An exploratory model of girls' vulnerability to commercial sexual exploitation in prostitution.

Science.gov (United States)

Reid, Joan A

2011-05-01

Due to inaccessibility of child victims of commercial sexual exploitation, the majority of emergent research on the problem lacks theoretical framing or sufficient data for quantitative analysis. Drawing from Agnew's general strain theory, this study utilized structural equation modeling to explore: whether caregiver strain is linked to child maltreatment, if experiencing maltreatment is associated with risk-inflating behaviors or sexual denigration of self/others, and if these behavioral and psychosocial dysfunctions are related to vulnerability to commercial sexual exploitation. The proposed model was tested with data from 174 predominately African American women, 12% of whom indicated involvement in prostitution while a minor. Findings revealed child maltreatment worsened with increased caregiver strain. Experiencing child maltreatment was linked to running away, initiating substance use at earlier ages, and higher levels of sexual denigration of self/others. Sexual denigration of self/others was significantly related to the likelihood of prostitution as a minor. The network of variables in the model accounted for 34% of the variance in prostitution as a minor.

Exploiting communication concurrency on high performance computing systems

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Chaimov, Nicholas [Univ. of Oregon, Eugene, OR (United States); Ibrahim, Khaled Z. [Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Williams, Samuel [Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Iancu, Costin [Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

2015-01-01

Although logically available, applications may not exploit enough instantaneous communication concurrency to maximize hardware utilization on HPC systems. This is exacerbated in hybrid programming models such as SPMD+OpenMP. We present the design of a "multi-threaded" runtime able to transparently increase the instantaneous network concurrency and to provide near saturation bandwidth, independent of the application configuration and dynamic behavior. The runtime forwards communication requests from application level tasks to multiple communication servers. Our techniques alleviate the need for spatial and temporal application level message concurrency optimizations. Experimental results show improved message throughput and bandwidth by as much as 150% for 4KB bytes messages on InfiniBand and by as much as 120% for 4KB byte messages on Cray Aries. For more complex operations such as all-to-all collectives, we observe as much as 30% speedup. This translates into 23% speedup on 12,288 cores for a NAS FT implemented using FFTW. We also observe as much as 76% speedup on 1,500 cores for an already optimized UPC+OpenMP geometric multigrid application using hybrid parallelism.

Modelling an exploited marine fish community with 15 parameters - results from a simple size-based model

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Pope, J.G.; Rice, J.C.; Daan, N.; Jennings, S.; Gislason, H.

2006-01-01

To measure and predict the response of fish communities to exploitation, it is necessary to understand how the direct and indirect effects of fishing interact. Because fishing and predation are size-selective processes, the potential response can be explored with size-based models. We use a

Exploiting intrinsic fluctuations to identify model parameters.

Science.gov (United States)

Zimmer, Christoph; Sahle, Sven; Pahle, Jürgen

2015-04-01

Parameterisation of kinetic models plays a central role in computational systems biology. Besides the lack of experimental data of high enough quality, some of the biggest challenges here are identification issues. Model parameters can be structurally non-identifiable because of functional relationships. Noise in measured data is usually considered to be a nuisance for parameter estimation. However, it turns out that intrinsic fluctuations in particle numbers can make parameters identifiable that were previously non-identifiable. The authors present a method to identify model parameters that are structurally non-identifiable in a deterministic framework. The method takes time course recordings of biochemical systems in steady state or transient state as input. Often a functional relationship between parameters presents itself by a one-dimensional manifold in parameter space containing parameter sets of optimal goodness. Although the system's behaviour cannot be distinguished on this manifold in a deterministic framework it might be distinguishable in a stochastic modelling framework. Their method exploits this by using an objective function that includes a measure for fluctuations in particle numbers. They show on three example models, immigration-death, gene expression and Epo-EpoReceptor interaction, that this resolves the non-identifiability even in the case of measurement noise with known amplitude. The method is applied to partially observed recordings of biochemical systems with measurement noise. It is simple to implement and it is usually very fast to compute. This optimisation can be realised in a classical or Bayesian fashion.

Exploiting the Capture Effect to Enhance RACH Performance in Cellular-Based M2M Communications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jonghun Kim

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Cellular-based machine-to-machine (M2M communication is expected to facilitate services for the Internet of Things (IoT. However, because cellular networks are designed for human users, they have some limitations. Random access channel (RACH congestion caused by massive access from M2M devices is one of the biggest factors hindering cellular-based M2M services because the RACH congestion causes random access (RA throughput degradation and connection failures to the devices. In this paper, we show the possibility exploiting the capture effects, which have been known to have a positive impact on the wireless network system, on RA procedure for improving the RA performance of M2M devices. For this purpose, we analyze an RA procedure using a capture model. Through this analysis, we examine the effects of capture on RA performance and propose an Msg3 power-ramping (Msg3 PR scheme to increase the capture probability (thereby increasing the RA success probability even when severe RACH congestion problem occurs. The proposed analysis models are validated using simulations. The results show that the proposed scheme, with proper parameters, further improves the RA throughput and reduces the connection failure probability, by slightly increasing the energy consumption. Finally, we demonstrate the effects of coexistence with other RA-related schemes through simulation results.

Analytically exploiting noise correlations inside the feedback loop to improve locked-oscillator performance

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Sastrawan, J

2016-08-01

Full Text Available (2016) Analytically exploiting noise correlations inside the feedback loop to improve locked-oscillator performance J. Sastrawan,1 C. Jones,1 I. Akhalwaya,2 H. Uys,2 and M. J. Biercuk1,* 1ARC Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, School of Physics...) that probes and is locked to the atomic transition. The LO frequencymay evolve randomly in time due to intrinsic noise processes in the underlying hardware [10,11], leading to time-varying deviations of the LO frequency from that of the stable atomic reference...

A Multiple-Iterated Dual Control Model for Groundwater Exploitation and Water Level Based on the Optimal Allocation Model of Water Resources

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Junqiu Liu

2018-04-01

Full Text Available In order to mitigate environmental and ecological impacts resulting from groundwater overexploitation, we developed a multiple-iterated dual control model consisting of four modules for groundwater exploitation and water level. First, a water resources allocation model integrating calculation module of groundwater allowable withdrawal was built to predict future groundwater recharge and discharge. Then, the results were input into groundwater numerical model to simulate water levels. Groundwater exploitation was continuously optimized using the critical groundwater level as the feedback, and a groundwater multiple-iterated technique was applied to the feedback process. The proposed model was successfully applied to a typical region in Shenyang in northeast China. Results showed the groundwater numerical model was verified in simulating water levels, with a mean absolute error of 0.44 m, an average relative error of 1.33%, and a root-mean-square error of 0.46 m. The groundwater exploitation reduced from 290.33 million m3 to 116.76 million m3 and the average water level recovered from 34.27 m to 34.72 m in planning year. Finally, we proposed the strategies for water resources management in which the water levels should be controlled within the critical groundwater level. The developed model provides a promising approach for water resources allocation and sustainable groundwater management, especially for those regions with overexploited groundwater.

Exploitation and exploration dynamics in recessionary times

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Walrave, B.

2012-01-01

Firm performance largely depends on the ability to adapt to, and exploit, changes in the business environment. That is, firms should maintain ecological fitness by reconfiguring their resource base to cope with emerging threats and explore new opportunities, while at the same time exploiting

Exploration, Exploitation, and Organizational Coordination Mechanisms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Silvio Popadiuk

2016-03-01

Full Text Available This paper presents an empirical relationship among exploration, exploitation, and organizational coordination mechanisms, classified as the centralization of decision-making, formalization, and connectedness. In order to analyze the findings of this survey, we used two techniques: Principal Component Analysis (PCA and Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-PM. Our analysis was supported by 249 answers from managers of companies located in Brazil (convenience sampling. Contrary to expectations, centralization and exploitation were negatively associated. Our data supports the research hypothesis that formalization is positively associated with exploitation. Although the relationship between formalization and exploration were significant, the result is contrary to the research hypothesis that we made. The relationships among connectedness and exploitation, and connectedness and exploration were both positive and significant. This relationship means that the more connectedness increases, the higher the likelihood of exploitation and exploration.

Models for solid oxide fuel cell systems exploitation of models hierarchy for industrial design of control and diagnosis strategies

CERN Document Server

Marra, Dario; Polverino, Pierpaolo; Sorrentino, Marco

2016-01-01

This book presents methodologies for optimal design of control and diagnosis strategies for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell systems. A key feature of the methodologies presented is the exploitation of modelling tools that balance accuracy and computational burden.

Consensual exploitation : the moral wrong in exploitation and legal restrictions on consensual exploitative transactions

OpenAIRE

van der Neut, Wendy

2014-01-01

This thesis is about so-­‐called consensual exploitative transactions: transactions to which all parties agree voluntarily, and which are beneficial for all parties, but which are still widely considered exploitative, and for that reason legally restricted in many countries. The thesis asks two main questions: 1. What is wrong with consensual exploitation? 2.What implications does the answer to this question have for the legal restriction of consensual transactions ...

Exploitation of geographic information system at mapping and modelling of selected soil parameters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Palka, B.; Makovnikova, J.; Siran, M.

2005-01-01

In this presentation authors describe using of computers and geographic information systems (GIS) at effective use of soil fund, rational exploitation and organization of agricultural soil fund on the territory of the Slovak Republic, its monitoring and modelling. Using and creating of some geographically oriented information systems and databases about soils as well as present trends are discussed

On species preservation and Non-Cooperative Exploiters

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kronbak, Lone Grønbæk; Lindroos, Marko

cases where several non-cooperative exploiters are involved in mixed fisheries. This paper is targeting biodiversity preservation by setting up a two species model with the aim of ensuring both species survive harvesting of exploiters adapting a non-cooperative behaviour. The model starts out as a multi......-species model without biological dependency and is then modified to include also biological dependency. We contribute to the literature by analytically finding the limits on the number of players preserving both species including the conditions to be satisfied. For visual purposes we simulate a two species...

The Peace and Power Conceptual Model: An Assessment Guide for School Nurses Regarding Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.

Science.gov (United States)

Fraley, Hannah E; Aronowitz, Teri

2017-10-01

Human trafficking is a global problem; more than half of all victims are children. In the United States (US), at-risk youth continue to attend school. School nurses are on the frontlines, presenting a window of opportunity to identify and prevent exploitation. Available papers targeting school nurses report that school nurses may lack awareness of commercial sexual exploitation and may have attitudes and misperceptions about behaviors of school children at risk. This is a theoretical paper applying the Peace and Power Conceptual Model to understand the role of school nurses in commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Teotihuacan, tepeapulco, and obsidian exploitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Charlton, T H

1978-06-16

Current cultural ecological models of the development of civilization in central Mexico emphasize the role of subsistence production techniques and organization. The recent use of established and productive archeological surface survey techniques along natural corridors of communication between favorable niches for cultural development within the Central Mexican symbiotic region resulted in the location of sites that indicate an early development of a decentralized resource exploitation, manufacturing, and exchange network. The association of the development of this system with Teotihuacán indicates the importance such nonsubsistence production and exchange had in the evolution of this first central Mexican civilization. The later expansion of Teotihuacán into more distant areas of Mesoamerica was based on this resource exploitation model. Later civilizations centered at Tula and Tenochtitlán also used such a model in their expansion.

DEVELOPMENT OF RESERVOIR CHARACTERIZATION TECHNIQUES AND PRODUCTION MODELS FOR EXPLOITING NATURALLY FRACTURED RESERVOIRS

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Michael L. Wiggins; Raymon L. Brown; Faruk Civan; Richard G. Hughes

2002-12-31

For many years, geoscientists and engineers have undertaken research to characterize naturally fractured reservoirs. Geoscientists have focused on understanding the process of fracturing and the subsequent measurement and description of fracture characteristics. Engineers have concentrated on the fluid flow behavior in the fracture-porous media system and the development of models to predict the hydrocarbon production from these complex systems. This research attempts to integrate these two complementary views to develop a quantitative reservoir characterization methodology and flow performance model for naturally fractured reservoirs. The research has focused on estimating naturally fractured reservoir properties from seismic data, predicting fracture characteristics from well logs, and developing a naturally fractured reservoir simulator. It is important to develop techniques that can be applied to estimate the important parameters in predicting the performance of naturally fractured reservoirs. This project proposes a method to relate seismic properties to the elastic compliance and permeability of the reservoir based upon a sugar cube model. In addition, methods are presented to use conventional well logs to estimate localized fracture information for reservoir characterization purposes. The ability to estimate fracture information from conventional well logs is very important in older wells where data are often limited. Finally, a desktop naturally fractured reservoir simulator has been developed for the purpose of predicting the performance of these complex reservoirs. The simulator incorporates vertical and horizontal wellbore models, methods to handle matrix to fracture fluid transfer, and fracture permeability tensors. This research project has developed methods to characterize and study the performance of naturally fractured reservoirs that integrate geoscience and engineering data. This is an important step in developing exploitation strategies for

Automated UAV-based video exploitation using service oriented architecture framework

Science.gov (United States)

Se, Stephen; Nadeau, Christian; Wood, Scott

2011-05-01

Airborne surveillance and reconnaissance are essential for successful military missions. Such capabilities are critical for troop protection, situational awareness, mission planning, damage assessment, and others. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) gather huge amounts of video data but it is extremely labour-intensive for operators to analyze hours and hours of received data. At MDA, we have developed a suite of tools that can process the UAV video data automatically, including mosaicking, change detection and 3D reconstruction, which have been integrated within a standard GIS framework. In addition, the mosaicking and 3D reconstruction tools have also been integrated in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework. The Visualization and Exploitation Workstation (VIEW) integrates 2D and 3D visualization, processing, and analysis capabilities developed for UAV video exploitation. Visualization capabilities are supported through a thick-client Graphical User Interface (GUI), which allows visualization of 2D imagery, video, and 3D models. The GUI interacts with the VIEW server, which provides video mosaicking and 3D reconstruction exploitation services through the SOA framework. The SOA framework allows multiple users to perform video exploitation by running a GUI client on the operator's computer and invoking the video exploitation functionalities residing on the server. This allows the exploitation services to be upgraded easily and allows the intensive video processing to run on powerful workstations. MDA provides UAV services to the Canadian and Australian forces in Afghanistan with the Heron, a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAV system. On-going flight operations service provides important intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information to commanders and front-line soldiers.

Surrogate Model Application to the Identification of Optimal Groundwater Exploitation Scheme Based on Regression Kriging Method—A Case Study of Western Jilin Province

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yongkai An

2015-07-01

Full Text Available This paper introduces a surrogate model to identify an optimal exploitation scheme, while the western Jilin province was selected as the study area. A numerical simulation model of groundwater flow was established first, and four exploitation wells were set in the Tongyu county and Qian Gorlos county respectively so as to supply water to Daan county. Second, the Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS method was used to collect data in the feasible region for input variables. A surrogate model of the numerical simulation model of groundwater flow was developed using the regression kriging method. An optimization model was established to search an optimal groundwater exploitation scheme using the minimum average drawdown of groundwater table and the minimum cost of groundwater exploitation as multi-objective functions. Finally, the surrogate model was invoked by the optimization model in the process of solving the optimization problem. Results show that the relative error and root mean square error of the groundwater table drawdown between the simulation model and the surrogate model for 10 validation samples are both lower than 5%, which is a high approximation accuracy. The contrast between the surrogate-based simulation optimization model and the conventional simulation optimization model for solving the same optimization problem, shows the former only needs 5.5 hours, and the latter needs 25 days. The above results indicate that the surrogate model developed in this study could not only considerably reduce the computational burden of the simulation optimization process, but also maintain high computational accuracy. This can thus provide an effective method for identifying an optimal groundwater exploitation scheme quickly and accurately.

The Ethics of Exploitation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paul McLaughlin

2008-11-01

Full Text Available Philosophical inquiry into exploitation has two major deficiencies to date: it assumes that exploitation is wrong by definition; and it pays too much attention to the Marxian account of exploitation. Two senses of exploitation should be distinguished: the ‘moral’ or pejorative sense and the ‘non-moral’ or ‘non-prejudicial’ sense. By demonstrating the conceptual inadequacy of exploitation as defined in the first sense, and by defining exploitation adequately in the latter sense, we seek to demonstrate the moral complexity of exploitation. We contend, moreover, that moral evaluation of exploitation is only possible once we abandon a strictly Marxian framework and attempt, in the long run, to develop an integral ethic along Godwinian lines.

Transnational gestational surrogacy: does it have to be exploitative?

Science.gov (United States)

Kirby, Jeffrey

2014-01-01

This article explores the controversial practice of transnational gestational surrogacy and poses a provocative question: Does it have to be exploitative? Various existing models of exploitation are considered and a novel exploitation-evaluation heuristic is introduced to assist in the analysis of the potentially exploitative dimensions/elements of complex health-related practices. On the basis of application of the heuristic, I conclude that transnational gestational surrogacy, as currently practiced in low-income country settings (such as rural, western India), is exploitative of surrogate women. Arising out of consideration of the heuristic's exploitation conditions, a set of public education and enabled choice, enhanced protections, and empowerment reforms to transnational gestational surrogacy practice is proposed that, if incorporated into a national regulatory framework and actualized within a low income country, could possibly render such practice nonexploitative.

Ambidextrous Organizations: A Multiple-Level Study of Absorptive Capacity, Exploratory and Exploitative Innovation and Performance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

J.J.P. Jansen (Justin)

2005-01-01

textabstractBalancing and synchronizing exploration and exploitation is fundamental to the competitive success of firms in dynamic environments. Despite the importance of reconciling exploration and exploitation within organizations, however, relatively little empirical research has examined this

Exploiting opportunities at all cost? Entrepreneurial intent and externalities

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Urbig, D.; Weitzel, G.U.; Rosenkranz, S.; van Witteloostuijn, A.

2011-01-01

they exploit welfare-enhancing opportunities as it is assumed in several normative models? Do we need to prevent potential entrepreneurs from being destructive or are there intrinsic limits to harm others? We experimentally investigate how people with different entrepreneurial intent exploit risky

Risk assessment by dynamic representation of vulnerability, exploitation, and impact

Science.gov (United States)

Cam, Hasan

2015-05-01

Assessing and quantifying cyber risk accurately in real-time is essential to providing security and mission assurance in any system and network. This paper presents a modeling and dynamic analysis approach to assessing cyber risk of a network in real-time by representing dynamically its vulnerabilities, exploitations, and impact using integrated Bayesian network and Markov models. Given the set of vulnerabilities detected by a vulnerability scanner in a network, this paper addresses how its risk can be assessed by estimating in real-time the exploit likelihood and impact of vulnerability exploitation on the network, based on real-time observations and measurements over the network. The dynamic representation of the network in terms of its vulnerabilities, sensor measurements, and observations is constructed dynamically using the integrated Bayesian network and Markov models. The transition rates of outgoing and incoming links of states in hidden Markov models are used in determining exploit likelihood and impact of attacks, whereas emission rates help quantify the attack states of vulnerabilities. Simulation results show the quantification and evolving risk scores over time for individual and aggregated vulnerabilities of a network.

A Practical Model to Perform Comprehensive Cybersecurity Audits

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Regner Sabillon

2018-03-01

Full Text Available These days organizations are continually facing being targets of cyberattacks and cyberthreats; the sophistication and complexity of modern cyberattacks and the modus operandi of cybercriminals including Techniques, Tactics and Procedures (TTP keep growing at unprecedented rates. Cybercriminals are always adopting new strategies to plan and launch cyberattacks based on existing cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exploiting end users by using social engineering techniques. Cybersecurity audits are extremely important to verify that information security controls are in place and to detect weaknesses of inexistent cybersecurity or obsolete controls. This article presents an innovative and comprehensive cybersecurity audit model. The CyberSecurity Audit Model (CSAM can be implemented to perform internal or external cybersecurity audits. This model can be used to perform single cybersecurity audits or can be part of any corporate audit program to improve cybersecurity controls. Any information security or cybersecurity audit team has either the options to perform a full audit for all cybersecurity domains or by selecting specific domains to audit certain areas that need control verification and hardening. The CSAM has 18 domains; Domain 1 is specific for Nation States and Domains 2-18 can be implemented at any organization. The organization can be any small, medium or large enterprise, the model is also applicable to any Non-Profit Organization (NPO.

A simple interpretation of Hubbert's model of resource exploitation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bardi, U.; Lavacchi, A. [Dipartimento di Chimica, Universita di Firenze, Via della Lastruccia 3, Sesto Fiorentino FI (Italy); Bardi, U.; Lavacchi, A. [ASPO - Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, Italian section, c/o Dipartimento di Chimica, Universita di Firenze, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino (Italy)

2009-07-01

The well known 'Hubbert curve' assumes that the production curve of a crude oil in a free market economy is 'bell shaped' and symmetric. The model was first applied in the 1950s as a way of forecasting the production of crude oil in the US lower 48 states. Today, variants of the model are often used for describing the worldwide production of crude oil, which is supposed to reach a global production peak ('peak oil') and to decline afterwards. The model has also been shown to be generally valid for mineral resources other than crude oil and also for slowly renewable biological resources such as whales. Despite its widespread use, Hubbert's model sometimes criticized for being arbitrary and its underlying assumptions are rarely examined. In the present work, we use a simple model to generate the bell shaped curve using the smallest possible number of assumptions, taking also into account the 'Energy Return to Energy Invested' (EROI or EROEI) parameter. We show that this model can reproduce several historical cases, even for resources other than crude oil, and provide a useful tool for understanding the general mechanisms of resource exploitation and the future of energy production in the world's economy. (author)

Exploiting conformational ensembles in modeling protein-protein interactions on the proteome scale

Science.gov (United States)

Kuzu, Guray; Gursoy, Attila; Nussinov, Ruth; Keskin, Ozlem

2013-01-01

Cellular functions are performed through protein-protein interactions; therefore, identification of these interactions is crucial for understanding biological processes. Recent studies suggest that knowledge-based approaches are more useful than ‘blind’ docking for modeling at large scales. However, a caveat of knowledge-based approaches is that they treat molecules as rigid structures. The Protein Data Bank (PDB) offers a wealth of conformations. Here, we exploited ensemble of the conformations in predictions by a knowledge-based method, PRISM. We tested ‘difficult’ cases in a docking-benchmark dataset, where the unbound and bound protein forms are structurally different. Considering alternative conformations for each protein, the percentage of successfully predicted interactions increased from ~26% to 66%, and 57% of the interactions were successfully predicted in an ‘unbiased’ scenario, in which data related to the bound forms were not utilized. If the appropriate conformation, or relevant template interface, is unavailable in the PDB, PRISM could not predict the interaction successfully. The pace of the growth of the PDB promises a rapid increase of ensemble conformations emphasizing the merit of such knowledge-based ensemble strategies for higher success rates in protein-protein interaction predictions on an interactome-scale. We constructed the structural network of ERK interacting proteins as a case study. PMID:23590674

Exploiting first-class arrays in Fortran for accelerator programming

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rasmussen, Craig E.; Weseloh, Wayne N.; Robey, Robert W.; Sottile, Matthew J.; Quinlan, Daniel; Overbey, Jeffrey

2010-01-01

Emerging architectures for high performance computing often are well suited to a data parallel programming model. This paper presents a simple programming methodology based on existing languages and compiler tools that allows programmers to take advantage of these systems. We will work with the array features of Fortran 90 to show how this infrequently exploited, standardized language feature is easily transformed to lower level accelerator code. Our transformations are based on a mapping from Fortran 90 to C++ code with OpenCL extensions. The sheer complexity of programming for clusters of many or multi-core processors with tens of millions threads of execution make the simplicity of the data parallel model attractive. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of todays applications (especially when convolved with the increasing complexity of the hardware) and the need for portability across hardware architectures make a higher-level and simpler programming model like data parallel attractive. The goal of this work has been to exploit source-to-source transformations that allow programmers to develop and maintain programs at a high-level of abstraction, without coding to a specific hardware architecture. Furthermore these transformations allow multiple hardware architectures to be targeted without changing the high-level source. It also removes the necessity for application programmers to understand details of the accelerator architecture or to know OpenCL.

Meaning, function and methods of the recultivation in mining exploitation

OpenAIRE

Dambov, Risto; Ljatifi, Ejup

2015-01-01

With the exploitation of mineral resources is performed degradation and deformation of the relief and the general part of surface of the Earth's crust. Depending on the type of open pit mine, this degradation can be expressed to a lesser or greater extent, and sometimes in several square kilometers. The exploitation of mineral resources is with unbreakable link with the environment. Very often it is said that mining is „enemy No. 1“ for environment. With exploitation comes to degradation of h...

Performance testing of LiDAR exploitation software

Science.gov (United States)

Varela-González, M.; González-Jorge, H.; Riveiro, B.; Arias, P.

2013-04-01

Mobile LiDAR systems are being used widely in recent years for many applications in the field of geoscience. One of most important limitations of this technology is the large computational requirements involved in data processing. Several software solutions for data processing are available in the market, but users are often unknown about the methodologies to verify their performance accurately. In this work a methodology for LiDAR software performance testing is presented and six different suites are studied: QT Modeler, AutoCAD Civil 3D, Mars 7, Fledermaus, Carlson and TopoDOT (all of them in x64). Results depict as QTModeler, TopoDOT and AutoCAD Civil 3D allow the loading of large datasets, while Fledermaus, Mars7 and Carlson do not achieve these powerful performance. AutoCAD Civil 3D needs large loading time in comparison with the most powerful softwares such as QTModeler and TopoDOT. Carlson suite depicts the poorest results among all the softwares under study, where point clouds larger than 5 million points cannot be loaded and loading time is very large in comparison with the other suites even for the smaller datasets. AutoCAD Civil 3D, Carlson and TopoDOT show more threads than other softwares like QTModeler, Mars7 and Fledermaus.

Inference of gene regulatory networks with sparse structural equation models exploiting genetic perturbations.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiaodong Cai

Full Text Available Integrating genetic perturbations with gene expression data not only improves accuracy of regulatory network topology inference, but also enables learning of causal regulatory relations between genes. Although a number of methods have been developed to integrate both types of data, the desiderata of efficient and powerful algorithms still remains. In this paper, sparse structural equation models (SEMs are employed to integrate both gene expression data and cis-expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTL, for modeling gene regulatory networks in accordance with biological evidence about genes regulating or being regulated by a small number of genes. A systematic inference method named sparsity-aware maximum likelihood (SML is developed for SEM estimation. Using simulated directed acyclic or cyclic networks, the SML performance is compared with that of two state-of-the-art algorithms: the adaptive Lasso (AL based scheme, and the QTL-directed dependency graph (QDG method. Computer simulations demonstrate that the novel SML algorithm offers significantly better performance than the AL-based and QDG algorithms across all sample sizes from 100 to 1,000, in terms of detection power and false discovery rate, in all the cases tested that include acyclic or cyclic networks of 10, 30 and 300 genes. The SML method is further applied to infer a network of 39 human genes that are related to the immune function and are chosen to have a reliable eQTL per gene. The resulting network consists of 9 genes and 13 edges. Most of the edges represent interactions reasonably expected from experimental evidence, while the remaining may just indicate the emergence of new interactions. The sparse SEM and efficient SML algorithm provide an effective means of exploiting both gene expression and perturbation data to infer gene regulatory networks. An open-source computer program implementing the SML algorithm is freely available upon request.

Rational Exploitation and Utilizing of Groundwater in Jiangsu Coastal Area

Science.gov (United States)

Kang, B.; Lin, X.

2017-12-01

Jiangsu coastal area is located in the southeast coast of China, where is a new industrial base and an important coastal and Land Resources Development Zone of China. In the areas with strong human exploitation activities, regional groundwater evolution is obviously affected by human activities. In order to solve the environmental geological problems caused by groundwater exploitation fundamentally, we must find out the forming conditions of regional groundwater hydrodynamic field, and the impact of human activities on groundwater hydrodynamic field evolution and hydrogeochemical evolition. Based on these results, scientific management and reasonable exploitation of the regional groundwater resources can be provided for the utilization. Taking the coastal area of Jiangsu as the research area, we investigate and analyze of the regional hydrogeological conditions. The numerical simulation model of groundwater flow was established according to the water power, chemical and isotopic methods, the conditions of water flow and the influence of hydrodynamic field on the water chemical field. We predict the evolution of regional groundwater dynamics under the influence of human activities and climate change and evaluate the influence of groundwater dynamic field evolution on the environmental geological problems caused by groundwater exploitation under various conditions. We get the following conclusions: Three groundwater exploitation optimal schemes were established. The groundwater salinization was taken as the primary control condition. The substitution model was proposed to model groundwater exploitation and water level changes by BP network method.Then genetic algorithm was used to solve the optimization solution. Three groundwater exploitation optimal schemes were submit to local water resource management. The first sheme was used to solve the groundwater salinization problem. The second sheme focused on dual water supply. The third sheme concerned on emergency water

Hacking the art of exploitation

CERN Document Server

Erickson, Jon

2003-01-01

A comprehensive introduction to the techniques of exploitation and creative problem-solving methods commonly referred to as "hacking," Hacking: The Art of Exploitation is for both technical and non-technical people who are interested in computer security. It shows how hackers exploit programs and write exploits, instead of just how to run other people's exploits. Unlike many so-called hacking books, this book explains the technical aspects of hacking, including stack based overflows, heap based overflows, string exploits, return-into-libc, shellcode, and cryptographic attacks on 802.11b.

Exploitation of linkage learning in evolutionary algorithms

CERN Document Server

Chen, Ying-ping

2010-01-01

The exploitation of linkage learning is enhancing the performance of evolutionary algorithms. This monograph examines recent progress in linkage learning, with a series of focused technical chapters that cover developments and trends in the field.

Oil exploitation and the environmental Kuznets curve

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Esmaeili, Abdoulkarim; Abdollahzadeh, Negar

2009-01-01

This study refers to a panel estimation of an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for oil to determine the factors most affecting oil exploitation in 38 oil-producing countries during 1990-2000. Control variables such as oil reserves, oil price, population, political rights, and the Gini index were used to determine its contribution to the main EKC model. The empirical results fully support the existence of an EKC for oil exploitation. Furthermore, the result indicates that the proved oil reserves has a significant and positive role in oil production, but oil price and population do not significantly affect crude oil production. Also, increased freedoms and a better income distribution will reduce the rate of oil exploitation. Thus, policies aiming at enhancing democratic society and better income distribution would be more compatible with sustainability. (author)

Oil exploitation and the environmental Kuznets curve

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Esmaeili, Abdoulkarim; Abdollahzadeh, Negar [Department of Agricultural Economics, College of Agriculture, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Fars (Iran)

2009-01-15

This study refers to a panel estimation of an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for oil to determine the factors most affecting oil exploitation in 38 oil-producing countries during 1990-2000. Control variables such as oil reserves, oil price, population, political rights, and the Gini index were used to determine its contribution to the main EKC model. The empirical results fully support the existence of an EKC for oil exploitation. Furthermore, the result indicates that the proved oil reserves has a significant and positive role in oil production, but oil price and population do not significantly affect crude oil production. Also, increased freedoms and a better income distribution will reduce the rate of oil exploitation. Thus, policies aiming at enhancing democratic society and better income distribution would be more compatible with sustainability. (author)

Exploitation of Labour and Exploitation of Commodities: a “New Interpretation”

OpenAIRE

Veneziani, Roberto; Yoshihara, Naoki

2011-01-01

In the standard Okishio-Morishima approach, the existence of profits is proved to be equivalent to the exploitation of labour. Yet, it can also be proved that the existence of profits is equivalent to the ‘exploitation’ of any good. Labour and commodity exploitation are just different numerical representations of the productiveness of the economy. This paper presents an alternative approach to exploitation theory which is related to the New Interpretation (Duménil 1980; Foley 1982). In this a...

Exploitation and disadvantage

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ferguson, B.

2016-01-01

According to some accounts of exploitation, most notably Ruth Sample's (2003) degradation-based account and Robert Goodin's (1987) vulnerability-based account, exploitation occurs when an advantaged party fails to constrain their advantage in light of another's disadvantage, regardless of the cause

Regional research exploitation of the LHC a case-study of the required computing resources

CERN Document Server

Almehed, S; Eerola, Paule Anna Mari; Mjörnmark, U; Smirnova, O G; Zacharatou-Jarlskog, C; Åkesson, T

2002-01-01

A simulation study to evaluate the required computing resources for a research exploitation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been performed. The evaluation was done as a case study, assuming existence of a Nordic regional centre and using the requirements for performing a specific physics analysis as a yard-stick. Other imput parameters were: assumption for the distribution of researchers at the institutions involved, an analysis model, and two different functional structures of the computing resources.

Security option file - Exploitation (DOS-Expl)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2016-01-01

This document aims at presenting functions performed by Cigeo during its exploitation phase, its main technical and security options which are envisaged with respect to different types of internal or external risks, and a first assessment of its impact on mankind and on the environment during its exploitation in normal operation as well as in incidental or accidental situations. A first volume addresses security principles, approach and management in relationship with the legal and regulatory framework. The second volume presents input data related to waste parcels and used for the installation sizing and operation, the main site characteristics, the main technical options regarding structures and equipment, and the main options regarding exploitation (parcel management, organisational and human aspects, and effluent management). The third volume describes how parcel are processed from their arrival to their setting in storage compartment, an inventory of internal and external risks, and a first assessment of consequences of scenarios on mankind and on the environment. The fourth volume presents options and operations which are envisaged regarding Cigeo closure, and inventory of associated risks

Television production, Funding Models and Exploitation of Content

OpenAIRE

Doyle, Gillian

2016-01-01

The rise of digital platforms has transformative implications for strategies of financing media production and for exploitation of the economic value in creative content. In the television industry, changes in technologies for distribution and the emergence of SVOD services such as Netflix are gradually shifting audiences and financial power away from broadcasters while at the same time creating unprecedented opportunities for programme-makers.  Drawing on findings from recent RCUK-funded res...

Simulated population responses of common carp to commercial exploitation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Weber, Michael J.; Hennen, Matthew J.; Brown, Michael L.

2011-12-01

Common carp Cyprinus carpio is a widespread invasive species that can become highly abundant and impose deleterious ecosystem effects. Thus, aquatic resource managers are interested in controlling common carp populations. Control of invasive common carp populations is difficult, due in part to the inherent uncertainty of how populations respond to exploitation. To understand how common carp populations respond to exploitation, we evaluated common carp population dynamics (recruitment, growth, and mortality) in three natural lakes in eastern South Dakota. Common carp exhibited similar population dynamics across these three systems that were characterized by consistent recruitment (ages 3 to 15 years present), fast growth (K = 0.37 to 0.59), and low mortality (A = 1 to 7%). We then modeled the effects of commercial exploitation on size structure, abundance, and egg production to determine its utility as a management tool to control populations. All three populations responded similarly to exploitation simulations with a 575-mm length restriction, representing commercial gear selectivity. Simulated common carp size structure modestly declined (9 to 37%) in all simulations. Abundance of common carp declined dramatically (28 to 56%) at low levels of exploitation (0 to 20%) but exploitation >40% had little additive effect and populations were only reduced by 49 to 79% despite high exploitation (>90%). Maximum lifetime egg production was reduced from 77 to 89% at a moderate level of exploitation (40%), indicating the potential for recruitment overfishing. Exploitation further reduced common carp size structure, abundance, and egg production when simulations were not size selective. Our results provide insights to how common carp populations may respond to exploitation. Although commercial exploitation may be able to partially control populations, an integrated removal approach that removes all sizes of common carp has a greater chance of controlling population abundance

Learning Metasploit exploitation and development

CERN Document Server

Balapure, Aditya

2013-01-01

A practical, hands-on tutorial with step-by-step instructions. The book will follow a smooth and easy-to-follow tutorial approach, covering the essentials and then showing the readers how to write more sophisticated exploits.This book targets exploit developers, vulnerability analysts and researchers, network administrators, and ethical hackers looking to gain advanced knowledge in exploitation development and identifying vulnerabilities. The primary goal is to take readers wishing to get into more advanced exploitation discovery and reaching the next level.Prior experience exploiting basic st

Toward a synthetic economic systems modeling tool for sustainable exploitation of ecosystems.

Science.gov (United States)

Richardson, Colin; Courvisanos, Jerry; Crawford, John W

2011-02-01

Environmental resources that underpin the basic human needs of water, energy, and food are predicted to become in such short supply by 2050 that global security and the well-being of millions will be under threat. These natural commodities have been allowed to reach crisis levels of supply because of a failure of economic systems to sustain them. This is largely because there have been no means of integrating their exploitation into any economic model that effectively addresses ecological systemic failures in a way that provides an integrated ecological-economic tool that can monitor and evaluate market and policy targets. We review the reasons for this and recent attempts to address the problem while identifying outstanding issues. The key elements of a policy-oriented economic model that integrates ecosystem processes are described and form the basis of a proposed new synthesis approach. The approach is illustrated by an indicative case study that develops a simple model for rainfed and irrigated food production in the Murray-Darling basin of southeastern Australia. © 2011 New York Academy of Sciences.

Information source exploitation/exploration and NPD decision-making

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jespersen, Kristina Risom

different Scandinavian companies. Data was analyzed using hierarchical regression models across decision criteria dimensions and NPD stages as well as analyzing the combination of selected information sources. Rather than forwarding one optimal search behavior for the entire NPD process, we find optimal...... information search behavior at either end of the exploitation/exploration continuum. Additionally, we find that overexploitation and overexploration is caused by managerial bias. This creates managerial misbehavior at gate decision-points of the NPD process.......The purpose of this study is to examine how the exploration/exploitation continuum is applied by decision-makers in new product gate decision-making. Specifically, we analyze at gate decision-points how the evaluation of a new product project is affected by the information source exploitation...

Anthropology of sexual exploitation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lalić Velibor

2009-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, the authors observe sexual exploitation from an anthropological perspective. They analyze the rational, ethical, emotional and mythological dimensions of human sexuality. Consequently, after setting the phenomenon in a social and historical context, sexual exploitation is closely observed in the contemporary age. Based on thoughts of relevant thinkers, they make the conclusion that the elimination of sexual exploitation is not an utterly legal issue, but political and economical issues as well. Namely, legal norms are not sufficient to overcome sexual exploitation, but, political and economical relationships in contemporary societies, which will be based on sincere equal opportunities must be established.

Managerial attention to exploitation versus exploration : Toward a dynamic perspective on ambidexterity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Walrave, B.; Romme, A.G.L.; van Oorschot, K.E.; Langerak, F.

2017-01-01

Managerial attention to exploitation and exploration has a strong influence on organizational performance. However, there is hardly any knowledge about whether senior managers need to adjust their distribution of attention to exploitation and exploration in response to major changes in demand

The exploitation argument against commercial surrogacy.

Science.gov (United States)

Wilkinson, Stephen

2003-04-01

This paper discusses the exploitation argument against commercial surrogacy: the claim that commercial surrogacy is morally objectionable because it is exploitative. The following questions are addressed. First, what exactly does the exploitation argument amount to? Second, is commercial surrogacy in fact exploitative? Third, if it were exploitative, would this provide a sufficient reason to prohibit (or otherwise legislatively discourage) it? The focus throughout is on the exploitation of paid surrogates, although it is noted that other parties (e.g. 'commissioning parents') may also be the victims of exploitation. It is argued that there are good reasons for believing that commercial surrogacy is often exploitative. However, even if we accept this, the exploitation argument for prohibiting (or otherwise legislatively discouraging) commercial surrogacy remains quite weak. One reason for this is that prohibition may well 'backfire' and lead to potential surrogates having to do other things that are more exploitative and/or more harmful than paid surrogacy. It is concluded therefore that those who oppose exploitation should (rather than attempting to stop particular practices like commercial surrogacy) concentrate on: (a) improving the conditions under which paid surrogates 'work'; and (b) changing the background conditions (in particular, the unequal distribution of power and wealth) which generate exploitative relationships.

