1). The Digital Chart of the World (DCW) database was initially selected as a source of shoreline data for this effort. Techniques for developing a land mask from these shoreline data are discussed. The resulting land mask, although not perfect, is seen to exhibit significant improvement over previous land mask products
Reversible inhibition of cathepsin L-like proteases by 4-mer pseudopeptides
AbstractA library of 121 pseudopeptides was designed to develop reversible inhibitors of trypanosomal enzymes (cruzain from Trypanosoma cruzi and congopain from Trypanosoma congolense). The peptides share the framework: Cha-X1-X2-Pro (Cha=cyclohexyl-alanine, X1 and X2 were phenylalanyl analogs), based on a previous report [Lecaille, F., Authié, E., Moreau, T., Serveau, C., Gauthier, F. and Lalmanach, G. (2001) Eur. J. Biochem. 268, 2733–2741]. Five peptides containing a nitro-substituted aromatic residue (Tyr/Phe) and one a 4-chloro-phenylalanine at the X1 position, and 3-(2-naphthyl)-alanine, homocyclohexylalanine or 3-nitro-tyrosine (3-NO2-Tyr) at the X2 position, were selected. They inhibited congopain more effectively than cruzain, except Cha-4-NO2-Phe-3-NO2-Tyr-Pro which bound the two parasitic enzymes similarly. Among this series, Cha-3-NO2-Tyr-HoCha-Pro and Cha-4-NO2-Phe-3-NO2-Tyr-Pro are the most selective for congopain relative to host cathepsins. No hydrolysis occurred upon prolonged incubation time with purified enzymes. In addition introduction of non-proteogenic residues in the peptidyl backbone greatly enhanced resistance to proteolysis by mammalian sera
XMM-Newton confirmation of a new intermediate polar: XMMU J185330.7-012815
We report the results from a detailed spectro-imaging and temporal analysis
of an archival XMM-Newton observation of a new intermediate polar XMMU
J185330.7-012815. Its X-ray spectrum can be well-described by a
multi-temperature thermal plasma model with the K-lines of heavy elements
clearly detected. Possible counterparts of XMMU J185330.7-012815 have been
identified in optical and UV bands. The low value of the inferred X-ray-to-UV
and X-ray-to-optical flux ratios help to safely rule out the possibility as an
isolated neutron star. We confirm the X-ray periodicity of ~238 s, but
different from the previous preliminary result, we do not find any convincing
evidence of phase-shift in this observation. We further investigate its
properties through an energy-resolved temporal analysis and find the pulsed
fraction monotonically increases with energy.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRA
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