Observation of Mixed Alkali Like Behaviour by Fluorine Ion in Mixed Alkali Oxyfluro Vanadate Glasses: Analysis from Conductivity Measurements

In this communication we report the fluorine ion dynamics in mixed alkali oxyfluro vanadate glasses. We have measured the electrical conductivity using impedance spectroscopy technique Room temperature conductivity falls to 5 orders of magnitude from its single alkali values at 33 mol% of rubidium concentration. We have also estimated the distance between similar mobile ions using the density values. Assuming this distance as the hopping distance between the similar ions we have estimated the anionic (Fluorine ion in our case) conductivity. It is observed that the fluorine ion dynamics mimics the mixed alkali effect and scales as the onset frequency f0.Comment: submitted to DAE-SSDP 2018 Indi

Why Do Firms Smooth Earnings?

We explain why a firm may smooth reported earnings. Greater earnings volatility leads to a bigger informational advantage for informed investors over uninformed investors. If sufficiently many current shareholders are uninformed and may need to trade in the future for liquidity reasons, an increase in the volatility of reported earnings will magnify these shareholders' trading losses. They will, therefore, want the manager to smooth reported earnings as much as possible. Empirical implications are drawn out that link earnings smoothing to managerial compensation contracts, uncertainty about the volatility of earnings, and ownership structure.

Effects of lengthscales and attractions on the collapse of hydrophobic polymers in water

We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on folding. Hydrophobic polymers display parabolic, protein-like, temperature-dependent free energy of unfolding. Folded states of small attractive polymers are marginally stable at 300 K, and can be unfolded by heating or cooling. Increasing the lengthscale or decreasing the polymer-water attractions stabilizes folded states significantly, the former dominated by the hydration contribution. That hydration contribution can be described by the surface tension model, $\Delta G=\gamma (T)\Delta A$, where the surface tension, $\gamma$, is lengthscale dependent and decreases monotonically with temperature. The resulting variation of the hydration entropy with polymer lengthscale is consistent with theoretical predictions of Huang and Chandler (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.,97, 8324-8327, 2000) that explain the blurring of entropy convergence observed in protein folding thermodynamics. Analysis of water structure shows that the polymer-water hydrophobic interface is soft and weakly dewetted, and is characterized by enhanced interfacial density fluctuations. Formation of this interface, which induces polymer folding, is strongly opposed by enthalpy and favored by entropy, similar to the vapor-liquid interface.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

The effect of partner-directed emotion in social exchange decision-making

Despite the prevalence of studies examining economic decision-making as a purely rational phenomenon, common sense suggests that emotions affect our decision-making particularly in a social context. To explore the influence of emotions on economic decision-making, we manipulated opponent-directed emotions prior to engaging participants in two social exchange decision-making games (the Trust Game and the Prisoner's Dilemma). Participants played both games with three different (fictional) partners and their tendency to defect was measured. Prior to playing each game, participants exchanged handwritten “essays” with their partners, and subsequently exchanged evaluations of each essay. The essays and evaluations, read by the participant, were designed to induce either anger, sympathy, or a neutral emotional response toward the confederate with whom they would then play the social exchange games. Galvanic skin conductance level (SCL) showed enhanced physiological arousal during anger induction compared to both the neutral and sympathy conditions. In both social exchange games, participants were most likely to defect against their partner after anger induction and least likely to defect after sympathy induction, with the neutral condition eliciting intermediate defection rates. This pattern was found to be strongest in participants exhibiting low cognitive control (as measured by a Go/no-Go task). The findings indicate that emotions felt toward another individual alter how one chooses to interact with them, and that this influence depends both on the specific emotion induced and the cognitive control of the individual

Correlating Pedestrian Flows and Search Engine Queries

An important challenge for ubiquitous computing is the development of techniques that can characterize a location vis-a-vis the richness and diversity of urban settings. In this paper we report our work on correlating urban pedestrian flows with Google search queries. Using longitudinal data we show pedestrian flows at particular locations can be correlated with the frequency of Google search terms that are semantically relevant to those locations. Our approach can identify relevant content, media, and advertisements for particular locations.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Simultaneous adsorption and biodegradation of reactive dyes using jatropha deoiled cakes

© BEIESP. Endemic pollution problems due to discharge of wastewaters are affecting all the aspects of human life. The poor quality effluents coming from industries is destroying the fragile ecosystem, leading to various apprehensions amongst researchers and scientific communities. Treatment of wastewaters have become an urgent need of the society, which cannot be ignored. Incineration, absorption on solid matrices and biological treatment are some of the effluent treatment methods available. These methods, however, have their own disadvantages. This work explores the application of jatropha deoiled cakes on the concurrent adsorption and biological degradation of reactive dyes. Reactive blue, reactive yellow, reactive red were used for the experiments. The combined experiments were tested for effect of glucose concentrations as well as initial concentrations. Glucose concentrations of 1 g/l, 2 g/l and 3 g/l were taken. All the dyes were varied from 100 ppm to 600 ppm. It was observed that combined degradation yielded higher degradation compared to biological degradation alone. The degradation rate varied with the variation of glucose concentration and it also varied with the initial concentration

Automatic Lighting Mechanism on Highways during Midnight

This paper presents the key points in implementing automatic lighting mechanism on highway roads with the help of moving object detection in urban cities during midnight. The objective of the object detection system will be to detect objects confined in a particular area. The detection system will thus require important information like speed of moving objects, size of objects and number of vehicles on the road. The lighting system is responsible for switching off the lights in a particular area where the object detection monitoring system evaluates to a minimum threshold value. The lighting system will be active 350m to direction of the object moving in a particular direction

Real Time Net Zero Energy Building Energy Manager with Heterogeneous Wireless Ad hoc Network Adaptable To IoT Architectures

Significant energy consumption by buildings from utility grid has made researchers revisit existing Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS). Most of the developing countries have taken a green initiative of Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) to reduce carbon foot print and fast depletion of conventional energy sources. Though the integration of solar and wind based systems to grid is successful in recent years, residential building energy management systems with renewable energy sources is still an evolving research area. Monitoring, control and actuation systems should be tightly coupled with the help of any to any device communication namely Internet of Things (IoT) to realize an efficient NZEB. In this paper a real time NZEB is proposed and developed with bi-directional wireless sensor and actuation system. Proposed NZEB central server collects and maintains a database of on site solar generation, battery state of charge and load power consumption data of a building with help of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Proposed system was deployed as a test bed with sensing, control, actuation and server modules and connecting them with a bi-directional wireless network architecture similar to IoT. Data observed at experimental test bed confirm that developed system can estimate on site solar power generation, state of charge on battery bank and load power consumption with negligible error. A simulation study with experimental data collected at NZEB test bed shows that NZEB can optimally schedule loads between local generation and utility grid thereby minimizing peak demand on the grid