Exploitability Assessment with TEASER

Science.gov (United States)

2017-05-01

for architectural neutral taint analysis on top of LLVM and QEMU. POC Proof of Concept : Demonstration of an exploit on a program . vii RCE Remote Code...bug with a Proof of Concept (POC), or input to a program demonstrating the ability to use a bug to exploit the application, to demonstrate the...often leads to either computationally difficult constraint solving problems or taint explosion. Given the computational difficulty of exploit

Two questions about surrogacy and exploitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Wertheimer, Alan

1992-01-01

In this article I will consider two related questions about surrogacy and exploitation: (1) Is surrogacy exploitative? (2) If surrogacy is exploitative, what is the moral force of this exploitation? Briefly stated, I shall argue that whether surrogacy is exploitative depends on whether exploitation must be harmful to the exploited party or whether (as I think) there can be mutually advantageous exploitation. It also depends on some facts about surrogacy about which we have little reliable evidence and on our philosophical view on what counts as a harm to the surrogate. Our answer to the second question will turn in part on the account of exploitation we invoke in answering the first question and in part on the way in which we resolve some other questions about the justification of state interference. I shall suggest, however, that if surrogacy is a form of voluntary and mutually advantageous exploitation, then there is a strong presumption that surrogacy contracts should be permitted and even enforceable, although that presumption may be overridden on other grounds.

3D Massive MIMO Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis

KAUST Repository

Nadeem, Qurrat-Ul-Ain

2015-07-30

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems of current LTE releases are capable of adaptation in the azimuth only. Recently, the trend is to enhance system performance by exploiting the channel’s degrees of freedom in the elevation, which necessitates the characterization of 3D channels. We present an information-theoretic channel model for MIMO systems that supports the elevation dimension. The model is based on the principle of maximum entropy, which enables us to determine the distribution of the channel matrix consistent with the prior information on the angles. Based on this model, we provide analytical expression for the cumulative density function (CDF) of the mutual information (MI) for systems with a single receive and finite number of transmit antennas in the general signalto- interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) regime. The result is extended to systems with finite receive antennas in the low SINR regime. A Gaussian approximation to the asymptotic behavior of MI distribution is derived for the large number of transmit antennas and paths regime. We corroborate our analysis with simulations that study the performance gains realizable through meticulous selection of the transmit antenna downtilt angles, confirming the potential of elevation beamforming to enhance system performance. The results are directly applicable to the analysis of 5G 3D-Massive MIMO-systems.

Exploit Kit traffic analysis

OpenAIRE

Καπίρης, Σταμάτης; Kapiris, Stamatis

2017-01-01

Exploit kits have become one of the most widespread and destructive threat that Internet users face on a daily basis. Since the first actor, which has been categorized as exploit kit, namely MPack, appeared in 2006, we have seen a new era on exploit kit variants compromising popular websites, infecting hosts and delivering destructive malware, following an exponentially evolvement to date. With the growing threat landscape, large enterprises to domestic networks, have starte...

Final Report, “Exploiting Global View for Resilience”

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Chien, Andrew [Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States)

2017-03-29

Final technical report for the "Exploiting Global View for Resilience" project. The GVR project aims to create a new approach to portable, resilient applications. The GVR approach builds on a global view data model,, adding versioning (multi-version), user control of timing and rate (multi-stream), and flexible cross layer error signalling and recovery. With a versioned array as a portable abstraction, GVR enables application programmers to exploit deep scientific and application code insights to manage resilience (and its overhead) in a flexible, portable fashion.

Human collective intelligence under dual exploration-exploitation dilemmas.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wataru Toyokawa

Full Text Available The exploration-exploitation dilemma is a recurrent adaptive problem for humans as well as non-human animals. Given a fixed time/energy budget, every individual faces a fundamental trade-off between exploring for better resources and exploiting known resources to optimize overall performance under uncertainty. Colonies of eusocial insects are known to solve this dilemma successfully via evolved coordination mechanisms that function at the collective level. For humans and other non-eusocial species, however, this dilemma operates within individuals as well as between individuals, because group members may be motivated to take excessive advantage of others' exploratory findings through social learning. Thus, even though social learning can reduce collective exploration costs, the emergence of disproportionate "information scroungers" may severely undermine its potential benefits. We investigated experimentally whether social learning opportunities might improve the performance of human participants working on a "multi-armed bandit" problem in groups, where they could learn about each other's past choice behaviors. Results showed that, even though information scroungers emerged frequently in groups, social learning opportunities reduced total group exploration time while increasing harvesting from better options, and consequentially improved collective performance. Surprisingly, enriching social information by allowing participants to observe others' evaluations of chosen options (e.g., Amazon's 5-star rating system in addition to choice-frequency information had a detrimental impact on performance compared to the simpler situation with only the choice-frequency information. These results indicate that humans groups can handle the fundamental "dual exploration-exploitation dilemmas" successfully, and that social learning about simple choice-frequencies can help produce collective intelligence.

ASSESSING UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PERFORMANCE WITH MULTIPLE CONSTITUENCIES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kuang-Liang Liu

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The research performance of the university is critical to the national competitiveness. Previous research has established that research performance is based on scholarly publishing. Several studies suggested that journal ranking is the important research quality indicator. However, unilateral measurement for the research performance will seriously corrode the development of university research work. Assessing university research performance with multiple constituencies is a better to enhance the university research. Although substantial studies have been performed on the critical factors that affect knowledge exploration in the university, those in knowledge exploitation are still lacking. With the multiple constituencies, a fully understanding of research performance can be gained. In the research model, knowledge exploration represents the academic research and knowledge exploitation represents the university–industry collaboration. Data collected from 124 university data in online database. The study shows that knowledge exploration and exploitation both are significant positive predictors of university competitiveness. University resources play important roles to affect both knowledge exploration and exploitation in the university. The study also shows that higher knowledge exploration will enhance knowledge exploitation. Implications for theory and practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Exploiting the opportunities of Internet and multi-channel pricing : An exploratory research

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Sotgiu, Francesca; Ancarani, Fabio

2004-01-01

Smart firms are not worried about the impact of the Internet on pricing, but realise that they have the unique opportunity to exploit new options and improve their marketing performance. Multi-channel pricing is one of the most interesting opportunities firms can exploit in the digital economy.

Inverse modeling and forecasting for the exploitation of the Pauzhetsky geothermal field, Kamchatka, Russia

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Finsterle, Stefan; Kiryukhin, A.V.; Asaulova, N.P.; Finsterle, S.

2008-04-01

A three-dimensional numerical model of the Pauzhetsky geothermal field has been developed based on a conceptual hydrogeological model of the system. It extends over a 13.6-km2 area and includes three layers: (1) a base layer with inflow; (2) a geothermal reservoir; and (3) an upper layer with discharge and recharge/infiltration areas. Using the computer program iTOUGH2 (Finsterle, 2004), the model is calibrated to a total of 13,675 calibration points, combining natural-state and 1960-2006 exploitation data. The principal model parameters identified and estimated by inverse modeling include the fracture permeability and fracture porosity of the geothermal reservoir, the initial natural upflow rate, the base-layer porosity, and the permeabilities of the infiltration zones. Heat and mass balances derived from the calibrated model helped identify the sources of the geothermal reserves in the field. With the addition of five makeup wells, simulation forecasts for the 2007-2032 period predict a sustainable average steam production of 29 kg/s, which is sufficient to maintain the generation of 6.8 MWe at the Pauzhetsky power plant.

Network exploitation using WAMI tracks

Science.gov (United States)

Rimey, Ray; Record, Jim; Keefe, Dan; Kennedy, Levi; Cramer, Chris

2011-06-01

Creating and exploiting network models from wide area motion imagery (WAMI) is an important task for intelligence analysis. Tracks of entities observed moving in the WAMI sensor data are extracted, then large numbers of tracks are studied over long time intervals to determine specific locations that are visited (e.g., buildings in an urban environment), what locations are related to other locations, and the function of each location. This paper describes several parts of the network detection/exploitation problem, and summarizes a solution technique for each: (a) Detecting nodes; (b) Detecting links between known nodes; (c) Node attributes to characterize a node; (d) Link attributes to characterize each link; (e) Link structure inferred from node attributes and vice versa; and (f) Decomposing a detected network into smaller networks. Experimental results are presented for each solution technique, and those are used to discuss issues for each problem part and its solution technique.

Rationalising predictors of child sexual exploitation and sex-trading.

Science.gov (United States)

Klatt, Thimna; Cavner, Della; Egan, Vincent

2014-02-01

Although there is evidence for specific risk factors leading to child sexual exploitation and prostitution, these influences overlap and have rarely been examined concurrently. The present study examined case files for 175 young persons who attended a voluntary organization in Leicester, United Kingdom, which supports people who are sexually exploited or at risk of sexual exploitation. Based on the case files, the presence or absence of known risk factors for becoming a sex worker was coded. Data were analyzed using t-test, logistic regression, and smallest space analysis. Users of the voluntary organization's services who had been sexually exploited exhibited a significantly greater number of risk factors than service users who had not been victims of sexual exploitation. The logistic regression produced a significant model fit. However, of the 14 potential predictors--many of which were associated with each other--only four variables significantly predicted actual sexual exploitation: running away, poverty, drug and/or alcohol use, and having friends or family members in prostitution. Surprisingly, running away was found to significantly decrease the odds of becoming involved in sexual exploitation. Smallest space analysis of the data revealed 5 clusters of risk factors. Two of the clusters, which reflected a desperation and need construct and immature or out-of-control lifestyles, were significantly associated with sexual exploitation. Our research suggests that some risk factors (e.g. physical and emotional abuse, early delinquency, and homelessness) for becoming involved in sexual exploitation are common but are part of the problematic milieu of the individuals affected and not directly associated with sex trading itself. Our results also indicate that it is important to engage with the families and associates of young persons at risk of becoming (or remaining) a sex worker if one wants to reduce the numbers of persons who engage in this activity. Copyright �

A new measure of interpersonal exploitativeness

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amy B. Brunell

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Measures of exploitativeness evidence problems with validity and reliability. The present set of studies assessed a new measure (the Interpersonal Exploitativeness Scale that defines exploitativeness in terms of reciprocity. In Studies 1 and 2, 33 items were administered to participants. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis demonstrated that a single factor consisting of six items adequately assess interpersonal exploitativeness. Study 3 results revealed that the Interpersonal Exploitativeness Scale was positively associated with normal narcissism, pathological narcissism, psychological entitlement, and negative reciprocity and negatively correlated with positive reciprocity. In Study 4, participants competed in a commons dilemma. Those who scored higher on the Interpersonal Exploitativeness Scale were more likely to harvest a greater share of resources over time, even while controlling for other relevant variables, such as entitlement. Together, these studies show the Interpersonal Exploitativeness Scale to be a valid and reliable measure of interpersonal exploitativeness. The authors discuss the implications of these studies.

Uncertainty avoidance and the exploration-exploitation trade-off

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Broekhuizen, Thijs; Giarratana, Marco S.; Torres, Anna

2017-01-01

Purpose - This study aims to investigate how a firm's uncertainty avoidance - as indicated by the headquarters' national culture - impacts firm performance by affecting exploratory (product innovation) and exploitative (brand trademark protection) activities. It aims to show that firms characterized

Capabilities, innovation, and overall performance in Brazilian export firms.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

José Ednilson de Oliveira Cabral

2015-06-01

Full Text Available This article extends the current research on innovation by investigating the relationship between innovative capabilities and export firms’ overall performance. From the perspectives of the resource-based view (RBV and dynamic capability, we examine the differential and interactive effects of exploration and exploitation capabilities in product innovation for external markets and overall performance (direct and mediated by a new product. In addition, we test the moderating effect of market dynamism and the controlling effect of firm size on these relationships. Hence, the main contribution of this article is developing and empirically testing an original model, by combining these constructs that address new relationships, in an emerging country. This model was tested with data from 498 Brazilian export firms, distributed throughout all Brazilian manufacturing sectors, by firm size, and in states. The analysis was made with application of the structural equation modeling (SEM. As a result, we found support for the assumptions that exploitation capabilities influence product innovation and overall performance, whereas exploration capabilities and their interaction to exploitation capabilities influence overall performance, but not product innovation. Additionally, the relationship between exploitation capabilities and overall performance is mediated by product innovation. Unlike hypothesized, market dynamism does not moderate the relationship between product innovation and overall performance. Furthermore, firm size works as a controlling variable in the relationships analyzed. Regarding the implications for theory, this study contributes to grasp that exploitation capabilities influences a firm’s overall performance, both directly and indirectly (via product innovation, and highlights the various direct and mediatory effects of innovation on overall performance. These insights show the importance of considering the role of mediating and

EXPLOITATION OF GRANITE BOULDER

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ivan Cotman

1994-12-01

Full Text Available The processes of forming, petrography, features, properties and exploitation of granite boulders are described. The directional drilling and black powder blasting is the succesful method in exploitation of granite boulders (boulder technology (the paper is published in Croatian.

Intensively exploited Mediterranean aquifers: resilience and proximity to critical points of seawater intrusion

Science.gov (United States)

Mazi, K.; Koussis, A. D.; Destouni, G.

2013-11-01

We investigate here seawater intrusion in three prominent Mediterranean aquifers that are subject to intensive exploitation and modified hydrologic regimes by human activities: the Nile Delta Aquifer, the Israel Coastal Aquifer and the Cyprus Akrotiri Aquifer. Using a generalized analytical sharp-interface model, we review the salinization history and current status of these aquifers, and quantify their resilience/vulnerability to current and future sea intrusion forcings. We identify two different critical limits of sea intrusion under groundwater exploitation and/or climatic stress: a limit of well intrusion, at which intruded seawater reaches key locations of groundwater pumping, and a tipping point of complete sea intrusion upto the prevailing groundwater divide of a coastal aquifer. Either limit can be reached, and ultimately crossed, under intensive aquifer exploitation and/or climate-driven change. We show that sea intrusion vulnerability for different aquifer cases can be directly compared in terms of normalized intrusion performance curves. The site-specific assessments show that the advance of seawater currently seriously threatens the Nile Delta Aquifer and the Israel Coastal Aquifer. The Cyprus Akrotiri Aquifer is currently somewhat less threatened by increased seawater intrusion.

Intensively exploited Mediterranean aquifers: resilience to seawater intrusion and proximity to critical thresholds

Science.gov (United States)

Mazi, K.; Koussis, A. D.; Destouni, G.

2014-05-01

We investigate seawater intrusion in three prominent Mediterranean aquifers that are subject to intensive exploitation and modified hydrologic regimes by human activities: the Nile Delta, Israel Coastal and Cyprus Akrotiri aquifers. Using a generalized analytical sharp interface model, we review the salinization history and current status of these aquifers, and quantify their resilience/vulnerability to current and future seawater intrusion forcings. We identify two different critical limits of seawater intrusion under groundwater exploitation and/or climatic stress: a limit of well intrusion, at which intruded seawater reaches key locations of groundwater pumping, and a tipping point of complete seawater intrusion up to the prevailing groundwater divide of a coastal aquifer. Either limit can be reached, and ultimately crossed, under intensive aquifer exploitation and/or climate-driven change. We show that seawater intrusion vulnerability for different aquifer cases can be directly compared in terms of normalized intrusion performance curves. The site-specific assessments show that (a) the intruding seawater currently seriously threatens the Nile Delta aquifer, (b) in the Israel Coastal aquifer the sharp interface toe approaches the well location and (c) the Cyprus Akrotiri aquifer is currently somewhat less threatened by increased seawater intrusion.

Sustainable exploitation and management of aquatic resources

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Neuenfeldt, Stefan; Köster, Fritz

2014-01-01

DTU Aqua conducts research, provides advice,educates at university level and contributes toinnovation in sustainable exploitation andmanagement of aquatic resources. The vision of DTUAqua is to enable ecologically and economicallysustainable exploitation of aquatic resourcesapplying an integrated...... management. Marineecosystems aims at understanding the mechanisms that govern the interaction between individuals,species and populations in an ecosystem enabling us to determine the stability and flexibility of theecosystem.Marine living resources looks at the sustainable utilization of fish and shellfish...... stocks.Ecosystem effects expands from the ecosystem approach to fisheries management to an integratedapproach where other human activities are taken into consideration. Fisheries management developsmethods, models and tools for predicting and evaluating the effects of management measures andregulations...

Performance and robustness of hybrid model predictive control for controllable dampers in building models

Science.gov (United States)

Johnson, Erik A.; Elhaddad, Wael M.; Wojtkiewicz, Steven F.

2016-04-01

A variety of strategies have been developed over the past few decades to determine controllable damping device forces to mitigate the response of structures and mechanical systems to natural hazards and other excitations. These "smart" damping devices produce forces through passive means but have properties that can be controlled in real time, based on sensor measurements of response across the structure, to dramatically reduce structural motion by exploiting more than the local "information" that is available to purely passive devices. A common strategy is to design optimal damping forces using active control approaches and then try to reproduce those forces with the smart damper. However, these design forces, for some structures and performance objectives, may achieve high performance by selectively adding energy, which cannot be replicated by a controllable damping device, causing the smart damper performance to fall far short of what an active system would provide. The authors have recently demonstrated that a model predictive control strategy using hybrid system models, which utilize both continuous and binary states (the latter to capture the switching behavior between dissipative and non-dissipative forces), can provide reductions in structural response on the order of 50% relative to the conventional clipped-optimal design strategy. This paper explores the robustness of this newly proposed control strategy through evaluating controllable damper performance when the structure model differs from the nominal one used to design the damping strategy. Results from the application to a two-degree-of-freedom structure model confirms the robustness of the proposed strategy.

Exploiting the atmosphere's memory for monthly, seasonal and interannual temperature forecasting using Scaling LInear Macroweather Model (SLIMM)

Science.gov (United States)

Del Rio Amador, Lenin; Lovejoy, Shaun

2016-04-01

. The corresponding space-time model (the ScaLIng Macroweather Model (SLIMM) is thus only multifractal in space where the spatial intermittency is associated with different climate zones. SLIMM exploits the power law (scaling) behavior in time of the temperature field and uses the long historical memory of the temperature series to improve the skill. The only model parameter is the fluctuation scaling exponent, H (usually in the range -0.5 - 0), which is directly related to the skill and can be obtained from the data. The results predicted analytically by the model have been tested by performing actual hindcasts in different 5° x 5° regions covering the planet using ERA-Interim, 20CRv2 and NCEP/NCAR reanalysis as reference datasets. We report maps of theoretical skill predicted by the model and we compare it with actual skill based on hindcasts for monthly, seasonal and annual resolutions. We also present maps of calibrated probability hindcasts with their respective validations. Comparisons between our results using SLIMM, some other stochastic autoregressive model, and hindcasts from the Canadian Seasonal to Interannual Prediction System (CanSIPS) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)'s model CFSv2, are also shown. For seasonal temperature forecasts, SLIMM outperforms the GCM based forecasts in over 90% of the earth's surface. SLIMM forecasts can be accessed online through the site: http://www.to_be_announced.mcgill.ca.

Exploiting VM/XA

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Boeheim, C.

1990-03-01

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center has recently completed a conversion to IBM's VM/XA SP Release 2 operating system. The primary physics application had been constrained by the previous 16 megabyte memory limit. Work is underway to enable this application to exploit the new features of VM/XA. This paper presents a brief tutorial on how to convert an application to exploit VM/XA and discusses some of the SLAC experiences in doing so. 13 figs

Exploitation of cloud computing in management of construction projects in Slovakia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mandičák Tomáš

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The issue of cloud computing is a highly topical issue. Cloud computing represents a new model for information technology (IT services based on the exploitation of Web (it represents a cloud and other application platforms, as well as software as a service. In general, the exploitation of cloud computing in construction project management has several advantages, as demonstrated by several research reports. Currently, research quantifying the exploitation of cloud computing in the Slovak construction industry has not yet been carried out. The article discusses the issue of exploitation of cloud computing in construction project management in Slovakia. The main objective of the research is to confirm whether factors such as size of construction enterprise, owner of construction enterprise and participant of construction project have any impact on the exploitation level of cloud computing in construction project management. It includes confirmation of differences in use between different participants of the construction project or between construction enterprises broken down by size and shareholders.

Exploiting GPUs in Virtual Machine for BioCloud

OpenAIRE

Jo, Heeseung; Jeong, Jinkyu; Lee, Myoungho; Choi, Dong Hoon

2013-01-01

Recently, biological applications start to be reimplemented into the applications which exploit many cores of GPUs for better computation performance. Therefore, by providing virtualized GPUs to VMs in cloud computing environment, many biological applications will willingly move into cloud environment to enhance their computation performance and utilize infinite cloud computing resource while reducing expenses for computations. In this paper, we propose a BioCloud system architecture that ena...

Inverse modeling and forecasting for the exploitation of the Pauzhetsky geothermal field, Kamchatka, Russia

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kiryukhin, Alexey V. [Institute of Volcanology and Seismology FEB RAS, Piip-9, P-Kamchatsky 683006 (Russian Federation); Asaulova, Natalia P. [Kamchatskburgeotemia Enterprise, Krasheninnikova-1, Thermalny, Kamchatka 684035 (Russian Federation); Finsterle, Stefan [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MS 90-1116, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)

2008-10-15

A three-dimensional numerical model of the Pauzhetsky geothermal field has been developed based on a conceptual hydrogeological model of the system. It extends over a 13.6-km{sup 2} area and includes three layers: (1) a base layer with inflow; (2) a geothermal reservoir; and (3) an upper layer with discharge and recharge/infiltration areas. Using the computer program iTOUGH2 [Finsterle, S., 2004. Multiphase inverse modeling: review and iTOUGH2 applications. Vadose Zone J. 3, 747-762], the model is calibrated to a total of 13,675 calibration points, combining natural-state and 1960-2006 exploitation data. The principal model parameters identified and estimated by inverse modeling include the fracture permeability and fracture porosity of the geothermal reservoir, the initial natural upflow rate, the base-layer porosity, and the permeabilities of the infiltration zones. Heat and mass balances derived from the calibrated model helped identify the sources of the geothermal reserves in the field. With the addition of five make-up wells, simulation forecasts for the 2007-2032 period predict a sustainable average steam production of 29 kg/s, which is sufficient to maintain the generation of 6.8 MWe at the Pauzhetsky power plant. (author)

Exploitation in International Paid Surrogacy Arrangements

OpenAIRE

Wilkinson, Stephen

2015-01-01

Abstract Many critics have suggested that international paid surrogacy is exploitative. Taking such concerns as its starting point, this article asks: (1) how defensible is the claim that international paid surrogacy is exploitative and what could be done to make it less exploitative? (2) In the light of the answer to (1), how strong is the case for prohibiting it? Exploitation could in principle be dealt with by improving surrogates' pay and conditions. However, doing so may exacerbate probl...

Performance Analysis of GFDL's GCM Line-By-Line Radiative Transfer Model on GPU and MIC Architectures

Science.gov (United States)

Menzel, R.; Paynter, D.; Jones, A. L.

2017-12-01

Due to their relatively low computational cost, radiative transfer models in global climate models (GCMs) run on traditional CPU architectures generally consist of shortwave and longwave parameterizations over a small number of wavelength bands. With the rise of newer GPU and MIC architectures, however, the performance of high resolution line-by-line radiative transfer models may soon approach those of the physical parameterizations currently employed in GCMs. Here we present an analysis of the current performance of a new line-by-line radiative transfer model currently under development at GFDL. Although originally designed to specifically exploit GPU architectures through the use of CUDA, the radiative transfer model has recently been extended to include OpenMP in an effort to also effectively target MIC architectures such as Intel's Xeon Phi. Using input data provided by the upcoming Radiative Forcing Model Intercomparison Project (RFMIP, as part of CMIP 6), we compare model results and performance data for various model configurations and spectral resolutions run on both GPU and Intel Knights Landing architectures to analogous runs of the standard Oxford Reference Forward Model on traditional CPUs.

Efficient Depth Map Compression Exploiting Segmented Color Data

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Milani, Simone; Zanuttigh, Pietro; Zamarin, Marco

2011-01-01

performances is still an open research issue. This paper presents a novel compression scheme that exploits a segmentation of the color data to predict the shape of the different surfaces in the depth map. Then each segment is approximated with a parameterized plane. In case the approximation is sufficiently...

An Exploitability Analysis Technique for Binary Vulnerability Based on Automatic Exception Suppression

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhiyuan Jiang

2018-01-01

Full Text Available To quickly verify and fix vulnerabilities, it is necessary to judge the exploitability of the massive crash generated by the automated vulnerability mining tool. While the current manual analysis of the crash process is inefficient and time-consuming, the existing automated tools can only handle execute exceptions and some write exceptions but cannot handle common read exceptions. To address this problem, we propose a method of determining the exploitability based on the exception type suppression. This method enables the program to continue to execute until an exploitable exception is triggered. The method performs a symbolic replay of the crash sample, constructing and reusing data gadget, to bypass the complex exception, thereby improving the efficiency and accuracy of vulnerability exploitability analysis. The testing of typical CGC/RHG binary software shows that this method can automatically convert a crash that cannot be judged by existing analysis tools into a different crash type and judge the exploitability successfully.

Energy Exploitation of High-Temperature Geothermal Sources in Volcanic Areas—a Possible ORC Application in Phlegraean Fields (Southern Italy)

OpenAIRE

Angelo Algieri

2018-01-01

This work aims to investigate the energy performances of small-scale Organic Rankine Cycles (ORCs) for the exploitation of high temperature geothermal sources in volcanic areas. For this purpose, a thermodynamic model has been developed, and a parametric analysis has been performed that considers subcritical and transcritical configurations, and different organic fluids (isobutane, isopentane, and R245ca). The investigation illustrates the significant effect of the temperature at the entrance...

Six scenarios of exploiting an ontology based, mobilized learning environment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kismihók, G.; Szabó, I.; Vas, R.

2012-01-01

In this article, six different exploitation possibilities of an educational ontology based, mobilized learning management system are presented. The focal point of this system is the educational ontology model. The first version of this educational ontology model serves as a foundation for curriculum

Modeling of information on the impact of mining exploitation on bridge objects in BIM

Science.gov (United States)

Bętkowski, Piotr

2018-04-01

The article discusses the advantages of BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology in the management of bridge infrastructure on mining areas. The article shows the problems with information flow in the case of bridge objects located on mining areas and the advantages of proper information management, e.g. the possibility of automatic monitoring of structures, improvement of safety, optimization of maintenance activities, cost reduction of damage removal and preventive actions, improvement of atmosphere for mining exploitation, improvement of the relationship between the manager of the bridge and the mine. Traditional model of managing bridge objects on mining areas has many disadvantages, which are discussed in this article. These disadvantages include among others: duplication of information about the object, lack of correlation in investments due to lack of information flow between bridge manager and mine, limited assessment possibilities of damage propagation on technical condition and construction resistance to mining influences.

Quantitative groundwater modelling for a sustainable water resource exploitation in a Mediterranean alluvial aquifer

Science.gov (United States)

Laïssaoui, Mounir; Mesbah, Mohamed; Madani, Khodir; Kiniouar, Hocine

2018-05-01

To analyze the water budget under human influences in the Isser wadi alluvial aquifer in the northeast of Algeria, we built a mathematical model which can be used for better managing groundwater exploitation. A modular three-dimensional finite-difference groundwater flow model (MODFLOW) was used. The modelling system is largely based on physical laws and employs a numerical method of the finite difference to simulate water movement and fluxes in a horizontally discretized field. After calibration in steady-state, the model could reproduce the initial heads with a rather good precision. It enabled us to quantify the aquifer water balance terms and to obtain a conductivity zones distribution. The model also highlighted the relevant role of the Isser wadi which constitutes a drain of great importance for the aquifer, ensuring alone almost all outflows. The scenarios suggested in transient simulations showed that an increase in the pumping would only increase the lowering of the groundwater levels and disrupting natural balance of aquifer. However, it is clear that this situation depends primarily on the position of pumping wells in the plain as well as on the extracted volumes of water. As proven by the promising results of model, this physically based and distributed-parameter model is a valuable contribution to the ever-advancing technology of hydrological modelling and water resources assessment.

Redefining Exploitation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Agarwala, Rina

2016-01-01

This article examines how self-employed workers are organizing in the garments and waste collection industries in India. Although the question of who is profiting from self-employed workers’ labor is complex, the cases outlined in this paper highlight telling instances of how some self......-employed workers are organizing as workers. They are fighting labor exploitation by redefining the concept to include additional exploitation axes (from the state and middle class) and forms (including sexual). In doing so, they are redefining potential solutions, including identities and material benefits, to fit...... their unique needs. By expanding the category of “workers” beyond those defined by a narrow focus on a standard employer-employee relationship, these movements are also fighting exclusion from earlier labor protections by increasing the number of entitled beneficiaries. These struggles provide an important...

Performance Production Analysis of Romanian Simmental Exploited at „P.F.A Munteanu Cornel” Farm

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alin Florin Avram

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Research follow to assess levels of productivity and the main indicators of milk of Romanian Simmental cows and its half blood, exploited in terms of milk production into Alba County environmental conditions. There were studied 45 cows from “P.F.A. Munteanu Cornel” farm. The results show that the maximum average of milk production is 5774 kg, registered in the third lactation and the average percentage of fat and protein is 3.92 respectively 3.34. The conclusion learned from the study is that Romanian Simmental cows studied have quantitative and qualitative productions over race standard and it is trying to reduce the period of exploitation and to intensify the process of milk production in first lactations.

Optical modelling of far-infrared astronomical instrumentation exploiting multimode horn antennas

Science.gov (United States)

O'Sullivan, Créidhe; Murphy, J. Anthony; Mc Auley, Ian; Wilson, Daniel; Gradziel, Marcin L.; Trappe, Neil; Cahill, Fiachra; Peacocke, T.; Savini, G.; Ganga, K.

2014-07-01

In this paper we describe the optical modelling of astronomical telescopes that exploit bolometric detectors fed by multimoded horn antennas. In cases where the horn shape is profiled rather than being a simple cone, we determine the beam at the horn aperture using an electromagnetic mode-matching technique. Bolometers, usually placed in an integrating cavity, can excite many hybrid modes in a corrugated horn; we usually assume they excite all modes equally. If the waveguide section feeding the horn is oversized these modes can propagate independently, thereby increasing the throughput of the system. We use an SVD analysis on the matrix that describes the scattering between waveguide (TE/TM) modes to recover the independent orthogonal fields (hybrid modes) and then propagate these to the sky independently where they are added in quadrature. Beam patterns at many frequencies across the band are then added with a weighting appropriate to the source spectrum. Here we describe simulations carried out on the highest-frequency (857-GHz) channel of the Planck HFI instrument. We concentrate in particular on the use of multimode feedhorns and consider the effects of possible manufacturing tolerances on the beam on the sky. We also investigate the feasibility of modelling far-out sidelobes across a wide band for electrically large structures and bolometers fed by multi-mode feedhorns. Our optical simulations are carried out using the industry-standard GRASP software package.

Using pMOS Pass-Gates to Boost SRAM Performance by Exploiting Strain Effects in Sub-20-nm FinFET Technologies

OpenAIRE

Royer del Barrio, Pablo; López Vallejo, Marisa

2014-01-01

Strained fin is one of the techniques used to improve the devices as their size keeps reducing in new nanoscale nodes. In this paper, we use a predictive technology of 14 nm where pMOS mobility is significantly improved when those devices are built on top of long, uncut fins, while nMOS devices present the opposite behavior due to the combination of strains. We explore the possibility of boosting circuit performance in repetitive structures where long uncut fins can be exploited to increase f...

Determination of performance characteristics of robotic manipulator's permanent magnet synchronous motor by learning its FEM model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bharadvaj, Bimmi; Saini, Surendra Singh; Swaroop, Teja Tumapala; Sarkar, Ushnish; Ray, Debashish Datta

2016-01-01

Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSM) are widely used as actuators because of high torque density, high efficiency and reliability. Robotic Manipulator designed for specific task generally requires actuators with very high intermittent torque and speed for their operation in limited space. Hence accurate performance characteristics of PMSM must be known beforehand under these conditions as it may damage the motor. Therefore an advanced mathematical model of PMSM is required for its control synthesis and performance analysis over wide operating range. The existing mathematical models are developed considering ideal motor without including the geometrical deviations that occur during manufacturing process of the motor or its components. These manufacturing tolerance affect torque ripple, operating current range etc. thereby affecting motor performance. In this work, the magnetically non-linear dynamic model is further exploited to refine the FE model using a proposed algorithm to iteratively compensate for the experimentally observed deviations due to manufacturing. (author)

Exploiting GPUs in Virtual Machine for BioCloud

Science.gov (United States)

Jo, Heeseung; Jeong, Jinkyu; Lee, Myoungho; Choi, Dong Hoon

2013-01-01

Recently, biological applications start to be reimplemented into the applications which exploit many cores of GPUs for better computation performance. Therefore, by providing virtualized GPUs to VMs in cloud computing environment, many biological applications will willingly move into cloud environment to enhance their computation performance and utilize infinite cloud computing resource while reducing expenses for computations. In this paper, we propose a BioCloud system architecture that enables VMs to use GPUs in cloud environment. Because much of the previous research has focused on the sharing mechanism of GPUs among VMs, they cannot achieve enough performance for biological applications of which computation throughput is more crucial rather than sharing. The proposed system exploits the pass-through mode of PCI express (PCI-E) channel. By making each VM be able to access underlying GPUs directly, applications can show almost the same performance as when those are in native environment. In addition, our scheme multiplexes GPUs by using hot plug-in/out device features of PCI-E channel. By adding or removing GPUs in each VM in on-demand manner, VMs in the same physical host can time-share their GPUs. We implemented the proposed system using the Xen VMM and NVIDIA GPUs and showed that our prototype is highly effective for biological GPU applications in cloud environment. PMID:23710465

Exploiting GPUs in Virtual Machine for BioCloud

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Heeseung Jo

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Recently, biological applications start to be reimplemented into the applications which exploit many cores of GPUs for better computation performance. Therefore, by providing virtualized GPUs to VMs in cloud computing environment, many biological applications will willingly move into cloud environment to enhance their computation performance and utilize infinite cloud computing resource while reducing expenses for computations. In this paper, we propose a BioCloud system architecture that enables VMs to use GPUs in cloud environment. Because much of the previous research has focused on the sharing mechanism of GPUs among VMs, they cannot achieve enough performance for biological applications of which computation throughput is more crucial rather than sharing. The proposed system exploits the pass-through mode of PCI express (PCI-E channel. By making each VM be able to access underlying GPUs directly, applications can show almost the same performance as when those are in native environment. In addition, our scheme multiplexes GPUs by using hot plug-in/out device features of PCI-E channel. By adding or removing GPUs in each VM in on-demand manner, VMs in the same physical host can time-share their GPUs. We implemented the proposed system using the Xen VMM and NVIDIA GPUs and showed that our prototype is highly effective for biological GPU applications in cloud environment.

Exploiting GPUs in virtual machine for BioCloud.

Science.gov (United States)

Jo, Heeseung; Jeong, Jinkyu; Lee, Myoungho; Choi, Dong Hoon

2013-01-01

Recently, biological applications start to be reimplemented into the applications which exploit many cores of GPUs for better computation performance. Therefore, by providing virtualized GPUs to VMs in cloud computing environment, many biological applications will willingly move into cloud environment to enhance their computation performance and utilize infinite cloud computing resource while reducing expenses for computations. In this paper, we propose a BioCloud system architecture that enables VMs to use GPUs in cloud environment. Because much of the previous research has focused on the sharing mechanism of GPUs among VMs, they cannot achieve enough performance for biological applications of which computation throughput is more crucial rather than sharing. The proposed system exploits the pass-through mode of PCI express (PCI-E) channel. By making each VM be able to access underlying GPUs directly, applications can show almost the same performance as when those are in native environment. In addition, our scheme multiplexes GPUs by using hot plug-in/out device features of PCI-E channel. By adding or removing GPUs in each VM in on-demand manner, VMs in the same physical host can time-share their GPUs. We implemented the proposed system using the Xen VMM and NVIDIA GPUs and showed that our prototype is highly effective for biological GPU applications in cloud environment.

Thermal exploitation of shallow aquifers. Guide for the preparation of preliminary studies of technical feasibility

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ausseur, J.Y.; Sauty, J.P.

1982-08-01

This report presents the main devices aimed at exploiting surface aquifers. After an introduction to the different systems of thermal exploitation of aquifers (generalities, very low energy geothermal, sensitive heat storage, interest of thermal exploitation of aquifers, indication of possible systems), this report presents the different possible systems and analyses their characteristics and performance. These systems are: direct exploitation of groundwater bodies at their natural temperature by heat sink and with release in surface networks or by geothermal dipole, or exploitation with artificial thermal refill. Thus the report addresses the single sink device with or without storage, heat pumps on dipole in surface groundwater bodies or very low temperature geothermal, the scanning dipole system, and the dipole system with hot sink and cold sink. It discusses the choice and sizing of the exploitation system. An appendix reports a feasibility preliminary study of nine cases of thermal exploitation of surface aquifers by double drills

A novel spatial performance metric for robust pattern optimization of distributed hydrological models

Science.gov (United States)

Stisen, S.; Demirel, C.; Koch, J.

2017-12-01

Evaluation of performance is an integral part of model development and calibration as well as it is of paramount importance when communicating modelling results to stakeholders and the scientific community. There exists a comprehensive and well tested toolbox of metrics to assess temporal model performance in the hydrological modelling community. On the contrary, the experience to evaluate spatial performance is not corresponding to the grand availability of spatial observations readily available and to the sophisticate model codes simulating the spatial variability of complex hydrological processes. This study aims at making a contribution towards advancing spatial pattern oriented model evaluation for distributed hydrological models. This is achieved by introducing a novel spatial performance metric which provides robust pattern performance during model calibration. The promoted SPAtial EFficiency (spaef) metric reflects three equally weighted components: correlation, coefficient of variation and histogram overlap. This multi-component approach is necessary in order to adequately compare spatial patterns. spaef, its three components individually and two alternative spatial performance metrics, i.e. connectivity analysis and fractions skill score, are tested in a spatial pattern oriented model calibration of a catchment model in Denmark. The calibration is constrained by a remote sensing based spatial pattern of evapotranspiration and discharge timeseries at two stations. Our results stress that stand-alone metrics tend to fail to provide holistic pattern information to the optimizer which underlines the importance of multi-component metrics. The three spaef components are independent which allows them to complement each other in a meaningful way. This study promotes the use of bias insensitive metrics which allow comparing variables which are related but may differ in unit in order to optimally exploit spatial observations made available by remote sensing

Research on Factors Affecting the Optimal Exploitation of Natural Gas Resources in China

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jianzhong Xiao

2016-05-01

Full Text Available This paper develops an optimizing model for the long-term exploitation of limited natural gas reserves in China. In addition to describing the life cycle characteristics of natural gas production and introducing the inter-temporal allocation theory, this paper builds the optimal exploitation model of natural gas resources within a gas field in the Ordos Basin as an example to analyze its exploitation scale and how influence factors, such as recovery rate, discount rate and the gas well exhausting cycle, affect the optimal exploration path of this gas field. We determine that an increase in the discount rate stimulates investors to invest more aggressively in natural gas exploitation in the early period due to the lower discounted value, thereby increasing the pace of the exploitation of natural gas and the exhaustion of gas fields. A higher recoverable factor implies more recoverable reserves and greater potential of increasing the output of gas fields. The exhaustion rate of gas wells affects the capability of converting capacity to output. When exhaustion occurs quickly in gas wells, the output will likely increase in the output rising period, and the output will likely decrease at a faster rate in the output reduction period. Price reform affects the economic recoverable reserves of gas fields.

