Pressure induced magnetic and magnetocaloric properties in NiCoMnSb Heusler alloy

The effect of pressure on the magnetic and the magnetocaloric properties around the martensitic transformation temperature in NiCoMnSb Heusler alloy has been studied. The martensitic transition temperature has significantly shifted to higher temperatures with pressure, whereas the trend is opposite with the application of applied magnetic field. The maximum magnetic entropy change around the martensitic transition temperature for Ni45Co5Mn38Sb12 is 41.4 J/kg K at the ambient pressure, whereas it is 33 J/kg K at 8.5 kbar. We find that by adjusting the Co concentration and applying suitable pressure, NiCoMnSb system can be tuned to achieve giant magnetocaloric effect spread over a large temperature span around the room temperature, thereby making it a potential magnetic refrigerant material for applications.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Parramore and the Interstate 4: A World Torn Asunder (1880-1980)

The present project centers on how the African American community of Parramore in Orlando, Florida, became a low-income neighborhood. Based on a timeline from 1880 to 1980 and the construction of the Interstate 4, this thesis investigates Parramore’s decline grounded in the effects of urban sprawl and racial oppression. Among the effects that contributed to the neighborhood\u27s decline in the postwar era were the closing of black schools and the migration of black residents to other places after the 1960s; the disruption of the neighborhood with the construction of highways and public housing; and the lack of investment in new urban infrastructure. The social, economic, and cultural decay of this community begins with the racist ideology of the Jim Crow era and continues with the racialization of spaces and the control of the wealth distribution through the urbanization of the Sunbelt region. Divided into five chapters, the paper presents the following: Intersection of modern social black history and racial segregation; history of the American urban sprawl; historical development of racial segregation in Florida; history of the National Highway System; and history of Parramore. Ultimately, this thesis aims to draw awareness to how urban megaprojects serve as class and racial barriers. Thus, this paper presents the history of an inner city built upon the violence of the Jim Crow era, and the postwar development that led to the transformation of a thriving neighborhood into a low-income community

Next challenges for adaptive learning systems

Learning from evolving streaming data has become a 'hot' research topic in the last decade and many adaptive learning algorithms have been developed. This research was stimulated by rapidly growing amounts of industrial, transactional, sensor and other business data that arrives in real time and needs to be mined in real time. Under such circumstances, constant manual adjustment of models is in-efficient and with increasing amounts of data is becoming infeasible. Nevertheless, adaptive learning models are still rarely employed in business applications in practice. In the light of rapidly growing structurally rich 'big data', new generation of parallel computing solutions and cloud computing services as well as recent advances in portable computing devices, this article aims to identify the current key research directions to be taken to bring the adaptive learning closer to application needs. We identify six forthcoming challenges in designing and building adaptive learning (pre-diction) systems: making adaptive systems scalable, dealing with realistic data, improving usability and trust, integrat-ing expert knowledge, taking into account various application needs, and moving from adaptive algorithms towards adaptive tools. Those challenges are critical for the evolving stream settings, as the process of model building needs to be fully automated and continuous.</jats:p

Physiological response of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) seedlings to salinity stress

The effect of salinity stress on five cultivars of common bean: Bassbeer, Beladi, Giza 3, HRS 516 and RO21 were evaluated on a sand/peat medium with different salinity levels (0, 50 and 100 mM NaCl) applied 3 weeks after germination for duration of 10 days. Salinity had adverse effects not only on the biomass yield and relative growth rate (RGRt), but also on other morphological parameters such asplant height, number of leaves, root length and shoot/root weight ratio. Photosynthesis, transpiration rate and stomatal conductance were adversely affected in all cultivars. Leaf osmotic potential and leafturgor varied significantly among cultivars and salt levels. The interaction between cultivars and salt levels for photosynthesis, leaf osmotic potential and leaf turgor was highly significant at day 10 of salttreatment. The Na uptake among the cultivars varied in the order: HRS 51

Bacterial cellulose : production and applications

Bacterial cellulose (BC), excreted by Gluconacetobacter xylinus, is a unique nanofibrilar biopolymer with a wide range of applications in human and veterinary medicine, odonthology, pharmaceutical industry, biotechnological, food and paper industry. The major research activities of our research group include the following headlines: - Surface-modification of BC matrices and BC whiskers for the design of novel functional BC nanocomposite systems. This domain includes the surface-activation of BC with CBMs (Carbohydrate Binding Modules) conjugated with bioactive peptides for biomedical applications.[1] CEB-UM has already shown that the adsorption of CBM-RGD (the minimal essential cell adhesion recognition motifs) onto BC improves its ability to adsorb fibroblasts.[2] Also, research on the use of BC tubes as new guides for neuronal growth (CAPES, 3989/05-4) and, for the first time, on assessing the in vivo cytotoxicity of BC nanofibers (SFRH/BD/18418/2004), is on course. - Design of novel BC structures with tailored microporosity, for biomedical applications (SFRH/BD/48759/2008). - Engineering of electro-conductive and electro-active BC scaffolds with potential applications in neuronal growth. The embedded polymeric directionally of the BC nanofibers is expected to exhibit shear piezoelectricity which, coupled with a high in situ moldability, thrusts a promising future for novel BC-based materials such as lightweight, biodegradable electro-actives, biosensors and flexible electric displays, with a tailored oriented stiffness and strength. - Exploring the large-scale fermentation of BC. A novel bioreactor, based on a surfaceculture method was designed. A simple and low-cost piece of equipment is capable of direct nebulization of a high volume of dispersed and microparticulated subtrate over the growing bacteria. The developed system may reveal to be an interesting economic solution for the large-scale production of BC

Concept drift detection based on anomaly analysis

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. In online machine learning, the ability to adapt to new concept quickly is highly desired. In this paper, we propose a novel concept drift detection method, which is called Anomaly Analysis Drift Detection (AADD), to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms under non-stationary environment. The proposed AADD method is based on an anomaly analysis of learner’s accuracy associate with the similarity between learners’ training domain and test data. This method first identifies whether there are conflicts between current concept and new coming data. Then the learner will incrementally learn the non conflict data, which will not decrease the accuracy of the learner on previous trained data, for concept extension. Otherwise, a new learner will be created based on the new data. Experiments illustrate that this AADD method can detect new concept quickly and learn extensional drift incrementally