Physical Properties of Pit and Fissure Sealants

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67086/2/10.1177_00220345790580042701.pd

Parameters that Affect the Color of Direct Restorative Resins

The effects of thickness, background color, specular reflection, and surface roughness on the color of five commercial restorative resins were studied by reflection spectrophotometry. As thickness increased, values of luminous reflectance and excitation purity increased for a black background but decreased for a white background. Opacity increased dramatically as thickness increased from 1.3 to 3.9 mm.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67249/2/10.1177_00220345780570090701.pd

Family-Owned Newspapers: Filling Niches in Local U.S. Communities

Citation: Powers, A., Sohn, A. B., Briggs-Bunting, J. (2016) Family-Owned Newspapers: Filling Niches in Local U.S. Communities. Journal of Media Business Studies. 2(11)Since small town newspapers are facing increased competition and technological changes that are threatening their survival, the purpose of this paper was to analyze the strategy-making activities of these organizations from an ecological perspective. Findings indicate that family-owned newspapers were finding stability in retaining their core print businesses while migrating content to the web. Too many variations from the norm appeared to weaken financial footholds and were often eventually abandoned. Such behaviors indicate a rationale for upholding a “tried-and-true” approach in newspapers. While profits may fluctuate, the uncertainty that occurred with variation seemed to play a role in increasing the threat of failure for these small, family-owned newspapers

Grain Elevators of South Dakota and Associated Farm Supply Businesses: Some Factors Affecting Their Growth and Future Prospects

The purpose of this study is to explore some of the characteristics of the South Dakota grain elevator and farm supply industry and to identify factors affecting the growth or survival of an elevator. It is possible by utilizing known economies of volume through their marketing systems, South Dakota producers could realize a savings of at least $19 million annually

Global Opportunities to Increase Agricultural Independence Through Phosphorus Recycling

Food production hinges largely upon access to phosphorus (P) fertilizer. Most fertilizer P used in the global agricultural system comes from mining of nonrenewable phosphate rock deposits located within few countries. However, P contained in livestock manure or urban wastes represents a recyclable source of P. To inform development of P recycling technologies and policies, we examined subnational, national, and global spatial patterns for two intersections of land use affording high P recycling potential: (a) manure‐rich cultivated areas and (b) populous cultivated areas. In turn, we examined overlap between P recycling potential and nation‐level P fertilizer import dependency. Populous cultivated areas were less abundant globally than manure‐rich cultivated areas, reflecting greater segregation between crops and people compared to crops and livestock, especially in the Americas. Based on a global hexagonal grid (290‐km2 grid cell area), disproportionately large shares of subnational “hot spots” for P recycling potential occurred in India, China, Southeast Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. Outside of China, most of the remaining manure‐rich or populous cultivated areas occurred within nations that had relatively high imports of P fertilizer (net P import:consumption ratios ≥0.4) or substantial increases in fertilizer demand between the 2000s (2002–2006) and 2010s (2010–2014). Manure‐rich cultivated grid cells (those above the 75th percentiles for both manure and cropland extent) represented 12% of the global grid after excluding cropless cells. Annually, the global sum of animal manure P was at least 5 times that contained in human excreta, and among cultivated cells the ratio was frequently higher (median = 8.9). The abundance of potential P recycling hot spots within nations that have depended on fertilizer imports or experienced rising fertilizer demand could prove useful for developing local P sources and maintaining agricultural independence

Generalized Hurst exponent and multifractal function of original and translated texts mapped into frequency and length time series

A nonlinear dynamics approach can be used in order to quantify complexity in written texts. As a first step, a one-dimensional system is examined : two written texts by one author (Lewis Carroll) are considered, together with one translation, into an artificial language, i.e. Esperanto are mapped into time series. Their corresponding shuffled versions are used for obtaining a "base line". Two different one-dimensional time series are used here: (i) one based on word lengths (LTS), (ii) the other on word frequencies (FTS). It is shown that the generalized Hurst exponent $h(q)$ and the derived $f(\alpha)$ curves of the original and translated texts show marked differences. The original "texts" are far from giving a parabolic $f(\alpha)$ function, - in contrast to the shuffled texts. Moreover, the Esperanto text has more extreme values. This suggests cascade model-like, with multiscale time asymmetric features as finally written texts. A discussion of the difference and complementarity of mapping into a LTS or FTS is presented. The FTS $f(\alpha)$ curves are more opened than the LTS onesComment: preprint for PRE; 2 columns; 10 pages; 6 (multifigures); 3 Tables; 70 reference

Design of a Servo Driven Adjustable Pick and Place Mechanism

The goal of this project was to design a tooling station consisting of three of the same linkage mechanisms providing motion along three different axes. Each of the linkages needed to be driven by a servo motor to achieve variable output stroke between zero and fifty six millimeters and to reduce the replacement cost of cams in the sponsor\u27s production-line machinery. Each mechanism is a six-bar linkage consisting of a slider, which is constrained within a slot in the main rocker whose motion is guided by a crank. A right-angle gearbox and servo motor were chosen to drive the linkage. Three linkages were efficiently packaged within the 250 mm x 250 mm x 1000 mm work envelope specified by the sponsor to deliver motion along three different axes

The Index of (White) Noises and their Product Systems

(See detailed abstract in the article.) We single out the correct class of spatial product systems (and the spatial endomorphism semigroups with which the product systems are associated) that allows the most far reaching analogy in their classifiaction when compared with Arveson systems. The main differences are that mere existence of a unit is not it sufficient: The unit must be CENTRAL. And the tensor product under which the index is additive is not available for product systems of Hilbert modules. It must be replaced by a new product that even for Arveson systems need not coincide with the tensor product

A matter of words: NLP for quality evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles

Automatic quality evaluation of Web information is a task with many fields of applications and of great relevance, especially in critical domains like the medical one. We move from the intuition that the quality of content of medical Web documents is affected by features related with the specific domain. First, the usage of a specific vocabulary (Domain Informativeness); then, the adoption of specific codes (like those used in the infoboxes of Wikipedia articles) and the type of document (e.g., historical and technical ones). In this paper, we propose to leverage specific domain features to improve the results of the evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles. In particular, we evaluate the articles adopting an "actionable" model, whose features are related to the content of the articles, so that the model can also directly suggest strategies for improving a given article quality. We rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and dictionaries-based techniques in order to extract the bio-medical concepts in a text. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by classifying the medical articles of the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, which have been previously manually labeled by the Wiki Project team. The results of our experiments confirm that, by considering domain-oriented features, it is possible to obtain sensible improvements with respect to existing solutions, mainly for those articles that other approaches have less correctly classified. Other than being interesting by their own, the results call for further research in the area of domain specific features suitable for Web data quality assessment