Exploiting HRM in support of lean manufacturing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, Frances; Matthiesen, Rikke

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in HRM practices are-and could potentially be-exploited to support lean manufacturing in practice. First, a review of the pertinent literature regarding HRM, SHRM, and lean manufacturing is presented to provide an understanding of the mechanisms...... by which HRM practices could, theoretically, be used to support a lean implementation. Data presented in the paper are derived from 1) a longitudinal case study on lean implementation and 2) from managers currently involved with lean manufacturing in a second company. The relevant literature and the data...... depicting the potential role in supporting HRM/lean integrated practices. The analysis of the model with respect to the theoretical background emphasizes a number of areas in which HRM could be more fully exploited in order to more successfully support lean implementation, for example, by stressing HRM...

3D Massive MIMO Systems: Channel Modeling and Performance Analysis

KAUST Repository

Nadeem, Qurrat-Ul-Ain

2015-01-01

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems of current LTE releases are capable of adaptation in the azimuth only. More recently, the trend is to enhance the system performance by exploiting the channel's degrees of freedom in the elevation

Advanced Three-Dimensional Finite Element Modeling of a Slow Landslide through the Exploitation of DInSAR Measurements and in Situ Surveys

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vincenzo De Novellis

2016-08-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we propose an advanced methodology to perform three-dimensional (3D Finite Element (FE modeling to investigate the kinematical evolution of a slow landslide phenomenon. Our approach benefits from the effective integration of the available geological, geotechnical and satellite datasets to perform an accurate simulation of the landslide process. More specifically, we fully exploit the capability of the advanced Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR technique referred to as the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS approach to provide spatially dense surface displacement information. Subsequently, we analyze the physical behavior characterizing the observed landslide phenomenon by means of an inverse analysis based on an optimization procedure. We focus on the Ivancich landslide phenomenon, which affects a residential area outside the historical center of the town of Assisi (Central Italy. Thanks to the large amount of available information, we have selected this area as a representative case study highlighting the capability of advanced 3D FE modeling to perform effective risk analyses of slow landslide processes and accurate urban development planning. In particular, the FE modeling is constrained by using the data from 7 litho-stratigraphic cross-sections and 62 stratigraphic boreholes; and the optimization procedure is carried out using the SBAS-DInSAR retrieved results by processing 39 SAR images collected by the Cosmo-SkyMed (CSK constellation in the 2009–2012 time span. The achieved results allow us to explore the spatial and temporal evolution of the slow-moving phenomenon and via comparison with the geomorphological data, to derive a synoptic view of the kinematical activity of the urban area affected by the Ivancich landslide.

User-driven sampling strategies in image exploitation

Science.gov (United States)

Harvey, Neal; Porter, Reid

2013-12-01

Visual analytics and interactive machine learning both try to leverage the complementary strengths of humans and machines to solve complex data exploitation tasks. These fields overlap most significantly when training is involved: the visualization or machine learning tool improves over time by exploiting observations of the human-computer interaction. This paper focuses on one aspect of the human-computer interaction that we call user-driven sampling strategies. Unlike relevance feedback and active learning sampling strategies, where the computer selects which data to label at each iteration, we investigate situations where the user selects which data is to be labeled at each iteration. User-driven sampling strategies can emerge in many visual analytics applications but they have not been fully developed in machine learning. User-driven sampling strategies suggest new theoretical and practical research questions for both visualization science and machine learning. In this paper we identify and quantify the potential benefits of these strategies in a practical image analysis application. We find user-driven sampling strategies can sometimes provide significant performance gains by steering tools towards local minima that have lower error than tools trained with all of the data. In preliminary experiments we find these performance gains are particularly pronounced when the user is experienced with the tool and application domain.

Noise-exploitation and adaptation in neuromorphic sensors

Science.gov (United States)

Hindo, Thamira; Chakrabartty, Shantanu

2012-04-01

Even though current micro-nano fabrication technology has reached integration levels where ultra-sensitive sensors can be fabricated, the sensing performance (resolution per joule) of synthetic systems are still orders of magnitude inferior to those observed in neurobiology. For example, the filiform hairs in crickets operate at fundamental limits of noise; auditory sensors in a parasitoid fly can overcome fundamental limitations to precisely localize ultra-faint acoustic signatures. Even though many of these biological marvels have served as inspiration for different types of neuromorphic sensors, the main focus these designs have been to faithfully replicate the biological functionalities, without considering the constructive role of "noise". In man-made sensors device and sensor noise are typically considered as a nuisance, where as in neurobiology "noise" has been shown to be a computational aid that enables biology to sense and operate at fundamental limits of energy efficiency and performance. In this paper, we describe some of the important noise-exploitation and adaptation principles observed in neurobiology and how they can be systematically used for designing neuromorphic sensors. Our focus will be on two types of noise-exploitation principles, namely, (a) stochastic resonance; and (b) noise-shaping, which are unified within our previously reported framework called Σ▵ learning. As a case-study, we describe the application of Σ▵ learning for the design of a miniature acoustic source localizer whose performance matches that of its biological counterpart(Ormia Ochracea).

Toward a dynamic perspective on explorative and exploitative innovation activities: a longitudinal study of innovation in the wind blade industry

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Visser, Matthias

2010-01-01

Innovation requires a combination of explorative and exploitative innovation activities. Previous studies have provided valuable insights in the antecedents of investing in explorative and exploitative activities, the structural governance of exploration and exploitation and the performance

Toward a dynamic perspective on explorative and exploitative innovation activities: A longitudinal study of innovation in the wind blade industry

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Visser, Matthias; Faems, D.L.M.

2010-01-01

Innovation requires a combination of explorative and exploitative innovation activities. Previous studies have provided valuable insights in the antecedents of investing in explorative and exploitative activities, the structural governance of exploration and exploitation and the performance

Television production, Funding Models and Exploitation of Content

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gillian Doyle

2016-07-01

Full Text Available The rise of digital platforms has transformative implications for strategies of financing media production and for exploitation of the economic value in creative content. In the television industry, changes in technologies for distribution and the emergence of SVOD services such as Netflix are gradually shifting audiences and financial power away from broadcasters while at the same time creating unprecedented opportunities for programme-makers.  Drawing on findings from recent RCUK-funded research, this article examines how these shifts are affecting production financing and the economics of supplying television content.  In particular, it focuses on how changes in the dynamics of rights markets and in strategic approaches towards the financing of television production might mean for markets, industries and for policies intended to support the economic sustainability of independent television content production businesses.

Incentivize Spectrum Leasing in Cognitive Radio Networks by Exploiting Cooperative Retransmission

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiaoyan Wang

2015-07-01

Full Text Available This paper addresses the spectrum leasing issue in cognitive radio networks by exploiting the secondary user’s cooperative retransmission. In contrast with the previous researches that focuses on cancellationbased or coding-based cooperative retransmissions, we propose a novel trading-based mechanism to facilitate the cooperative retransmission for cognitive radio networks. By utilizing the Stackelberg game model, we incentivize the otherwise non-cooperative users by maximizing their utilities in terms of transmission rates and economic profit. We analyze the existence of the unique Nash equilibrium of the game, and provide the optimal solutions with corresponding constraints. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed mechanism, under which the performance of the whole system could be substantially improved.

Assessing uncertainty and risk in exploited marine populations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fogarty, M.J.; Mayo, R.K.; O'Brien, L.; Serchuk, F.M.; Rosenberg, A.A.

1996-01-01

The assessment and management of exploited fish and invertebrate populations is subject to several types of uncertainty. This uncertainty translates into risk to the population in the development and implementation of fishery management advice. Here, we define risk as the probability that exploitation rates will exceed a threshold level where long term sustainability of the stock is threatened. We distinguish among several sources of error or uncertainty due to (a) stochasticity in demographic rates and processes, particularly in survival rates during the early fife stages; (b) measurement error resulting from sampling variation in the determination of population parameters or in model estimation; and (c) the lack of complete information on population and ecosystem dynamics. The first represents a form of aleatory uncertainty while the latter two factors represent forms of epistemic uncertainty. To illustrate these points, we evaluate the recent status of the Georges Bank cod stock in a risk assessment framework. Short term stochastic projections are made accounting for uncertainty in population size and for random variability in the number of young surviving to enter the fishery. We show that recent declines in this cod stock can be attributed to exploitation rates that have substantially exceeded sustainable levels

SpF: Enabling Petascale Performance for Pseudospectral Dynamo Models

Science.gov (United States)

Jiang, W.; Clune, T.; Vriesema, J.; Gutmann, G.

2013-12-01

Pseudospectral (PS) methods possess a number of characteristics (e.g., efficiency, accuracy, natural boundary conditions) that are extremely desirable for dynamo models. Unfortunately, dynamo models based upon PS methods face a number of daunting challenges, which include exposing additional parallelism, leveraging hardware accelerators, exploiting hybrid parallelism, and improving the scalability of global memory transposes. Although these issues are a concern for most models, solutions for PS methods tend to require far more pervasive changes to underlying data and control structures. Further, improvements in performance in one model are difficult to transfer to other models, resulting in significant duplication of effort across the research community. We have developed an extensible software framework for pseudospectral methods called SpF that is intended to enable extreme scalability and optimal performance. High-level abstractions provided by SpF unburden applications of the responsibility of managing domain decomposition and load balance while reducing the changes in code required to adapt to new computing architectures. The key design concept in SpF is that each phase of the numerical calculation is partitioned into disjoint numerical 'kernels' that can be performed entirely in-processor. The granularity of domain-decomposition provided by SpF is only constrained by the data-locality requirements of these kernels. SpF builds on top of optimized vendor libraries for common numerical operations such as transforms, matrix solvers, etc., but can also be configured to use open source alternatives for portability. SpF includes several alternative schemes for global data redistribution and is expected to serve as an ideal testbed for further research into optimal approaches for different network architectures. In this presentation, we will describe the basic architecture of SpF as well as preliminary performance data and experience with adapting legacy dynamo codes

Organ sales: exploitative at any price?

Science.gov (United States)

Lawlor, Rob

2014-05-01

In many cases, claims that a transaction is exploitative will focus on the details of the transaction, such as the price paid or conditions. For example, in a claim that a worker is exploited, the grounds for the claim are usually that the pay is not sufficient or the working conditions too dangerous. In some cases, however, the claim that a transaction is exploitative is not seen to rely on these finer details. Many, for example, claim that organ sales would be exploitative, in a way that doesn't seem to depend on the details. This article considers, but ultimately rejects, a number of arguments which could be used to defend this sort of claim. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Enhanced aeroelastic energy harvesting by exploiting combined nonlinearities: theory and experiment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sousa, V C; De M Anicézio, M; De Marqui Jr, C; Erturk, A

2011-01-01

Converting aeroelastic vibrations into electricity for low power generation has received growing attention over the past few years. In addition to potential applications for aerospace structures, the goal is to develop alternative and scalable configurations for wind energy harvesting to use in wireless electronic systems. This paper presents modeling and experiments of aeroelastic energy harvesting using piezoelectric transduction with a focus on exploiting combined nonlinearities. An airfoil with plunge and pitch degrees of freedom (DOF) is investigated. Piezoelectric coupling is introduced to the plunge DOF while nonlinearities are introduced through the pitch DOF. A state-space model is presented and employed for the simulations of the piezoaeroelastic generator. A two-state approximation to Theodorsen aerodynamics is used in order to determine the unsteady aerodynamic loads. Three case studies are presented. First the interaction between piezoelectric power generation and linear aeroelastic behavior of a typical section is investigated for a set of resistive loads. Model predictions are compared to experimental data obtained from the wind tunnel tests at the flutter boundary. In the second case study, free play nonlinearity is added to the pitch DOF and it is shown that nonlinear limit-cycle oscillations can be obtained not only above but also below the linear flutter speed. The experimental results are successfully predicted by the model simulations. Finally, the combination of cubic hardening stiffness and free play nonlinearities is considered in the pitch DOF. The nonlinear piezoaeroelastic response is investigated for different values of the nonlinear-to-linear stiffness ratio. The free play nonlinearity reduces the cut-in speed while the hardening stiffness helps in obtaining persistent oscillations of acceptable amplitude over a wider range of airflow speeds. Such nonlinearities can be introduced to aeroelastic energy harvesters (exploiting

Exploiting Virtualization and Cloud Computing in ATLAS

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Harald Barreiro Megino, Fernando; Van der Ster, Daniel; Benjamin, Doug; De, Kaushik; Gable, Ian; Paterson, Michael; Taylor, Ryan; Hendrix, Val; Vitillo, Roberto A; Panitkin, Sergey; De Silva, Asoka; Walker, Rod

2012-01-01

The ATLAS Computing Model was designed around the concept of grid computing; since the start of data-taking, this model has proven very successful in the federated operation of more than one hundred Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) sites for offline data distribution, storage, processing and analysis. However, new paradigms in computing, namely virtualization and cloud computing, present improved strategies for managing and provisioning IT resources that could allow ATLAS to more flexibly adapt and scale its storage and processing workloads on varied underlying resources. In particular, ATLAS is developing a “grid-of-clouds” infrastructure in order to utilize WLCG sites that make resources available via a cloud API. This work will present the current status of the Virtualization and Cloud Computing R and D project in ATLAS Distributed Computing. First, strategies for deploying PanDA queues on cloud sites will be discussed, including the introduction of a “cloud factory” for managing cloud VM instances. Next, performance results when running on virtualized/cloud resources at CERN LxCloud, StratusLab, and elsewhere will be presented. Finally, we will present the ATLAS strategies for exploiting cloud-based storage, including remote XROOTD access to input data, management of EC2-based files, and the deployment of cloud-resident LCG storage elements.

SMARTS: Exploiting Temporal Locality and Parallelism through Vertical Execution

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Beckman, P.; Crotinger, J.; Karmesin, S.; Malony, A.; Oldehoeft, R.; Shende, S.; Smith, S.; Vajracharya, S.

1999-01-01

In the solution of large-scale numerical prob- lems, parallel computing is becoming simultaneously more important and more difficult. The complex organization of today's multiprocessors with several memory hierarchies has forced the scientific programmer to make a choice between simple but unscalable code and scalable but extremely com- plex code that does not port to other architectures. This paper describes how the SMARTS runtime system and the POOMA C++ class library for high-performance scientific computing work together to exploit data parallelism in scientific applications while hiding the details of manag- ing parallelism and data locality from the user. We present innovative algorithms, based on the macro -dataflow model, for detecting data parallelism and efficiently executing data- parallel statements on shared-memory multiprocessors. We also desclibe how these algorithms can be implemented on clusters of SMPS

SMARTS: Exploiting Temporal Locality and Parallelism through Vertical Execution

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Beckman, P.; Crotinger, J.; Karmesin, S.; Malony, A.; Oldehoeft, R.; Shende, S.; Smith, S.; Vajracharya, S.

1999-01-04

In the solution of large-scale numerical prob- lems, parallel computing is becoming simultaneously more important and more difficult. The complex organization of today's multiprocessors with several memory hierarchies has forced the scientific programmer to make a choice between simple but unscalable code and scalable but extremely com- plex code that does not port to other architectures. This paper describes how the SMARTS runtime system and the POOMA C++ class library for high-performance scientific computing work together to exploit data parallelism in scientific applications while hiding the details of manag- ing parallelism and data locality from the user. We present innovative algorithms, based on the macro -dataflow model, for detecting data parallelism and efficiently executing data- parallel statements on shared-memory multiprocessors. We also desclibe how these algorithms can be implemented on clusters of SMPS.

Exploiting wild relatives of S. lycopersicum for quality traits

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Víquez Zamora, A.M.

2015-01-01

Exploiting wild relatives of S. lycopersicum for quality traits Ana Marcela Víquez Zamora Tomatoes are consumed worldwide and became a model for crop plant research. A part of the research aims at expanding genetic diversity in tomato; this can be done by incorporating

Ultrasonic imaging of material flaws exploiting multipath information

Science.gov (United States)

Shen, Xizhong; Zhang, Yimin D.; Demirli, Ramazan; Amin, Moeness G.

2011-05-01

In this paper, we consider ultrasonic imaging for the visualization of flaws in a material. Ultrasonic imaging is a powerful nondestructive testing (NDT) tool which assesses material conditions via the detection, localization, and classification of flaws inside a structure. Multipath exploitations provide extended virtual array apertures and, in turn, enhance imaging capability beyond the limitation of traditional multisensor approaches. We utilize reflections of ultrasonic signals which occur when encountering different media and interior discontinuities. The waveforms observed at the physical as well as virtual sensors yield additional measurements corresponding to different aspect angles. Exploitation of multipath information addresses unique issues observed in ultrasonic imaging. (1) Utilization of physical and virtual sensors significantly extends the array aperture for image enhancement. (2) Multipath signals extend the angle of view of the narrow beamwidth of the ultrasound transducers, allowing improved visibility and array design flexibility. (3) Ultrasonic signals experience difficulty in penetrating a flaw, thus the aspect angle of the observation is limited unless access to other sides is available. The significant extension of the aperture makes it possible to yield flaw observation from multiple aspect angles. We show that data fusion of physical and virtual sensor data significantly improves the detection and localization performance. The effectiveness of the proposed multipath exploitation approach is demonstrated through experimental studies.

Herbivory eliminates fitness costs of mutualism exploiters.

Science.gov (United States)

Simonsen, Anna K; Stinchcombe, John R

2014-04-01

A common empirical observation in mutualistic interactions is the persistence of variation in partner quality and, in particular, the persistence of exploitative phenotypes. For mutualisms between hosts and symbionts, most mutualism theory assumes that exploiters always impose fitness costs on their host. We exposed legume hosts to mutualistic (nitrogen-fixing) and exploitative (non-nitrogen-fixing) symbiotic rhizobia in field conditions, and manipulated the presence or absence of insect herbivory to determine if the costly fitness effects of exploitative rhizobia are context-dependent. Exploitative rhizobia predictably reduced host fitness when herbivores were excluded. However, insects caused greater damage on hosts associating with mutualistic rhizobia, as a consequence of feeding preferences related to leaf nitrogen content, resulting in the elimination of fitness costs imposed on hosts by exploitative rhizobia. Our experiment shows that herbivory is potentially an important factor in influencing the evolutionary dynamic between legumes and rhizobia. Partner choice and host sanctioning are theoretically predicted to stabilize mutualisms by reducing the frequency of exploitative symbionts. We argue that herbivore pressure may actually weaken selection on choice and sanction mechanisms, thus providing one explanation of why host-based discrimination mechanisms may not be completely effective in eliminating nonbeneficial partners. © 2014 The Authors. New Phytologist © 2014 New Phytologist Trust.

Uncovering Indicators of Commercial Sexual Exploitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Bounds, Dawn; Delaney, Kathleen R; Julion, Wrenetha; Breitenstein, Susan

2017-07-01

It is estimated that annually 100,000 to 300,000 youth are at risk for sex trafficking; a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or any such act where the person induced to perform such an act is younger than 18 years of age. Increasingly, such transactions are occurring online via Internet-based sites that serve the commercial sex industry. Commercial sex transactions involving trafficking are illegal; thus, Internet discussions between those involved must be veiled. Even so, transactions around sex trafficking do occur. Within these transactions are innuendos that provide one avenue for detecting potential activity. The purpose of this study is to identify linguistic indicators of potential commercial sexual exploitation within the online comments of men posted on an Internet site. Six hundred sixty-six posts from five Midwest cities and 363 unique members were analyzed via content analysis. Three main indicators were found: the presence of youth or desire for youthfulness, presence of pimps, and awareness of vulnerability. These findings begin a much-needed dialogue on uncovering online risks of commercial sexual exploitation and support the need for further research on Internet indicators of sex trafficking.

Channel modeling and performance evaluation of FSO communication systems in fog

KAUST Repository

Esmail, Maged Abdullah

2016-07-01

Free space optical (FSO) communication has become more exciting during the last decade. It has unregulated spectrum with a huge capacity compared to its radio frequency (RF) counterpart. Although FSO has many applications that cover indoor and outdoor environments, its widespread is humped by weather effects. Fog is classified as an extreme weather impairment that may cause link drop. Foggy channel modeling and characterization is necessary to analyze the system performance. In this paper, we first address the statistical behavior of the foggy channel based on a set of literature experimental data and develop a probability distribution function (PDF) model for fog attenuation. We then exploit our PDF model to derive closed form expressions and evaluate the system performance theoretically and numerically, in terms of average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and outage probability. The results show that for 10-3 outage probability and 22 dBm transmitted power, the FSO system can work over 80 m, 160 m, 310 m, and 460 m link length under dense, thick, moderate, and light fog respectively. Increasing the transmitted power will have high impact when the fog density is low. However, under very dense fog, it has almost no effect. © 2016 IEEE.

Channel modeling and performance evaluation of FSO communication systems in fog

KAUST Repository

Esmail, Maged Abdullah; Fathallah, Habib; Alouini, Mohamed-Slim

2016-01-01

Free space optical (FSO) communication has become more exciting during the last decade. It has unregulated spectrum with a huge capacity compared to its radio frequency (RF) counterpart. Although FSO has many applications that cover indoor and outdoor environments, its widespread is humped by weather effects. Fog is classified as an extreme weather impairment that may cause link drop. Foggy channel modeling and characterization is necessary to analyze the system performance. In this paper, we first address the statistical behavior of the foggy channel based on a set of literature experimental data and develop a probability distribution function (PDF) model for fog attenuation. We then exploit our PDF model to derive closed form expressions and evaluate the system performance theoretically and numerically, in terms of average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and outage probability. The results show that for 10-3 outage probability and 22 dBm transmitted power, the FSO system can work over 80 m, 160 m, 310 m, and 460 m link length under dense, thick, moderate, and light fog respectively. Increasing the transmitted power will have high impact when the fog density is low. However, under very dense fog, it has almost no effect. © 2016 IEEE.

Dissemination and Exploitation Strategy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Badger, Merete; Monaco, Lucio; Fransson, Torsten

of Technology in Sweden, Politecnico di Torino in Italy, and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. The project is partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (project no. RI-283746). This report describes the final dissemination and exploitation strategy...... for project Virtual Campus Hub. A preliminary dissemination and exploitation plan was setup early in the project as described in the deliverable D6.1 Dissemination strategy paper - preliminary version. The plan has been revised on a monthly basis during the project’s lifecycle in connection with the virtual...

Exploitative and Deceptive Resource Acquisition Strategies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joshua J. Reynolds

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Life history strategy (LHS and life history contingencies (LHCs should theoretically influence the use of exploitative and deceptive resource acquisition strategies. However, little research has been done in this area. The purpose of the present work was to create measures of exploitative strategies and test the predictions of life history theory. Pilot studies developed and validated a behavioral measure of cheating called the Dot Game. The role of individual LHS and LHCs (manipulated via validated story primes on cheating was investigated in Study 1. Studies 2a through 2c were conducted to develop and validate a self-report measure called the Exploitative and Deceptive Resource Acquisition Strategy Scale (EDRASS. Finally, Study 3 investigated life history and EDRASS. Results indicated that while LHS influences exploitative strategies, life history contingences had little effect. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Trajectories and cycles of sexual exploitation and trafficking for sexual exploitation of women in the Peruvian Amazon

OpenAIRE

Mujica, Jaris

2015-01-01

The commercial sexual exploitation is a constant activity in the Peruvian Amazon. Around the river port of Pucallpa in ucayali region, the practice appears systematically: teenage attend taverns around the port, and those dedicated to the work of cooking camps logging, are victims of constant exploitation and many also of trafficking. this article aims to reconstruct the path of life and reproductive cycle of the forms of exploitation in a sample of 20 women, and focuses on: (i) evidence of s...

Pupil Diameter Tracks the Exploration-Exploitation Trade-off during Analogical Reasoning and Explains Individual Differences in Fluid Intelligence.

Science.gov (United States)

Hayes, Taylor R; Petrov, Alexander A

2016-02-01

The ability to adaptively shift between exploration and exploitation control states is critical for optimizing behavioral performance. Converging evidence from primate electrophysiology and computational neural modeling has suggested that this ability may be mediated by the broad norepinephrine projections emanating from the locus coeruleus (LC) [Aston-Jones, G., & Cohen, J. D. An integrative theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function: Adaptive gain and optimal performance. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 28, 403-450, 2005]. There is also evidence that pupil diameter covaries systematically with LC activity. Although imperfect and indirect, this link makes pupillometry a useful tool for studying the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system in humans and in high-level tasks. Here, we present a novel paradigm that examines how the pupillary response during exploration and exploitation covaries with individual differences in fluid intelligence during analogical reasoning on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices. Pupillometry was used as a noninvasive proxy for LC activity, and concurrent think-aloud verbal protocols were used to identify exploratory and exploitative solution periods. This novel combination of pupillometry and verbal protocols from 40 participants revealed a decrease in pupil diameter during exploitation and an increase during exploration. The temporal dynamics of the pupillary response was characterized by a steep increase during the transition to exploratory periods, sustained dilation for many seconds afterward, and followed by gradual return to baseline. Moreover, the individual differences in the relative magnitude of pupillary dilation accounted for 16% of the variance in Advanced Progressive Matrices scores. Assuming that pupil diameter is a valid index of LC activity, these results establish promising preliminary connections between the literature on locus coeruleus norepinephrine-mediated cognitive control and the literature on analogical

Exploitation in International Paid Surrogacy Arrangements.

Science.gov (United States)

Wilkinson, Stephen

2016-05-01

Many critics have suggested that international paid surrogacy is exploitative. Taking such concerns as its starting point, this article asks: (1) how defensible is the claim that international paid surrogacy is exploitative and what could be done to make it less exploitative? (2) In the light of the answer to (1), how strong is the case for prohibiting it? Exploitation could in principle be dealt with by improving surrogates' pay and conditions. However, doing so may exacerbate problems with consent. Foremost amongst these is the argument that surrogates from economically disadvantaged countries cannot validly consent because their background circumstances are coercive. Several versions of this argument are examined and I conclude that at least one has some merit. The article's overall conclusion is that while ethically there is something to be concerned about, paid surrogacy is in no worse a position than many other exploitative commercial transactions which take place against a backdrop of global inequality and constrained options, such as poorly-paid and dangerous construction work. Hence, there is little reason to single surrogacy out for special condemnation. On a policy level, the case for prohibiting international commercial surrogacy is weak, despite legitimate concerns about consent and background poverty.

Exploitation in International Paid Surrogacy Arrangements

Science.gov (United States)

Wilkinson, Stephen

2015-01-01

Abstract Many critics have suggested that international paid surrogacy is exploitative. Taking such concerns as its starting point, this article asks: (1) how defensible is the claim that international paid surrogacy is exploitative and what could be done to make it less exploitative? (2) In the light of the answer to (1), how strong is the case for prohibiting it? Exploitation could in principle be dealt with by improving surrogates' pay and conditions. However, doing so may exacerbate problems with consent. Foremost amongst these is the argument that surrogates from economically disadvantaged countries cannot validly consent because their background circumstances are coercive. Several versions of this argument are examined and I conclude that at least one has some merit. The article's overall conclusion is that while ethically there is something to be concerned about, paid surrogacy is in no worse a position than many other exploitative commercial transactions which take place against a backdrop of global inequality and constrained options, such as poorly‐paid and dangerous construction work. Hence, there is little reason to single surrogacy out for special condemnation. On a policy level, the case for prohibiting international commercial surrogacy is weak, despite legitimate concerns about consent and background poverty. PMID:27471338

Intensive time series data exploitation: the Multi-sensor Evolution Analysis (MEA) platform

Science.gov (United States)

Mantovani, Simone; Natali, Stefano; Folegani, Marco; Scremin, Alessandro

2014-05-01

The monitoring of the temporal evolution of natural phenomena must be performed in order to ensure their correct description and to allow improvements in modelling and forecast capabilities. This assumption, that is obvious for ground-based measurements, has not always been true for data collected through space-based platforms: except for geostationary satellites and sensors, that allow providing a very effective monitoring of phenomena with geometric scale from regional to global; smaller phenomena (with characteristic dimension lower than few kilometres) have been monitored with instruments that could collect data only with a time interval in the order of several days; bi-temporal techniques have been the most used ones for years, in order to characterise temporal changes and try identifying specific phenomena. The more the number of flying sensor has grown and their performance improved, the more their capability of monitoring natural phenomena at a smaller geographic scale has grown: we can now count on tenth of years of remotely sensed data, collected by hundreds of sensors that are now accessible from a wide users' community, and the techniques for data processing have to be adapted to move toward a data intensive exploitation. Starting from 2008, the European Space Agency has initiated the development of the Multi-sensor Evolution Analysis (MEA) platform (https://mea.eo.esa.int), whose first aim was to permit the access and exploitation of long term remotely sensed satellite data from different platforms: 15 years of global (A)ATSR data together with 5 years of regional AVNIR-2 data were loaded into the system and were used, through a web-based graphic user interface, for land cover change analysis. The MEA data availability has grown during years integrating multi-disciplinary data that feature spatial and temporal dimensions: so far tenths of Terabytes of data in the land and atmosphere domains are available and can be visualized and exploited, keeping the

Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin's reading notebooks.

Science.gov (United States)

Murdock, Jaimie; Allen, Colin; DeDeo, Simon

2017-02-01

Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin's behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin's own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin's consumption more exploratory than the culture's production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

DETERMINATION OF OPTIMAL CONTOURS OF OPEN PIT MINE DURING OIL SHALE EXPLOITATION, BY MINEX 5.2.3. PROGRAM

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Miroslav Ignjatović

2013-04-01

Full Text Available By examination and determination of optimal solution of technological processes of exploitation and oil shale processing from Aleksinac site and with adopted technical solution and exploitation of oil shale, derived a technical solution that optimize contour of the newly defined open pit mine. In the world, this problem is solved by using a computer program that has become the established standard for quick and efficient solution for this problem. One of the computer’s program, which can be used for determination of the optimal contours of open pit mines is Minex 5.2.3. program, produced in Australia in the Surpac Minex Group Pty Ltd Company, which is applied at the Mining and Metallurgy Institute Bor (no. of licenses are SSI - 24765 and SSI - 24766. In this study, authors performed 11 optimization of deposit geo - models in Minex 5.2.3. based on the tests results, performed in a laboratory for soil mechanics of Mining and Metallurgy Institute, Bor, on samples from the site of Aleksinac deposits.

Poverty-Exploitation-Alienation.

Science.gov (United States)

Bronfenbrenner, Martin

1980-01-01

Illustrates how knowledge derived from the discipline of economics can be used to help shed light on social problems such as poverty, exploitation, and alienation, and can help decision makers form policy to minimize these and similar problems. (DB)

Exploiting multiple sources of information in learning an artificial language: human data and modeling.

Science.gov (United States)

Perruchet, Pierre; Tillmann, Barbara

2010-03-01

This study investigates the joint influences of three factors on the discovery of new word-like units in a continuous artificial speech stream: the statistical structure of the ongoing input, the initial word-likeness of parts of the speech flow, and the contextual information provided by the earlier emergence of other word-like units. Results of an experiment conducted with adult participants show that these sources of information have strong and interactive influences on word discovery. The authors then examine the ability of different models of word segmentation to account for these results. PARSER (Perruchet & Vinter, 1998) is compared to the view that word segmentation relies on the exploitation of transitional probabilities between successive syllables, and with the models based on the Minimum Description Length principle, such as INCDROP. The authors submit arguments suggesting that PARSER has the advantage of accounting for the whole pattern of data without ad-hoc modifications, while relying exclusively on general-purpose learning principles. This study strengthens the growing notion that nonspecific cognitive processes, mainly based on associative learning and memory principles, are able to account for a larger part of early language acquisition than previously assumed. Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

The role of the noradrenergic system in the exploration-exploitation trade-off: a pharmacological study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marieke Jepma

2010-08-01

Full Text Available Animal research and computational modeling have indicated an important role for the neuromodulatory locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE system in the control of behavior. According to the adaptive gain theory, the LC-NE system is critical for optimizing behavioral performance by regulating the balance between exploitative and exploratory control states. However, crucial direct empirical tests of this theory in human subjects have been lacking. We used a pharmacological manipulation of the LC-NE system to test predictions of this theory in humans. In a double-blind parallel-groups design (N = 52, participants received 4 mg reboxetine (a selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, 30 mg citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or placebo. The adaptive gain theory predicted that the increased tonic NE levels induced by reboxetine would promote task disengagement and exploratory behavior. We assessed the effects of reboxetine on performance in two cognitive tasks designed to examine task (disengagement and exploitative versus exploratory behavior: a diminishing-utility task and a gambling task with a non-stationary pay-off structure. In contrast to predictions of the adaptive gain theory, we did not find differences in task (disengagement or exploratory behavior between the three experimental groups, despite demonstrable effects of the two drugs on non-specific central and autonomic nervous system parameters. Our findings suggest that the LC-NE system may not be involved in the regulation of the exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans, at least not within the context of a single task. It remains to be examined whether the LC-NE system is involved in random exploration exceeding the current task context.

Balancing the Budget through Social Exploitation: Why Hard Times Are Even Harder for Some.

Science.gov (United States)

Tropman, John; Nicklett, Emily

2012-01-01

In all societies needs and wants regularly exceed resources. Thus societies are always in deficit; demand always exceeds supply and "balancing the budget" is a constant social problem. To make matters somewhat worse, research suggests that need- and want-fulfillment tends to further stimulate the cycle of wantseeking rather than satiating desire. Societies use various resource-allocation mechanisms, including price, to cope with gaps between wants and resources. Social exploitation is a second mechanism, securing labor from population segments that can be coerced or convinced to perform necessary work for free or at below-market compensation. Using practical examples, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding social exploitation. It then offers case examples of how different segments of the population emerge as exploited groups in the United States, due to changes in social policies. These exploitative processes have been exacerbated and accelerated by the economic downturn that began in 2007.

Exploiting tumor shrinkage through temporal optimization of radiotherapy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Unkelbach, Jan; Craft, David; Hong, Theodore; Papp, Dávid; Wolfgang, John; Bortfeld, Thomas; Ramakrishnan, Jagdish; Salari, Ehsan

2014-01-01

In multi-stage radiotherapy, a patient is treated in several stages separated by weeks or months. This regimen has been motivated mostly by radiobiological considerations, but also provides an approach to reduce normal tissue dose by exploiting tumor shrinkage. The paper considers the optimal design of multi-stage treatments, motivated by the clinical management of large liver tumors for which normal liver dose constraints prohibit the administration of an ablative radiation dose in a single treatment. We introduce a dynamic tumor model that incorporates three factors: radiation induced cell kill, tumor shrinkage, and tumor cell repopulation. The design of multi-stage radiotherapy is formulated as a mathematical optimization problem in which the total dose to the normal tissue is minimized, subject to delivering the prescribed dose to the tumor. Based on the model, we gain insight into the optimal administration of radiation over time, i.e. the optimal treatment gaps and dose levels. We analyze treatments consisting of two stages in detail. The analysis confirms the intuition that the second stage should be delivered just before the tumor size reaches a minimum and repopulation overcompensates shrinking. Furthermore, it was found that, for a large range of model parameters, approximately one-third of the dose should be delivered in the first stage. The projected benefit of multi-stage treatments in terms of normal tissue sparing depends on model assumptions. However, the model predicts large dose reductions by more than a factor of 2 for plausible model parameters. The analysis of the tumor model suggests that substantial reduction in normal tissue dose can be achieved by exploiting tumor shrinkage via an optimal design of multi-stage treatments. This suggests taking a fresh look at multi-stage radiotherapy for selected disease sites where substantial tumor regression translates into reduced target volumes. (paper)

Exploiting Surface Albedos Products to Bridge the Gap Between Remote Sensing Information and Climate Models

Science.gov (United States)

Pinty, Bernard; Andredakis, Ioannis; Clerici, Marco; Kaminski, Thomas; Taberner, Malcolm; Stephen, Plummer

2011-01-01

We present results from the application of an inversion method conducted using MODIS derived broadband visible and near-infrared surface albedo products. This contribution is an extension of earlier efforts to optimally retrieve land surface fluxes and associated two- stream model parameters based on the Joint Research Centre Two-stream Inversion Package (JRC-TIP). The discussion focuses on products (based on the mean and one-sigma values of the Probability Distribution Functions (PDFs)) obtained during the summer and winter and highlight specific issues related to snowy conditions. This paper discusses the retrieved model parameters including the effective Leaf Area Index (LAI), the background brightness and the scattering efficiency of the vegetation elements. The spatial and seasonal changes exhibited by these parameters agree with common knowledge and underscore the richness of the high quality surface albedo data sets. At the same time, the opportunity to generate global maps of new products, such as the background albedo, underscores the advantages of using state of the art algorithmic approaches capable of fully exploiting accurate satellite remote sensing datasets. The detailed analyses of the retrieval uncertainties highlight the central role and contribution of the LAI, the main process parameter to interpret radiation transfer observations over vegetated surfaces. The posterior covariance matrix of the uncertainties is further exploited to quantify the knowledge gain from the ingestion of MODIS surface albedo products. The estimation of the radiation fluxes that are absorbed, transmitted and scattered by the vegetation layer and its background is achieved on the basis of the retrieved PDFs of the model parameters. The propagation of uncertainties from the observations to the model parameters is achieved via the Hessian of the cost function and yields a covariance matrix of posterior parameter uncertainties. This matrix is propagated to the radiation

Exploiting the Dynamics of Soft Materials for Machine Learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Nakajima, Kohei; Hauser, Helmut; Li, Tao; Pfeifer, Rolf

2018-06-01

Soft materials are increasingly utilized for various purposes in many engineering applications. These materials have been shown to perform a number of functions that were previously difficult to implement using rigid materials. Here, we argue that the diverse dynamics generated by actuating soft materials can be effectively used for machine learning purposes. This is demonstrated using a soft silicone arm through a technique of multiplexing, which enables the rich transient dynamics of the soft materials to be fully exploited as a computational resource. The computational performance of the soft silicone arm is examined through two standard benchmark tasks. Results show that the soft arm compares well to or even outperforms conventional machine learning techniques under multiple conditions. We then demonstrate that this system can be used for the sensory time series prediction problem for the soft arm itself, which suggests its immediate applicability to a real-world machine learning problem. Our approach, on the one hand, represents a radical departure from traditional computational methods, whereas on the other hand, it fits nicely into a more general perspective of computation by way of exploiting the properties of physical materials in the real world.

