1,400 research outputs found
Development Of Innovating Na Leak Detector On Pipes
International audienceWithin the ASTRID reactor project, CEA, EDF and AREVA NP, have launched a RetD program focused on the low leak rates detection of sodium on pipes. This program is focused on the development of innovating detectors, multilayer-type and Optic Fiber, involving tests in the FUTUNa sodium loop. This loop is designed to produce very accurate sodium leak rates within a range around 1cm/min, the tests being performed at different temperature (up to 550DC) on large-diameter pipe mock-ups (D 800 mm) at ambient atmosphere. This paper presents the first series of tests carried out with various materials of the first and second layer of the detector. The results are compared and discussed as well as the observations made after removing the mock-ups. The most interesting result of the overall tests is a detection time less than 2 hours for the two types of detectors
Incentivizing High Quality Crowdwork
We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of
crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments
awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run
randomized behavioral experiments on the popular crowdsourcing platform Amazon
Mechanical Turk with the goal of understanding when, where, and why PBPs help,
identifying properties of the payment, payment structure, and the task itself
that make them most effective. We provide examples of tasks for which PBPs do
improve quality. For such tasks, the effectiveness of PBPs is not too sensitive
to the threshold for quality required to receive the bonus, while the magnitude
of the bonus must be large enough to make the reward salient. We also present
examples of tasks for which PBPs do not improve quality. Our results suggest
that for PBPs to improve quality, the task must be effort-responsive: the task
must allow workers to produce higher quality work by exerting more effort. We
also give a simple method to determine if a task is effort-responsive a priori.
Furthermore, our experiments suggest that all payments on Mechanical Turk are,
to some degree, implicitly performance-based in that workers believe their work
may be rejected if their performance is sufficiently poor. Finally, we propose
a new model of worker behavior that extends the standard principal-agent model
from economics to include a worker's subjective beliefs about his likelihood of
being paid, and show that the predictions of this model are in line with our
experimental findings. This model may be useful as a foundation for theoretical
studies of incentives in crowdsourcing markets.Comment: This is a preprint of an Article accepted for publication in WWW
\c{opyright} 2015 International World Wide Web Conference Committe
Microstructural Characterization of Graphite Spheroids in Ductile Iron
The present work brings new insights by transmission electron microscopy allowing disregarding or supporting some of the models proposed for spheroidal growth of graphite in cast irons. Nodules consist of sectors made of graphite plates elongated along a hai direction and stack on each other with their c axis aligned with the radial direction. These plates are the elementary units for spheroidal growth and a calculation supports the idea that new units continuously nucleate at the ledge between sectors
Market Power and Collusion on Interconnection Phone Market in Tunisia : What Lessons from International Experiences
We try in this paper to characterize the state of mobile phone market in Tunisia. Our study is based on a survey of foreign experience (Europe) in detecting collusive behavior and a comparison of the critical threshold of collusion between operators in developing countries like Tunisia. The market power is estimated based on the work of Parker Roller (1997) and the assumption of "Balanced Calling Pattern". We use then the model of Friedman (1971) to compare the critical threshold of collusion. We show that the "conduct parameter" measuring the intensity of competition is not null during the period 1993-2011. Results show also that collusion is easier on the Tunisian market that on the Algerian, Jordanian, or Moroccan one
Inner Space Preserving Generative Pose Machine
Image-based generative methods, such as generative adversarial networks
(GANs) have already been able to generate realistic images with much context
control, specially when they are conditioned. However, most successful
frameworks share a common procedure which performs an image-to-image
translation with pose of figures in the image untouched. When the objective is
reposing a figure in an image while preserving the rest of the image, the
state-of-the-art mainly assumes a single rigid body with simple background and
limited pose shift, which can hardly be extended to the images under normal
settings. In this paper, we introduce an image "inner space" preserving model
that assigns an interpretable low-dimensional pose descriptor (LDPD) to an
articulated figure in the image. Figure reposing is then generated by passing
