Coffee, tea, and caffeinated cognition

People associate coffee with urgency and tea with relaxation due to their differing levels of caffeine. Accordingly, tea anchors thoughts in the future, boosting creativity and dampening the relevance of product-related details; coffee reverses these effects. This holds when thinking about or consuming the beverages and disappears for decaffeinated drinks

A mismatch between institutional conditions and trust

In this study, we aim to unpack why information conveyed by high-status women are less trusted in the collaborative project setting. We theorize about the mechanism of gender-status mismatch - a cultural-cognitive mismatch between beliefs about gender and status hierarchies when a woman is associated with the high status. We set three hypotheses to test the negative effects of the mismatch on trust in women: (1) a woman who has a higher rank is considered a mismatch, (2) a woman who works for a high-status organization is considered a mismatch, and (3) a woman who has a higher network status is considered a mismatch

Hydrocarbon ratios during PEM-WEST A: A model perspective

A useful application of the hydrocarbon measurements collected during the Pacific Exploratory Mission (PEM-West A) is as markers or indices of atmospheric processing. Traditionally, ratios of particular hydrocarbons have been interpreted as photochemical indices, since much of the effect due to atmospheric transport is assumed to cancel by using ratios. However, an ever increasing body of observatonial and theoretical evidence suggests that turbulent mixing associated with atmospheric transport influences certain hydrocarbon ratios significantly. In this study a three-dimensional mesoscale photochemical model is used to study the interaction of photochemistry and atmospheric mixing on select hydrocarbons. In terms of correlations and functional relationships between various alkanes the model results and PEM-West A hydrocarbon observations share many similar characteristics as well as explainable differences. When the three-dimensional model is applied to inert tracers, hydrocarbon ratios and other relationships exactly follow those expected by simple dilution with model-imposed "background air," and the three-dimensional results for reactive hydrocarbons are quite consistent with a combined influence of photochemistry and simple dilution. Analogous to these model results, relationships between various hydrocarbons collected during the PEM-West A experiment appear to be consistent with this simplified picture of photochemistry and dilution affecting individual air masses. When hydrocarbons are chosen that have negligeble contributions to clean background air, unambiguous determinations of the relative contributions to photochemistry and dilution can be estimated from the hydrocarbon samples. Both the three-dimensional model results and the observations imply an average characteristic lifetime for dilution with background air roughly equivalent to the photochemical lifetime of butane for the western Pacific lower troposphere. Moreover, the dominance of OH as the primary photochemical oxidant downwind of anthropogenic source regions can be inferred from correlations between the highly reactive alkane ratios. By incorporating back-trajectory information within the three-dimensional model analysis, a correspondence between time and a particular hydrocarbon or hydrocarbon ratio can be determined, and the influence of atmospheric mixing or photochemistry can be quantified. Results of the three-dimensional model study are compared and applied to the PEM-West A hydrocarbon dataset, yielding a practical methodology for determining average OH concentrations and atmospheric mixing rates from the hydrocarbon measurements. Aircraft data taken below 2 km during wall flights east of Japan imply a diurnal average OH concentration of ∼3 × 106 cm-3. The characteristic time for dilution with background air is estimated to be ∼2.5 days for the two study areas examined in this work. Copyright 1996 by the American Geophysical Union

Measuring Coverage of Prolog Programs Using Mutation Testing

Testing is an important aspect in professional software development, both to avoid and identify bugs as well as to increase maintainability. However, increasing the number of tests beyond a reasonable amount hinders development progress. To decide on the completeness of a test suite, many approaches to assert test coverage have been suggested. Yet, frameworks for logic programs remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce a framework for Prolog programs measuring test coverage using mutations. We elaborate the main ideas of mutation testing and transfer them to logic programs. To do so, we discuss the usefulness of different mutations in the context of Prolog and empirically evaluate them in a new mutation testing framework on different examples.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted for presentation in WFLP 201

Cloud Ownership and Reliability – Issues and Developments

Cloud computing is a composite paradigm that provides crucial services to individuals and organisations over networked infrastructure at a cost. The Cloud provides custom built applications, made available by a CSP to customers. Several customers can access an instance of one application. The Cloud also affords an avenue for customers to build their own application in a language compatible with a CSP and subsequently deploy that application on the Cloud. In addition, massive scalable storage and computing devices are available on the Cloud. A customers expects optimum services whenever and wherever it is required. Hence, system failure on the part of a CSP must not affect the services being provided to the customer. This paper examines present trends in the area of Cloud ownership reliability and provides a guide for future research. The paper aims to answer the following question: what is the current trend and development in Cloud ownership reliability? In addition, analysis was done on existing work published in journals, conferences, white papers and those published in reputable magazines, to answer the question raised. The expected result is the identification of trends in Cloud ownership and reliability which will be of benefit to prospective Cloud users and service providers alike