High Performance Programming Using Explicit Shared Memory Model on Cray T3D1

Science.gov (United States)

Simon, Horst D.; Saini, Subhash; Grassi, Charles

1994-01-01

The Cray T3D system is the first-phase system in Cray Research, Inc.'s (CRI) three-phase massively parallel processing (MPP) program. This system features a heterogeneous architecture that closely couples DEC's Alpha microprocessors and CRI's parallel-vector technology, i.e., the Cray Y-MP and Cray C90. An overview of the Cray T3D hardware and available programming models is presented. Under Cray Research adaptive Fortran (CRAFT) model four programming methods (data parallel, work sharing, message-passing using PVM, and explicit shared memory model) are available to the users. However, at this time data parallel and work sharing programming models are not available to the user community. The differences between standard PVM and CRI's PVM are highlighted with performance measurements such as latencies and communication bandwidths. We have found that the performance of neither standard PVM nor CRI s PVM exploits the hardware capabilities of the T3D. The reasons for the bad performance of PVM as a native message-passing library are presented. This is illustrated by the performance of NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) programmed in explicit shared memory model on Cray T3D. In general, the performance of standard PVM is about 4 to 5 times less than obtained by using explicit shared memory model. This degradation in performance is also seen on CM-5 where the performance of applications using native message-passing library CMMD on CM-5 is also about 4 to 5 times less than using data parallel methods. The issues involved (such as barriers, synchronization, invalidating data cache, aligning data cache etc.) while programming in explicit shared memory model are discussed. Comparative performance of NPB using explicit shared memory programming model on the Cray T3D and other highly parallel systems such as the TMC CM-5, Intel Paragon, Cray C90, IBM-SP1, etc. is presented.

Radiation environmental impact assessment of copper exploitation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fan Guang; Wen Zhijian

2010-01-01

The radiation environmental impact of mineral exploitation on the surrounding environment has become a public concern. This paper presents the radiation environmental impact assessment of copper exploitation. Based on the project description and detailed investigations of surrounding environment, systematic radiation environmental impacts have been identified. The environmental impacts are assessed during both construction and operation phase. The environmental protection measures have also been proposed. The related conclusion and measures can play an active role in copper exploitation and environmental protection. (authors)

Analysis Of Damage Arising From Exploitation Of The Aircraft

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Woźny Piotr

2014-12-01

Full Text Available During exploitation, due to a variety of reasons, aircrafts are damaged or suffer from different failures. In the process of operation, using appropriate methods of diagnosis, failure, damage, and relative deregulation of individual elements or units can be detected. For this purpose, one can apply a number of indirect diagnostic methods with the use of recorded diagnostic signals or a direct diagnosis with the use of non-destructive methods. The proper identification of the technical condition allows to determine the causes of irregularities and take actions aimed at preventing their occurrence. The article presents the types of exploitation damage of a multi-purpose aircraft. In addition, the criteria for the division of damage and research methods of the causes of damage are presented. Furthermore, an analysis of the scope of activities to be performed during the research of causes of damage to the aircraft is made.

Competing Discourses about Youth Sexual Exploitation in Canadian News Media.

Science.gov (United States)

Saewyc, Elizabeth M; Miller, Bonnie B; Rivers, Robert; Matthews, Jennifer; Hilario, Carla; Hirakata, Pam

2013-10-01

Media holds the power to create, maintain, or break down stigmatizing attitudes, which affect policies, funding, and services. To understand how Canadian news media depicts the commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth, we examined 835 Canadian newspaper articles from 1989-2008 using a mixed methods critical discourse analysis approach, comparing representations to existing research about sexually exploited youth. Despite research evidence that equal rates of boys and girls experience exploitation, Canadian news media depicted exploited youth predominantly as heterosexual girls, and described them alternately as victims or workers in a trade, often both in the same story. News media mentioned exploiters far less often than victims, and portrayed them almost exclusively as male, most often called 'customers' or 'consumers,' and occasionally 'predators'; in contrast, research has documented the majority of sexually exploited boys report female exploiters. Few news stories over the past two decades portrayed the diversity of victims, perpetrators, and venues of exploitation reported in research. The focus on victims but not exploiters helps perpetuate stereotypes of sexual exploitation as business or a 'victimless crime,' maintains the status quo, and blurs responsibility for protecting youth under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Health care providers and researchers can be advocates for accuracy in media coverage about sexual exploitation; news reporters and editors should focus on exploiters more than victims, draw on existing research evidence to avoid perpetuating stereotypes, and use accurate terms, such as commercial sexual exploitation, rather than terms related to business or trade.

Measuring Sandy Bottom Dynamics by Exploiting Depth from Stereo Video Sequences

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Musumeci, Rosaria E.; Farinella, Giovanni M.; Foti, Enrico

2013-01-01

In this paper an imaging system for measuring sandy bottom dynamics is proposed. The system exploits stereo sequences and projected laser beams to build the 3D shape of the sandy bottom during time. The reconstruction is used by experts of the field to perform accurate measurements and analysis...

129 Durabilité agro-écologique des exploitations agricoles dans la ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

User

durabilité alors que la composante «organisation de l'espace» constitue un facteur limitant. ... la performance agro-écologique de l'exploitation agricole, à un moment ... Pour mener cette étude, deux types de données ont été nécessaires : les ...

A Simulation Study: The Impact of Random and Realistic Mobility Models on the Performance of Bypass-AODV in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Baroudi Uthman

2010-01-01

Full Text Available To bring VANET into reality, it is crucial to devise routing protocols that can exploit the inherited characteristics of VANET environment to enhance the performance of the running applications. Previous studies have shown that a certain routing protocol behaves differently under different presumed mobility patterns. Bypass-AODV is a new optimization of the AODV routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. It is proposed as a local recovery mechanism to enhance the performance of the AODV routing protocol. It shows outstanding performance under the Random Waypoint mobility model compared with AODV. However, Random Waypoint is a simple model that may be applicable to some scenarios but it is not sufficient to capture some important mobility characteristics of scenarios where VANETs are deployed. In this paper, we will investigate the performance of Bypass-AODV under a wide range of mobility models including other random mobility models, group mobility models, and vehicular mobility models. Simulation results show an interesting feature that is the insensitivity of Bypass-AODV to the selected random mobility model, and it has a clear performance improvement compared to AODV. For group mobility model, both protocols show a comparable performance, but for vehicular mobility models, Bypass-AODV suffers from performance degradation in high-speed conditions.

Managing the Innovators for Exploration and Exploitation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

C. Annique UN

2007-09-01

Full Text Available I analyze how to manage employees to achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation in large established firms. Previous studies suggest that, although firms need to undertake both exploration and exploitation simultaneously, this is difficult either because of the scarcity of resources or because of the incompatibility of these two processes. Proposed solutions have been ambidexterity, punctuated equilibrium or specialization. I suggest another method: managing employees. Specifically, I argue that using the so-called “innovative” system of human resource management practices, consisting of team-based incentive system, team-based job design, and job rotation, enables the firm to undertake exploration and exploitation simultaneously because it provides the psychological safety for people to explore new knowledge to make novel products and develops employees to have the perspective-taking capability that enables the integration of knowledge cross-functionally for efficiency. Using the so-called “traditional” system of human resource management practices, consisting of individual-based incentive system, individual-based job design, and no job rotation, has limited impact on either exploration or exploitation because it does not create the psychological safety for people to explore new knowledge and does not develop the perspective-taking capability needed for exploitation. Moreover, mixing practices from both systems is better than only using the traditional system in achieving exploration or exploitation, but less effective than only using the innovative system as the mix of practices can create inconsistent expectations on employees.

Exploitation as the Unequal Exchange of Labour : An Axiomatic Approach

OpenAIRE

Yoshihara, Naoki; Veneziani, Roberto

2009-01-01

In subsistence economies with general convex technology and rational optimising agents, a new, axiomatic approach is developed, which allows an explicit analysis of the core positive and normative intuitions behind the concept of exploitation. Three main new axioms, called Labour Exploitation in Subsistence Economies , Relational Exploitation , and Feasibility of Non-Exploitation , are presented and it is proved that they uniquely characterise a definition of exploitation conceptually related...

A fuzzy model for exploiting customer requirements

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zahra Javadirad

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Nowadays, Quality function deployment (QFD is one of the total quality management tools, where customers’ views and requirements are perceived and using various techniques improves the production requirements and operations. The QFD department, after identification and analysis of the competitors, takes customers’ feedbacks to meet the customers’ demands for the products compared with the competitors. In this study, a comprehensive model for assessing the importance of the customer requirements in the products or services for an organization is proposed. The proposed study uses linguistic variables, as a more comprehensive approach, to increase the precision of the expression evaluations. The importance of these requirements specifies the strengths and weaknesses of the organization in meeting the requirements relative to competitors. The results of these experiments show that the proposed method performs better than the other methods.

THE REENACTMENT AS TOURISM EXPLOITATION THROUGH HERITAGE INTERPRETATION OF HERITAGE SITES IN TRANSYLVANIA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

MIHAELA ZOTICA

2015-06-01

Full Text Available The Reenactment as Tourism Exploitation through Heritage Interpretation of Heritage Sites in Transylvania. Beside the need of reviewing up to date the theoretical progress in the field, we aimed at reviewing the challenges the reenactment performances in Romania have to face as presented in the literature. Another aim of this paper was to furnish an inventory of all tourism objectives in Transylvania where heritage interpretation in the form of reenactment is performed as a form of tourism exploitation of numerous sites. Another objective of this paper was to investigate the main issues of audience’s expectations regarding the performance of reenactment at Romanian historical tourism sites and issues practitioners have to challenge in their relatively recent activity. No theoretical meta-analysis or literature review paper on theoretical progress was found. The theoretical preoccupations for unifying the terminology and conceptualization seems to date since the Gotteborg (2012 Conference Re/theorisation of Heritage Studies, but from 2012 the interest in theorization was increasing, being visible in the number of papers published per year in peer-reviewed indexed journals. The results on the Romanian context were consistent with previous works stating that audience’s expectations, in their nature and information content, were very diverse. Half of the subjects investigated through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires assessing the expected level of satisfaction with the reenactment performance and the actual level of satisfaction after the performance showed positive differences. The (historical reenactment represents a viable modality of heritage interpretation in Romania and an efficient mean of tourism exploitation with positive results especially for the citadels in Transylvania.

The Effect of Mutation on Explorative & Exploitative Behaviours with rt-NEAT

OpenAIRE

Pham, Khoa Dang Phu

2017-01-01

This thesis aims to explore how different factors can affect the search performance of evolutionary algorithms. Additionally how applying different mutation techniques changes the overall search performance of rtNEAT. This thesis demonstrates how mutation affects exploration and exploitation when optimizing for a 3-input XOR gate as well as optimizing agent movements in a real time environment. This thesis is also provided as a guideline in the development of an evolutionary algorithm, partic...

Exploration and Exploitation within Firms : The Impact of CEOs' Cognitive Style on Incremental and Radical Innovation Performance

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Visser, Matthias; Faems, Dries

Previous studies have provided valuable insights into how environmental and organizational factors may influence levels of explorative and exploitative innovation in firms. At the same time, scholars suggest that individual characteristics, such as cognitive and behavioural inclinations of top

A mixed integer linear programming model for integrating thermodynamic cycles for waste heat exploitation in process sites

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oluleye, Gbemi; Smith, Robin

2016-01-01

Highlights: • MILP model developed for integration of waste heat recovery technologies in process sites. • Five thermodynamic cycles considered for exploitation of industrial waste heat. • Temperature and quantity of multiple waste heat sources considered. • Interactions with the site utility system considered. • Industrial case study presented to illustrate application of the proposed methodology. - Abstract: Thermodynamic cycles such as organic Rankine cycles, absorption chillers, absorption heat pumps, absorption heat transformers, and mechanical heat pumps are able to utilize wasted thermal energy in process sites for the generation of electrical power, chilling and heat at a higher temperature. In this work, a novel systematic framework is presented for optimal integration of these technologies in process sites. The framework is also used to assess the best design approach for integrating waste heat recovery technologies in process sites, i.e. stand-alone integration or a systems-oriented integration. The developed framework allows for: (1) selection of one or more waste heat sources (taking into account the temperatures and thermal energy content), (2) selection of one or more technology options and working fluids, (3) selection of end-uses of recovered energy, (4) exploitation of interactions with the existing site utility system and (5) the potential for heat recovery via heat exchange is also explored. The methodology is applied to an industrial case study. Results indicate a systems-oriented design approach reduces waste heat by 24%; fuel consumption by 54% and CO_2 emissions by 53% with a 2 year payback, and stand-alone design approach reduces waste heat by 12%; fuel consumption by 29% and CO_2 emissions by 20.5% with a 4 year payback. Therefore, benefits from waste heat utilization increase when interactions between the existing site utility system and the waste heat recovery technologies are explored simultaneously. The case study also shows

Exploitation of Clustering Techniques in Transactional Healthcare Data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Naeem Ahmad Mahoto

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Healthcare service centres equipped with electronic health systems have improved their resources as well as treatment processes. The dynamic nature of healthcare data of each individual makes it complex and difficult for physicians to manually mediate them; therefore, automatic techniques are essential to manage the quality and standardization of treatment procedures. Exploratory data analysis, patternanalysis and grouping of data is managed using clustering techniques, which work as an unsupervised classification. A number of healthcare applications are developed that use several data mining techniques for classification, clustering and extracting useful information from healthcare data. The challenging issue in this domain is to select adequate data mining algorithm for optimal results. This paper exploits three different clustering algorithms: DBSCAN (Density-Based Clustering, agglomerative hierarchical and k-means in real transactional healthcare data of diabetic patients (taken as case study to analyse their performance in large and dispersed healthcare data. The best solution of cluster sets among the exploited algorithms is evaluated using clustering quality indexes and is selected to identify the possible subgroups of patients having similar treatment patterns

SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND ABUSE BY UN PEACEKEEPERS ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Allaiac

sexual exploitation of children by peacekeepers is particularly insidious. ... sexual exploitation and abuse should involve an understanding of the social .... The charges of sexual misconduct, and the consequent media exposure, have ..... awareness programmes such as video tapes, lectures and training manuals, designed.

Exploitation by Economic Necessity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kristian F. Braekkan

2015-10-01

Full Text Available This study develops and tests a model that proposes economic necessity moderates the relationship between psychological contract violations (PCVs and organizational commitment and trust in the employing organization among non-unionized manufacturing workers (N = 226. Moderated regression analyses revealed that there was a significant interaction between PCV and economic necessity in predicting both outcomes. Specifically, the findings indicated that individuals experiencing high PCV and high economic necessity did not decrease their organizational commitment like their counterparts who endorsed lower economic necessity. They did, however, experience significantly decreased trust in their employer. The findings suggest that individuals who are forced to sell their labor power and obtain what they need through the market are more likely to continue to be exploited by their employer, as they have no other options than to continue the relationship. The importance of the findings is discussed, and recommendations for future research are provided.

A Knowledge Management and Decision Support Model for Enterprises

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Patrizia Ribino

2011-01-01

Full Text Available We propose a novel knowledge management system (KMS for enterprises. Our system exploits two different approaches for knowledge representation and reasoning: a document-based approach based on data-driven creation of a semantic space and an ontology-based model. Furthermore, we provide an expert system capable of supporting the enterprise decisional processes and a semantic engine which performs intelligent search on the enterprise knowledge bases. The decision support process exploits the Bayesian networks model to improve business planning process when performed under uncertainty.

Host exploitation strategies of the social parasite Maculinea alcon

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fürst, Matthias Alois

as model systems. These enable the study of adaptations and counter-adaptations that might evolve in the arms-race between a parasite pursuing maximum gain and a host trying to avoid exploitation. One such system is the socially parasitic butterfly Maculinea alcon and its host the ant Myrmica rubra....... Throughout the first instars M. alcon lives on a specific food plant, however, in the last instar before pupation it develops into an obligate social parasite, posing a considerably cost to its host ant colony. I here focus on the different exploitation strategies of M. alcon throughout its lifecycle...... a fitness cost to infected host ant colonies, the host ants are expected to have developed defense mechanisms in response to the presence of the social parasite. I was able to demonstrate that the efficiency of ant colonies to defend themselves against intruders depends on a multitude of often correlated...

Study on the stress changes due to the regional groundwater exploitation based on a 3-D fully coupled poroelastic model: An example of the North China Plain

Science.gov (United States)

Cheng, H.; Zhang, H.; Pang, Y. J.; Shi, Y.

2017-12-01

With the quick urban development, over-exploitation of groundwater resources becomes more and more intense, which leads to not only widespread groundwater depression cones but also a series of harsh environmental and geological hazards. Among which, the most intuitive phenomenon is the ground subsidence in loose sediments. However, another direct consequence triggered by the groundwater depletion is the substantial crustal deformation and potential modulation of crustal stress underneath the groundwater over-pumping zones. In our previous 3-D viscoelastic finite element model, we found that continuous over-exploitation of groundwater resources in North China Plain during the past 60 years give rise to crustal-scale uplift reaching 4.9cm, with the Coulomb failure stress decreasing by up to 12 kPa, which may inhibit the nucleation of possible big earthquake events. Furthermore, according to the effective pressure principle and lab experiments, the pore pressure may also have changed due to the reduced water level. In order to quantitatively analyze the stress changes due to the regional groundwater exploitation in North China Plain, a three-dimensional fully coupled poroelastic finite element model is developed in this study. The high resolution topography, grounwater level fluctuation, fault parameters and etc, are taken into consideration. Further, the changes of Coulomb Failure Stress, in correspondence to elastic stress and pore pressure changes induced by fluid diffusion are calculated. Meanwhile, the elastic strain energy accumulation in region due to the regional groundwater exploitation is obtained. Finally, we try to analyze the seismic risk of major faults within North China Plain to further discuss the regional seismic activities.

Energy Exploitation of High-Temperature Geothermal Sources in Volcanic Areas—a Possible ORC Application in Phlegraean Fields (Southern Italy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Angelo Algieri

2018-03-01

Full Text Available This work aims to investigate the energy performances of small-scale Organic Rankine Cycles (ORCs for the exploitation of high temperature geothermal sources in volcanic areas. For this purpose, a thermodynamic model has been developed, and a parametric analysis has been performed that considers subcritical and transcritical configurations, and different organic fluids (isobutane, isopentane, and R245ca. The investigation illustrates the significant effect of the temperature at the entrance of the expander on the ORC behaviour and the rise in system effectiveness when the internal heat exchange (IHE is adopted. As a possible application, the analysis has focused on the active volcanic area of Phlegraean Fields (Southern Italy where high temperature geothermal reservoirs are available at shallow depths. The work demonstrates that ORC systems represent a very interesting option for exploiting geothermal sources and increasing the share of energy production from renewables. In particular, the investigation has been performed considering a 1 kg/s geothermal mass flow rate at 230 °C. The comparative analysis highlights that transcritical configurations with IHE guarantee the highest performance. Isopentane is suggested to maximise the ORC electric efficiency (17.7%, while R245ca offers the highest electric power (91.3 kWel. The selected systems are able to fulfil a significant quota of the annual electric load of domestic users in the area.

3D Massive MIMO Systems: Channel Modeling and Performance Analysis

KAUST Repository

Nadeem, Qurrat-Ul-Ain

2015-03-01

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems of current LTE releases are capable of adaptation in the azimuth only. More recently, the trend is to enhance the system performance by exploiting the channel\\'s degrees of freedom in the elevation through the dynamic adaptation of the vertical antenna beam pattern. This necessitates the derivation and characterization of three-dimensional (3D) channels. Over the years, channel models have evolved to address the challenges of wireless communication technologies. In parallel to theoretical studies on channel modeling, many standardized channel models like COST-based models, 3GPP SCM, WINNER, ITU have emerged that act as references for industries and telecommunication companies to assess system-level and link-level performances of advanced signal processing techniques over real-like channels. Given the existing channels are only two dimensional (2D) in nature; a large effort in channel modeling is needed to study the impact of the channel component in the elevation direction. The first part of this work sheds light on the current 3GPP activity around 3D channel modeling and beamforming, an aspect that to our knowledge has not been extensively covered by a research publication. The standardized MIMO channel model is presented, that incorporates both the propagation effects of the environment and the radio effects of the antennas. In order to facilitate future studies on the use of 3D beamforming, the main features of the proposed 3D channel model are discussed. A brief overview of the future 3GPP 3D channel model being outlined for the next generation of wireless networks is also provided. In the subsequent part of this work, we present an information-theoretic channel model for MIMO systems that supports the elevation dimension. The model is based on the principle of maximum entropy, which enables us to determine the distribution of the channel matrix consistent with the prior information on the angles of departure and

Trade-off between learning and exploitation: the Pareto-optimal versus evolutionarily stable learning schedule in cumulative cultural evolution.

Science.gov (United States)

Wakano, Joe Yuichiro; Miura, Chiaki

2014-02-01

Inheritance of culture is achieved by social learning and improvement is achieved by individual learning. To realize cumulative cultural evolution, social and individual learning should be performed in this order in one's life. However, it is not clear whether such a learning schedule can evolve by the maximization of individual fitness. Here we study optimal allocation of lifetime to learning and exploitation in a two-stage life history model under a constant environment. We show that the learning schedule by which high cultural level is achieved through cumulative cultural evolution is unlikely to evolve as a result of the maximization of individual fitness, if there exists a trade-off between the time spent in learning and the time spent in exploiting the knowledge that has been learned in earlier stages of one's life. Collapse of a fully developed culture is predicted by a game-theoretical analysis where individuals behave selfishly, e.g., less learning and more exploiting. The present study suggests that such factors as group selection, the ability of learning-while-working ("on the job training"), or environmental fluctuation might be important in the realization of rapid and cumulative cultural evolution that is observed in humans. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Boldness predicts an individual's position along an exploration-exploitation foraging trade-off.

Science.gov (United States)

Patrick, Samantha C; Pinaud, David; Weimerskirch, Henri

2017-09-01

Individuals do not have complete information about the environment and therefore they face a trade-off between gathering information (exploration) and gathering resources (exploitation). Studies have shown individual differences in components of this trade-off but how stable these strategies are in a population and the intrinsic drivers of these differences is not well understood. Top marine predators are expected to experience a particularly strong trade-off as many species have large foraging ranges and their prey often have a patchy distribution. This environment leads these species to exhibit pronounced exploration and exploitation phases but differences between individuals are poorly resolved. Personality differences are known to be important in foraging behaviour but also in the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Here we test whether personality predicts an individual exploration-exploitation strategy using wide ranging wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) as a model system. Using GPS tracking data from 276 wandering albatrosses, we extract foraging parameters indicative of exploration (searching) and exploitation (foraging) and show that foraging effort, time in patch and size of patch are strongly correlated, demonstrating these are indicative of an exploration-exploitation (EE) strategy. Furthermore, we show these are consistent within individuals and appear stable in the population, with no reproductive advantage. The searching and foraging behaviour of bolder birds placed them towards the exploration end of the trade-off, whereas shy birds showed greater exploitation. This result provides a mechanism through which individual foraging strategies may emerge. Age and sex affected components of the trade-off, but not the trade-off itself, suggesting these factors may drive behavioural compensation to maintain resource acquisition and this was supported by the evidence that there were no fitness consequence of any EE trait nor the trade

Packaging of Sin Goods - Commitment or Exploitation?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nafziger, Julia

to such self-control problems, and possibly exploit them, by offering different package sizes. In a competitive market, either one or three (small, medium and large) packages are offered. In contrast to common intuition, the large, and not the small package is a commitment device. The latter serves to exploit...

A bi-population based scheme for an explicit exploration/exploitation trade-off in dynamic environments

Science.gov (United States)

Ben-Romdhane, Hajer; Krichen, Saoussen; Alba, Enrique

2017-05-01

Optimisation in changing environments is a challenging research topic since many real-world problems are inherently dynamic. Inspired by the natural evolution process, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are among the most successful and promising approaches that have addressed dynamic optimisation problems. However, managing the exploration/exploitation trade-off in EAs is still a prevalent issue, and this is due to the difficulties associated with the control and measurement of such a behaviour. The proposal of this paper is to achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation in an explicit manner. The idea is to use two equally sized populations: the first one performs exploration while the second one is responsible for exploitation. These tasks are alternated from one generation to the next one in a regular pattern, so as to obtain a balanced search engine. Besides, we reinforce the ability of our algorithm to quickly adapt after cnhanges by means of a memory of past solutions. Such a combination aims to restrain the premature convergence, to broaden the search area, and to speed up the optimisation. We show through computational experiments, and based on a series of dynamic problems and many performance measures, that our approach improves the performance of EAs and outperforms competing algorithms.

Exploiting Innocuous Activity for Correlating Users Across Sites

OpenAIRE

Goga , Oana; Lei , Howard; Parthasarathi , Sree Hari Krishnan; Friedland , Gerald; Sommer , Robin; Teixeira , Renata

2013-01-01

International audience; We study how potential attackers can identify accounts on different social network sites that all belong to the same user, exploiting only innocuous activity that inherently comes with posted content. We examine three specific features on Yelp, Flickr, and Twitter: the geo-location attached to a user's posts, the timestamp of posts, and the user's writing style as captured by language models. We show that among these three features the location of posts is the most powe...

A Theory of Exploitative Child Labor

OpenAIRE

Carol Ann Rogers; Kenneth A. Swinnerton

2003-01-01

Child labor laws should aim to protect children who work, instead of trying to remove children from work. In this paper, we identify an instance when the risk of exploitation lowers the expected bene…t of child labor to the child,and therefore suppresses child labor force participation. Targeted legal intervention that lowers or removes the risk of exploitation raises child participation in the labor market, child welfare, and overall societal welfare. Targeting on child labor more broadly ma...

Effect of habitat productivity and exploitation on populations with complex life cycles

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wolfshaar, van de K.E.; Hille Ris Lambers, R.; Gardmark, A.

2011-01-01

In this paper we study the consequences of habitat switching and the corresponding ontogenetic diet shifts between adult and juvenile life stages for harvesting and management of exploited populations using a consumer-resource model with stage-specific mortality. Specifically, we study how

Shale gas exploitation: Status, problems and prospect

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shiqian Wang

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Over the past five years, great progress has been made in shale gas exploitation, which has become the most driving force for global gas output growth. Hydrocarbon extraction from shale helps drive the USA on the road to energy independence. Besides, shale oil & gas production has been kept in a sustained growth by continuous improvement in drilling efficiency and well productivity in the case of tumbling oil prices and rig counts. Shale gas reserves and production have been in a rapid growth in China owing to the Lower Paleozoic Wufeng and Longmaxi shale gas exploitation in the Sichuan Basin, which has become an important sector for the future increment of gas reserves and output in China. However, substantial progress has been made neither in non-marine shale gas exploitation as previously expected nor in the broad complicated tectonic areas in South China for which a considerable investment was made. Analysis of the basic situation and issues in domestic shale gas development shows that shale gas exploitation prospects are constrained by many problems in terms of resources endowment, horizontal well fracturing technology, etc. especially in non-marine shale deposits and complicated tectonic areas in South China where hot shales are widely distributed but geological structures are found severely deformed and over matured. Discussion on the prospects shows that the sustained and steady growth in shale gas reserves and production capacity in the coming years lies in the discovery and supersession of new shale plays in addition to Wufeng and Longmaxi shale plays, and that a technological breakthrough in ultra-high-pressure and ultra-deep (over 3500 m buried in the Sichuan Basin marine shale gas exploitation is the key and hope. Keywords: Shale gas, Exploitation, Marine facies, Hot shale, Resource endowment, Sichuan Basin, South China, Complicated tectonic area, Gas play

Exploiting Redundancy in an OFDM SDR Receiver

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tomas Palenik

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Common OFDM system contains redundancy necessary to mitigate interblock interference and allows computationally effective single-tap frequency domain equalization in receiver. Assuming the system implements an outer error correcting code and channel state information is available in the receiver, we show that it is possible to understand the cyclic prefix insertion as a weak inner ECC encoding and exploit the introduced redundancy to slightly improve error performance of such a system. In this paper, an easy way to implement modification to an existing SDR OFDM receiver is presented. This modification enables the utilization of prefix redundancy, while preserving full compatibility with existing OFDM-based communication standards.

Helix Nebula and CERN: A Symbiotic approach to exploiting commercial clouds

CERN Document Server

Barreiro Megino, Fernando Harald; Kucharczyk, Katarzyna; Medrano Llamas, Ramón; van der Ster, Daniel

2014-01-01

The recent paradigm shift toward cloud computing in IT, and general interest in "Big Data" in particular, have demonstrated that the computing requirements of HEP are no longer globally unique. Indeed, the CERN IT department and LHC experiments have already made significant R&D investments in delivering and exploiting cloud computing resources. While a number of technical evaluations of interesting commercial offerings from global IT enterprises have been performed by various physics labs, further technical, security, sociological, and legal issues need to be address before their large-scale adoption by the research community can be envisaged. Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud is an initiative that explores these questions by joining the forces of three European research institutes (CERN, ESA and EMBL) with leading European commercial IT enterprises. The goals of Helix Nebula are to establish a cloud platform federating multiple commercial cloud providers, along with new business models, which can sustain ...

Helix Nebula and CERN: A Symbiotic approach to exploiting commercial clouds

CERN Multimedia

Barreiro Megino, Fernando Harald; Kucharczyk, Katarzyna; Medrano Llamas, Ramón; van der Ster, Daniel

2013-01-01

The recent paradigm shift toward cloud computing in IT, and general interest in "Big Data" in particular, have demonstrated that the computing requirements of HEP are no longer globally unique. Indeed, the CERN IT department and LHC experiments have already made significant R&D; investments in delivering and exploiting cloud computing resources. While a number of technical evaluations of interesting commercial offerings from global IT enterprises have been performed by various physics labs, further technical, security, sociological, and legal issues need to be address before their large-scale adoption by the research community can be envisaged. Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud is an initiative that explores these questions by joining the forces of three European research institutes (CERN, ESA and EMBL) with leading European commercial IT enterprises. The goals of Helix Nebula are to establish a cloud platform federating multiple commercial cloud providers, along with new business models, which can sustain...

Well performance model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Thomas, L.K.; Evans, C.E.; Pierson, R.G.; Scott, S.L.

1992-01-01

This paper describes the development and application of a comprehensive oil or gas well performance model. The model contains six distinct sections: stimulation design, tubing and/or casing flow, reservoir and near-wellbore calculations, production forecasting, wellbore heat transmission, and economics. These calculations may be performed separately or in an integrated fashion with data and results shared among the different sections. The model analysis allows evaluation of all aspects of well completion design, including the effects on future production and overall well economics

CamOptimus: a tool for exploiting complex adaptive evolution to optimize experiments and processes in biotechnology.

Science.gov (United States)

Cankorur-Cetinkaya, Ayca; Dias, Joao M L; Kludas, Jana; Slater, Nigel K H; Rousu, Juho; Oliver, Stephen G; Dikicioglu, Duygu

2017-06-01

Multiple interacting factors affect the performance of engineered biological systems in synthetic biology projects. The complexity of these biological systems means that experimental design should often be treated as a multiparametric optimization problem. However, the available methodologies are either impractical, due to a combinatorial explosion in the number of experiments to be performed, or are inaccessible to most experimentalists due to the lack of publicly available, user-friendly software. Although evolutionary algorithms may be employed as alternative approaches to optimize experimental design, the lack of simple-to-use software again restricts their use to specialist practitioners. In addition, the lack of subsidiary approaches to further investigate critical factors and their interactions prevents the full analysis and exploitation of the biotechnological system. We have addressed these problems and, here, provide a simple-to-use and freely available graphical user interface to empower a broad range of experimental biologists to employ complex evolutionary algorithms to optimize their experimental designs. Our approach exploits a Genetic Algorithm to discover the subspace containing the optimal combination of parameters, and Symbolic Regression to construct a model to evaluate the sensitivity of the experiment to each parameter under investigation. We demonstrate the utility of this method using an example in which the culture conditions for the microbial production of a bioactive human protein are optimized. CamOptimus is available through: (https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.10257).

Exploiting different active silicon detectors in the International Space Station: ALTEA and DOSTEL galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) measurements

Science.gov (United States)

Narici, Livo; Berger, Thomas; Burmeister, Sönke; Di Fino, Luca; Rizzo, Alessandro; Matthiä, Daniel; Reitz, Günther

2017-08-01

The solar system exploration by humans requires to successfully deal with the radiation exposition issue. The scientific aspect of this issue is twofold: knowing the radiation environment the astronauts are going to face and linking radiation exposure to health risks. Here we focus on the first issue. It is generally agreed that the final tool to describe the radiation environment in a space habitat will be a model featuring the needed amount of details to perform a meaningful risk assessment. The model should also take into account the shield changes due to the movement of materials inside the habitat, which in turn produce changes in the radiation environment. This model will have to undergo a final validation with a radiation field of similar complexity. The International Space Station (ISS) is a space habitat that features a radiation environment inside which is similar to what will be found in habitats in deep space, if we use measurements acquired only during high latitude passages (where the effects of the Earth magnetic field are reduced). Active detectors, providing time information, that can easily select data from different orbital sections, are the ones best fulfilling the requirements for these kinds of measurements. The exploitation of the radiation measurements performed in the ISS by all the available instruments is therefore mandatory to provide the largest possible database to the scientific community, to be merged with detailed Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, in the quest for a full model validation. While some efforts in comparing results from multiple active detectors have been attempted, a thorough study of a procedure to merge data in a single data matrix in order to provide the best validation set for radiation environment models has never been attempted. The aim of this paper is to provide such a procedure, to apply it to two of the most performing active detector systems in the ISS: the Anomalous Long Term Effects in Astronauts (ALTEA

The possibilities of exploitation of Serbian thermomineral waters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jovanovic, L.

2002-01-01

Global ecological problem of petrol resources deficit caused an intensive search of alternative energy sources. Deficit of conventional energy fluids in Yugoslavia requires serious efforts to create a program of alternative energy sources exploitation. Geothermal energy represents an important energetic source for the countries with poor energy resources. Geothermal energy can become the basis for economic development. At present these geothermal resources are not being exploited in Yugoslavia. The possibilities of effective exploitation of thermal and thermomineral water resources in Yugoslavia are presented in this paper

Endangered Species and Natural Resource Exploitation: Extinction vs. Coexistence

OpenAIRE

Tsur, Yacov; Zemel, Amos

1994-01-01

The threat on the survival of animal species due to intensive use of natural resources is incorporated within resource management models, paying special attention to uncertainty regarding the conditions that lead to extinction. The manner in which the potential benefits forgone due to the species extinction (denoted extinction penalty) induce more conservative exploitation policies is studied in detail. When the extinction penalty is ignored, the optimal policy is to drive the resource stock ...

Using a spatially structured life cycle model to assess the influence of multiple stressors on an exploited coastal-nursery-dependent population

Science.gov (United States)

Archambault, B.; Rivot, E.; Savina, M.; Le Pape, O.

2018-02-01

Exploited coastal-nursery-dependent fish species are subject to various stressors occurring at specific stages of the life cycle: climate-driven variability in hydrography determines the success of the first eggs/larvae stages; coastal nursery habitat suitability controls juvenile growth and survival; and fisheries target mostly adults. A life cycle approach was used to quantify the relative influence of these stressors on the Eastern English Channel (EEC) population of the common sole (Solea solea), a coastal-nursery-dependent flatfish population which sustains important fisheries. The common sole has a complex life cycle: after eggs hatch, larvae spend several weeks drifting in open water. Survivors go on to metamorphose into benthic fish. Juveniles spend the first two years of their life in coastal and estuarine nurseries. Close to maturation, they migrate to deeper areas, where different subpopulations supplied by different nurseries reproduce and are exploited by fisheries. A spatially structured age-and stage-based hierarchical Bayesian model integrating various aspects of ecological knowledge, data sources and expert knowledge was built to quantitatively describe this complex life cycle. The model included the low connectivity among three subpopulations in the EEC, the influence of hydrographic variability, the availability of suitable juvenile habitat and fisheries. Scenarios were designed to quantify the effects of interacting stressors on population renewal. Results emphasized the importance of coastal nursery habitat availability and quality for the population renewal. Realistic restoration scenarios of the highly degraded Seine estuary produced a two-third increase in catch potential for the adjacent subpopulation. Fisheries, however, remained the main source of population depletion. Setting fishing mortality to the maximum sustainable yield led to substantial increases in biomass (+100%) and catch (+33%) at the EEC scale. The approach also showed how

Collaborative real-time motion video analysis by human observer and image exploitation algorithms

Science.gov (United States)

Hild, Jutta; Krüger, Wolfgang; Brüstle, Stefan; Trantelle, Patrick; Unmüßig, Gabriel; Heinze, Norbert; Peinsipp-Byma, Elisabeth; Beyerer, Jürgen

2015-05-01

Motion video analysis is a challenging task, especially in real-time applications. In most safety and security critical applications, a human observer is an obligatory part of the overall analysis system. Over the last years, substantial progress has been made in the development of automated image exploitation algorithms. Hence, we investigate how the benefits of automated video analysis can be integrated suitably into the current video exploitation systems. In this paper, a system design is introduced which strives to combine both the qualities of the human observer's perception and the automated algorithms, thus aiming to improve the overall performance of a real-time video analysis system. The system design builds on prior work where we showed the benefits for the human observer by means of a user interface which utilizes the human visual focus of attention revealed by the eye gaze direction for interaction with the image exploitation system; eye tracker-based interaction allows much faster, more convenient, and equally precise moving target acquisition in video images than traditional computer mouse selection. The system design also builds on prior work we did on automated target detection, segmentation, and tracking algorithms. Beside the system design, a first pilot study is presented, where we investigated how the participants (all non-experts in video analysis) performed in initializing an object tracking subsystem by selecting a target for tracking. Preliminary results show that the gaze + key press technique is an effective, efficient, and easy to use interaction technique when performing selection operations on moving targets in videos in order to initialize an object tracking function.

Thermal Property Engineering: Exploiting the Properties of Ceramic Nanocomposites

Science.gov (United States)

2018-03-01

ARL-TR-8308 ● MAR 2018 US Army Research Laboratory Thermal Property Engineering : Exploiting the Properties of Ceramic...return it to the originator. ARL-TR-8308 ● MAR 2018 US Army Research Laboratory Thermal Property Engineering : Exploiting the...2015 – Dec 31 2017 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Thermal Property Engineering : Exploiting the Properties of Ceramic Nanocomposites 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER 5b

Balancing Information Analysis and Decision Value: A Model to Exploit the Decision Process

Science.gov (United States)

2011-12-01

technical intelli- gence e.g. signals and sensors (SIGINT and MASINT), imagery (!MINT), as well and human and open source intelligence (HUMINT and OSINT ...Clark 2006). The ability to capture large amounts of da- ta and the plenitude of modem intelligence information sources provides a rich cache of...many tech- niques for managing information collected and derived from these sources , the exploitation of intelligence assets for decision-making

Rethinking exploitation: a process-centered account.

Science.gov (United States)

Jansen, Lynn A; Wall, Steven

2013-12-01

Exploitation has become an important topic in recent discussions of biomedical and research ethics. This is due in no small measure to the influence of Alan Wertheimer's path-breaking work on the subject. This paper presents some objections to Wertheimer's account of the concept. The objections attempt to show that his account places too much emphasis on outcome-based considerations and too little on process-based considerations. Building on these objections, the paper develops an alternative process-centered account of the concept. This alternative account of exploitation takes as its point of departure the broadly Kantian notion that it is wrong to use another as an instrument for the advancement of one's own ends. It sharpens this slippery notion and adds a number of refinements to it. The paper concludes by arguing that process-centered accounts of exploitation better illuminate the ethical challenges posed by research on human subjects than outcome-centered accounts.

Dissipative environment may improve the quantum annealing performances of the ferromagnetic p -spin model

Science.gov (United States)

Passarelli, G.; De Filippis, G.; Cataudella, V.; Lucignano, P.