the LDPD and the original image through multi-stage augmented hourglass
networks in a conditional GAN structure, called inner space preserving
generative pose machine (ISP-GPM). We evaluated ISP-GPM on reposing human
figures, which are highly articulated with versatile variations. Test of a
state-of-the-art pose estimator on our reposed dataset gave an accuracy over
80% on PCK0.5 metric. The results also elucidated that our ISP-GPM is able to
preserve the background with high accuracy while reasonably recovering the area
blocked by the figure to be reposed.Comment: http://www.northeastern.edu/ostadabbas/2018/07/23/inner-space-preserving-generative-pose-machine
Desarrollo del aparato digestivo en pollos Campero INTA alimentados con poroto mucuna (Stizolobium deeringianum)
Las leguminosas tropicales se utilizan en los sistemas de producción alternativos para la alimentación de aves. En el presente trabajo se evaluó el efecto de la incorporación de harina de poroto mucuna (Stizolobium deeringianum) en el alimento terminador, sobre el desarrollo del aparato digestivo en pollos Campero INTA. La dieta control se elaboró en base a maíz, soja y una premezcla de vitaminas y minerales; en la dieta de prueba el poroto mucuna reemplazó parcialmente a la harina de soja. El análisis comparativo se realizó mediante ANOVA en un arreglo factorial, operando el sexo y tipo de alimento como efectos principales. No se constataron interacciones significativas entre los distintos niveles de ambos factores para las variables dependientes analizadas. Se constataron diferencias significativas para peso relativo del tracto gastrointestinal con valores de 6,62±0,62 y 7,33±0,59% para las dietas control y mucuna respectivamente. El peso relativo del estómago muscular registró diferencias estadísticas significativas con valores de 2,56±0,45 y 3,06±0,46% para las dietas control y mucuna respectivamente. Se demostraron correlaciones positivas y significativas entre el peso relativo del tracto gastrointestinal y del estómago glandular (r=0,82; p=0,01) e intestino delgado (r=0,72; p=0,04) en el grupo control. En este grupo experimental el estómago glandular correlacionó en forma positiva y significativa con el peso del intestino delgado (r=0,93; p=0,0007). En el grupo alimentado con mucuna se registró una correlación positiva y significativa entre el peso relativo del tracto gastrointestinal y del estómago muscular (r=0,79; p=0,02). Se concluye que la incorporación de poroto mucuna produce un incremento en el peso relativo del tracto gastrointestinal. Teniendo en cuenta que dicho poroto podría emplearse en pollos como fuente alternativa de proteínas, se considera necesario profundizar los estudios sobre los métodos de eliminación de sus factores antinutricionales, para una más segura utilización práctica
Size-dependent spinodal and miscibility gaps for intercalation in nano-particles
Using a recently-proposed mathematical model for intercalation dynamics in
phase-separating materials [Singh, Ceder, Bazant, Electrochimica Acta 53, 7599
(2008)], we show that the spinodal and miscibility gaps generally shrink as the
host particle size decreases to the nano-scale. Our work is motivated by recent
experiments on the high-rate Li-ion battery material LiFePO4; this serves as
the basis for our examples, but our analysis and conclusions apply to any
intercalation material. We describe two general mechanisms for the suppression
of phase separation in nano-particles: (i) a classical bulk effect, predicted
by the Cahn-Hilliard equation, in which the diffuse phase boundary becomes
confined by the particle geometry; and (ii) a novel surface effect, predicted
by chemical-potential-dependent reaction kinetics, in which
insertion/extraction reactions stabilize composition gradients near surfaces in
equilibrium with the local environment. Composition-dependent surface energy
and (especially) elastic strain can contribute to these effects but are not
required to predict decreased spinodal and miscibility gaps at the nano-scale
Viable tax constitutions
Taxation is only sustainable if the general public complies with it. This observation is uncontroversial with tax practitioners but has been ignored by the public finance tradition, which has interpreted tax constitutions as binding contracts by which the power to tax is irretrievably conferred by individuals to government, which can then levy any tax it chooses. However, in the absence of an outside party enforcing contracts between members of a group, no arrangement within groups can be considered to be a binding contract, and therefore the power of tax must be sanctioned by individuals on an ongoing basis. In this paper we offer, for the first time, a theoretical analysis of this fundamental compliance problem associated with taxation, obtaining predictions that in some cases point to a re-interptretation of the theoretical constructions of the public finance tradition while in others call them into question
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