Flavonoid intake and the risk of age-related cataract in China’s Heilongjiang Province

Background/Objectives: Epidemiological evidence suggests that diets rich in flavonoids may reduce the risk of developing age-related cataract (ARC). Flavonoids are widely distributed in foods of plant origin and the objective of this study was to evaluate retrospectively the association between the intakes of the five flavonoid subclasses and the risk of ARC.  Subjects/Methods: A population-based case-control study (249 cases and 66 controls) was carried out in Heilongjiang province, which is located in the Northeast of China, and where intakes and availability of fresh vegetables and fruits can be limited. Dietary data gathered by food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) were used to calculate flavonoid intake. Adjusted odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were estimated by logistic regression.  Results: No linear associations between risk of developing ARC and intakes of total dietary flavonoids, anthocyanidins, flavon-3-ol, flavanone, total flavones or total flavonols were found, but quercetin and isorhamnetin intake was inversely associated with ARC risk (OR 11.78, 95% CI: 1.62-85.84, P<0.05, and OR 6.99, 95% CI:1.12-43.44, P<0.05, quartile 4 vs quartile 1, respectively).  Conclusion: As quercetin is contained in many plant foods and isorhamnetin is only contained in very few foods, we concluded that higher quercetin intake may be an important dietary factor in the reduction of risk of age-related cataract

In search of multipolar order on the Penrose tiling

Based on Monte Carlo calculations, multipolar ordering on the Penrose tiling, relevant for two-dimensional molecular adsorbates on quasicrystalline surfaces and for nanomagnetic arrays, has been analyzed. These initial investigations are restricted to multipolar rotors of rank one through four - described by spherical harmonics Ylm with l=1...4 and restricted to m=0 - positioned on the vertices of the rhombic Penrose tiling. At first sight, the ground states of odd-parity multipoles seem to exhibit long-range multipolar order, indicated by the appearance of a superstructure in the form of the decagonal Hexagon-Boat-Star tiling, in agreement with previous investigations of dipolar systems. Yet careful analysis establishes that long-range multipolar order is absent in all cases investigated here, and only short-range order exists. This result should be taken as a warning for any future analysis of order in either real or simulated arrangements of multipoles on quasiperiodic templates

A parametric level-set method for partially discrete tomography

This paper introduces a parametric level-set method for tomographic reconstruction of partially discrete images. Such images consist of a continuously varying background and an anomaly with a constant (known) grey-value. We represent the geometry of the anomaly using a level-set function, which we represent using radial basis functions. We pose the reconstruction problem as a bi-level optimization problem in terms of the background and coefficients for the level-set function. To constrain the background reconstruction we impose smoothness through Tikhonov regularization. The bi-level optimization problem is solved in an alternating fashion; in each iteration we first reconstruct the background and consequently update the level-set function. We test our method on numerical phantoms and show that we can successfully reconstruct the geometry of the anomaly, even from limited data. On these phantoms, our method outperforms Total Variation reconstruction, DART and P-DART.Comment: Paper submitted to 20th International Conference on Discrete Geometry for Computer Imager

Nonintrusive reduced order model for parametric solutions of inertia relief problems

The Inertia Relief (IR) technique is widely used by industry and produces equilibrated loads allowing to analyze unconstrained systems without resorting to the more expensive full dynamic analysis. The main goal of this work is to develop a computational framework for the solution of unconstrained parametric structural problems with IR and the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD) method. First, the IR method is formulated in a parametric setting for both material and geometric parameters. A reduced order model using the encapsulated PGD suite is then developed to solve the parametric IR problem, circumventing the so-called curse of dimensionality. With just one offline computation, the proposed PGD-IR scheme provides a computational vademecum that contains all the possible solutions for a predefined range of the parameters. The proposed approach is nonintrusive and it is therefore possible to be integrated with commercial finite element (FE) packages. The applicability and potential of the developed technique is shown using a three-dimensional test case and a more complex industrial test case. The first example is used to highlight the numerical properties of the scheme, whereas the second example demonstrates the potential in a more complex setting and it shows the possibility to integrate the proposed framework within a commercial FE package. In addition, the last example shows the possibility to use the generalized solution in a multi-objective optimization setting