2018-02-01

We investigate the quantum annealing of the ferromagnetic p -spin model in a dissipative environment (p =5 and p =7 ). This model, in the large-p limit, codifies Grover's algorithm for searching in an unsorted database [L. K. Grover, Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (ACM, New York, 1996), pp. 212-219]. The dissipative environment is described by a phonon bath in thermal equilibrium at finite temperature. The dynamics is studied in the framework of a Lindblad master equation for the reduced density matrix describing only the spins. Exploiting the symmetries of our model Hamiltonian, we can describe many spins and extrapolate expected trends for large N and p . While at weak system-bath coupling the dissipative environment has detrimental effects on the annealing results, we show that in the intermediate-coupling regime, the phonon bath seems to speed up the annealing at low temperatures. This improvement in the performance is likely not due to thermal fluctuation but rather arises from a correlated spin-bath state and persists even at zero temperature. This result may pave the way to a new scenario in which, by appropriately engineering the system-bath coupling, one may optimize quantum annealing performances below either the purely quantum or the classical limit.

Estimating fish exploitation and aquatic habitat loss across diffuse inland recreational fisheries.

Science.gov (United States)

de Kerckhove, Derrick Tupper; Minns, Charles Kenneth; Chu, Cindy

2015-01-01

The current state of many freshwater fish stocks worldwide is largely unknown but suspected to be vulnerable to exploitation from recreational fisheries and habitat degradation. Both these factors, combined with complex ecological dynamics and the diffuse nature of inland fisheries could lead to an invisible collapse: the drastic decline in fish stocks without great public or management awareness. In this study we provide a method to address the pervasive knowledge gaps in regional rates of exploitation and habitat degradation, and demonstrate its use in one of North America's largest and most diffuse recreational freshwater fisheries (Ontario, Canada). We estimated that (1) fish stocks were highly exploited and in apparent danger of collapse in management zones close to large population centres, and (2) fish habitat was under a low but constant threat of degradation at rates comparable to deforestation in Ontario and throughout Canada. These findings confirm some commonly held, but difficult to quantify, beliefs in inland fisheries management but also provide some further insights including (1) large anthropogenic projects greater than one hectare could contribute much more to fish habitat loss on an area basis than the cumulative effect of smaller projects within one year, (2) hooking mortality from catch-and-release fisheries is likely a greater source of mortality than the harvest itself, and (3) in most northern management zones over 50% of the fisheries resources are not yet accessible to anglers. While this model primarily provides a framework to prioritize management decisions and further targeted stock assessments, we note that our regional estimates of fisheries productivity and exploitation were similar to broadscale monitoring efforts by the Province of Ontario. We discuss the policy implications from our results and extending the model to other jurisdictions and countries.

Exploitation of the Fourier chopper in neutron diffractometry at pulsed sources

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hiismaeki, P.; Poeyry, H.; Tiitta, A.

1988-01-01

The application of the Fourier chopper in the reverse time-of-flight mode to upgrading the performance of neutron powder diffractometry at pulsed sources is considered. Exploitation of a dual-delay-line binary correlator is suggested and a comprehensive analysis of the necessary data acquisition process is given. The best benefit is shown to be achievable at intensity optimized moderators. (orig.)

Can High-Performance Equipment Lead to a Low-Performance Building?

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Jonlin, Duane; Thornton, Brian A.; Rosenberg, Michael I.

2016-08-22

The performance-based compliance alternative available in most energy codes, intended to provide energy efficiency equivalent to that of prescriptive compliance while allowing innovation and design flexibility, can instead result in sub-standard energy performance in both the short and the long term. The potential deficiencies in modeled buildings originate with subtleties in the energy modeling rules, allowing building systems that consume more energy than their real-world, prescriptively-designed counterparts. This performance gap is exacerbated over subsequent decades as less efficient permanent features of the building remain while elements with shorter lives are regularly upgraded in most buildings. This paper summarizes an investigation into the topic for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the City of Seattle, including identification of the principal deficiencies exploited in the modeling path, and several potential code amendments that could resolve these deficiencies and establish better equivalency between prescriptive and performance compliance paths. The study, focusing on Seattle and Washington State energy codes, offers lessons and implications for other jurisdictions and energy codes.

Causation and Effectuation Processes: Opportunity Discovery and Exploitation Logics of Habitual Entrepreneurs

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Müller, Sabine

2010-01-01

This study investigates how habitual entrepreneurs (i.e. serial and portfolio entrepreneurs) discover and exploit opportunities, deal with risk and uncertainty, predict or control the future, and plan their businesses based on a causation and effectuation perspective. This study thereby uncovered...... the causation and effectuation logics applied by habitual entrepreneurs with regard to four dimensions of the venture creation: View of the future (VF), Opportunity Discovery (OD), Opportunity Exploitation (OE), and Dealing with Risk (DR). Six habitual entrepreneurs, who had to meet three strictly defined...... criteria, where sampled and case studies performed. The findings clearly indicate that habitual entrepreneurs mainly apply an effectual logic with regards to the four dimensions examined. Some of the more inexperienced habitual entrepreneurs tend to apply both logics, but almost exclusively become...

The Theory of Exploitation as the Unequal Exchange of Labour

OpenAIRE

Veneziani, Roberto; Yoshihara, Naoki

2016-01-01

This paper analyses the normative and positive foundations of the theory of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour (UEL). The key intuitions behind all of the main approaches to UEL exploitation are explicitly analysed as a series of formal claims in a general economic environment. It is then argued that these intuitions can be captured by one fundamental axiom - called Labour Exploitation - which defines the basic domain of all UEL exploitation forms and identifies the formal and the...

The theory of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour

OpenAIRE

Veneziani, Roberto; Yoshihara, Naoki

2017-01-01

This paper analyses the normative and positive foundations of the theory of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour (UEL). The key intuitions behind all of the main approaches to UEL exploitation are explicitly analysed as a series of formal claims in a general economic environment. It is then argued that these intuitions can be captured by one fundamental axiom - called Labour Exploitation - which defines the basic domain of all UEL exploitation forms and identifies the formal and the...

Fishery Development and Exploitation in South East Australia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Camilla Novaglio

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Understanding the full extent of past ecological changes in human-influenced marine systems is needed to inform present management policies, but is often hampered by the scarcity of information about exploitation practices and population status over the entire history of fishing. The history of commercial fishing in South East Australia is relatively recent and thus easier to document. Our aim is to reconstruct such history and to use this information to understand general patterns and consequences of fishing exploitation. Intense exploitation of marine resources arrived in South East Australia with European colonization in the early 1800s, and unregulated sealing, whaling and oyster dredging resulted in the first documented significant impact on local marine populations. Exploitation extended to demersal resources in 1915 when the trawl fishery developed. Between the early 1800s and the 1980s, some of the exploited stocks collapsed, but fishing moved further offshore and in deeper waters as technology improved and new resources became available or were discovered. This phase of fisheries expansion masked the unsustainable nature of some fishing industries, such as trawling and whaling, and postponed the need for management regulations. From the 1990s onward, an increasing awareness of the depleted nature of some fisheries led to the establishment of management strategies aiming at a more sustainable exploitation of target stocks and, from the mid-2000s onwards, management strategies were revised and improved to better address the effect of fishing on multiple components of marine ecosystems. This led to the recovery of some depleted populations and to increased habitat protection. The relatively short history of fishing exploitation and the small scale of the fishing industry in South East Australia played a significant role in limiting the magnitude of fishing impacts on local populations and helped to achieve recoveries when fisheries

EXPLOITATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF RESERVOIR PERFORMANCE IN HUNTON FORMATION, OKLAHOMA

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Mohan Kelkar

2002-03-31

The West Carney Field in Lincoln County, Oklahoma is one of few newly discovered oil fields in Oklahoma. Although profitable, the field exhibits several unusual characteristics. These include decreasing water-oil ratios, decreasing gas-oil ratios, decreasing bottomhole pressures during shut-ins in some wells, and transient behavior for water production in many wells. This report explains the unusual characteristics of West Carney Field based on detailed geological and engineering analyses. We propose a geological history that explains the presence of mobile water and oil in the reservoir. The combination of matrix and fractures in the reservoir explains the reservoir's flow behavior. We confirm our hypothesis by matching observed performance with a simulated model and develop procedures for correlating core data to log data so that the analysis can be extended to other, similar fields where the core coverage may be limited.

From Exploitation to Industry: Definitions, Risks, and Consequences of Domestic Sexual Exploitation and Sex Work Among Women and Girls.

Science.gov (United States)

Gerassi, Lara

In the last 15 years, terms such as prostitution, sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, modern-day slavery, and sex work have elicited much confusion and debate as to their definitions. Consequently several challenges have emerged for both law enforcement in the prosecution of criminals and practitioners in service provision. This article reviews the state of the literature with regard to domestic, sexual exploitation among women and girls in the United States and seeks to (1) provide definitions and describe the complexity of all terms relating to domestic sexual exploitation of women and girls in the United States, (2) explore available national prevalence data according to the definitions provided, and (3) review the evidence of mental health, social, and structural risk factors at the micro-, mezzo-, and macrolevels.

Global Delivery Models

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Manning, Stephan; Larsen, Marcus M.; Bharati, Pratyush

2013-01-01

This article examines antecedents and performance implications of global delivery models (GDMs) in global business services. GDMs require geographically distributed operations to exploit both proximity to clients and time-zone spread for efficient service delivery. We propose and empirically show...

The ESA Geohazard Exploitation Platform

Science.gov (United States)

Bally, Philippe; Laur, Henri; Mathieu, Pierre-Philippe; Pinto, Salvatore

2015-04-01

Earthquakes represent one of the world's most significant hazards in terms both of loss of life and damages. In the first decade of the 21st century, earthquakes accounted for 60 percent of fatalities from natural disasters, according to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). To support mitigation activities designed to assess and reduce risks and improve response in emergency situations, satellite EO can be used to provide a broad range of geo-information services. This includes for instance crustal block boundary mapping to better characterize active faults, strain rate mapping to assess how rapidly faults are deforming, soil vulnerability mapping to help estimate how the soil is behaving in reaction to seismic phenomena, geo-information to assess the extent and intensity of the earthquake impact on man-made structures and formulate assumptions on the evolution of the seismic sequence, i.e. where local aftershocks or future main shocks (on nearby faults) are most likely to occur. In May 2012, the European Space Agency and the GEO Secretariat convened the International Forum on Satellite EO for Geohazards now known as the Santorini Conference. The event was the continuation of a series of international workshops such as those organized by the Geohazards Theme of the Integrated Global Observing Strategy Partnership. In Santorini the seismic community has set out a vision of the EO contribution to an operational global seismic risk program, which lead to the Geohazard Supersites and Natural Laboratories (GSNL) initiative. The initial contribution of ESA to suuport the GSNL was the first Supersites Exploitation Platform (SSEP) system in the framework of Grid Processing On Demand (GPOD), now followed by the Geohazard Exploitation Platform (GEP). In this presentation, we will describe the contribution of the GEP for exploiting satellite EO for geohazard risk assessment. It is supporting the GEO Supersites and has been further

2D Modelling of the Gorkha earthquake through the joint exploitation of Sentinel 1-A DInSAR measurements and geological, structural and seismological information

Science.gov (United States)

De Novellis, Vincenzo; Castaldo, Raffaele; Solaro, Giuseppe; De Luca, Claudio; Pepe, Susi; Bonano, Manuela; Casu, Francesco; Zinno, Ivana; Manunta, Michele; Lanari, Riccardo; Tizzani, Pietro

2016-04-01

A Mw 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal on 25 April 2015 at 06:11:26 UTC, killing more than 9,000 people, injuring more than 23,000 and producing extensive damages. The main seismic event, known as the Gorkha earthquake, had its epicenter localized at ~82 km NW of the Kathmandu city and the hypocenter at a depth of approximately 15 km. After the main shock event, about 100 aftershocks occurred during the following months, propagating toward the south-east direction; in particular, the most energetic shocks were the Mw 6.7 and Mw 7.3 occurred on 26 April and 12 May, respectively. In this study, we model the causative fault of the earthquake by jointly exploiting surface deformation retrieved by the DInSAR measurements collected through the Sentinel 1-A (S1A) space-borne sensor and the available geological, structural and seismological information. We first exploit the analytical solution performing a back-analysis of the ground deformation detected by the first co-seismic S1A interferogram, computed by exploiting the 17/04/2015 and 29/04/2015 SAR acquisitions and encompassing the main earthquake and some aftershocks, to search for the location and geometry of the fault plane. Starting from these findings and by benefiting from the available geological, structural and seismological data, we carry out a Finite Element (FE)-based 2D modelling of the causative fault, in order to evaluate the impact of the geological structures activated during the seismic event on the distribution of the ground deformation field. The obtained results show that the causative fault has a rather complex compressive structure, dipping northward, formed by segments with different dip angles: 6° the deep segment and 60° the shallower one. Therefore, although the hypocenters of the main shock and most of the more energetic aftershocks are located along the deeper plane, corresponding to a segment of the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT), the FE solution also indicates the contribution of the shallower

EXPLOITATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF RESERVOIR PERFORMANCE IN HUNTON FORMATION, OKLAHOMA

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Mohan Kelkar

2005-02-01

Hunton formation in Oklahoma has displayed some unique production characteristics. These include high initial water-oil and gas-oil ratios, decline in those ratios over time and temporary increase in gas-oil ratio during pressure build up. The formation also displays highly complex geology, but surprising hydrodynamic continuity. This report addresses three key issues related specifically to West Carney Hunton field and, in general, to any other Hunton formation exhibiting similar behavior: (1) What is the primary mechanism by which oil and gas is produced from the field? (2) How can the knowledge gained from studying the existing fields can be extended to other fields which have the potential to produce? (3) What can be done to improve the performance of this reservoir? We have developed a comprehensive model to explain the behavior of the reservoir. By using available production, geological, core and log data, we are able to develop a reservoir model which explains the production behavior in the reservoir. Using easily available information, such as log data, we have established the parameters needed for a field to be economically successful. We provide guidelines in terms of what to look for in a new field and how to develop it. Finally, through laboratory experiments, we show that surfactants can be used to improve the hydrocarbons recovery from the field. In addition, injection of CO{sub 2} or natural gas also will help us recover additional oil from the field.

FSH: fast spaced seed hashing exploiting adjacent hashes.

Science.gov (United States)

Girotto, Samuele; Comin, Matteo; Pizzi, Cinzia

2018-01-01

Patterns with wildcards in specified positions, namely spaced seeds , are increasingly used instead of k -mers in many bioinformatics applications that require indexing, querying and rapid similarity search, as they can provide better sensitivity. Many of these applications require to compute the hashing of each position in the input sequences with respect to the given spaced seed, or to multiple spaced seeds. While the hashing of k -mers can be rapidly computed by exploiting the large overlap between consecutive k -mers, spaced seeds hashing is usually computed from scratch for each position in the input sequence, thus resulting in slower processing. The method proposed in this paper, fast spaced-seed hashing (FSH), exploits the similarity of the hash values of spaced seeds computed at adjacent positions in the input sequence. In our experiments we compute the hash for each positions of metagenomics reads from several datasets, with respect to different spaced seeds. We also propose a generalized version of the algorithm for the simultaneous computation of multiple spaced seeds hashing. In the experiments, our algorithm can compute the hashing values of spaced seeds with a speedup, with respect to the traditional approach, between 1.6[Formula: see text] to 5.3[Formula: see text], depending on the structure of the spaced seed. Spaced seed hashing is a routine task for several bioinformatics application. FSH allows to perform this task efficiently and raise the question of whether other hashing can be exploited to further improve the speed up. This has the potential of major impact in the field, making spaced seed applications not only accurate, but also faster and more efficient. The software FSH is freely available for academic use at: https://bitbucket.org/samu661/fsh/overview.

Research of ios operating system security and the abuse of its exploits

OpenAIRE

Jucius, Mindaugas

2017-01-01

iOS operating system, which is developed by Apple Inc., is claimed to be the most secure product in the market. In the light of worsening human rights conditions, mainly concerning data privacy breaches performed on governmental level, the need to be reassured about the security of software that runs in our pockets is strengthened. This thesis is focused on researching on potential iOS security exploits and their abuse to access private information or perform malicious actions without user’s ...

From Exploitation to Industry: Definitions, Risks, and Consequences of Domestic Sexual Exploitation and Sex Work Among Women and Girls

Science.gov (United States)

Gerassi, Lara

2015-01-01

In the last 15 years, terms such as prostitution, sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, modern-day slavery, and sex work have elicited much confusion and debate as to their definitions. Consequently several challenges have emerged for both law enforcement in the prosecution of criminals and practitioners in service provision. This article reviews the state of the literature with regard to domestic, sexual exploitation among women and girls in the United States and seeks to (1) provide definitions and describe the complexity of all terms relating to domestic sexual exploitation of women and girls in the United States, (2) explore available national prevalence data according to the definitions provided, and (3) review the evidence of mental health, social, and structural risk factors at the micro-, mezzo-, and macrolevels. PMID:26726289

Empirical Analysis of Exploiting Review Helpfulness for Extractive Summarization of Online Reviews

Science.gov (United States)

Xiong, Wenting; Litman, Diane

2014-01-01

We propose a novel unsupervised extractive approach for summarizing online reviews by exploiting review helpfulness ratings. In addition to using the helpfulness ratings for review-level filtering, we suggest using them as the supervision of a topic model for sentence-level content scoring. The proposed method is metadata-driven, requiring no…

Early Sexual Exploitation as an Influence in Prostitution.

Science.gov (United States)

Silbert, Mimi H.; Pines, Ayala M.

1983-01-01

Surveyed 200 female street prostitutes to determine whether they were sexually exploited during childhood. Results showed 60 percent of the subjects were sexually exploited. The few girls who discussed their abuse with others were met with shame and most often inaction. Only 10 percent were abused by strangers. (JAC)

Protocol to Exploit Waiting Resources for UASNs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Li-Ling Hung

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The transmission speed of acoustic waves in water is much slower than that of radio waves in terrestrial wireless sensor networks. Thus, the propagation delay in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASN is much greater. Longer propagation delay leads to complicated communication and collision problems. To solve collision problems, some studies have proposed waiting mechanisms; however, long waiting mechanisms result in low bandwidth utilization. To improve throughput, this study proposes a slotted medium access control protocol to enhance bandwidth utilization in UASNs. The proposed mechanism increases communication by exploiting temporal and spatial resources that are typically idle in order to protect communication against interference. By reducing wait time, network performance and energy consumption can be improved. A performance evaluation demonstrates that when the data packets are large or sensor deployment is dense, the energy consumption of proposed protocol is less than that of existing protocols as well as the throughput is higher than that of existing protocols.

Dissemination and Exploitation: Project Goals beyond Science

Science.gov (United States)

Hamann, Kristin; Reitz, Anja

2017-04-01

Dissemination and Exploitation are essential parts of public funded projects. In Horizon 2020 a plan for the exploitation and dissemination of results (PEDR) is a requirement. The plan should contain a clear vision on the objectives of the project in relation to actions for dissemination and potential exploitation of the project results. The actions follow the basic idea to spread the knowledge and results gathered within the project and face the challenge of how to bring the results into potentially relevant policy circle and how they impact the market. The plan follows the purpose to assess the impact of the project and to address various target groups who are interested in the project results. Simply put, dissemination concentrates on the transfer of knowledge and exploitation on the commercialization of the project. Beyond the question of the measurability of project`s impact, strategies within science marketing can serve purposes beyond internal and external communication. Accordingly, project managers are facing the challenge to implement a dissemination and exploitation strategy that ideally supports the identification of all partners with the project and matches the current discourse of the project`s content within the society, politics and economy. A consolidated plan might unite all projects partners under a central idea and supports the identification with the project beyond the individual research questions. Which applications, strategies and methods can be used to bring forward a PEDR that accompanies a project successfully and allows a comprehensive assessment of the project afterwards? Which hurdles might project managers experience in the dissemination process and which tasks should be fulfilled by the project manager?

Up-Rating - An Alternative Approach to Meeting Future Power Demands - Exploitation of Design Margins

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bruce, Barnaby; Schwarz, Thomas [AREVA NP GmbH, Freyeslebenstr. 1, 91058 Erlangen (Germany)

2008-07-01

Up-rating is a world-wide implemented approach that takes advantage of increased calculation and analytic abilities developed since commissioning and applies them to old plants. In doing so, what would possibly be considered today as over-engineered design margins are exploited and plant performance is improved, without necessarily involving extensive modifications or replacement of hardware. It is therefore a short-term alternative, compared to new plants, with little change in environmental ramifications for power production capacity gained. Up-rating is also more accepted by the wider community and licensing authorities, thus complimenting the building of new plants. The 10% thermal up-rating of the nuclear power plant at Almaraz, Spain, requires a comprehensive reanalysis of all power components. This paper focuses on those measures required to ensure the performance of the steam generators at increased load as an example of design margin exploitation in such crucial components. (authors)

Generating Billion-Edge Scale-Free Networks in Seconds: Performance Study of a Novel GPU-based Preferential Attachment Model

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Perumalla, Kalyan S. [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Alam, Maksudul [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

2017-10-01

A novel parallel algorithm is presented for generating random scale-free networks using the preferential-attachment model. The algorithm, named cuPPA, is custom-designed for single instruction multiple data (SIMD) style of parallel processing supported by modern processors such as graphical processing units (GPUs). To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to exploit GPUs, and also the fastest implementation available today, to generate scale free networks using the preferential attachment model. A detailed performance study is presented to understand the scalability and runtime characteristics of the cuPPA algorithm. In one of the best cases, when executed on an NVidia GeForce 1080 GPU, cuPPA generates a scale free network of a billion edges in less than 2 seconds.

Optimizing Search and Ranking in Folksonomy Systems by Exploiting Context Information

Science.gov (United States)

Abel, Fabian; Henze, Nicola; Krause, Daniel

Tagging systems enable users to annotate resources with freely chosen keywords. The evolving bunch of tag assignments is called folksonomy and there exist already some approaches that exploit folksonomies to improve resource retrieval. In this paper, we analyze and compare graph-based ranking algorithms: FolkRank and SocialPageRank. We enhance these algorithms by exploiting the context of tags, and evaluate the results on the GroupMe! dataset. In GroupMe!, users can organize and maintain arbitrary Web resources in self-defined groups. When users annotate resources in GroupMe!, this can be interpreted in context of a certain group. The grouping activity itself is easy for users to perform. However, it delivers valuable semantic information about resources and their context. We present GRank that uses the context information to improve and optimize the detection of relevant search results, and compare different strategies for ranking result lists in folksonomy systems.

Viability study of cold generation from biomass in an agrarian exploitation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Ganan Gomez, J.; Gonzalez, J.F.; Roman, S. [Departamento Ingenieria Quimica y Energetica, E II, Universidad de Extremadura, Avda, Elvas s/n, 06071 Badajoz (Spain); Miranda, A. [Departamento Eng, Electromecanica, Universidade da Beira Interior, 6201-001 Covilha (Portugal); Turegano, J.P. [Esc. Sup. de Tecnologia e Gestao, Instituto Politecnico de Portalegre, 7300 Portalegre (Portugal)

2006-01-15

In this work the performance of a cold production plant using biomass residuals from an agrarian exploitation as the primary energy source is analyzed. These residuals are generated in the pruning and renovation of fruit trees and are used in a boiler to convey heat to an absorption refrigeration engine. At first the study carries out the characterization and quantification of the energy produced by the residuals. Furthermore, it ponders on the viability analysis of converting that energy in cold by means of an absorption machine. The estimated thermal power sourced from the biomass generated in the exploitation (approx. 4216 ton) is of approximately 56.92x10{sup 6} MJ/year. This energy was shown to be greater than that required to keep the fruits at a suitable low temperature, thus obviating the use of conventional refrigeration and avoiding their associated high energy consumption. (author)

CubiCal - Fast radio interferometric calibration suite exploiting complex optimisation

Science.gov (United States)

Kenyon, J. S.; Smirnov, O. M.; Grobler, T. L.; Perkins, S. J.

2018-05-01

It has recently been shown that radio interferometric gain calibration can be expressed succinctly in the language of complex optimisation. In addition to providing an elegant framework for further development, it exposes properties of the calibration problem which can be exploited to accelerate traditional non-linear least squares solvers such as Gauss-Newton and Levenberg-Marquardt. We extend existing derivations to chains of Jones terms: products of several gains which model different aberrant effects. In doing so, we find that the useful properties found in the single term case still hold. We also develop several specialised solvers which deal with complex gains parameterised by real values. The newly developed solvers have been implemented in a Python package called CubiCal, which uses a combination of Cython, multiprocessing and shared memory to leverage the power of modern hardware. We apply CubiCal to both simulated and real data, and perform both direction-independent and direction-dependent self-calibration. Finally, we present the results of some rudimentary profiling to show that CubiCal is competitive with respect to existing calibration tools such as MeqTrees.

Algorithms and Methods for High-Performance Model Predictive Control

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Frison, Gianluca

routines employed in the numerical tests. The main focus of this thesis is on linear MPC problems. In this thesis, both the algorithms and their implementation are equally important. About the implementation, a novel implementation strategy for the dense linear algebra routines in embedded optimization...... is proposed, aiming at improving the computational performance in case of small matrices. About the algorithms, they are built on top of the proposed linear algebra, and they are tailored to exploit the high-level structure of the MPC problems, with special care on reducing the computational complexity....

OFDM Radar Space-Time Adaptive Processing by Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Sparsity

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sen, Satyabrata [ORNL

2013-01-01

We propose a sparsity-based space-time adaptive processing (STAP) algorithm to detect a slowly-moving target using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) radar. We observe that the target and interference spectra are inherently sparse in the spatio-temporal domain. Hence, we exploit that sparsity to develop an efficient STAP technique that utilizes considerably lesser number of secondary data and produces an equivalent performance as the other existing STAP techniques. In addition, the use of an OFDM signal increases the frequency diversity of our system, as different scattering centers of a target resonate at different frequencies, and thus improves the target detectability. First, we formulate a realistic sparse-measurement model for an OFDM radar considering both the clutter and jammer as the interfering sources. Then, we apply a residual sparse-recovery technique based on the LASSO estimator to estimate the target and interference covariance matrices, and subsequently compute the optimal STAP-filter weights. Our numerical results demonstrate a comparative performance analysis of the proposed sparse-STAP algorithm with four other existing STAP methods. Furthermore, we discover that the OFDM-STAP filter-weights are adaptable to the frequency-variabilities of the target and interference responses, in addition to the spatio-temporal variabilities. Hence, by better utilizing the frequency variabilities, we propose an adaptive OFDM-waveform design technique, and consequently gain a significant amount of STAP-performance improvement.

Synergy in spreading processes: from exploitative to explorative foraging strategies.

Science.gov (United States)

Pérez-Reche, Francisco J; Ludlam, Jonathan J; Taraskin, Sergei N; Gilligan, Christopher A

2011-05-27

An epidemiological model which incorporates synergistic effects that allow the infectivity and/or susceptibility of hosts to be dependent on the number of infected neighbors is proposed. Constructive synergy induces an exploitative behavior which results in a rapid invasion that infects a large number of hosts. Interfering synergy leads to a slower and sparser explorative foraging strategy that traverses larger distances by infecting fewer hosts. The model can be mapped to a dynamical bond percolation with spatial correlations that affect the mechanism of spread but do not influence the critical behavior of epidemics. © 2011 American Physical Society

Exploiting for medical and biological applications

Science.gov (United States)

Giano, Michael C.

Biotherapeutics are an emerging class of drug composed of molecules ranging in sizes from peptides to large proteins. Due to their poor stability and mucosal membrane permeability, biotherapeutics are administered by a parenteral method (i.e., syringe, intravenous or intramuscular). Therapeutics delivered systemically often experience short half-lives. While, local administration may involve invasive surgical procedures and suffer from poor retention at the site of application. To compensate, the patient receives frequent doses of highly concentrated therapeutic. Unfortunately, the off-target side effects and discomfort associated with multiple injections results in poor patient compliance. Therefore, new delivery methods which can improve therapeutic retention, reduce the frequency of administration and may aid in decreasing the off-target side effects is a necessity. Hydrogels are a class of biomaterials that are gaining interests for tissue engineering and drug delivery applications. Hydrogel materials are defined as porous, 3-dimensional networks that are primarily composed of water. Generally, they are mechanically rigid, cytocompatible and easily chemically functionalized. Collectively, these properties make hydrogels fantastic candidates to perform as drug delivery depots. Current hydrogel delivery systems physically entrap the target therapeutic which is then subsequently released over time at the site of administration. The swelling and degradation of the material effect the diffusion of the therapy from the hydrogel, and therefore should be controlled. Although these strategies provide some regulation over therapeutic release, full control of the delivery is not achieved. Newer approaches are focused on designing hydrogels that exploit known interactions, covalently attach the therapy or respond to an external stimulus in an effort to gain improved control over the therapy's release. Unfortunately, the biotherapeutic is typically required to be chemically

Exploitation program of ''Adamow'' quarry up to 2015

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hadlaw, A.

1994-01-01

The brown coal deposits exploited by the quarry ''Adamow'' located in Central Poland are shortly described and the prognosis of their exploitation up to 2015 is given. The basis data on the perspective deposits in the quarry's area are also presented. All deposits are shown on the map. 3 ills, 2 tabs

A kind of balance between exploitation and exploration on kriging for global optimization of expensive functions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dong, Huachao; Song, Baowei; Wang, Peng; Huang, Shuai

2015-01-01

In this paper, a novel kriging-based algorithm for global optimization of computationally expensive black-box functions is presented. This algorithm utilizes a multi-start approach to find all of the local optimal values of the surrogate model and performs searches within the neighboring area around these local optimal positions. Compared with traditional surrogate-based global optimization method, this algorithm provides another kind of balance between exploitation and exploration on kriging-based model. In addition, a new search strategy is proposed and coupled into this optimization process. The local search strategy employs a kind of improved 'Minimizing the predictor' method, which dynamically adjusts search direction and radius until finds the optimal value. Furthermore, the global search strategy utilizes the advantage of kriging-based model in predicting unexplored regions to guarantee the reliability of the algorithm. Finally, experiments on 13 test functions with six algorithms are set up and the results show that the proposed algorithm is very promising.

Exploiting CMS data popularity to model the evolution of data management for Run-2 and beyond

CERN Document Server

Bonacorsi, D; Giordano, D; Girone, M; Neri, M; Magini, N; Kuznetsov, V; Wildish, T

2015-01-01

During the LHC Run-1 data taking, all experiments collected large data volumes from proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. The collisions data, together with massive volumes of simulated data, were replicated in multiple copies, transferred among various Tier levels, transformed/slimmed in format/content. These data were then accessed (both locally and remotely) by large groups of distributed analysis communities exploiting the WorldWide LHC Computing Grid infrastructure and services. While efficient data placement strategies - together with optimal data redistribution and deletions on demand - have become the core of static versus dynamic data management projects, little effort has so far been invested in understanding the detailed data-access patterns which surfaced in Run-1. These patterns, if understood, can be used as input to simulation of computing models at the LHC, to optimise existing systems by tuning their behaviour, and to explore next-generation CPU/storage/network co-scheduling solutions. This...

zero day exploits and national readiness for cyber-warfare

African Journals Online (AJOL)

HOD

A zero day vulnerability is an unknown exploit that divulges security flaws in software before such a flaw is publicly ... Keywords: exploits, zero day, vulnerability, cyberspace, cyber-warfare. 1. ..... industries and companies across the globe. The.

Proba-V Mission Exploitation Platform

Science.gov (United States)

Goor, E.

2017-12-01

VITO and partners developed the Proba-V Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP) as an end-to-end solution to drastically improve the exploitation of the Proba-V (an EC Copernicus contributing mission) EO-data archive, the past mission SPOT-VEGETATION and derived vegetation parameters by researchers, service providers (e.g. the EC Copernicus Global Land Service) and end-users. The analysis of time series of data (PB range) is addressed, as well as the large scale on-demand processing of near real-time data on a powerful and scalable processing environment. New features are still developed, but the platform is yet fully operational since November 2016 and offers A time series viewer (browser web client and API), showing the evolution of Proba-V bands and derived vegetation parameters for any country, region, pixel or polygon defined by the user. Full-resolution viewing services for the complete data archive. On-demand processing chains on a powerfull Hadoop/Spark backend. Virtual Machines can be requested by users with access to the complete data archive mentioned above and pre-configured tools to work with this data, e.g. various toolboxes and support for R and Python. This allows users to immediately work with the data without having to install tools or download data, but as well to design, debug and test applications on the platform. Jupyter Notebooks is available with some examples python and R projects worked out to show the potential of the data. Today the platform is already used by several international third party projects to perform R&D activities on the data, and to develop/host data analysis toolboxes. From the Proba-V MEP, access to other data sources such as Sentinel-2 and landsat data is also addressed. Selected components of the MEP are also deployed on public cloud infrastructures in various R&D projects. Users can make use of powerful Web based tools and can self-manage virtual machines to perform their work on the infrastructure at VITO with access to

Coastal Thematic Exploitation Platform (C-TEP): An innovative and collaborative platform to facilitate Big Data coastal research

Science.gov (United States)

Tuohy, Eimear; Clerc, Sebastien; Politi, Eirini; Mangin, Antoine; Datcu, Mihai; Vignudelli, Stefano; Illuzzi, Diomede; Craciunescu, Vasile; Aspetsberger, Michael

2017-04-01

The Coastal Thematic Exploitation Platform (C-TEP) is an on-going European Space Agency (ESA) funded project to develop a web service dedicated to the observation of the coastal environment and to support coastal management and monitoring. For over 20 years ESA satellites have provided a wealth of environmental data. The availability of an ever increasing volume of environmental data from satellite remote sensing provides a unique opportunity for exploratory science and the development of coastal applications. However, the diversity and complexity of EO data available, the need for efficient data access, information extraction, data management and high spec processing tools pose major challenges to achieving its full potential in terms of Big Data exploitation. C-TEP will provide a new means to handle the technical challenges of the observation of coastal areas and contribute to improved understanding and decision-making with respect to coastal resources and environments. C-TEP will unlock coastal knowledge and innovation as a collaborative, virtual work environment providing access to a comprehensive database of coastal Earth Observation (EO) data, in-situ data, model data and the tools and processors necessary to fully exploit these vast and heterogeneous datasets. The cloud processing capabilities provided, allow users to perform heavy processing tasks through a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). A connection to the PEPS (Plateforme pour l'Exploitation des Produits Sentinel) archive will provide data from Sentinel missions 1, 2 and 3. Automatic comparison tools will be provided to exploit the in-situ datasets in synergy with EO data. In addition, users may develop, test and share their own advanced algorithms for the extraction of coastal information. Algorithm validation will be facilitated by the capabilities to compute statistics over long time-series. Finally, C-TEP subscription services will allow users to perform automatic monitoring of some key

From Exploitation to Industry: Definitions, Risks, and Consequences of Domestic Sexual Exploitation and Sex Work Among Women and Girls

OpenAIRE

Gerassi, Lara

2015-01-01

In the last 15 years, terms such as prostitution, sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, modern-day slavery, and sex work have elicited much confusion and debate as to their definitions. Consequently several challenges have emerged for both law enforcement in the prosecution of criminals and practitioners in service provision. This article reviews the state of the literature with regard to domestic, sexual exploitation among women and girls in the United States and seeks to (1) provide definit...

Exploitation of Microdoppler and Multiple Scattering Phenomena for Radar Target Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

2006-08-24

progress on the reserach grant "Exploitation of MicroDoppler and Multiple Scattering Phenomena for Radar Target Recognition" during the period 1...paper describes a methodology of modeling A number of ray-based EM techniques have been interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IFSAR) images...modes including the single present an IFSAR simulation methodology to simulate the antenna transmit mode, the ping-pong mode or the repeat interferogram

How swifts control their glide performance with morphing wings

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lentink, D.; Muller, U. K.; Stamhuis, E. J.; de Kat, R.; van Gestel, W.; Veldhuis, L. L. M.; Henningsson, P.; Hedenstrom, A.; Videler, J. J.

2007-01-01

Gliding birds continually change the shape and size of their wings(1-6), presumably to exploit the profound effect of wing morphology on aerodynamic performance(7-9). That birds should adjust wing sweep to suit glide speed has been predicted qualitatively by analytical glide models(2,10), which

Aspects économiques de l'exploitation des resources halieutiques ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Aspects économiques de l'exploitation des resources halieutiques des petits barrages du Nord de la Côte d' lvoire : Economic aspects of the exploitation of halieutic resources of petits barrages inland waters in the north of Côte d'lvoire.

Factors Affecting Slot Machine Performance in an Electronic Gaming Machine Facility

OpenAIRE

Etienne Provencal; David L. St-Pierre

2017-01-01

A facility exploiting only electronic gambling machines (EGMs) opened in 2007 in Quebec City, Canada under the name of Salons de Jeux du Québec (SdjQ). This facility is one of the first worldwide to rely on that business model. This paper models the performance of such EGMs. The interest from a managerial point of view is to identify the variables that can be controlled or influenced so that a comprehensive model can help improve the overall performance of the business. The EGM individual per...

Optimization Models for Petroleum Field Exploitation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Jonsbraaten, Tore Wiig

1998-12-31

This thesis presents and discusses various models for optimal development of a petroleum field. The objective of these optimization models is to maximize, under many uncertain parameters, the project`s expected net present value. First, an overview of petroleum field optimization is given from the point of view of operations research. Reservoir equations for a simple reservoir system are derived and discretized and included in optimization models. Linear programming models for optimizing production decisions are discussed and extended to mixed integer programming models where decisions concerning platform, wells and production strategy are optimized. Then, optimal development decisions under uncertain oil prices are discussed. The uncertain oil price is estimated by a finite set of price scenarios with associated probabilities. The problem is one of stochastic mixed integer programming, and the solution approach is to use a scenario and policy aggregation technique developed by Rockafellar and Wets although this technique was developed for continuous variables. Stochastic optimization problems with focus on problems with decision dependent information discoveries are also discussed. A class of ``manageable`` problems is identified and an implicit enumeration algorithm for finding optimal decision policy is proposed. Problems involving uncertain reservoir properties but with a known initial probability distribution over possible reservoir realizations are discussed. Finally, a section on Nash-equilibrium and bargaining in an oil reservoir management game discusses the pool problem arising when two lease owners have access to the same underlying oil reservoir. Because the oil tends to migrate, both lease owners have incentive to drain oil from the competitors part of the reservoir. The discussion is based on a numerical example. 107 refs., 31 figs., 14 tabs.

