A comparison between single sided and double sided friction stir welded 8mm thick DH36 steel plate

As part of an ongoing process to fully evaluate the potential for friction stir welding (FSW) to be used in the shipbuilding industry, a comparison has been made between two variants of the process. 8mm thick DH36 steel plate was friction stir welded using a single sided and a double sided process. An assessment of the processes was made to report on the resultant distortion behaviour, hardness, yield strength, toughness and microstructure. As a further comparison, additional work on 8mm thick submerged arc welded (SAW) DH36 plate has been included as the current shipbuilding benchmark. The overall process feasibility will be assessed including the issue of the requirement to rotate the workpiece through 180° to complete the second side of the double sided process

Competitiveness of Turkeys Organic Exports in the European Union Market

Turkeys exports of organically produced agricultural products have been rapidly growing particularly in response to increasing demand in the European Union countries. Common view and findings of the research on organic trade in Turkey confirms that European market is expanding. A lacking component of the existing research on Turkeys organic exports is that none of the studies focused on modeling the export market for organic products which would enable to make forecasts as well as to make analysis for policy implications. Another missing component of the stream of studies on trade of Turkish organic commodities is the lack of understanding of the present situation of the competitiveness of Turkish exports in the European Union market. The study therefore focuses on estimating an econometric export demand function for organic products and exploring the competitiveness and export performance of Turkish exports as well as understanding the components of export performance. An effort to estimate an econometric export demand model for Turkeys organic exports and revealing sources of export performance and competitiveness is what makes the present study a unique one. The project has three major objectives and thus seeks to produce three outputs: The first objective is to estimate an export demand model for Turkish organic products in the European Union market. It is therefore possible to estimate price and income elasticities of demand as well as to make projections. The second objective is to explore Turkeys export competitiveness in organic products in the European Union market. It order to fulfill this objective, we will estimate indices to measure Turkeys competitiveness. The third objective is to investigate export competitiveness and determine the components of export performance. Through constant market share analysis, we seek to determine the key factors underlying the growth or Turkeys organic exports. The study reveals that export demand for the Turkish organic products are growing and sensitive to price and income changes in target countries. Turkey has a clear comparative advantage against the rival EU countries in selected products. Competitiveness is particularly due to relative prices, thus does not indicate a sustainable competitiveness due to lack of added value in the export items.Organic Agriculture, Turkish Agriculture, Export Demand, Competitiveness, Turkish Organic Exports, International Relations/Trade, Livestock Production/Industries,

CCD BVRI and 2MASS Photometry of the Poorly Studied Open Cluster NGC 6631

Here we have obtained the {\it BVRI CCD} photometry down to a limiting magnitude of $V \sim$ 20 for the southern poorly studied open cluster NGC 6631. It is observed from the {\it 1.88 m} Telescope of Kottamia Observatory in Egypt. About 3300 stars have been observed in an area of $\sim 10^{\prime} \times 10^{\prime}$ around the cluster center. The main photometric parameters have been estimated and compared with the results that determined for the cluster using {\it JHKs 2MASS} photometric database. The cluster's diameter is estimated to be 10 arcmin; the reddening E(B-V)= 0.68 $\pm$ 0.10 mag, E(J-H)= 0.21 $\pm$ 0.10 mag, the true modulus (m-M)$_{o}$= 12.16 $\pm$ 0.10 mag, which corresponds to a distance of 2700 $\pm$125 pc and age of 500 $\pm$ 50 Myr.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

The fission yeast FANCM ortholog directs non-crossover recombination during meiosis

Peer reviewedPostprin

CloudScope: diagnosing and managing performance interference in multi-tenant clouds

© 2015 IEEE.Virtual machine consolidation is attractive in cloud computing platforms for several reasons including reduced infrastructure costs, lower energy consumption and ease of management. However, the interference between co-resident workloads caused by virtualization can violate the service level objectives (SLOs) that the cloud platform guarantees. Existing solutions to minimize interference between virtual machines (VMs) are mostly based on comprehensive micro-benchmarks or online training which makes them computationally intensive. In this paper, we present CloudScope, a system for diagnosing interference for multi-tenant cloud systems in a lightweight way. CloudScope employs a discrete-time Markov Chain model for the online prediction of performance interference of co-resident VMs. It uses the results to optimally (re)assign VMs to physical machines and to optimize the hypervisor configuration, e.g. the CPU share it can use, for different workloads. We have implemented CloudScope on top of the Xen hypervisor and conducted experiments using a set of CPU, disk, and network intensive workloads and a real system (MapReduce). Our results show that CloudScope interference prediction achieves an average error of 9%. The interference-aware scheduler improves VM performance by up to 10% compared to the default scheduler. In addition, the hypervisor reconfiguration can improve network throughput by up to 30%

Participatory plant breeding: a way to arrive at better-adapted onion varieties

The search for varieties that are better adapted to organic farming is a current topic in the organic sector. Breeding programmes specific for organic agriculture should solve this problem. Collaborating with organic farmers in such programmes, particularly in the selection process, can potentially result in varieties better adapted to their needs. Here, we assume that organic farmers' perceptive of plant health is broader than that of conventional breeders. Two organic onion farmers and one conventional onion breeder were monitored in their selection activities in 2004 and 2005 in order to verify whether and in which way this broader view on plant health contributes to improvement of organic varieties. They made selections by positive mass selection in three segregating populations under organic conditions. The monitoring showed that the organic farmers selected in the field for earliness and downy mildew and after storage for bulb characteristics. The conventional breeder selected only after storage. Farmers and breeder applied identical selection directions for bulb traits as a round shape, better hardness and skin firmness. This resulted in smaller bulbs in the breeders’ populations, while the bulbs in the farmer populations were bigger than in the original population. In 2006 and 2007 the new onion populations will be compared with each other and the original populations to determine the selection response

Transforming the post-school sector in South Africa: Limits of a skills-driven agenda

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