NASA/DOD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project. Paper 17: The relationship between seven variables and the use of US government technical reports by US aerospace engineers and scientists

A study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between the use of U.S. government technical reports by U.S. aerospace engineers and scientists and seven selected sociometric variables. Data were collected by means of a self-administered mail survey which was distributed to a randomly drawn sample of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) members. Two research questions concerning the use of conference meeting papers, journal articles, in-house technical reports, and U.S. government technical reports were investigated. Relevance, technical quality, and accessibility were found to be more important determinants of the overall extent to which U.S. government technical reports and three other information products were used by U.S. aerospace engineers and scientists

Synthetic fibres and steel fibres in concrete with regard to bond strength and toughness

The ability of fibre reinforced concrete composites to absorb energy has long been recognised as one of the most important benefits of the incorporation of fibres into plain concrete” (Golpalaratham and Gettu 1995). Steel and synthetic fibres have been used in concrete floor slabs with success in providing crack control. Slab design using synthetic fibres relies heavily upon manufacturers design guidance whereas steel fibres have better developed independent design guides available to assist their correct use (The Concrete Society 2007a). This paper examines the pull out values of both steel and Type 2 synthetic fibres embedded in concrete and equates their dosage when used in beams to provide near equal toughness values, thus providing the designer with a synthetic/steel fibre ratio by mass of fibre addition for equal performance. According to Nataraja, et al (2000), the most common method to measure toughness, is to use the load-deflection curve. One of the most widely used load-deflection tests has been ASTM 1018, which was used herein to evaluate the post crack toughness; by stating toughness as independent indices and residual strengths based upon the deflection at the formation of the first crack in the beam in relation to fixed points of further deflections under load. The ASTM test was chosen as it has been widely used and it is readily understood by many readers. The research demonstrates that near equal post crack toughness can be achieved in concrete beams using steel and synthetic fibres, at different doses

A review and evaluation of the Langley Research Center's Scientific and Technical Information Program. Results of phase 4: Knowledge and attitudes survey, academic and industrial personnel

Feedback from engineers and scientists in the academic and industrial community provided an assessment of the usage and perceived quality of NASA Langley generated STI and the familiarity and usage of selected NASA publications and services and identified ways to increase the accessibility of Langley STI. The questionnaire utilized both open and closed ended questions and was pretested for finalization. The questions were organized around the seven objectives for Phase IV. From a contact list of nearly 1,200 active industrial and academic researchers, approximately 600 addresses were verified. The 497 persons who agreed to participate were mailed questionnaires. The 381 completed questionnaires received by the cutoff date were analyzed. Based on the survey findings, recommendations were made for increasing the familiarity with and use of NASA and Langley STI and selected NASA publications and services. In addition, recommendations were made for increasing the accessibility of Langley STI

Electrodeposición de cinc en soluciones de cloruros y sulfatos

El objetivo de este capítulo es analizar la influencia de estos aniones en la electrodeposición voltamétrica de cinc a partir de soluciones de cloruros y de sulfatos. Las soluciones de estudio de (NH4Cl 1.6 M + ZnCl2 0,3M) y de (NH4)2SO4 1,3 M + ZnSO 4 0,3M) se prepararon a fuerza iónica I = 2,5 M y pH = 4 ajustado con soluciones de sulfato de amonio diluído. Por otra parte, se analizan las posibles reacciones de superficie que ocurren durante la deposición de cinc en éstas soluciones, mediante la técnica de XPS “X ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy”, que permite reconocer elementos y su entorno en pocas monocapas en una profundidad de 20 - 30 ÅFil:Mahmud, Z. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial (INTI). Procesos SuperficialesFil:Gordillo, G. Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Química Inorgánica, Analítica y Química Físic

Toward Network-based DDoS Detection in Software-defined Networks

To combat susceptibility of modern computing systems to cyberattack, identifying and disrupting malicious traffic without human intervention is essential. To accomplish this, three main tasks for an effective intrusion detection system have been identified: monitor network traffic, categorize and identify anomalous behavior in near real time, and take appropriate action against the identified threat. This system leverages distributed SDN architecture and the principles of Artificial Immune Systems and Self-Organizing Maps to build a network-based intrusion detection system capable of detecting and terminating DDoS attacks in progress

GPU acceleration of brain image proccessing

Durante los últimos años se ha venido demostrando el alto poder computacional que ofrecen las GPUs a la hora de resolver determinados problemas. Al mismo tiempo, existen campos en los que no es posible beneficiarse completamente de las mejoras conseguidas por los investigadores, debido principalmente a que los tiempos de ejecución de las aplicaciones llegan a ser extremadamente largos. Este es por ejemplo el caso del registro de imágenes en medicina. A pesar de que se han conseguido aceleraciones sobre el registro de imágenes, su uso en la práctica clínica es aún limitado. Entre otras cosas, esto se debe al rendimiento conseguido. Por lo tanto se plantea como objetivo de este proyecto, conseguir mejorar los tiempos de ejecución de una aplicación dedicada al resgitro de imágenes en medicina, con el fin de ayudar a aliviar este problema

Investigating the use of background knowledge for assessing the relevance of statements to an ontology in ontology evolution

The tasks of learning and enriching ontologies with new concepts and relations have attracted a lot of attention in the research community, leading to a number of tools facilitating the process of building and updating ontologies. These tools often discover new elements of information to be included in the considered ontology from external data sources such as text documents or databases, transforming these elements into ontology compatible statements or axioms. While some techniques are used to make sure that statements to be added are compatible with the ontology (e.g. through conflict detection), such tools generally pay little attention to the relevance of the statement in question. It is either assumed that any statement extracted from a data source is relevant, or that the user will assess whether a statement adds value to the ontology. In this paper, we investigate the use of background knowledge about the context where statements appear to assess their relevance. We devise a methodology to extract such a context from ontologies available online, to map it to the considered ontology and to visualize this mapping in a way that allows to study the intersection and complementarity of the two sources of knowledge. By applying this methodology on several examples, we identified an initial set of patterns giving strong indications concerning the relevance of a statement, as well as interesting issues to be considered when applying such techniques