TH-E-BRF-01: Exploiting Tumor Shrinkage in Split-Course Radiotherapy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Unkelbach, J; Craft, D; Hong, T; Papp, D; Wolfgang, J; Bortfeld, T; Ramakrishnan, J; Salari, E

2014-01-01

Purpose: In split-course radiotherapy, a patient is treated in several stages separated by weeks or months. This regimen has been motivated by radiobiological considerations. However, using modern image-guidance, it also provides an approach to reduce normal tissue dose by exploiting tumor shrinkage. In this work, we consider the optimal design of split-course treatments, motivated by the clinical management of large liver tumors for which normal liver dose constraints prohibit the administration of an ablative radiation dose in a single treatment. Methods: We introduce a dynamic tumor model that incorporates three factors: radiation induced cell kill, tumor shrinkage, and tumor cell repopulation. The design of splitcourse radiotherapy is formulated as a mathematical optimization problem in which the total dose to the liver is minimized, subject to delivering the prescribed dose to the tumor. Based on the model, we gain insight into the optimal administration of radiation over time, i.e. the optimal treatment gaps and dose levels. Results: We analyze treatments consisting of two stages in detail. The analysis confirms the intuition that the second stage should be delivered just before the tumor size reaches a minimum and repopulation overcompensates shrinking. Furthermore, it was found that, for a large range of model parameters, approximately one third of the dose should be delivered in the first stage. The projected benefit of split-course treatments in terms of liver sparing depends on model assumptions. However, the model predicts large liver dose reductions by more than a factor of two for plausible model parameters. Conclusion: The analysis of the tumor model suggests that substantial reduction in normal tissue dose can be achieved by exploiting tumor shrinkage via an optimal design of multi-stage treatments. This suggests taking a fresh look at split-course radiotherapy for selected disease sites where substantial tumor regression translates into reduced

TH-E-BRF-01: Exploiting Tumor Shrinkage in Split-Course Radiotherapy

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Unkelbach, J; Craft, D; Hong, T; Papp, D; Wolfgang, J; Bortfeld, T [Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA (United States); Ramakrishnan, J [University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (United States); Salari, E [Wichita State University, Wichita, KS (United States)

2014-06-15

Purpose: In split-course radiotherapy, a patient is treated in several stages separated by weeks or months. This regimen has been motivated by radiobiological considerations. However, using modern image-guidance, it also provides an approach to reduce normal tissue dose by exploiting tumor shrinkage. In this work, we consider the optimal design of split-course treatments, motivated by the clinical management of large liver tumors for which normal liver dose constraints prohibit the administration of an ablative radiation dose in a single treatment. Methods: We introduce a dynamic tumor model that incorporates three factors: radiation induced cell kill, tumor shrinkage, and tumor cell repopulation. The design of splitcourse radiotherapy is formulated as a mathematical optimization problem in which the total dose to the liver is minimized, subject to delivering the prescribed dose to the tumor. Based on the model, we gain insight into the optimal administration of radiation over time, i.e. the optimal treatment gaps and dose levels. Results: We analyze treatments consisting of two stages in detail. The analysis confirms the intuition that the second stage should be delivered just before the tumor size reaches a minimum and repopulation overcompensates shrinking. Furthermore, it was found that, for a large range of model parameters, approximately one third of the dose should be delivered in the first stage. The projected benefit of split-course treatments in terms of liver sparing depends on model assumptions. However, the model predicts large liver dose reductions by more than a factor of two for plausible model parameters. Conclusion: The analysis of the tumor model suggests that substantial reduction in normal tissue dose can be achieved by exploiting tumor shrinkage via an optimal design of multi-stage treatments. This suggests taking a fresh look at split-course radiotherapy for selected disease sites where substantial tumor regression translates into reduced

NIF capsule performance modeling

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Weber S.

2013-11-01

Full Text Available Post-shot modeling of NIF capsule implosions was performed in order to validate our physical and numerical models. Cryogenic layered target implosions and experiments with surrogate targets produce an abundance of capsule performance data including implosion velocity, remaining ablator mass, times of peak x-ray and neutron emission, core image size, core symmetry, neutron yield, and x-ray spectra. We have attempted to match the integrated data set with capsule-only simulations by adjusting the drive and other physics parameters within expected uncertainties. The simulations include interface roughness, time-dependent symmetry, and a model of mix. We were able to match many of the measured performance parameters for a selection of shots.

Flavins contained in yeast extract are exploited for anodic electron transfer by Lactococcus lactis.

Science.gov (United States)

Masuda, Masaki; Freguia, Stefano; Wang, Yung-Fu; Tsujimura, Seiya; Kano, Kenji

2010-06-01

Cyclic voltammograms of yeast extract-containing medium exhibit a clear redox peak around -0.4V vs. Ag|AgCl. Fermentative bacterium Lactococcus lactis was hereby shown to exploit this redox compound for extracellular electron transfer towards a graphite anode using glucose as an electron donor. High performance liquid chromatography revealed that this may be a flavin-type compound. The ability of L. lactis to exploit exogenous flavins for anodic glucose oxidation was confirmed by tests where flavin-type compounds were supplied to the bacterium in well defined media. Based on its mid-point potential, riboflavin can be regarded as a near-optimal mediator for microbially catalyzed anodic electron transfer. Riboflavin derivative flavin mononucleotide (FMN) was also exploited by L. lactis as a redox shuttle, unlike flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD), possibly due to the absence of a specific transporter for the latter. The use of yeast extract in microbial fuel cell media is herein discouraged based on the related unwanted artificial addition of redox mediators which may distort experimental results. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Multiprocessor performance modeling with ADAS

Science.gov (United States)

Hayes, Paul J.; Andrews, Asa M.

1989-01-01

A graph managing strategy referred to as the Algorithm to Architecture Mapping Model (ATAMM) appears useful for the time-optimized execution of application algorithm graphs in embedded multiprocessors and for the performance prediction of graph designs. This paper reports the modeling of ATAMM in the Architecture Design and Assessment System (ADAS) to make an independent verification of ATAMM's performance prediction capability and to provide a user framework for the evaluation of arbitrary algorithm graphs. Following an overview of ATAMM and its major functional rules are descriptions of the ADAS model of ATAMM, methods to enter an arbitrary graph into the model, and techniques to analyze the simulation results. The performance of a 7-node graph example is evaluated using the ADAS model and verifies the ATAMM concept by substantiating previously published performance results.

The strv 1 microsatellite semes: Exploiting the geosynchronous transfer orbit

Science.gov (United States)

Blott, R. J.; Wells, N. S.; Eves, J.

Following 3 successful years in orbit, the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency's two Space Technology Research Vehicle microsatellites (STRV) 1 a&b will be followed by a second mission. STRV 1 c&d are now in construction for a planned launch in 1999. The new mission, which includes 22 experimental payloads and developmental spacecraft bus technologies from European, US and Canadian military, civil and commercial sponsors, exploits the Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) to offer an affordable, working space research tool for both government and industry. The STRV 1 programme objective is to promote the enhancement of military and civil space communications, remote sensing and navigation capabilities at reduced cost and risk. Additional aims are to help industry to achieve commercial benefit from investment in emerging technologies and to develop the synergy between government, commercial and civilian space applications. The paper explains how STRV 1 exploits the variable altitude and high radiation environment of GTO to investigate the performance of emerging technologies and techniques. This includes the accelerated life testing of components and materials, such as infra-red detectors, advanced microprocessors and solar cell technologies, and the prototyping of new techniques to improve communications and spacecraft autonomy. Experiments include implementing a secure version of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) packet telecommand and telemetry standards, further development of the Internet-based Space Communication Protocol Standards (SCPS) and evaluating the exploitation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in geosynchronous orbit. The new mission also builds on and extends the comprehensive environmental monitoring achieved by STRV 1 a&b.

Proactive control for solar energy exploitation: A german high-inertia building case study

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Michailidis, Iakovos T.; Baldi, Simone; Pichler, Martin F.; Kosmatopoulos, Elias B.; Santiago, Juan R.

2015-01-01

Highlights: • Solar gains exploitation by utilizing large glass facades and concrete core thermal energy storing capacity. • Efficient Building Energy Management in a well-insulated modern building construction. • Energy consumption reduction by maintaining user comfort. • High inertia large scale office building test case, located in Germany. - Abstract: Energy efficient passive designs and constructions have been extensively studied in the last decades as a way to improve the ability of a building to store thermal energy, increase its thermal mass, increase passive insulation and reduce heat losses. However, many studies show that passive thermal designs alone are not enough to fully exploit the potential for energy efficiency in buildings: in fact, harmonizing the active elements for indoor thermal comfort with the passive design of the building can lead to further improvements in both energy efficiency and comfort. These improvements can be achieved via the design of appropriate Building Optimization and Control (BOC) systems, a task which is more complex in high-inertia buildings than in conventional ones. This is because high thermal mass implies a high memory, so that wrong control decisions will have negative repercussions over long time horizons. The design of proactive control strategies with the capability of acting in advance of a future situation, rather than just reacting to current conditions, is of crucial importance for a full exploitation of the capabilities of a high-inertia building. This paper applies a simulation-assisted control methodology to a high-inertia building in Kassel, Germany. A simulation model of the building is used to proactively optimize, using both current and future information about the external weather condition and the building state, a combined criterion composed of the energy consumption and the thermal comfort index. Both extensive simulation as well as real-life experiments performed during the unstable German

Exploration and Exploitation Fit and Performance in International Strategic Alliances

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Bo Bernhard; Gudergan, Siegfried

2012-01-01

antithetical) strategies with different antecedents and performance consequences. Our results show that while competency similarity is conducive to upstream innovative performance, prior experience with the partner is potentially damaging for this type of performance and trust and cultural distance do not play...... significant roles. When the motive is efficiency and downstream market performance, prior experience with the partner instead is beneficial, as are high levels of trust and low levels of cultural distance. These findings have key implications for literature on strategic fit and alliance performance....

VCSELs and silicon light sources exploiting SOI grating mirrors

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Chung, Il-Sug; Mørk, Jesper

2012-01-01

In this talk, novel vertical-cavity laser structure consisting of a dielectric Bragg reflector, a III-V active region, and a high-index-contrast grating made in the Si layer of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer will be presented. In the Si light source version of this laser structure, the SOI...... the Bragg reflector. Numerical simulations show that both the silicon light source and the VCSEL exploiting SOI grating mirrors have superior performances, compared to existing silicon light sources and long wavelength VCSELs. These devices are highly adequate for chip-level optical interconnects as well...

Self-report measure of financial exploitation of older adults.

Science.gov (United States)

Conrad, Kendon J; Iris, Madelyn; Ridings, John W; Langley, Kate; Wilber, Kathleen H

2010-12-01

this study was designed to improve the measurement of financial exploitation (FE) by testing psychometric properties of the older adult financial exploitation measure (OAFEM), a client self-report instrument. rasch item response theory and traditional validation approaches were used. Questionnaires were administered by 22 adult protective services investigators from 7 agencies in Illinois to 227 substantiated abuse clients. Analyses included tests for dimensionality, model fit, and additional construct validation. Results from the OAFEM were also compared with the substantiation decision of abuse and with investigators' assessments of FE using a staff report version. Hypotheses were generated to test hypothesized relationships. the OAFEM, including the original 79-, 54-, and 30-item measures, met stringent Rasch analysis fit and unidimensionality criteria and had high internal consistency and item reliability. The validation results were supportive, while leading to reconsideration of aspects of the hypothesized theoretical hierarchy. Thresholds were suggested to demonstrate levels of severity. the measure is now available to aid in the assessment of FE of older adults by both clinicians and researchers. Theoretical refinements developed using the empirically generated item hierarchy may help to improve assessment and intervention.

Exploitation and Utilization of Oilfield Geothermal Resources in China

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shejiao Wang

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Geothermal energy is a clean, green renewable resource, which can be utilized for power generation, heating, cooling, and could effectively replace oil, gas, and coal. In recent years, oil companies have put more efforts into exploiting and utilizing geothermal energy with advanced technologies for heat-tracing oil gathering and transportation, central heating, etc., which has not only reduced resource waste, but also improved large-scale and industrial resource utilization levels, and has achieved remarkable economic and social benefits. Based on the analysis of oilfield geothermal energy development status, resource potential, and exploitation and utilization modes, the advantages and disadvantages of harnessing oilfield geothermal resource have been discussed. Oilfield geothermal energy exploitation and utilization have advantages in resources, technical personnel, technology, and a large number of abandoned wells that could be reconstructed and utilized. Due to the high heat demand in oilfields, geothermal energy exploitation and utilization can effectively replace oil, gas, coal, and other fossil fuels, and has bright prospects. The key factors limiting oilfield geothermal energy exploitation and utilization are also pointed out in this paper, including immature technologies, lack of overall planning, lack of standards in resource assessment, and economic assessment, lack of incentive policies, etc.

Nanostructured Basaltfiberconcrete Exploitational Characteristics

Science.gov (United States)

Saraykina, K. A.; Shamanov, V. A.

2017-11-01

The article demonstrates that the mass use of basalt fiber concrete (BFC) is constrained by insufficient study of their durability and serviceability in a variety of environments. This research is aimed at the study of the basalt fiber corrosion processes in the cement stone of BFC, the control of the new products structure formation in order to protect the reinforcing fiber from alkaline destruction and thereby improve the exploitational characteristics of the composite. The research result revealed that the modification of basaltfiber concrete by the dispersion of MWNTs contributes to the directional formation of new products in the cement matrix. The HAM additive in basaltfiberconcrete provides for the binding of portlandite to low-basic calcium hydroaluminosilicates, thus reducing the aggressive effect of the cement environment on the reinforcing fibers properties. The complex modification of BFC with nanostructured additives provides for an increase in its durability and exploitational properties (strength, frost resistance and water resistance) due to basalt fiber protection from alkali corrosion on account of the compacting of the contact zone “basalt fiber - cement stone” and designing of the new products structure and morphology of cement matrix over the fiber surface.

Production performance and exploitation of heterosis in Cameroon ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

A crossbreeding experiment using Cameroon indigenous (CF) and German Dahlem Red (GR) chickens was undertaken to determine production performance and heterosis estimates of body weight of cockerels and laying hens at various ages and and egg production traits in layers. Four genetic groups were involved, ...

Trolling may intensify exploitation in crappie fisheries

Science.gov (United States)

Meals, K. O.; Dunn, A. W.; Miranda, Leandro E.

2012-01-01

In some parts of the USA, anglers targeting crappies Pomoxis spp. are transitioning from mostly stationary angling with a single pole around submerged structures to using multiple poles while drifting with the wind or under power. This shift in fishing methods could result in a change in catch efficiency, possibly increasing exploitation rates to levels that would be of concern to managers. We studied the catch statistics of anglers fishing while trolling with multiple poles (trollers) and those fishing with single poles (polers) in Mississippi reservoirs. Specifically, we tested whether (1) various catch statistics differed between trollers and polers, (2) catch rates of trollers were related to the number of poles fished, and (3) trollers could raise exploitation rates to potentially unsustainable levels. Results showed that participation in the crappie fisheries was about equally split between polers and trollers. In spring, 90% of crappie anglers were polers; in summer, 85% of crappie anglers were trollers. The size of harvested crappies was similar for the two angler groups, but the catch per hour was almost three times higher for trollers than for polers. Catch rates by trollers were directly correlated to the number of poles fished, although the relationship flattened as the number of poles increased. The average harvest rate for one troller fishing with three poles was similar to the harvest rate obtained by one poler. Simulations predicted that at the existing mix of about 50% polers and 50% trollers and with no restrictions on the number of poles used by trollers, exploitation of crappies is about 1.3 times higher than that in a polers-only fishery; under a scenario in which 100% of crappie anglers were trollers, exploitation was forecasted to increase to about 1.7 times the polers-only rate. The efficiency of trolling for crappies should be of concern to fishery managers because crappie fisheries are mostly consumptive and may increase exploitation

Exploiting CMS data popularity to model the evolution of data management for Run-2 and beyond

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bonacorsi, D; Neri, M; Boccali, T; Giordano, D; Girone, M; Magini, N; Kuznetsov, V; Wildish, T

2015-01-01

During the LHC Run-1 data taking, all experiments collected large data volumes from proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. The collisions data, together with massive volumes of simulated data, were replicated in multiple copies, transferred among various Tier levels, transformed/slimmed in format/content. These data were then accessed (both locally and remotely) by large groups of distributed analysis communities exploiting the WorldWide LHC Computing Grid infrastructure and services. While efficient data placement strategies - together with optimal data redistribution and deletions on demand - have become the core of static versus dynamic data management projects, little effort has so far been invested in understanding the detailed data-access patterns which surfaced in Run-1. These patterns, if understood, can be used as input to simulation of computing models at the LHC, to optimise existing systems by tuning their behaviour, and to explore next-generation CPU/storage/network co-scheduling solutions. This is of great importance, given that the scale of the computing problem will increase far faster than the resources available to the experiments, for Run-2 and beyond. Studying data-access patterns involves the validation of the quality of the monitoring data collected on the “popularity of each dataset, the analysis of the frequency and pattern of accesses to different datasets by analysis end-users, the exploration of different views of the popularity data (by physics activity, by region, by data type), the study of the evolution of Run-1 data exploitation over time, the evaluation of the impact of different data placement and distribution choices on the available network and storage resources and their impact on the computing operations. This work presents some insights from studies on the popularity data from the CMS experiment. We present the properties of a range of physics analysis activities as seen by the data popularity, and make recommendations for

Exploiting CMS data popularity to model the evolution of data management for Run-2 and beyond

Science.gov (United States)

Bonacorsi, D.; Boccali, T.; Giordano, D.; Girone, M.; Neri, M.; Magini, N.; Kuznetsov, V.; Wildish, T.

2015-12-01

During the LHC Run-1 data taking, all experiments collected large data volumes from proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions. The collisions data, together with massive volumes of simulated data, were replicated in multiple copies, transferred among various Tier levels, transformed/slimmed in format/content. These data were then accessed (both locally and remotely) by large groups of distributed analysis communities exploiting the WorldWide LHC Computing Grid infrastructure and services. While efficient data placement strategies - together with optimal data redistribution and deletions on demand - have become the core of static versus dynamic data management projects, little effort has so far been invested in understanding the detailed data-access patterns which surfaced in Run-1. These patterns, if understood, can be used as input to simulation of computing models at the LHC, to optimise existing systems by tuning their behaviour, and to explore next-generation CPU/storage/network co-scheduling solutions. This is of great importance, given that the scale of the computing problem will increase far faster than the resources available to the experiments, for Run-2 and beyond. Studying data-access patterns involves the validation of the quality of the monitoring data collected on the “popularity of each dataset, the analysis of the frequency and pattern of accesses to different datasets by analysis end-users, the exploration of different views of the popularity data (by physics activity, by region, by data type), the study of the evolution of Run-1 data exploitation over time, the evaluation of the impact of different data placement and distribution choices on the available network and storage resources and their impact on the computing operations. This work presents some insights from studies on the popularity data from the CMS experiment. We present the properties of a range of physics analysis activities as seen by the data popularity, and make recommendations for

Performance Modelling of Steam Turbine Performance using Fuzzy ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Performance Modelling of Steam Turbine Performance using Fuzzy Logic ... AFRICAN JOURNALS ONLINE (AJOL) · Journals · Advanced Search · USING AJOL · RESOURCES. Journal of Applied Sciences and Environmental Management ... A Fuzzy Inference System for predicting the performance of steam turbine

Exploiting graph kernels for high performance biomedical relation extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Panyam, Nagesh C; Verspoor, Karin; Cohn, Trevor; Ramamohanarao, Kotagiri

2018-01-30

Relation extraction from biomedical publications is an important task in the area of semantic mining of text. Kernel methods for supervised relation extraction are often preferred over manual feature engineering methods, when classifying highly ordered structures such as trees and graphs obtained from syntactic parsing of a sentence. Tree kernels such as the Subset Tree Kernel and Partial Tree Kernel have been shown to be effective for classifying constituency parse trees and basic dependency parse graphs of a sentence. Graph kernels such as the All Path Graph kernel (APG) and Approximate Subgraph Matching (ASM) kernel have been shown to be suitable for classifying general graphs with cycles, such as the enhanced dependency parse graph of a sentence. In this work, we present a high performance Chemical-Induced Disease (CID) relation extraction system. We present a comparative study of kernel methods for the CID task and also extend our study to the Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) extraction task, an important biomedical relation extraction task. We discuss novel modifications to the ASM kernel to boost its performance and a method to apply graph kernels for extracting relations expressed in multiple sentences. Our system for CID relation extraction attains an F-score of 60%, without using external knowledge sources or task specific heuristic or rules. In comparison, the state of the art Chemical-Disease Relation Extraction system achieves an F-score of 56% using an ensemble of multiple machine learning methods, which is then boosted to 61% with a rule based system employing task specific post processing rules. For the CID task, graph kernels outperform tree kernels substantially, and the best performance is obtained with APG kernel that attains an F-score of 60%, followed by the ASM kernel at 57%. The performance difference between the ASM and APG kernels for CID sentence level relation extraction is not significant. In our evaluation of ASM for the PPI task, ASM

Peat exploitation - Environment. Effects and measures

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Stenbeck, G.

1996-01-01

This report gives a detailed description of the influence of peat exploitation on the land-, water- and atmospheric environments. Proposals for mitigatory measures to minimize damage to the environment are also given

Intelligence, mapping, and geospatial exploitation system (IMAGES)

Science.gov (United States)

Moellman, Dennis E.; Cain, Joel M.

1998-08-01

This paper provides further detail to one facet of the battlespace visualization concept described in last year's paper Battlespace Situation Awareness for Force XXI. It focuses on the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) goal to 'provide customers seamless access to tailorable imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial information.' This paper describes Intelligence, Mapping, and Geospatial Exploitation System (IMAGES), an exploitation element capable of CONUS baseplant operations or field deployment to provide NIMA geospatial information collaboratively into a reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) environment through the United States Imagery and Geospatial Information System (USIGS). In a baseplant CONUS setting IMAGES could be used to produce foundation data to support mission planning. In the field it could be directly associated with a tactical sensor receiver or ground station (e.g. UAV or UGV) to provide near real-time and mission specific RSTA to support mission execution. This paper provides IMAGES functional level design; describes the technologies, their interactions and interdependencies; and presents a notional operational scenario to illustrate the system flexibility. Using as a system backbone an intelligent software agent technology, called Open Agent ArchitectureTM (OAATM), IMAGES combines multimodal data entry, natural language understanding, and perceptual and evidential reasoning for system management. Configured to be DII COE compliant, it would utilize, to the extent possible, COTS applications software for data management, processing, fusion, exploitation, and reporting. It would also be modular, scaleable, and reconfigurable. This paper describes how the OAATM achieves data synchronization and enables the necessary level of information to be rapidly available to various command echelons for making informed decisions. The reasoning component will provide for the best information to be developed in the timeline

Exploitation of Unique Properties of Zeolites in the Development of Gas Sensors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Prabir K. Dutta

2012-04-01

Full Text Available The unique properties of microporous zeolites, including ion-exchange properties, adsorption, molecular sieving, catalysis, conductivity have been exploited in improving the performance of gas sensors. Zeolites have been employed as physical and chemical filters to improve the sensitivity and selectivity of gas sensors. In addition, direct interaction of gas molecules with the extraframework cations in the nanoconfined space of zeolites has been explored as a basis for developing new impedance-type gas/vapor sensors. In this review, we summarize how these properties of zeolites have been used to develop new sensing paradigms. There is a considerable breadth of transduction processes that have been used for zeolite incorporated sensors, including frequency measurements, optical and the entire gamut of electrochemical measurements. It is clear from the published literature that zeolites provide a route to enhance sensor performance, and it is expected that commercial manifestation of some of the approaches discussed here will take place. The future of zeolite-based sensors will continue to exploit its unique properties and use of other microporous frameworks, including metal organic frameworks. Zeolite composites with electronic materials, including metals will lead to new paradigms in sensing. Use of nano-sized zeolite crystals and zeolite membranes will enhance sensor properties and make possible new routes of miniaturized sensors.

Exploiting Textured 3D Models for Developing Serious Games

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

G. Kontogianni

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Digital technologies have affected significantly many fields of computer graphics such as Games and especially the field of the Serious Games. These games are usually used for educational proposes in many fields such as Health Care, Military applications, Education, Government etc. Especially Digital Cultural Heritage is a scientific area that Serious Games are applied and lately many applications appear in the related literature. Realistic 3D textured models which have been produced using different photogrammetric methods could be a useful tool for the creation of Serious Game applications in order to make the final result more realistic and close to the reality. The basic goal of this paper is how 3D textured models which are produced by photogrammetric methods can be useful for developing a more realistic environment of a Serious Game. The application of this project aims at the creation of an educational game for the Ancient Agora of Athens. The 3D models used vary not only as far as their production methods (i.e. Time of Flight laser scanner, Structure from Motion, Virtual historical reconstruction etc. is concerned, but also as far as their era as some of them illustrated according to their existing situation and some others according to how these monuments looked like in the past. The Unity 3D® game developing environment was used for creating this application, in which all these models were inserted in the same file format. For the application two diachronic virtual tours of the Athenian Agora were produced. The first one illustrates the Agora as it is today and the second one at the 2nd century A.D. Finally the future perspective for the evolution of this game is presented which includes the addition of some questions that the user will be able to answer. Finally an evaluation is scheduled to be performed at the end of the project.

Exploiting Textured 3D Models for Developing Serious Games

Science.gov (United States)

Kontogianni, G.; Georgopoulos, A.

2015-08-01

Digital technologies have affected significantly many fields of computer graphics such as Games and especially the field of the Serious Games. These games are usually used for educational proposes in many fields such as Health Care, Military applications, Education, Government etc. Especially Digital Cultural Heritage is a scientific area that Serious Games are applied and lately many applications appear in the related literature. Realistic 3D textured models which have been produced using different photogrammetric methods could be a useful tool for the creation of Serious Game applications in order to make the final result more realistic and close to the reality. The basic goal of this paper is how 3D textured models which are produced by photogrammetric methods can be useful for developing a more realistic environment of a Serious Game. The application of this project aims at the creation of an educational game for the Ancient Agora of Athens. The 3D models used vary not only as far as their production methods (i.e. Time of Flight laser scanner, Structure from Motion, Virtual historical reconstruction etc.) is concerned, but also as far as their era as some of them illustrated according to their existing situation and some others according to how these monuments looked like in the past. The Unity 3D® game developing environment was used for creating this application, in which all these models were inserted in the same file format. For the application two diachronic virtual tours of the Athenian Agora were produced. The first one illustrates the Agora as it is today and the second one at the 2nd century A.D. Finally the future perspective for the evolution of this game is presented which includes the addition of some questions that the user will be able to answer. Finally an evaluation is scheduled to be performed at the end of the project.

Photovoltaic performance models - A report card

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, J. H.; Reiter, L. R.

1985-01-01

Models for the analysis of photovoltaic (PV) systems' designs, implementation policies, and economic performance, have proliferated while keeping pace with rapid changes in basic PV technology and extensive empirical data compiled for such systems' performance. Attention is presently given to the results of a comparative assessment of ten well documented and widely used models, which range in complexity from first-order approximations of PV system performance to in-depth, circuit-level characterizations. The comparisons were made on the basis of the performance of their subsystem, as well as system, elements. The models fall into three categories in light of their degree of aggregation into subsystems: (1) simplified models for first-order calculation of system performance, with easily met input requirements but limited capability to address more than a small variety of design considerations; (2) models simulating PV systems in greater detail, encompassing types primarily intended for either concentrator-incorporating or flat plate collector PV systems; and (3) models not specifically designed for PV system performance modeling, but applicable to aspects of electrical system design. Models ignoring subsystem failure or degradation are noted to exclude operating and maintenance characteristics as well.

Exploiting opportunistic resources for ATLAS with ARC CE and the Event Service

CERN Document Server

AUTHOR|(INSPIRE)INSPIRE-00226583; The ATLAS collaboration; Filipčič, Andrej; Guan, Wen; Tsulaia, Vakhtang; Walker, Rodney; Wenaus, Torre

2017-01-01

With ever-greater computing needs and fixed budgets, big scientific experiments are turning to opportunistic resources as a means to add much-needed extra computing power. These resources can be very different in design from the resources that comprise the Grid computing of most experiments, therefore exploiting these resources requires a change in strategy for the experiment. The resources may be highly restrictive in what can be run or in connections to the outside world, or tolerate opportunistic usage only on condition that tasks may be terminated without warning. The ARC CE with its non-intrusive architecture is designed to integrate resources such as High Performance Computing (HPC) systems into a computing Grid. The ATLAS experiment developed the Event Service primarily to address the issue of jobs that can be terminated at any point when opportunistic resources are needed by someone else. This paper describes the integration of these two systems in order to exploit opportunistic resources for ATLAS in...

Exploiting Opportunistic Resources for ATLAS with ARC CE and the Event Service

CERN Document Server

Cameron, David; The ATLAS collaboration

2016-01-01

With ever-greater computing needs and fixed budgets, big scientific experiments are turning to opportunistic resources as a means to add much-needed extra computing power. These resources can be very different in design from the resources that comprise the Grid computing of most experiments, therefore exploiting these resources requires a change in strategy for the experiment. The resources may be highly restrictive in what can be run or in connections to the outside world, or tolerate opportunistic usage only on condition that tasks may be terminated without warning. The ARC CE with its non-intrusive architecture is designed to integrate resources such as High Performance Computing (HPC) systems into a computing Grid. The ATLAS experiment developed the Event Service primarily to address the issue of jobs that can be terminated at any point when opportunistic resources are needed by someone else. This paper describes the integration of these two systems in order to exploit opportunistic resources for ATLAS in...

Improved Side Information Generation for Distributed Video Coding by Exploiting Spatial and Temporal Correlations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ye Shuiming

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Distributed video coding (DVC is a video coding paradigm allowing low complexity encoding for emerging applications such as wireless video surveillance. Side information (SI generation is a key function in the DVC decoder, and plays a key-role in determining the performance of the codec. This paper proposes an improved SI generation for DVC, which exploits both spatial and temporal correlations in the sequences. Partially decoded Wyner-Ziv (WZ frames, based on initial SI by motion compensated temporal interpolation, are exploited to improve the performance of the whole SI generation. More specifically, an enhanced temporal frame interpolation is proposed, including motion vector refinement and smoothing, optimal compensation mode selection, and a new matching criterion for motion estimation. The improved SI technique is also applied to a new hybrid spatial and temporal error concealment scheme to conceal errors in WZ frames. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve up to 1.0 dB improvement in rate distortion performance in WZ frames for video with high motion, when compared to state-of-the-art DVC. In addition, both the objective and perceptual qualities of the corrupted sequences are significantly improved by the proposed hybrid error concealment scheme, outperforming both spatial and temporal concealments alone.

Characterising performance of environmental models

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bennett, N.D.; Croke, B.F.W.; Guariso, G.; Guillaume, J.H.A.; Hamilton, S.H.; Jakeman, A.J.; Marsili-Libelli, S.; Newham, L.T.H.; Norton, J.; Perrin, C.; Pierce, S.; Robson, B.; Seppelt, R.; Voinov, A.; Fath, B.D.; Andreassian, V.

2013-01-01

In order to use environmental models effectively for management and decision-making, it is vital to establish an appropriate level of confidence in their performance. This paper reviews techniques available across various fields for characterising the performance of environmental models with focus

Elder Financial Exploitation: Implications for Future Policy and Research in Elder Mistreatment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Price, Thomas

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Recent advances in the understanding of elder mistreatment have demonstrated that financial exploitation tends to be one of the most common forms of mistreatment affecting older populations. Agencies such as the World Bank and World Health Organization show significant concern regarding financial exploitation and its connection to physical and emotional injury to victims. The World Bank uses the term “financial violence” as a means of generally describing the harm caused to an individual as a result of financial exploitation or abuse. The proportion of financial exploitation in relation to other forms of elder mistreatment is defined in our research. We discuss the potential impact of elder financial exploitation on victims as well as explore the implications for future research and policy development focused on financial aspects of elder mistreatment and call for further study in the concept of financial exploitation as a violent act. [West J Emerg Med. 2011;12(3:354-356.

Exploitation of commercial remote sensing images: reality ignored?

Science.gov (United States)

Allen, Paul C.

1999-12-01

The remote sensing market is on the verge of being awash in commercial high-resolution images. Market estimates are based on the growing numbers of planned commercial remote sensing electro-optical, radar, and hyperspectral satellites and aircraft. EarthWatch, Space Imaging, SPOT, and RDL among others are all working towards launch and service of one to five meter panchromatic or radar-imaging satellites. Additionally, new advances in digital air surveillance and reconnaissance systems, both manned and unmanned, are also expected to expand the geospatial customer base. Regardless of platform, image type, or location, each system promises images with some combination of increased resolution, greater spectral coverage, reduced turn-around time (request-to- delivery), and/or reduced image cost. For the most part, however, market estimates for these new sources focus on the raw digital images (from collection to the ground station) while ignoring the requirements for a processing and exploitation infrastructure comprised of exploitation tools, exploitation training, library systems, and image management systems. From this it would appear the commercial imaging community has failed to learn the hard lessons of national government experience choosing instead to ignore reality and replicate the bias of collection over processing and exploitation. While this trend may be not impact the small quantity users that exist today it will certainly adversely affect the mid- to large-sized users of the future.

Performability Modelling Tools, Evaluation Techniques and Applications

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Haverkort, Boudewijn R.H.M.

1990-01-01

This thesis deals with three aspects of quantitative evaluation of fault-tolerant and distributed computer and communication systems: performability evaluation techniques, performability modelling tools, and performability modelling applications. Performability modelling is a relatively new

Sexual exploitation and labor during adolescence: A case study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Luciana Dutra-Thomé

2011-09-01

Full Text Available The present article focused on the perception of sexual exploitation as a job, using a single case study design. The aim of the study was to investigate the case of a 14 year-old girl, involved in commercial sexual exploitation, who considered this situation as her labor activity. A content analysis showed protective and risk factors as categories, especially related to her labor activities. The girl perceived the sexual exploitation activity as a job that provided autonomy, subsistence, and survival. The study revealed that the negative effects of working during adolescence may bring consequences to health and development. Youth work may be defined as a risk factor, especially when the labour conditions are not adequate and protected.

PASTIS: Bayesian extrasolar planet validation - I. General framework, models, and performance

Science.gov (United States)

Díaz, R. F.; Almenara, J. M.; Santerne, A.; Moutou, C.; Lethuillier, A.; Deleuil, M.

2014-06-01

A large fraction of the smallest transiting planet candidates discovered by the Kepler and CoRoT space missions cannot be confirmed by a dynamical measurement of the mass using currently available observing facilities. To establish their planetary nature, the concept of planet validation has been advanced. This technique compares the probability of the planetary hypothesis against that of all reasonably conceivable alternative false positive (FP) hypotheses. The candidate is considered as validated if the posterior probability of the planetary hypothesis is sufficiently larger than the sum of the probabilities of all FP scenarios. In this paper, we present PASTIS, the Planet Analysis and Small Transit Investigation Software, a tool designed to perform a rigorous model comparison of the hypotheses involved in the problem of planet validation, and to fully exploit the information available in the candidate light curves. PASTIS self-consistently models the transit light curves and follow-up observations. Its object-oriented structure offers a large flexibility for defining the scenarios to be compared. The performance is explored using artificial transit light curves of planets and FPs with a realistic error distribution obtained from a Kepler light curve. We find that data support the correct hypothesis strongly only when the signal is high enough (transit signal-to-noise ratio above 50 for the planet case) and remain inconclusive otherwise. PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) shall provide transits with high enough signal-to-noise ratio, but to establish the true nature of the vast majority of Kepler and CoRoT transit candidates additional data or strong reliance on hypotheses priors is needed.

Exploiting core knowledge for visual object recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Schurgin, Mark W; Flombaum, Jonathan I

2017-03-01

Humans recognize thousands of objects, and with relative tolerance to variable retinal inputs. The acquisition of this ability is not fully understood, and it remains an area in which artificial systems have yet to surpass people. We sought to investigate the memory process that supports object recognition. Specifically, we investigated the association of inputs that co-occur over short periods of time. We tested the hypothesis that human perception exploits expectations about object kinematics to limit the scope of association to inputs that are likely to have the same token as a source. In several experiments we exposed participants to images of objects, and we then tested recognition sensitivity. Using motion, we manipulated whether successive encounters with an image took place through kinematics that implied the same or a different token as the source of those encounters. Images were injected with noise, or shown at varying orientations, and we included 2 manipulations of motion kinematics. Across all experiments, memory performance was better for images that had been previously encountered with kinematics that implied a single token. A model-based analysis similarly showed greater memory strength when images were shown via kinematics that implied a single token. These results suggest that constraints from physics are built into the mechanisms that support memory about objects. Such constraints-often characterized as 'Core Knowledge'-are known to support perception and cognition broadly, even in young infants. But they have never been considered as a mechanism for memory with respect to recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Prospects of geothermal resource exploitation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bourrelier, P.H.; Cornet, F.; Fouillac, C.

1994-01-01

The use of geothermal energy to generate electricity has only occurred during the past 50 years by drilling wells in aquifers close to magmas and producing either dry steam or hot water. The world's production of electricity from geothermal energy is over 6000 MWe and is still growing. The direct use of geothermal energy for major urban communities has been developed recently by exploitation of aquifers in sedimentary basins under large towns. Scaling up the extraction of heat implies the exploitation of larger and better located fields requiring an appropriate method of extraction; the objective of present attempts in USA, Japan and Europe is to create heat exchangers by the circulation of water between several deep wells. Two field categories are considered: the extension of classical geothermal fields beyond the aquifer areas, and areas favoured by both a high geothermal gradient, fractures inducing a natural permeability at large scale, and good commercial prospects (such as in the Rhenan Graben). Hot dry rocks concept has gained a large interest. 1 fig., 5 tabs., 11 refs

Malware Sandbox Analysis for Secure Observation of Vulnerability Exploitation

Science.gov (United States)

Yoshioka, Katsunari; Inoue, Daisuke; Eto, Masashi; Hoshizawa, Yuji; Nogawa, Hiroki; Nakao, Koji

Exploiting vulnerabilities of remote systems is one of the fundamental behaviors of malware that determines their potential hazards. Understanding what kind of propagation tactics each malware uses is essential in incident response because such information directly links with countermeasures such as writing a signature for IDS. Although recently malware sandbox analysis has been studied intensively, little work is done on securely observing the vulnerability exploitation by malware. In this paper, we propose a novel sandbox analysis method for securely observing malware's vulnerability exploitation in a totally isolated environment. In our sandbox, we prepare two victim hosts. We first execute the sample malware on one of these hosts and then let it attack the other host which is running multiple vulnerable services. As a simple realization of the proposed method, we have implemented a sandbox using Nepenthes, a low-interaction honeypot, as the second victim. Because Nepenthes can emulate a variety of vulnerable services, we can efficiently observe the propagation of sample malware. In the experiments, among 382 samples whose scan capabilities are confirmed, 381 samples successfully started exploiting vulnerabilities of the second victim. This indicates the certain level of feasibility of the proposed method.

Towards Integrated Powertrain Control: exploiting synergy between a diesel hybrid and aftertreatment system in a distribution truck

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Foster, D.L.; Cloudt, R.P.M.; Willems, F.P.T.

2008-01-01

With the increasing demands on driveability, fuel efficiency and emissions, it becomes essential to optimize the overall performance of future powertrains. Therefore, a system approach is required. In this study, the Integrated Powertrain Control concept is presented, which exploits the synergy

Towards Integrated Powertrain Control : exploiting synergy between a diesel hybrid and aftertreatment system in a distribution truck

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Foster, D.; Cloudt, R.P.M.; Willems, F.P.T.

