Investigation of Microstructure of Cementitious Materials Exposed to High Temperature by Non-destructive Integrated CT-XRD Method

Severe accident occurred in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and it can be assumed that the concrete building was exposed to high temperatures environment for a long time due to loss of the cooling function of the nuclear reactor. In order to prepare for the best scenario in the decommission plan, it should be first needed to clarify and evaluate the level of damage and deterioration of the contaminated concrete. To solve this problem, experiments were conducted for cementitious materials with the maximum temperature of 400 or 1000 degrees Celsius with durations of up to 2 hours. Subsequent results were evaluated microscopically. In this research, authors have employed a Non-Destructive Integrated CT-XRD Method using synchrotron white X-ray. The unique feature of this method is that both CT for measuring internal structure and XRD for identifying crystal structure can be performed on the same specimen at the same time. Therefore, in addition to other measurements such as the Thin film X-ray diffraction technique, the application of this method is expected to bring an interesting exploration with regard to the physical and chemical alteration of the concrete that was endured by high temperatures

Behavioral investigation of trust building in online banking : new marketing methodology for Suruga Bank

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-76).The recent financial crisis has brought a huge loss of faith in economic rationality and the economic discipline. For the current financial industry, how to re-build "Trust" with customers is the one of biggest issues. Although we know that the strong relationship between the deep level of trust and the banking business has high potential, it has not yet been optimized, especially in online transaction banking. This is in part due to customers' perception of higher risk in the absence of traditional face to face interaction. Recent findings have shown that facial cues can have a powerful impact on trust building. However, there is also evidence that images of faces in some cases can decrease online interactions. Thus, the goal of this thesis is to investigate the impact of different types of facial attributes and which customer profiles will most benefit from such facial images in online banking. In an experimental setting, this research created a personalized web site which features the banker's representative, and conducted an investment game in order to correlate them with investment performance. This research also included rating trustworthiness on a banking advisor's photo and a demographic questionnaire for statistic trust profiling. Understanding a subject's decision making mechanism by giving them advisor's facial stimuli in a naturalistic online context, with integrating communication will provide an important potential for building and promoting trust, which further suggest Suruga Bank will be in an unique position by capitalizing on the new marketing methodology.by Takuya Sugiyama.M.B.A

CATALYTIC ACTIVITY AND COKING RESISTANCE ON HYDROXYAPATITE FOR THE OXIDATIVE DEHYDROGENATION OF ISOBUTANE

Hydroxyapatite (HAp) samples were prepared from precursor solutions with different Ca/P molar ratios. The HAp samples were utilized as catalysts for the oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) of isobutane. Also, the HAp samples were characterized by N2 and H2O adsorption-desorption measurements, X-ray diffraction, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, thermogravimetry-differential thermal analyses, and temperature-programmed oxidation (TPO). The Ca/P molar ratio of the precursor solution had a major influence on the catalytic activity and coking resistance ability. The HAp catalyst prepared from the stoichiometric precursor solution [HAp (1.67)] showed the highest isobutene yield. Furthermore, the white color of HAp (1.67) remained unchanged during the ODH of isobutene, indicating the absence of coke on the surface of HAp (1.67) after the reaction and its higher coking resistance ability. The results of the TPO measurements showed that the HAp (1.67) catalyst possesses the strongest oxidation ability which is likely related to its higher coking resistance ability

Similarity-based Classification: Connecting Similarity Learning to Binary Classification

In real-world classification problems, pairwise supervision (i.e., a pair of patterns with a binary label indicating whether they belong to the same class or not) can often be obtained at a lower cost than ordinary class labels. Similarity learning is a general framework to utilize such pairwise supervision to elicit useful representations by inferring the relationship between two data points, which encompasses various important preprocessing tasks such as metric learning, kernel learning, graph embedding, and contrastive representation learning. Although elicited representations are expected to perform well in downstream tasks such as classification, little theoretical insight has been given in the literature so far. In this paper, we reveal that a specific formulation of similarity learning is strongly related to the objective of binary classification, which spurs us to learn a binary classifier without ordinary class labels---by fitting the product of real-valued prediction functions of pairwise patterns to their similarity. Our formulation of similarity learning does not only generalize many existing ones, but also admits an excess risk bound showing an explicit connection to classification. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed method on benchmark datasets.Comment: 22 page

Mitochondria and G-quadruplex evolution: an intertwined relationship

G-quadruplexes (G4s) are non-canonical structures formed in guanine (G)-rich sequences through stacked G tetrads by Hoogsteen hydrogen bonding. Several studies have demonstrated the existence of G4s in the genome of various organisms, including humans, and have proposed that G4s have a regulatory role in various cellular functions. However, little is known regarding the dissemination of G4s in mitochondria. In this review, we report the observation that the number of potential G4-forming sequences in the mitochondrial genome increases with the evolutionary complexity of different species, suggesting that G4s have a beneficial role in higher-order organisms. We also discuss the possible function of G4s in mitochondrial (mt)DNA and long noncoding (lnc)RNA and their role in various biological processes

Evaluation of the extent of damage to the esophageal wall caused by press-through package ingestion

Press-through package (PTP) is the most common accidentally ingested foreign body in Japan. Accidental ingestion of PTP can result in esophageal damage. An approach for evaluating the risk of esophageal injury has not been established. Therefore, we used porcine esophageal tissue and silicone sheets to establish a method for assessing the risk of esophageal damage on accidental PTP ingestion. We pathologically evaluated porcine lower esophageal tissue using a scratch tester. Using porcine esophageal tissue, scratch tests were performed with 4 test objects and pathological damage was compared. It was assumed that each object was accidentally ingested. The objects were polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC)-coated polyvinyl chloride (PVC) PTP, soft PThPa, round PTP, and a disposable scalpel. The porcine esophagus was replaced with a silicon sheet, and an automatic friction machine was used for quantitative evaluation. The silicon sheet was scratched using HHS 2000 with 750-g load at 50 mm/min. We investigated the frictional force exerted on the surface for each of the objects. The degree of damage (depth) was the highest for the disposable scalpel, followed by PVDC-coated PVC PTP, while the degree of damage (depth) was the lowest for soft PThPa and round PTP. The mean frictional forces on the silicon sheet were 524.0 gf with PVDC-coated PTP, 323.5 gf with soft PThPa, 288.7 gf with round PTP, and 922.7 gf with the disposable scalpel. We developed approaches to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the risk of esophageal damage after accidental PTP ingestion. Our findings indicate that the risk of gastrointestinal damage after accidental PTP ingestion is low with soft PTP and round PTP