2008-01-01

With the increasing demands on driveability, fuel efficiency and emissions, it becomes essential to optimize the overall performance of future powertrains. Therefore, a system approach is required. In this study, the Integrated Powertrain Control concept is presented, which exploits the synergy

Mission Exploitation Platform PROBA-V

Science.gov (United States)

Goor, Erwin

2016-04-01

VITO and partners developed an end-to-end solution to drastically improve the exploitation of the PROBA-V EO-data archive (http://proba-v.vgt.vito.be/), the past mission SPOT-VEGETATION and derived vegetation parameters by researchers, service providers and end-users. The analysis of time series of data (+1PB) is addressed, as well as the large scale on-demand processing of near real-time data. From November 2015 an operational Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP) PROBA-V, as an ESA pathfinder project, will be gradually deployed at the VITO data center with direct access to the complete data archive. Several applications will be released to the users, e.g. - A time series viewer, showing the evolution of PROBA-V bands and derived vegetation parameters for any area of interest. - Full-resolution viewing services for the complete data archive. - On-demand processing chains e.g. for the calculation of N-daily composites. - A Virtual Machine will be provided with access to the data archive and tools to work with this data, e.g. various toolboxes and support for R and Python. After an initial release in January 2016, a research platform will gradually be deployed allowing users to design, debug and test applications on the platform. From the MEP PROBA-V, access to Sentinel-2 and landsat data will be addressed as well, e.g. to support the Cal/Val activities of the users. Users can make use of powerful Web based tools and can self-manage virtual machines to perform their work on the infrastructure at VITO with access to the complete data archive. To realise this, private cloud technology (openStack) is used and a distributed processing environment is built based on Hadoop. The Hadoop ecosystem offers a lot of technologies (Spark, Yarn, Accumulo, etc.) which we integrate with several open-source components. The impact of this MEP on the user community will be high and will completely change the way of working with the data and hence open the large time series to a larger

A learning perspective on individual differences in skilled reading: Exploring and exploiting orthographic and semantic discrimination cues.

Science.gov (United States)

Milin, Petar; Divjak, Dagmar; Baayen, R Harald

2017-11-01

The goal of the present study is to understand the role orthographic and semantic information play in the behavior of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a self-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verbs were manipulated appear well-predicted by a combination of bottom-up sublexical letter triplets (trigraphs) and top-down semantic generalizations, modeled using the Naive Discrimination Learner. The results reveal a complex interplay of bottom-up and top-down support from orthography and semantics to the target verbs, whereby activations from orthography only are modulated by individual differences. Using performance on a serial reaction time (SRT) task for a novel operationalization of the mental speed hypothesis, we explain the observed individual differences in reading behavior in terms of the exploration/exploitation hypothesis from reinforcement learning, where initially slower and more variable behavior leads to better performance overall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Model performance analysis and model validation in logistic regression

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosa Arboretti Giancristofaro

2007-10-01

Full Text Available In this paper a new model validation procedure for a logistic regression model is presented. At first, we illustrate a brief review of different techniques of model validation. Next, we define a number of properties required for a model to be considered "good", and a number of quantitative performance measures. Lastly, we describe a methodology for the assessment of the performance of a given model by using an example taken from a management study.

Verification of Electromagnetic Physics Models for Parallel Computing Architectures in the GeantV Project

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Amadio, G.; et al.

2017-11-22

An intensive R&D and programming effort is required to accomplish new challenges posed by future experimental high-energy particle physics (HEP) programs. The GeantV project aims to narrow the gap between the performance of the existing HEP detector simulation software and the ideal performance achievable, exploiting latest advances in computing technology. The project has developed a particle detector simulation prototype capable of transporting in parallel particles in complex geometries exploiting instruction level microparallelism (SIMD and SIMT), task-level parallelism (multithreading) and high-level parallelism (MPI), leveraging both the multi-core and the many-core opportunities. We present preliminary verification results concerning the electromagnetic (EM) physics models developed for parallel computing architectures within the GeantV project. In order to exploit the potential of vectorization and accelerators and to make the physics model effectively parallelizable, advanced sampling techniques have been implemented and tested. In this paper we introduce a set of automated statistical tests in order to verify the vectorized models by checking their consistency with the corresponding Geant4 models and to validate them against experimental data.

How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eran Fisher

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract: The notion of audience labour has been an important contribution to Marxist political economy of the media. It revised the traditional political economy analysis, which focused on media ownership, by suggesting that media was also a site of production, constituting particular relations of production. Such analysis highlighted the active role of audience in the creation of media value as both commodities and workers, thus pointing to audience exploitation. Recently, in light of paradigmatic transformations in the media environment – particularly the emergence of Web 2.0 and social network sites – there has been a renewed interest in such analysis, and a reexamination of audience exploitation. Focusing on Facebook as a case-study, this article examines audience labour on social network sites along two Marxist themes – exploitation and alienation. It argues for a historical shift in the link between exploitation and alienation of audience labour, concurrent with the shift from mass media to social media. In the mass media, the capacity for exploitation of audience labour was quite limited while the alienation that such work created was high. In contrast, social media allows for the expansion and intensification of exploitation. Simultaneously, audience labour on social media – because it involves communication and sociability – also ameliorates alienation by allowing self-expression, authenticity, and relations with others. Moreover, the article argues that the political economy of social network sites is founded on a dialectical link between exploitation and alienation: in order to be de-alienated, Facebook users must communicate and socialize, thus exacerbating their exploitation. And vice-versa, in order for Facebook to exploit the work of its users, it must contribute to their de-alienation.

Exploiting Microwave Imaging Methods for Real-Time Monitoring of Thermal Ablation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosa Scapaticci

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Microwave thermal ablation is a cancer treatment that exploits local heating caused by a microwave electromagnetic field to induce coagulative necrosis of tumor cells. Recently, such a technique has significantly progressed in the clinical practice. However, its effectiveness would dramatically improve if paired with a noninvasive system for the real-time monitoring of the evolving dimension and shape of the thermally ablated area. In this respect, microwave imaging can be a potential candidate to monitor the overall treatment evolution in a noninvasive way, as it takes direct advantage from the dependence of the electromagnetic properties of biological tissues from temperature. This paper explores such a possibility by presenting a proof of concept validation based on accurate simulated imaging experiments, run with respect to a scenario that mimics an ex vivo experimental setup. In particular, two model-based inversion algorithms are exploited to tackle the imaging task. These methods provide independent results in real-time and their integration improves the quality of the overall tracking of the variations occurring in the target and surrounding regions.

Robust fluoroscopic tracking of fiducial markers: exploiting the spatial constraints

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Li Rui; Sharp, Gregory

2013-01-01

Two new fluoroscopic fiducial tracking methods that exploit the spatial relationship among the multiple implanted fiducial to achieve fast, accurate and robust tracking are proposed in this paper. The spatial relationship between multiple implanted markers are modeled as Gaussian distributions of their pairwise distances over time. The means and standard deviations of these distances are learned from training sequences, and pairwise distances that deviate from these learned distributions are assigned a low spatial matching score. The spatial constraints are incorporated in two different algorithms: a stochastic tracking method and a detection based method. In the stochastic method, hypotheses of the ‘true’ fiducial position are sampled from a pre-trained respiration motion model. Each hypothesis is assigned an importance value based on image matching score and spatial matching score. Learning the parameters of the motion model is needed in addition to learning the distribution parameters of the pairwise distances in the proposed stochastic tracking approach. In the detection based method, a set of possible marker locations are identified by using a template matching based fiducial detector. The best location is obtained by optimizing the image matching score and spatial matching score through non-serial dynamic programming. In this detection based approach, there is no need to learn the respiration motion model. The two proposed algorithms are compared with a recent work using a multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) algorithm which is denoted by MHT, Tang et al (2007 Phys. Med. Biol. 52 4081–98). Phantom experiments were performed using fluoroscopic videos captured with known motion relative to an anthropomorphic phantom. The patient experiments were performed using a retrospective study of 16 fluoroscopic videos of liver cancer patients with implanted fiducials. For the motion phantom data sets, the detection based approach has the smallest tracking error (�

Exploiting endogenous fibrocartilage stem cells to regenerate cartilage and repair joint injury

Science.gov (United States)

Embree, Mildred C.; Chen, Mo; Pylawka, Serhiy; Kong, Danielle; Iwaoka, George M.; Kalajzic, Ivo; Yao, Hai; Shi, Chancheng; Sun, Dongming; Sheu, Tzong-Jen; Koslovsky, David A.; Koch, Alia; Mao, Jeremy J.

2016-01-01

Tissue regeneration using stem cell-based transplantation faces many hurdles. Alternatively, therapeutically exploiting endogenous stem cells to regenerate injured or diseased tissue may circumvent these challenges. Here we show resident fibrocartilage stem cells (FCSCs) can be used to regenerate and repair cartilage. We identify FCSCs residing within the superficial zone niche in the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) condyle. A single FCSC spontaneously generates a cartilage anlage, remodels into bone and organizes a haematopoietic microenvironment. Wnt signals deplete the reservoir of FCSCs and cause cartilage degeneration. We also show that intra-articular treatment with the Wnt inhibitor sclerostin sustains the FCSC pool and regenerates cartilage in a TMJ injury model. We demonstrate the promise of exploiting resident FCSCs as a regenerative therapeutic strategy to substitute cell transplantation that could be beneficial for patients suffering from fibrocartilage injury and disease. These data prompt the examination of utilizing this strategy for other musculoskeletal tissues. PMID:27721375

AAV exploits subcellular stress associated with inflammation, endoplasmic reticulum expansion, and misfolded proteins in models of cystic fibrosis.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jarrod S Johnson

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Barriers to infection act at multiple levels to prevent viruses, bacteria, and parasites from commandeering host cells for their own purposes. An intriguing hypothesis is that if a cell experiences stress, such as that elicited by inflammation, endoplasmic reticulum (ER expansion, or misfolded proteins, then subcellular barriers will be less effective at preventing viral infection. Here we have used models of cystic fibrosis (CF to test whether subcellular stress increases susceptibility to adeno-associated virus (AAV infection. In human airway epithelium cultured at an air/liquid interface, physiological conditions of subcellular stress and ER expansion were mimicked using supernatant from mucopurulent material derived from CF lungs. Using this inflammatory stimulus to recapitulate stress found in diseased airways, we demonstrated that AAV infection was significantly enhanced. Since over 90% of CF cases are associated with a misfolded variant of Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (ΔF508-CFTR, we then explored whether the presence of misfolded proteins could independently increase susceptibility to AAV infection. In these models, AAV was an order of magnitude more efficient at transducing cells expressing ΔF508-CFTR than in cells expressing wild-type CFTR. Rescue of misfolded ΔF508-CFTR under low temperature conditions restored viral transduction efficiency to that demonstrated in controls, suggesting effects related to protein misfolding were responsible for increasing susceptibility to infection. By testing other CFTR mutants, G551D, D572N, and 1410X, we have shown this phenomenon is common to other misfolded proteins and not related to loss of CFTR activity. The presence of misfolded proteins did not affect cell surface attachment of virus or influence expression levels from promoter transgene cassettes in plasmid transfection studies, indicating exploitation occurs at the level of virion trafficking or processing. Thus

Boys are not exempt: Sexual exploitation of adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

Science.gov (United States)

Adjei, Jones K; Saewyc, Elizabeth M

2017-03-01

Research on youth sexual exploitation in Africa has largely neglected the experiences of exploited boys. To date, much of the research in sub-Saharan Africa continues to consider boys mainly as exploiters but not as exploited. Using the only publicly available population-based surveys from the National Survey of Adolescents, conducted in four sub-Saharan African countries - Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda-we assessed factors associated with transactional sexual behaviour among never-married adolescent boys and girls. We also examined whether boys' reported sexual exploitation was linked to similar risky sexual behaviours as has been noted among girls in sub-Saharan Africa. Results from our analyses indicated that even though adolescent girls have a somewhat higher likelihood of reporting sexual abuse and exploitation, the odds of trading sex were significantly elevated for previously traumatized boys (that is those with a history of sexual and physical abuse) but not for their female counterparts. Just like adolescent girls, transactional sexual behaviour was associated with the risk of having concurrent multiple sexual partners for boys. These findings support the reality of boys' sexual exploitation within the African context, and further highlight the importance of including males in general and boys in particular in population-based studies on sexual health, risk, and protective factors in the sub-Saharan African region. Understanding the factors linked to sexual exploitation for both boys and girls will help in developing policies and programs that could improve the overall sexual and reproductive health outcomes among adolescents and youth in sub-Saharan Africa. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A Descriptive Study on Sexually Exploited Children in Residential Treatment

Science.gov (United States)

Twill, Sarah E.; Green, Denise M.; Traylor, Amy

2010-01-01

Sexual exploitation and prostitution of children and adolescents is a multibillion dollar industry in the United States (Estes and Weiner in "Medical, legal & social science aspects of child sexual exploitation: A comprehensive review of pornography, prostitution, and internet crimes, vol I," G.W. Medical Publishing, Inc, St Louis,…

Impact of uranium exploitation by Cogema-Areva subsidiaries in Niger. Assessment of analyses performed by the CRIIRAD laboratory in 2004 and at the beginning of 2005

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2005-01-01

After a description of the uranium exploitation context (involved companies, production) in Arlit, Niger, by Cogema-Areva subsidiary companies, this report describes the context of controls performed by the CRIIRAD laboratory. Then, it reports and comments the contamination of underground so-called drinkable waters (contamination risks, Cogema statement, detection of a rather high concentration of alpha emitters, measurements performed in 2004 and 2005). The authors notice that water contamination is known by Cogema. Then, the report analyzes the issue of contaminated scrap metal dispersal, comments and criticizes the attitude of Cogema with respect to the associated risks. It comments the uranate transport accident which occurred in February 2004, the subsequent contamination, actions performed by Cogema, the associated health risks, and the statements made by Areva and Cogema. It also comments and analyzes the risks related to radioactive radon dusts inhalation around different sites and because of some technical practices, and Cogema statements about this issue. In conclusion, the authors outline the need of reinforced controls and of an epidemiological study, and outlines how Areva propagates wrong ideas

Electrical circuit models for performance modeling of Lithium-Sulfur batteries

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Knap, Vaclav; Stroe, Daniel Ioan; Teodorescu, Remus

2015-01-01

emerging technology for various applications, there is a need for Li-S battery performance model; however, developing such models represents a challenging task due to batteries' complex ongoing chemical reactions. Therefore, the literature review was performed to summarize electrical circuit models (ECMs......) used for modeling the performance behavior of Li-S batteries. The studied Li-S pouch cell was tested in the laboratory in order to parametrize four basic ECM topologies. These topologies were compared by analyzing their voltage estimation accuracy values, which were obtained for different battery...... current profiles. Based on these results, the 3 R-C ECM was chosen and the Li-S battery cell discharging performance model with current dependent parameters was derived and validated....

Shale gas, Poland pioneer of exploitation in Europe

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Rybicka, Urszula; Khalatbari, Azar; Schneider, Frederic; Nabrdalik, Maciek

2012-01-01

This article presents an installation built by a Polish company to perform drillings in the search for shale gas pockets from which gas would be extracted by hydraulic fracturing. Some technical characteristics of the installation and process are evoked. The article outlines the confidence the population now has gained in this installation. However and despite the fact that the region possesses important underground water reserves, water consumption is reported to be too high with respect to farmer needs. Besides, some farmers have had a compulsory purchase order made on their land and could afford to buy new lands. However, in some other places, the population did not accept the arrival of the multinational company Chevron. In parallel, a brief overview of shale gas exploitation projects or status in other European countries is given

Imouraren mining exploitation : Complementary studies Synthetic report Volum B - Mines

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1980-01-01

The object of the current study is to determine the main technical characteristics of the reference project of a mine that can supply the necessary ore quantity at a production of 3000 tonnes uranium per year, along 10 years. The project is one of the possible solutions for exploiting the mine. The current study permits to establish : investment and functioning cost estimation, overall project of the mining exploitation program, necessary strength estimation, average ore grades evaluation and variations of these grades, utilities needs, production vizing program, main exploitation methods and necessary materials. Reference project study of the mine serves as base to the economics studies and studies optimization [fr

Exploitative and hierarchical antagonism in a cooperative bacterium.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francesca Fiegna

2005-11-01

Full Text Available Social organisms that cooperate with some members of their own species, such as close relatives, may fail to cooperate with other genotypes of the same species. Such noncooperation may take the form of outright antagonism or social exploitation. Myxococcus xanthus is a highly social prokaryote that cooperatively develops into spore-bearing, multicellular fruiting bodies in response to starvation. Here we have characterized the nature of social interactions among nine developmentally proficient strains of M. xanthus isolated from spatially distant locations. Strains were competed against one another in all possible pairwise combinations during starvation-induced development. In most pairings, at least one competitor exhibited strong antagonism toward its partner and a majority of mixes showed bidirectional antagonism that decreased total spore production, even to the point of driving whole populations to extinction. Differential response to mixing was the primary determinant of competitive superiority rather than the sporulation efficiencies of unmixed populations. In some competitive pairings, the dominant partner sporulated more efficiently in mixed populations than in clonal isolation. This finding represents a novel form of exploitation in bacteria carried out by socially competent genotypes and is the first documentation of social exploitation among natural bacterial isolates. Patterns of antagonistic superiority among these strains form a highly linear dominance hierarchy. At least some competition pairs construct chimeric, rather than segregated, fruiting bodies. The cooperative prokaryote M. xanthus has diverged into a large number of distinct social types that cooperate with clone-mates but exhibit intense antagonism toward distinct social types of the same species. Most lengthy migration events in nature may thus result in strong antagonism between migratory and resident populations, and this antagonism may have large effects on local

Systematic assessment of multi-gene predictors of pan-cancer cell line sensitivity to drugs exploiting gene expression data [version 1; referees: 2 approved

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Linh Nguyen

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Background: Selected gene mutations are routinely used to guide the selection of cancer drugs for a given patient tumour. Large pharmacogenomic data sets were introduced to discover more of these single-gene markers of drug sensitivity. Very recently, machine learning regression has been used to investigate how well cancer cell line sensitivity to drugs is predicted depending on the type of molecular profile. The latter has revealed that gene expression data is the most predictive profile in the pan-cancer setting. However, no study to date has exploited GDSC data to systematically compare the performance of machine learning models based on multi-gene expression data against that of widely-used single-gene markers based on genomics data. Methods: Here we present this systematic comparison using Random Forest (RF classifiers exploiting the expression levels of 13,321 genes and an average of 501 tested cell lines per drug. To account for time-dependent batch effects in IC50 measurements, we employ independent test sets generated with more recent GDSC data than that used to train the predictors and show that this is a more realistic validation than K-fold cross-validation. Results and Discussion: Across 127 GDSC drugs, our results show that the single-gene markers unveiled by the MANOVA analysis tend to achieve higher precision than these RF-based multi-gene models, at the cost of generally having a poor recall (i.e. correctly detecting only a small part of the cell lines sensitive to the drug. Regarding overall classification performance, about two thirds of the drugs are better predicted by multi-gene RF classifiers. Among the drugs with the most predictive of these models, we found pyrimethamine, sunitinib and 17-AAG. Conclusions: We now know that this type of models can predict in vitro tumour response to these drugs. These models can thus be further investigated on in vivo tumour models.

Ion thruster performance model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Brophy, J.R.

1984-01-01

A model of ion thruster performance is developed for high flux density cusped magnetic field thruster designs. This model is formulated in terms of the average energy required to produce an ion in the discharge chamber plasma and the fraction of these ions that are extracted to form the beam. The direct loss of high energy (primary) electrons from the plasma to the anode is shown to have a major effect on thruster performance. The model provides simple algebraic equations enabling one to calculate the beam ion energy cost, the average discharge chamber plasma ion energy cost, the primary electron density, the primary-to-Maxwellian electron density ratio and the Maxwellian electron temperature. Experiments indicate that the model correctly predicts the variation in plasma ion energy cost for changes in propellant gas (Ar, Kr, and Xe), grid transparency to neutral atoms, beam extraction area, discharge voltage, and discharge chamber wall temperature

Performability assessment by model checking of Markov reward models

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Baier, Christel; Cloth, L.; Haverkort, Boudewijn R.H.M.; Hermanns, H.; Katoen, Joost P.

2010-01-01

This paper describes efficient procedures for model checking Markov reward models, that allow us to evaluate, among others, the performability of computer-communication systems. We present the logic CSRL (Continuous Stochastic Reward Logic) to specify performability measures. It provides flexibility

A three-dimensional microstructuring technique exploiting the positive photoresist property

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hirai, Yoshikazu; Sugano, Koji; Tsuchiya, Toshiyuki; Tabata, Osamu

2010-01-01

The present paper describes a three-dimensional (3D) thick-photoresist microstructuring technique that exploits the effect of exposure wavelength on dissolution rate distributions in a thick-film diazonaphthoquinone (DNQ) photoresist. In fabricating 3D microstructure with specific applications, it is important to control the spatial dissolution rate distribution in the photoresist layer, since the lithographic performance for 3D microstructuring is largely determined by the details of the dissolution property. To achieve this goal, the effect of exposure wavelength on dissolution rate distributions was applied for 3D microstructuring. The parametric experimental results demonstrated (1) the advantages of the fabrication technique for 3D microstructuring and (2) the necessity of a dedicated simulation approach based on the measured thick-photoresist property for further verification. Thus, a simple and practical photolithography simulation model that makes use of the Fresnel diffraction theory and an empirically characterized DNQ photoresist property was adopted. Simulations revealed good quantitative agreement between the photoresist development profiles of the standard photolithography and the moving-mask UV lithography process. The simulation and experimental results conclude that the g-line (λ = 436 nm) process can reduce the dimensional limitation or complexity of the photolithography process for the 3D microstructuring which leads to nanoscale microstructuring.

Cognitive performance modeling based on general systems performance theory.

Science.gov (United States)

Kondraske, George V

2010-01-01

General Systems Performance Theory (GSPT) was initially motivated by problems associated with quantifying different aspects of human performance. It has proved to be invaluable for measurement development and understanding quantitative relationships between human subsystem capacities and performance in complex tasks. It is now desired to bring focus to the application of GSPT to modeling of cognitive system performance. Previous studies involving two complex tasks (i.e., driving and performing laparoscopic surgery) and incorporating measures that are clearly related to cognitive performance (information processing speed and short-term memory capacity) were revisited. A GSPT-derived method of task analysis and performance prediction termed Nonlinear Causal Resource Analysis (NCRA) was employed to determine the demand on basic cognitive performance resources required to support different levels of complex task performance. This approach is presented as a means to determine a cognitive workload profile and the subsequent computation of a single number measure of cognitive workload (CW). Computation of CW may be a viable alternative to measuring it. Various possible "more basic" performance resources that contribute to cognitive system performance are discussed. It is concluded from this preliminary exploration that a GSPT-based approach can contribute to defining cognitive performance models that are useful for both individual subjects and specific groups (e.g., military pilots).

Exploitation of humid air latent heat by means of solar assisted heat pumps operating below the dew point

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Scarpa, Federico; Tagliafico, Luca A.

2016-01-01

Highlights: • The opportunity of humid air latent heat exploitation by DX-SAHP is investigated. • A set of experimental tests confirms this opportunity and quantifies it as relevant. • A parametric analysis is performed, via simulation, to deepen the subject. • The energy gain is relevant during both night and daytime. - Abstract: Nowadays, the exploitation of environmental exergy resources for heating purposes (solar energy, convection heat transfer from ambient air, moist air humidity condensation) by means of properly designed heat pump systems is a possible opportunity. In particular, the use of direct expansion solar assisted heat pumps (DX-SAHP) is investigated in this study, when a bare external plate (the solar collector) is kept at temperatures lower than the dew point temperature of ambient air, so that condensation takes place on it. The potential of this technology is settled and an instrumented prototype of a small DX-SAHP system is used to verify the actual performance of the system, in terms of specific thermal energy delivered to the user, efficiency and regulation capabilities. Results clearly show that the contribution of the condensation is significant (20%–30% of the total harvested energy) overnight or in cloudy days with very low or no solar irradiation, and must be taken into account in a system model devoted to describe the DX-SAHP behavior. During daytime, the percentage gain decreases but is still consistent. By investigating along these lines, the heat due to condensation harvested by the collector is found to be a function of the dew-point temperature alone.

EXPLOITATION OF GLASS SAND ON THE OPEN PIT »VRTLINSKA« (MOSLAVINA, CROATIA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Slavko Vujec

1994-12-01

Full Text Available The exploitation of glass sand in Slavonia and Moslavina has a long tradition. The open-pit »Vrtlinska« is-accordirtg to its dimensions and production capacity the biggest one in this regions. Exploitation reserves within this open pit amount about 1 000 000 t glass sand of a very good quality, and the production capacity is 200 000 t yearly according to real needs during design and opening the pit, i. e. before the war. This article discusses geological and geomechanical characteristics of the deposit, as well as the exploitation process, which is considerably matching natural characteristics of the deposit. A more detailed description is given of the planned exploitation phase I above groundwater level which is carried out according to discontinuous system. For the exploitation of the depth part under groundwater level in the phase II, the necessity of further examination of hydrogeological characteristics of the deposit is presented, in order to acquire necessary information on groundwater regime and drainage conditions. Such knowledge will influence the choice of the most appropriate solutions in the exploitation of the depth part of the deposit.

Shale Gas Exploration and Exploitation Induced Risks - SHEER

Science.gov (United States)

Capuano, Paolo; Orlecka-Sikora, Beata; Lasocki, Stanislaw; Cesca, Simone; Gunning, Andrew; jaroslawsky, Janusz; Garcia-Aristizabal, Alexander; Westwood, Rachel; Gasparini, Paolo

2017-04-01

Shale gas operations may affect the quality of air, water and landscapes; furthermore, it can induce seismic activity, with the possible impacts on the surrounding infrastructure. The SHEER project aims at setting up a probabilistic methodology to assess and mitigate the short and the long term environmental risks connected to the exploration and exploitation of shale gas. In particular we are investigating risks associated with groundwater contamination, air pollution and induced seismicity. A shale gas test site located in Poland (Wysin) has been monitored before, during and after the fracking operations with the aim of assessing environmental risks connected with groundwater contamination, air pollution and earthquakes induced by fracking and injection of waste water. The severity of each of these hazards depends strongly on the unexpected enhanced permeability pattern, which may develop as an unwanted by-product of the fracking processes and may become pathway for gas and fluid migration towards underground water reservoirs or the surface. The project is devoted to monitor and understand how far this enhanced permeability pattern develops both in space and time. The considered hazards may be at least partially inter-related as they all depend on this enhanced permeability pattern. Therefore they are being approached from a multi-hazard, multi parameter perspective. We expect to develop methodologies and procedures to track and model fracture evolution around shale gas exploitation sites and a robust statistically based, multi-parameter methodology to assess environmental impacts and risks across the operational lifecycle of shale gas. The developed methodologies are going to be applied and tested on a comprehensive database consisting of seismicity, changes of the quality of ground-waters and air, ground deformations, and operational data collected from the ongoing monitoring episode (Wysin) and past episodes: Lubocino (Poland), Preese Hall (UK), Oklahoma (USA

Exploiting Data Sparsity for Large-Scale Matrix Computations

KAUST Repository

Akbudak, Kadir

2018-02-24

Exploiting data sparsity in dense matrices is an algorithmic bridge between architectures that are increasingly memory-austere on a per-core basis and extreme-scale applications. The Hierarchical matrix Computations on Manycore Architectures (HiCMA) library tackles this challenging problem by achieving significant reductions in time to solution and memory footprint, while preserving a specified accuracy requirement of the application. HiCMA provides a high-performance implementation on distributed-memory systems of one of the most widely used matrix factorization in large-scale scientific applications, i.e., the Cholesky factorization. It employs the tile low-rank data format to compress the dense data-sparse off-diagonal tiles of the matrix. It then decomposes the matrix computations into interdependent tasks and relies on the dynamic runtime system StarPU for asynchronous out-of-order scheduling, while allowing high user-productivity. Performance comparisons and memory footprint on matrix dimensions up to eleven million show a performance gain and memory saving of more than an order of magnitude for both metrics on thousands of cores, against state-of-the-art open-source and vendor optimized numerical libraries. This represents an important milestone in enabling large-scale matrix computations toward solving big data problems in geospatial statistics for climate/weather forecasting applications.

Exploiting Data Sparsity for Large-Scale Matrix Computations

KAUST Repository

Akbudak, Kadir; Ltaief, Hatem; Mikhalev, Aleksandr; Charara, Ali; Keyes, David E.

2018-01-01

Exploiting data sparsity in dense matrices is an algorithmic bridge between architectures that are increasingly memory-austere on a per-core basis and extreme-scale applications. The Hierarchical matrix Computations on Manycore Architectures (HiCMA) library tackles this challenging problem by achieving significant reductions in time to solution and memory footprint, while preserving a specified accuracy requirement of the application. HiCMA provides a high-performance implementation on distributed-memory systems of one of the most widely used matrix factorization in large-scale scientific applications, i.e., the Cholesky factorization. It employs the tile low-rank data format to compress the dense data-sparse off-diagonal tiles of the matrix. It then decomposes the matrix computations into interdependent tasks and relies on the dynamic runtime system StarPU for asynchronous out-of-order scheduling, while allowing high user-productivity. Performance comparisons and memory footprint on matrix dimensions up to eleven million show a performance gain and memory saving of more than an order of magnitude for both metrics on thousands of cores, against state-of-the-art open-source and vendor optimized numerical libraries. This represents an important milestone in enabling large-scale matrix computations toward solving big data problems in geospatial statistics for climate/weather forecasting applications.

[Impacts of hydroelectric cascade exploitation on river ecosystem and landscape: a review].

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Kun; Deng, Xi; Li, Xue-Ling; Wen, Ping

2011-05-01

Hydroelectric cascade exploitation, one of the major ways for exploiting water resources and developing hydropower, not only satisfies the needs of various national economic sectors, but also promotes the socio-economic sustainable development of river basin. unavoidable anthropogenic impacts on the entire basin ecosystem. Based on the process of hydroelectric cascade exploitation and the ecological characteristics of river basins, this paper reviewed the major impacts of hydroelectric cascade exploitation on dam-area ecosystems, river reservoirs micro-climate, riparian ecosystems, river aquatic ecosystems, wetlands, and river landscapes. Some prospects for future research were offered, e.g., strengthening the research of chain reactions and cumulative effects of ecological factors affected by hydroelectric cascade exploitation, intensifying the study of positive and negative ecological effects under the dam networks and their joint operations, and improving the research of successional development and stability of basin ecosystems at different temporal and spatial scales.

The Five Key Questions of Human Performance Modeling.

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Changxu

2018-01-01

Via building computational (typically mathematical and computer simulation) models, human performance modeling (HPM) quantifies, predicts, and maximizes human performance, human-machine system productivity and safety. This paper describes and summarizes the five key questions of human performance modeling: 1) Why we build models of human performance; 2) What the expectations of a good human performance model are; 3) What the procedures and requirements in building and verifying a human performance model are; 4) How we integrate a human performance model with system design; and 5) What the possible future directions of human performance modeling research are. Recent and classic HPM findings are addressed in the five questions to provide new thinking in HPM's motivations, expectations, procedures, system integration and future directions.

The exploitation of living resources in the Dutch Wadden Sea : a historical overview

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wolff, W J

An overview, based on written sources and personal observations, is presented of exploitation of living resources in and around the Dutch Wadden Sea during the past few centuries. It is concluded that before about 1900 exploitation was almost unrestricted. Exploitation of plants has been documented

PROBA-V Mission Exploitation Platform

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Erwin Goor

2016-07-01

Full Text Available As an extension of the PROBA-Vegetation (PROBA-V user segment, the European Space Agency (ESA, de Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek (VITO, and partners TRASYS and Spacebel developed an operational Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP to drastically improve the exploitation of the PROBA-V Earth Observation (EO data archive, the archive from the historical SPOT-VEGETATION mission, and derived products by researchers, service providers, and thematic users. The analysis of the time series of data (petabyte range is addressed, as well as the large scale on-demand processing of the complete archive, including near real-time data. The platform consists of a private cloud environment, a Hadoop-based processing environment and a data manager. Several applications are released to the users, e.g., a full resolution viewing service, a time series viewer, pre-defined on-demand processing chains, and virtual machines with powerful tools and access to the data. After an initial release in January 2016 a research platform was deployed gradually, allowing users to design, debug, and test applications on the platform. From the PROBA-V MEP, access to, e.g., Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data will be addressed as well.

SSC-EKE: Semi-Supervised Classification with Extensive Knowledge Exploitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Qian, Pengjiang; Xi, Chen; Xu, Min; Jiang, Yizhang; Su, Kuan-Hao; Wang, Shitong; Muzic, Raymond F

2018-01-01

We introduce a new, semi-supervised classification method that extensively exploits knowledge. The method has three steps. First, the manifold regularization mechanism, adapted from the Laplacian support vector machine (LapSVM), is adopted to mine the manifold structure embedded in all training data, especially in numerous label-unknown data. Meanwhile, by converting the labels into pairwise constraints, the pairwise constraint regularization formula (PCRF) is designed to compensate for the few but valuable labelled data. Second, by further combining the PCRF with the manifold regularization, the precise manifold and pairwise constraint jointly regularized formula (MPCJRF) is achieved. Third, by incorporating the MPCJRF into the framework of the conventional SVM, our approach, referred to as semi-supervised classification with extensive knowledge exploitation (SSC-EKE), is developed. The significance of our research is fourfold: 1) The MPCJRF is an underlying adjustment, with respect to the pairwise constraints, to the graph Laplacian enlisted for approximating the potential data manifold. This type of adjustment plays the correction role, as an unbiased estimation of the data manifold is difficult to obtain, whereas the pairwise constraints, converted from the given labels, have an overall high confidence level. 2) By transforming the values of the two terms in the MPCJRF such that they have the same range, with a trade-off factor varying within the invariant interval [0, 1), the appropriate impact of the pairwise constraints to the graph Laplacian can be self-adaptively determined. 3) The implication regarding extensive knowledge exploitation is embodied in SSC-EKE. That is, the labelled examples are used not only to control the empirical risk but also to constitute the MPCJRF. Moreover, all data, both labelled and unlabelled, are recruited for the model smoothness and manifold regularization. 4) The complete framework of SSC-EKE organically incorporates multiple

Exploiting Multiple Detections for Person Re-Identification

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amran Bhuiyan

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Re-identification systems aim at recognizing the same individuals in multiple cameras, and one of the most relevant problems is that the appearance of same individual varies across cameras due to illumination and viewpoint changes. This paper proposes the use of cumulative weighted brightness transfer functions (CWBTFs to model these appearance variations. Different from recently proposed methods which only consider pairs of images to learn a brightness transfer function, we exploit such a multiple-frame-based learning approach that leverages consecutive detections of each individual to transfer the appearance. We first present a CWBTF framework for the task of transforming appearance from one camera to another. We then present a re-identification framework where we segment the pedestrian images into meaningful parts and extract features from such parts, as well as from the whole body. Jointly, both of these frameworks contribute to model the appearance variations more robustly. We tested our approach on standard multi-camera surveillance datasets, showing consistent and significant improvements over existing methods on three different datasets without any other additional cost. Our approach is general and can be applied to any appearance-based method.

Exploiting Phase Diversity for CDMA2000 1X Smart Antenna Base Stations

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Seongdo; Hyeon, Seungheon; Choi, Seungwon

2004-12-01

A performance analysis of an access channel decoder is presented which exploits a diversity gain due to the independent magnitude of received signals energy at each of the antenna elements of a smart-antenna base-station transceiver subsystem (BTS) operating in CDMA2000 1X signal environment. The objective is to enhance the data retrieval at cellsite during the access period, for which the optimal weight vector of the smart antenna BTS is not available. It is shown in this paper that the access channel decoder proposed in this paper outperforms the conventional one, which is based on a single antenna channel in terms of detection probability of access probe, access channel failure probability, and Walsh-code demodulation performance.

Metabolic robustness in young roots underpins a predictive model of maize hybrid performance in the field.

Science.gov (United States)

de Abreu E Lima, Francisco; Westhues, Matthias; Cuadros-Inostroza, Álvaro; Willmitzer, Lothar; Melchinger, Albrecht E; Nikoloski, Zoran

2017-04-01

Heterosis has been extensively exploited for yield gain in maize (Zea mays L.). Here we conducted a comparative metabolomics-based analysis of young roots from in vitro germinating seedlings and from leaves of field-grown plants in a panel of inbred lines from the Dent and Flint heterotic patterns as well as selected F 1 hybrids. We found that metabolite levels in hybrids were more robust than in inbred lines. Using state-of-the-art modeling techniques, the most robust metabolites from roots and leaves explained up to 37 and 44% of the variance in the biomass from plants grown in two distinct field trials. In addition, a correlation-based analysis highlighted the trade-off between defense-related metabolites and hybrid performance. Therefore, our findings demonstrated the potential of metabolic profiles from young maize roots grown under tightly controlled conditions to predict hybrid performance in multiple field trials, thus bridging the greenhouse-field gap. © 2017 The Authors The Plant Journal © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Panel discussion on exploitation of geothermal resources in thermal zones

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Viramonte, J G; Mange, J; Stefani, G

1978-03-01

The topics discussed include the major known geothermal resources, varying ways of exploiting geothermal resources, technical and economic difficulties in the exploitation, the place of geothermal energy in the total energy policy of a given country, advanced exploration techniques, and indications of needed areas of study. The panelists represented most of the South American countries, Mexico, and Italy. (JSR)

Exploiting Non-Markovianity for Quantum Control.

Science.gov (United States)

Reich, Daniel M; Katz, Nadav; Koch, Christiane P

2015-07-22

Quantum technology, exploiting entanglement and the wave nature of matter, relies on the ability to accurately control quantum systems. Quantum control is often compromised by the interaction of the system with its environment since this causes loss of amplitude and phase. However, when the dynamics of the open quantum system is non-Markovian, amplitude and phase flow not only from the system into the environment but also back. Interaction with the environment is then not necessarily detrimental. We show that the back-flow of amplitude and phase can be exploited to carry out quantum control tasks that could not be realized if the system was isolated. The control is facilitated by a few strongly coupled, sufficiently isolated environmental modes. Our paradigmatic example considers a weakly anharmonic ladder with resonant amplitude control only, restricting realizable operations to SO(N). The coupling to the environment, when harnessed with optimization techniques, allows for full SU(N) controllability.

Human-Assisted Machine Information Exploitation: a crowdsourced investigation of information-based problem solving

Science.gov (United States)

Kase, Sue E.; Vanni, Michelle; Caylor, Justine; Hoye, Jeff

2017-05-01

The Human-Assisted Machine Information Exploitation (HAMIE) investigation utilizes large-scale online data collection for developing models of information-based problem solving (IBPS) behavior in a simulated time-critical operational environment. These types of environments are characteristic of intelligence workflow processes conducted during human-geo-political unrest situations when the ability to make the best decision at the right time ensures strategic overmatch. The project takes a systems approach to Human Information Interaction (HII) by harnessing the expertise of crowds to model the interaction of the information consumer and the information required to solve a problem at different levels of system restrictiveness and decisional guidance. The design variables derived from Decision Support Systems (DSS) research represent the experimental conditions in this online single-player against-the-clock game where the player, acting in the role of an intelligence analyst, is tasked with a Commander's Critical Information Requirement (CCIR) in an information overload scenario. The player performs a sequence of three information processing tasks (annotation, relation identification, and link diagram formation) with the assistance of `HAMIE the robot' who offers varying levels of information understanding dependent on question complexity. We provide preliminary results from a pilot study conducted with Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) participants on the Volunteer Science scientific research platform.

Local Perspectives on Environmental Insecurity and Its Influence on Illegal Biodiversity Exploitation.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Meredith L Gore

Full Text Available Environmental insecurity is a source and outcome of biodiversity declines and social conflict. One challenge to scaling insecurity reduction policies is that empirical evidence about local attitudes is overwhelmingly missing. We set three objectives: determine how local people rank risk associated with different sources of environmental insecurity; assess perceptions of environmental insecurity, biodiversity exploitation, myths of nature and risk management preferences; and explore relationships between perceptions and biodiversity exploitation. We conducted interviews (N = 88 with residents of Madagascar's Torotorofotsy Protected Area, 2014. Risk perceptions had a moderate effect on perceptions of environmental insecurity. We found no effects of environmental insecurity on biodiversity exploitation. Results offer one if not the first exploration of local perceptions of illegal biodiversity exploitation and environmental security. Local people's perception of risk seriousness associated with illegal biodiversity exploitation such as lemur hunting (low overall may not reflect perceptions of policy-makers (considered to be high. Discord is a key entry point for attention.

Sensor Exposure, Exploitation, and Experimentation Environment (SE4)

Science.gov (United States)

Buell, D.; Duff, F.; Goding, J.; Bankston, M.; McLaughlin, T.; Six, S.; Taylor, S.; Wootton, S.

2011-09-01

As the resident space object population increases from new launches and events such as the COSMOS/IRIDIUM collision, the maintenance of high-level Space Situational Awareness (SSA) has become increasingly difficult. To maintain situational awareness of the changing environment, new systems and methods must be developed. The Sensor Exposure, Exploitation and Experimentation Environment (SE4) provides a platform to illustrate “The Art of the Possible” that shows the potential benefit of enriched sensor data collections and real-time data sharing. Through modeling and simulation, and a net-centric architecture, SE4 shows the added value of sharing data in real-time and exposing new types of sensor data. The objective of SE4 is to develop an experimentation and innovation environment for sensor data exposure, composable sensor capabilities, reuse, and exploitation that accelerates the delivery of needed Command and Control, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance capabilities to the warfighter. Through modeling, simulation and rapid prototyping, the art of the possible for a fully-connected, net-centric space Command and Control (C2) and sensor enterprise can be demonstrated. This paper provides results that demonstrate the potential for faster cataloging of breakup events and additional event monitoring that are possible with data available today in the Space Surveillance Network (SSN). Demonstrating the art of the possible for the enterprise will guide net-centric requirements definition and facilitate discussions with stakeholder organizations on the Concept of Operations (CONOPS), policy, and Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) evolution necessary to take full advantage of net-centric operations. SE4 aligns with direction from Secretary Gates and the Chairman Joint Chief of Staff that emphasizes the need to get the most out of our existing systems. Continuing to utilize SE4 will enable the enterprise by demonstrating the benefits of applying

The ALARA project of the EDF nuclear park exploitation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Potoczek, J.

1998-01-01

To bring the exploitation of the nuclear park of EDF at the level of the best exploiters in the world in matter of collective and individual dosimetry, the ALARA principle coordinates numerous actions: to associate the temporary societies, to define common language, methods and tools for the whole park to organize a level effect in this area, to optimize the maintenance that is expansive in radiation doses, to make the different levels of management responsible on dosimetric stakes, to reduce the singular sources of exposure, to assure the organisation and exploitation of the experience back in this field and adapt consequently the system of information. The results are cheerful and the objectives for 2000 are: less than 1.2 h.Sv by year and by reactor, no intervener whom annual radiation dose is upper than 20 mSv (out of exceptional case). (N.C.)

Predictive performance models and multiple task performance

Science.gov (United States)

Wickens, Christopher D.; Larish, Inge; Contorer, Aaron

1989-01-01

Five models that predict how performance of multiple tasks will interact in complex task scenarios are discussed. The models are shown in terms of the assumptions they make about human operator divided attention. The different assumptions about attention are then empirically validated in a multitask helicopter flight simulation. It is concluded from this simulation that the most important assumption relates to the coding of demand level of different component tasks.

Maintenance Personnel Performance Simulation (MAPPS) model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Siegel, A.I.; Bartter, W.D.; Wolf, J.J.; Knee, H.E.; Haas, P.M.

1984-01-01

A stochastic computer model for simulating the actions and behavior of nuclear power plant maintenance personnel is described. The model considers personnel, environmental, and motivational variables to yield predictions of maintenance performance quality and time to perform. The mode has been fully developed and sensitivity tested. Additional evaluation of the model is now taking place

Exploitation and Benefits of BIM in Construction Project Management

Science.gov (United States)

Mesároš, Peter; Mandičák, Tomáš

2017-10-01

BIM is increasingly getting into the awareness in construction industry. BIM is the process of creating and data managing of the building during its life cycle. BIM became a part of management tools in modern construction companies. Construction projects have a number of participants. It means difficulty process of construction project management and a serious requirement for processing the huge amount of information including design, construction, time and cost parameters, economic efficiency and sustainability. Progressive information and communication technologies support cost management and management of construction project. One of them is Building Information Modelling. Aim of the paper is to examine the impact of BIM exploitation and benefits on construction project management in Slovak companies.

Making Money from Exploiting Schumpeterian Opportunities: John Sanguinetti and the Electronic Design Automation Industry

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Arthur Low

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Accounts of the effect that John Sanguinetti’s two companies had on the market for integrated circuit design languages were used to gain insights on how to profit from the exploitation of Schumpeterian opportunities. This article will be of interest to entrepreneurs who expect to profit from exploiting opportunities that disrupt the status quo. To write this article, the author reviewed the literature on Schumpeterian and Kirznerian opportunities and examined the writings of and about Sanguinetti and his companies, blogs written by industry insiders, and articles in industry trade journals. Sanguinetti’s first company introduced a new technology and his second company introduced a new business strategy and a new technology. Both of Sanguinetti's companies undermined the capital investments of the established incumbents and created new value for customers. The article provides three main insights. First, deep knowledge and experience in the customer domain enable an entrepreneur to recognize and act to profit from a Schumpeterian opportunity. Second, to profit from a Schumpeterian opportunity the entrepreneur needs to combine technology and business model components in a way that adds significant value to customers. Third, large amounts of venture capital may or may not be required to exploit Schumpeterian opportunities.

Cloud Based Earth Observation Data Exploitation Platforms

Science.gov (United States)

Romeo, A.; Pinto, S.; Loekken, S.; Marin, A.

2017-12-01

In the last few years data produced daily by several private and public Earth Observation (EO) satellites reached the order of tens of Terabytes, representing for scientists and commercial application developers both a big opportunity for their exploitation and a challenge for their management. New IT technologies, such as Big Data and cloud computing, enable the creation of web-accessible data exploitation platforms, which offer to scientists and application developers the means to access and use EO data in a quick and cost effective way. RHEA Group is particularly active in this sector, supporting the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Exploitation Platforms (EP) initiative, developing technology to build multi cloud platforms for the processing and analysis of Earth Observation data, and collaborating with larger European initiatives such as the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). An EP is a virtual workspace, providing a user community with access to (i) large volume of data, (ii) algorithm development and integration environment, (iii) processing software and services (e.g. toolboxes, visualization routines), (iv) computing resources, (v) collaboration tools (e.g. forums, wiki, etc.). When an EP is dedicated to a specific Theme, it becomes a Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP). Currently, ESA has seven TEPs in a pre-operational phase dedicated to geo-hazards monitoring and prevention, costal zones, forestry areas, hydrology, polar regions, urban areas and food security. On the technology development side, solutions like the multi cloud EO data processing platform provides the technology to integrate ICT resources and EO data from different vendors in a single platform. In particular it offers (i) Multi-cloud data discovery, (ii) Multi-cloud data management and access and (iii) Multi-cloud application deployment. This platform has been demonstrated with the EGI Federated Cloud, Innovation Platform Testbed Poland

The concept of exploitation in international human trafficking law

OpenAIRE

von der Pütten, Tuija Kaarina

2017-01-01

Human trafficking is commonly known as a criminal practice that takes place in the framework of sex trade: women and children are trafficked within a state, or from one state to another, for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Similarly, the early 20th century international conventions aimed to tackle ‘white slave traffic’, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation. However, it is misleading to see trafficking only within this context. People are trafficked so that they can be...

Work domain constraints for modelling surgical performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Morineau, Thierry; Riffaud, Laurent; Morandi, Xavier; Villain, Jonathan; Jannin, Pierre

2015-10-01

Three main approaches can be identified for modelling surgical performance: a competency-based approach, a task-based approach, both largely explored in the literature, and a less known work domain-based approach. The work domain-based approach first describes the work domain properties that constrain the agent's actions and shape the performance. This paper presents a work domain-based approach for modelling performance during cervical spine surgery, based on the idea that anatomical structures delineate the surgical performance. This model was evaluated through an analysis of junior and senior surgeons' actions. Twenty-four cervical spine surgeries performed by two junior and two senior surgeons were recorded in real time by an expert surgeon. According to a work domain-based model describing an optimal progression through anatomical structures, the degree of adjustment of each surgical procedure to a statistical polynomial function was assessed. Each surgical procedure showed a significant suitability with the model and regression coefficient values around 0.9. However, the surgeries performed by senior surgeons fitted this model significantly better than those performed by junior surgeons. Analysis of the relative frequencies of actions on anatomical structures showed that some specific anatomical structures discriminate senior from junior performances. The work domain-based modelling approach can provide an overall statistical indicator of surgical performance, but in particular, it can highlight specific points of interest among anatomical structures that the surgeons dwelled on according to their level of expertise.

Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of adolescents.

Science.gov (United States)

Chung, Richard J; English, Abigail

2015-08-01

This review describes the current state of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of adolescents in the United States and globally, the legal and health implications of this severe form of abuse, and the roles that pediatric and adolescent healthcare providers can play in addressing this issue. Although this form of exploitation and abuse is shrouded in secrecy, pediatric and adolescent healthcare providers are well positioned to respond when it arises. However, awareness and understanding of the issue are generally lacking among healthcare professionals, currently limiting their effectiveness in combating this problem. Although the empirical evidence base available to guide clinical care of victims of trafficking remains limited given the secretive nature of the abuse, important contributions to the multidisciplinary literature on this issue have been made in recent years, including the Institute of Medicine's landmark report in the United States. Commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking of adolescents represent a human rights tragedy that remains inadequately addressed. As preeminent advocates for the health and well-being of adolescents, pediatric and adolescent healthcare providers can play a crucial role in advancing efforts not only to intervene but also to prevent further victimization of vulnerable youth.

Generation and performance assessment of the global TanDEM-X digital elevation model

Science.gov (United States)

Rizzoli, Paola; Martone, Michele; Gonzalez, Carolina; Wecklich, Christopher; Borla Tridon, Daniela; Bräutigam, Benjamin; Bachmann, Markus; Schulze, Daniel; Fritz, Thomas; Huber, Martin; Wessel, Birgit; Krieger, Gerhard; Zink, Manfred; Moreira, Alberto

2017-10-01

The primary objective of the TanDEM-X mission is the generation of a global, consistent, and high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) with unprecedented global accuracy. The goal is achieved by exploiting the interferometric capabilities of the two twin SAR satellites TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, which fly in a close orbit formation, acting as an X-band single-pass interferometer. Between December 2010 and early 2015 all land surfaces have been acquired at least twice, difficult terrain up to seven or eight times. The acquisition strategy, data processing, and DEM calibration and mosaicking have been systematically monitored and optimized throughout the entire mission duration, in order to fulfill the specification. The processing of all data has finally been completed in September 2016 and this paper reports on the final performance of the TanDEM-X global DEM and presents the acquisition and processing strategy which allowed to obtain the final DEM quality. The results confirm the outstanding global accuracy of the delivered product, which can be now utilized for both scientific and commercial applications.

Subjective evaluation of two stereoscopic imaging systems exploiting visual attention to improve 3D quality of experience

Science.gov (United States)

Hanhart, Philippe; Ebrahimi, Touradj

2014-03-01

Crosstalk and vergence-accommodation rivalry negatively impact the quality of experience (QoE) provided by stereoscopic displays. However, exploiting visual attention and adapting the 3D rendering process on the fly can reduce these drawbacks. In this paper, we propose and evaluate two different approaches that exploit visual attention to improve 3D QoE on stereoscopic displays: an offline system, which uses a saliency map to predict gaze position, and an online system, which uses a remote eye tracking system to measure real time gaze positions. The gaze points were used in conjunction with the disparity map to extract the disparity of the object-of-interest. Horizontal image translation was performed to bring the fixated object on the screen plane. The user preference between standard 3D mode and the two proposed systems was evaluated through a subjective evaluation. Results show that exploiting visual attention significantly improves image quality and visual comfort, with a slight advantage for real time gaze determination. Depth quality is also improved, but the difference is not significant.

Performance of different radiotherapy workload models

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Barbera, Lisa; Jackson, Lynda D.; Schulze, Karleen; Groome, Patti A.; Foroudi, Farshad; Delaney, Geoff P.; Mackillop, William J.

2003-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of different radiotherapy workload models using a prospectively collected dataset of patient and treatment information from a single center. Methods and Materials: Information about all individual radiotherapy treatments was collected for 2 weeks from the three linear accelerators (linacs) in our department. This information included diagnosis code, treatment site, treatment unit, treatment time, fields per fraction, technique, beam type, blocks, wedges, junctions, port films, and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status. We evaluated the accuracy and precision of the original and revised basic treatment equivalent (BTE) model, the simple and complex Addenbrooke models, the equivalent simple treatment visit (ESTV) model, fields per hour, and two local standards of workload measurement. Results: Data were collected for 2 weeks in June 2001. During this time, 151 patients were treated with 857 fractions. The revised BTE model performed better than the other models with a mean vertical bar observed - predicted vertical bar of 2.62 (2.44-2.80). It estimated 88.0% of treatment times within 5 min, which is similar to the previously reported accuracy of the model. Conclusion: The revised BTE model had similar accuracy and precision for data collected in our center as it did for the original dataset and performed the best of the models assessed. This model would have uses for patient scheduling, and describing workloads and case complexity

Annexe 3. Constitution d'une exploitation à Homs

OpenAIRE

2015-01-01

‘Abd al-Laṭīf, né en 1925, est jardinier à Horns. Il exploite avec son fils aîné et l'aide de deux de ses petits-fils un jardin de quelques 35 dunum (3,5 hectares) situé dans le zūr al-Ǧdīdeh, secteur central de la zone agricole. Cette grande exploitation, constituée de plusieurs parcelles ayant différents statuts, est en partie le produit d'une histoire familiale dont je voudrais présenter ici brièvement les principaux aspects. Figure 50 – Alliances matrimoniales entre la lignée de ‘Abbās e...

Open pit coal exploitation viability. Margarita mine. Case of study

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Veloza, Julia; Molina, Jorge; Mejia, Humberto

2006-01-01

This paper provides an analysis of financial viability, planning and design for the new coal open pit exploitation for La Margarita mine, with coal-resources estimated on 440.139,7 ton. Dimension, design and economic evaluation were possible by three exploitation methods: (multiple bench, open cast contour, and terraces). Net present values (NVP) were calculated: $c 817,5; $c 518,5 and $c 645,2 respectively for each method (given in million current Colombian pesos $. $c 2380 are equivalent to $us 1) and rate of return (ROR) 78,33%; 34,0% and 38,62% respectively for each method. These indicators served as a parameter to choose the multiple bench method, which should be recalculated because it was necessary to work jointly with two pits and making feasible the project. in addition a general environmental evaluation was done, which is vital for the exploitation. Important impacts on the flower, animals, air, water were found, and measures of control, prevention and mitigation were stated. it is expected that this paper can be useful as a technical-economical support for the development of the open pit exploitation in the margarita mine

Proba-V Mission Exploitation Platform

Science.gov (United States)

Goor, Erwin; Dries, Jeroen

2017-04-01

VITO and partners developed the Proba-V Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP) as an end-to-end solution to drastically improve the exploitation of the Proba-V (a Copernicus contributing mission) EO-data archive (http://proba-v.vgt.vito.be/), the past mission SPOT-VEGETATION and derived vegetation parameters by researchers, service providers and end-users. The analysis of time series of data (+1PB) is addressed, as well as the large scale on-demand processing of near real-time data on a powerful and scalable processing environment. Furthermore data from the Copernicus Global Land Service is in scope of the platform. From November 2015 an operational Proba-V MEP environment, as an ESA operation service, is gradually deployed at the VITO data center with direct access to the complete data archive. Since autumn 2016 the platform is operational and yet several applications are released to the users, e.g. - A time series viewer, showing the evolution of Proba-V bands and derived vegetation parameters from the Copernicus Global Land Service for any area of interest. - Full-resolution viewing services for the complete data archive. - On-demand processing chains on a powerfull Hadoop/Spark backend e.g. for the calculation of N-daily composites. - Virtual Machines can be provided with access to the data archive and tools to work with this data, e.g. various toolboxes (GDAL, QGIS, GrassGIS, SNAP toolbox, …) and support for R and Python. This allows users to immediately work with the data without having to install tools or download data, but as well to design, debug and test applications on the platform. - A prototype of jupyter Notebooks is available with some examples worked out to show the potential of the data. Today the platform is used by several third party projects to perform R&D activities on the data, and to develop/host data analysis toolboxes. In parallel the platform is further improved and extended. From the MEP PROBA-V, access to Sentinel-2 and landsat data will

SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND ABUSE BY UN PEACEKEEPERS ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Allaiac

from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (ST/SGB/2003/13) (UN, Secretary .... In addition, in most situations, UN personnel have enjoyed immunity from local .... 9 Official UN statistics show a higher incidence of allegations reported against.

Model Performance Evaluation and Scenario Analysis (MPESA)

Science.gov (United States)

Model Performance Evaluation and Scenario Analysis (MPESA) assesses the performance with which models predict time series data. The tool was developed Hydrological Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) and the Stormwater Management Model (SWMM)

Estimation of Physical Layer Performance inWSNs Exploiting the Method of Indirect Observations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Luigi Atzori

2012-11-01

Full Text Available Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs are used in many industrial and consumer applications that are increasingly gaining impact in our day to day lives. Still great efforts are needed towards the definition of methodologies for their effective management. One big issue is themonitoring of the network status, which requires the definition of the performance indicators and methodologies and should be accurate and not intrusive at the same time. In this paper, we present a new process for the monitoring of the physical layer in WSNs making use of a completely passive methodology. From data sniffed by external nodes, we first estimate the position of the nodes by applying the Weighted Least Squares (WLS to the method of indirect observations. The resulting node positions are then used to estimate the status of the communication links using the most appropriate propagation model. We performed a significant number of measurements on the field in both indoor and outdoor environments. From the experiments, we were able to achieve an accurate estimation of the channel links status with an average error lower than 1 dB, which is around 5 dB lower than the error introduced without the application of the proposed method.

Exploiting Phase Diversity for CDMA2000 1X Smart Antenna Base Stations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hyeon Seungheon

2004-01-01

Full Text Available A performance analysis of an access channel decoder is presented which exploits a diversity gain due to the independent magnitude of received signals energy at each of the antenna elements of a smart-antenna base-station transceiver subsystem (BTS operating in CDMA2000 1X signal environment. The objective is to enhance the data retrieval at cellsite during the access period, for which the optimal weight vector of the smart antenna BTS is not available. It is shown in this paper that the access channel decoder proposed in this paper outperforms the conventional one, which is based on a single antenna channel in terms of detection probability of access probe, access channel failure probability, and Walsh-code demodulation performance.

The exploitation of swamp plants for dewatering liquid sewage sludge

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jiří Šálek

2006-01-01

Full Text Available The operators of little rural wastewater treatment plants have been interested in economic exploitation of sewage sludge in local conditions. The chance is searching simply and natural ways of processing and exploitation stabilized sewage sludge in agriculture. Manure substrate have been obtained by composting waterless sewage sludge including rest plant biomass after closing 6–8 years period of filling liquid sewage sludge to the basin. Main attention was focused on exploitation of swamp plants for dewatering liquid sewage sludge and determination of influence sewage sludge on plants, intensity and course of evapotranspiration and design and setting of drying beds. On the base of determined ability of swamp plants evapotranspiration were edited suggestion solutions of design and operation sludge bed facilities in the conditions of small rural wastewater treatment plant.

Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nicole S. Cohen

2012-05-01

Full Text Available This paper argues that Marxist political economy is a useful framework for understanding contemporary conditions of cultural work. Drawing on Karl Marx’s foundational concepts, labour process theory, and a case study of freelance writers, I argue that the debate over autonomy and control in cultural work ignores exploitation in labour-capital relationships, which is a crucial process shaping cultural work. To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, I discuss two methods media firms use to extract surplus value from freelance writers: exploitation of unpaid labour time and exploitation of intellectual property through aggressive copyright regimes. I argue that a Marxist perspective can uncover the dynamics that are transforming cultural industries and workers’ experiences. From this perspective, cultural work is understood as a site of struggle.

The Evolution of Ecosystems for Converging Technologies – Drivers and Barriers of Technology Exploration and Exploitation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Laufs, Daniel; Giones, Ferran; Schultz, Carsten

2018-01-01

Convergent technologies, like biotechnology, rely on the contribution of multiple scientific disciplines and are applied to distant needs and markets. As such, the development of technologies and related applications fields require the evolution of ecosystems that involve multidisciplinary......, previously unrelated, actors in collaborative exploration and exploitation processes. We know little on how these processes unfold, in particular in the early stages of the ecosystem development. Previous research suggests that human and social capital [1], patents and VC funding [2], or market orientation....... This helps us to generate an understanding of the pattern of technology convergence as well as of the drivers and barriers that affect the innovation process. In order to develop a holistic framework of the interplay between technology exploration and exploitation and the relevant ecosystem, we perform...

Isotopic assessment of long term groundwater exploitation. Proceedings of a final research coordination meeting

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2006-10-01

The stress imposed on the available water resources due to man's impact (exploitation, release of pollutants and agricultural practices) has resulted in depletion of the available reserves as well as deterioration of water quality in many parts of the world. Over wide areas, abstractions are exceeding current natural recharge and it is apparent from scientific studies that these water resources are being mined, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. Sustainable development and management of those water resources needs long term monitoring records to understand the changes and dynamic responses due to the exploitation. These proceedings provide a synthesis of a series of hydrochemical, isotope and geohydrological data sets which will be used for quantitative assessment of the long term dynamic response of the groundwater system. The results show that both stable and radioactive isotopes are excellent tools for characterizing and understanding aquifer systems that are undergoing long term exploitation. Specific outcomes include establishment of methodologies for monitoring and predicting changes in water quality and quantity that will lead to improved water resources management. This publication is a summary of the results achieved during the coordinated research project (CRP) and the various studies performed by the participating institutions are presented as individual presentations. The overall achievements are presented as an executive summary, and the detailed findings are presented in each contribution. These results were presented in the final coordination meeting held in Vienna, 12-16 May 2003. The results obtained from this CRP will be used to improve the predictions of future behaviour of groundwater resources in response to exploitation. The scientific component of this CRP will be a valuable source of information for isotope hydrologists involved in isotope field applications and a useful guide for groundwater managers involved in groundwater resources

Financial Exploitation Is Associated With Structural and Functional Brain Differences in Healthy Older Adults.

Science.gov (United States)

Spreng, R Nathan; Cassidy, Benjamin N; Darboh, Bri S; DuPre, Elizabeth; Lockrow, Amber W; Setton, Roni; Turner, Gary R

2017-10-01

Age-related brain changes leading to altered socioemotional functioning may increase vulnerability to financial exploitation. If confirmed, this would suggest a novel mechanism leading to heightened financial exploitation risk in older adults. Development of predictive neural markers could facilitate increased vigilance and prevention. In this preliminary study, we sought to identify structural and functional brain differences associated with financial exploitation in older adults. Financially exploited older adults (n = 13, 7 female) and a matched cohort of older adults who had been exposed to, but avoided, a potentially exploitative situation (n = 13, 7 female) were evaluated. Using magnetic resonance imaging, we examined cortical thickness and resting state functional connectivity. Behavioral data were collected using standardized cognitive assessments, self-report measures of mood and social functioning. The exploited group showed cortical thinning in anterior insula and posterior superior temporal cortices, regions associated with processing affective and social information, respectively. Functional connectivity encompassing these regions, within default and salience networks, was reduced, while between network connectivity was increased. Self-reported anger and hostility was higher for the exploited group. We observed financial exploitation associated with brain differences in regions involved in socioemotional functioning. These exploratory and preliminary findings suggest that alterations in brain regions implicated in socioemotional functioning may be a marker of financial exploitation risk. Large-scale, prospective studies are necessary to validate this neural mechanism, and develop predictive markers for use in clinical practice. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.

Systematic assessment of multi-gene predictors of pan-cancer cell line sensitivity to drugs exploiting gene expression data [version 2; referees: 2 approved

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Linh Nguyen

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Background: Selected gene mutations are routinely used to guide the selection of cancer drugs for a given patient tumour. Large pharmacogenomic data sets, such as those by Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC consortium, were introduced to discover more of these single-gene markers of drug sensitivity. Very recently, machine learning regression has been used to investigate how well cancer cell line sensitivity to drugs is predicted depending on the type of molecular profile. The latter has revealed that gene expression data is the most predictive profile in the pan-cancer setting. However, no study to date has exploited GDSC data to systematically compare the performance of machine learning models based on multi-gene expression data against that of widely-used single-gene markers based on genomics data. Methods: Here we present this systematic comparison using Random Forest (RF classifiers exploiting the expression levels of 13,321 genes and an average of 501 tested cell lines per drug. To account for time-dependent batch effects in IC50 measurements, we employ independent test sets generated with more recent GDSC data than that used to train the predictors and show that this is a more realistic validation than standard k-fold cross-validation. Results and Discussion: Across 127 GDSC drugs, our results show that the single-gene markers unveiled by the MANOVA analysis tend to achieve higher precision than these RF-based multi-gene models, at the cost of generally having a poor recall (i.e. correctly detecting only a small part of the cell lines sensitive to the drug. Regarding overall classification performance, about two thirds of the drugs are better predicted by the multi-gene RF classifiers. Among the drugs with the most predictive of these models, we found pyrimethamine, sunitinib and 17-AAG. Conclusions: Thanks to this unbiased validation, we now know that this type of models can predict in vitro tumour response to some of these

Geographical aspects of exploitation of nuclear energy in Europe

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kurucova, S.

2007-05-01

The topic of exploitation of nuclear energy is becoming increasingly actual in the present time in connection with frequently discussed question of 'renaissance of nuclear energetics'. The work is aimed at research of geographical aspects of exploitation of nuclear energy for military and civil purposes on the territory of Europe. The base of work represents the analysis of theoretical aspects of research of energy, mainly of nuclear energy. The work examines the historical development of exploitation of nuclear energy since its discovery, through development of military nuclear industry in Europe, big attention is paid to spreading of nuclear energetics on the territory of Europe from its beginnings up to the present time. The main part of the work represents the analysis of the present situation of exploitation of nuclear energy for civil purposes in Europe. The attention is paid to so-called nuclear fuel cycle as complex chain of several reciprocally interconnected operations of nuclear fuel treatment. The monitoring of spatial relations among individual countries within their nuclear fuel cycles is emphasised. The analysis of historical development and of the present state of nuclear energetics finished up in the outline of the perspectives of its further development in Europe. The analysis of the tendencies of evolution of world energetic economy mentions on the trend of growth of energy consumption in the world and Europe, as well as on the important position of nuclear energy in the structure of energy sources. Summary in English language is included. (author)

Performance Measurement Model A TarBase model with ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

rohit

Model A 8.0 2.0 94.52% 88.46% 76 108 12 12 0.86 0.91 0.78 0.94. Model B 2.0 2.0 93.18% 89.33% 64 95 10 9 0.88 0.90 0.75 0.98. The above results for TEST – 1 show details for our two models (Model A and Model B).Performance of Model A after adding of 32 negative dataset of MiRTif on our testing set(MiRecords) ...

SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN IN THE TOURISM – THE DARK SIDE OF TOURISM

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Janez Mekinc

2015-05-01

Full Text Available The underlying causes of sexual exploitation and prostitution are poverty, inequality between women and men, high population growth and rural - urban migration. Victims are, predominantly, women and children with lower socio-economic status. One particular form of sexual exploitation is child sex tourism. This ruthless exploitation of children can be found throughout the world, predominantly in the third world and developing countries. Children, mainly between the ages of 6 to 14 years, are trapped in a vicious battle between large impoverished families who are dependent on their support, and a society that ruthlessly exploits them. In line with the trend in increasing child exploitation, there is, also, increasing exploitation of children for the purposes of child sex tourism. Based on the analysis of forms, reasons, impacts, consequences and trends of child sex tourism, it has been possible to develop from these findings some necessary measures to prevent this practice from occurring. Analysis of the phenomenon of child sex tourism has highlighted some fundamental conditions for preventing it becoming a social phenomenon. These include the strict implementation of laws against child labour and the political will to enforce them.

The ESA Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions element

Science.gov (United States)

Desnos, Yves-Louis; Regner, Peter; Delwart, Steven; Benveniste, Jerome; Engdahl, Marcus; Zehner, Claus; Mathieu, Pierre-Philippe; Bojkov, Bojan; Gascon, Ferran; Donlon, Craig; Davidson, Malcolm; Goryl, Philippe; Pinnock, Simon

2015-04-01

SEOM is a program element within the fourth period (2013-2017) of ESA's Earth Observation Envelope Programme (http://seom.esa.int/). The prime objective is to federate, support and expand the international research community that the ERS,ENVISAT and the Envelope programmes have built up over the last 25 years. It aims to further strengthen the leadership of the European Earth Observation research community by enabling them to extensively exploit future European operational EO missions. SEOM will enable the science community to address new scientific research that are opened by free and open access to data from operational EO missions. Based on community-wide recommendations for actions on key research issues, gathered through a series of international thematic workshops and scientific user consultation meetings, a work plan has been established and is approved every year by ESA Members States. The 2015 SEOM work plan is covering the organisation of three Science users consultation workshops for Sentinel1/3/5P , the launch of new R&D studies for scientific exploitation of the Sentinels, the development of open-source multi-mission scientific toolboxes, the organisation of advanced international training courses, summer schools and educational materials, as well as activities for promoting the scientific use of EO data. The first SEOM projects have been tendered since 2013 including the development of Sentinel toolboxes, advanced INSAR algorithms for Sentinel-1 TOPS data exploitation, Improved Atmospheric Spectroscopic data-base (IAS), as well as grouped studies for Sentinel-1, -2, and -3 land and ocean applications and studies for exploiting the synergy between the Sentinels. The status and first results from these SEOM projects will be presented and an outlook for upcoming SEOM studies will be given.

Making and exploiting fullerenes, graphene, and carbon nanotubes

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Marcaccio, Massimo; Paolucci, Francesco

2014-01-01

overview of the different types of fullerene-stoppered bistable rotaxanes, their switching mechanism and their potential applications. In the chapter ''Catalysis-Material Crosstalk at Tailored Nano-Carbon Interfaces'' by Michele Melchionna et al., carbon nanomaterials are described as supports for molecular and nanostructured catalysts, where their outstanding electronic and optical properties, high surface area and thermal and mechanical stability contribute to create a synergistic effect that leads to enhanced performance for a wide range of possible applications. Exploitation of nanocarbons in biology and biomedical applications has been increasingly proposed and, in particular, the chapter ''Carbon Nanotubes in Tissue Engineering'' by Susanna Bosi et al. explores applications of CNTs for tissue engineering purposes, where the tubes proved to be ideal materials for the growth and proliferation of many kind of tissues. The local chemical reactivity, the mechanical properties and the electron transfer in graphene membranes have been shown to be strongly affected by the fold-induced curvature; thus in the chapter ''Folds and Buckles at the Nanoscale: Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of the Bending Properties of Graphene Membranes'' by Vittorio Morandi, a novel methodology to investigate the mechanical properties of folded and wrinkled graphene crystals, which combine transmission electron microscopy mapping and theoretical modelling, is described. Graphene and nanocarbons in general are intensively investigated as platforms for the development of sensing devices for the selective and highly sensitive detection of biohazards. The aim of the chapter ''Graphene and Graphene Oxide Materials for Chemo- and Biosensing of Chemical and Biochemical Hazards'' by Piyush Sindhu Sharma et al. is then to bring out important advances of graphene-based sensors, with particular attention to the rapid detection and quantization of toxins, explosives, pesticides and pathogens.

Making and exploiting fullerenes, graphene, and carbon nanotubes

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Marcaccio, Massimo; Paolucci, Francesco (eds.) [Bologna Univ. (Italy). Dept. of Chemistry G. Ciamician

2014-11-01

;'Fullerene-Stoppered Bistable Rotaxanes'' by Aurelio Mateo-Alonso, which presents an overview of the different types of fullerene-stoppered bistable rotaxanes, their switching mechanism and their potential applications. In the chapter ''Catalysis-Material Crosstalk at Tailored Nano-Carbon Interfaces'' by Michele Melchionna et al., carbon nanomaterials are described as supports for molecular and nanostructured catalysts, where their outstanding electronic and optical properties, high surface area and thermal and mechanical stability contribute to create a synergistic effect that leads to enhanced performance for a wide range of possible applications. Exploitation of nanocarbons in biology and biomedical applications has been increasingly proposed and, in particular, the chapter ''Carbon Nanotubes in Tissue Engineering'' by Susanna Bosi et al. explores applications of CNTs for tissue engineering purposes, where the tubes proved to be ideal materials for the growth and proliferation of many kind of tissues. The local chemical reactivity, the mechanical properties and the electron transfer in graphene membranes have been shown to be strongly affected by the fold-induced curvature; thus in the chapter ''Folds and Buckles at the Nanoscale: Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of the Bending Properties of Graphene Membranes'' by Vittorio Morandi, a novel methodology to investigate the mechanical properties of folded and wrinkled graphene crystals, which combine transmission electron microscopy mapping and theoretical modelling, is described. Graphene and nanocarbons in general are intensively investigated as platforms for the development of sensing devices for the selective and highly sensitive detection of biohazards. The aim of the chapter ''Graphene and Graphene Oxide Materials for Chemo- and Biosensing of Chemical and Biochemical Hazards'' by Piyush Sindhu Sharma et al. is then to bring out important

Syntactic discriminative language model rerankers for statistical machine translation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Carter, S.; Monz, C.

2011-01-01

This article describes a method that successfully exploits syntactic features for n-best translation candidate reranking using perceptrons. We motivate the utility of syntax by demonstrating the superior performance of parsers over n-gram language models in differentiating between Statistical

Exploiting opportunistic resources for ATLAS with ARC CE and the Event Service

Science.gov (United States)

Cameron, D.; Filipčič, A.; Guan, W.; Tsulaia, V.; Walker, R.; Wenaus, T.; ATLAS Collaboration

2017-10-01

With ever-greater computing needs and fixed budgets, big scientific experiments are turning to opportunistic resources as a means to add much-needed extra computing power. These resources can be very different in design from those that comprise the Grid computing of most experiments, therefore exploiting them requires a change in strategy for the experiment. They may be highly restrictive in what can be run or in connections to the outside world, or tolerate opportunistic usage only on condition that tasks may be terminated without warning. The Advanced Resource Connector Computing Element (ARC CE) with its nonintrusive architecture is designed to integrate resources such as High Performance Computing (HPC) systems into a computing Grid. The ATLAS experiment developed the ATLAS Event Service (AES) primarily to address the issue of jobs that can be terminated at any point when opportunistic computing capacity is needed by someone else. This paper describes the integration of these two systems in order to exploit opportunistic resources for ATLAS in a restrictive environment. In addition to the technical details, results from deployment of this solution in the SuperMUC HPC centre in Munich are shown.

Evaluating spatial patterns in hydrological modelling

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Koch, Julian

the contiguous United Sates (10^6 km2). To this end, the thesis at hand applies a set of spatial performance metrics on various hydrological variables, namely land-surface-temperature (LST), evapotranspiration (ET) and soil moisture. The inspiration for the applied metrics is found in related fields...... is not fully exploited by current modelling frameworks due to the lack of suitable spatial performance metrics. Furthermore, the traditional model evaluation using discharge is found unsuitable to lay confidence on the predicted catchment inherent spatial variability of hydrological processes in a fully...

The false promises of coal exploitation: How mining affects herdsmen well-being in the grassland ecosystems of Inner Mongolia

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dai, G.S.; Ulgiati, S.; Zhang, Y.S.; Yu, B.H.; Kang, M.Y.; Jin, Y.; Dong, X.B.; Zhang, X.S.

2014-01-01

The grasslands of Inner Mongolia are not only the source of the necessary resources for the survival and development of herdsmen, but also represent a significant green ecological barrier in North China. Coal-mining production is important in maintaining GDP growth in Inner Mongolia. However, over-exploitation has created serious problems, such as pollution of the environment and significant decreases in grassland ecosystem services, in addition to impacting the well-being of herdsmen and other humans. Based on questionnaires survey performed among 864 herdsmen addressing the relationship between coal exploitation in grasslands and human well-being in Xilinguole League in Inner Mongolia, we found that (1) coal resource exploitation in these grasslands does not benefit the herdsmen by increasing their income; (2) the rapid development of this resource has not obviously materially improved the life of the herdsmen; and (3) these activities have increased the risks that herdsman will have to endure in the future. Overall, coal resource exploitation in grasslands has more negative than positive effects on the well-being of herdsmen. We propose the conservation of coal resources and improvement of ecological compensation should be carried out without blindly pursuing economic growth, instead of focusing on economic development and structural adjustments. - Highlights: • Evaluation of the human well-being of the Xilinguole grassland, Inner Mongolia, China. • Impact of mining affects herdsmen well-being in grassland ecosystem. • Quantity of questionnaires survey. • Addressing the relationship between coal exploitation in grasslands and human well-being

Preliminary exploitation of industrial facility for flue gas treatment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chmielewski, A.G.; Zimek, Z.; Iller, E.; Tyminski, B.; Licki, J.

2001-01-01

laboratory and pilot installation in Poland has lead to decision concerning design and construction of the industrial demonstration plant for electron beam flue gas treatment. Industrial demonstration facility for electron beam flue gas treatment was designed and installed in EPS Pomorzany in Szczecin. This flue gas purification installation treats exhaust gases coming from a block which consists of two Benson type boilers of power 56 MWe each, supplying additional steam for heating purposes up to 40 MWth each. The 270,000 Nm 3 /h flue gases (half of produced by the blocks) is treated meet Polish regulations which are imposed since 1997. Four electron accelerators has been constructed by Nissin High Voltage, Kyoto, Japan to provide 1200 kW of total beam power with electron energy 0,8 MeV to be installed in EPS Pomorzany. Two-stage irradiation was applied as it was tested at the pilot plant. The industrial installation located at EPS Pomorzany consist of two independent reaction chambers, humidification tower with water and steam supply systems, ammonia water handling system with ammonia injection, electrostatic precipitator, by product handling system, measuring and control systems. Solid particles which are formed as salts are separated in ESP and byproduct pretreated in handling system with amount up to 700 kg/h. All systems including accelerators were tested separately to meet EPS regulations (72 h continues run) and confirm producer warranted parameters and facility design specification. Some necessary modifications including accelerators were introduced by equipment producers depends on obtained results of performed measurements. The quality of shielding properties of accelerator chamber walls was tested according to national regulation and the license on accelerator exploitation and personnel qualification were issued by polish authorities. The spatial dose distribution and dose rate measurement were carried on with electron energy 700 and 800 keV. Preliminary results

Relationship between exploitation, oscillation, MSY and extinction.

Science.gov (United States)

Ghosh, Bapan; Kar, T K; Legovic, T

2014-10-01

We give answers to two important problems arising in current fisheries: (i) how maximum sustainable yield (MSY) policy is influenced by the initial population level, and (ii) how harvesting, oscillation and MSY are related to each other in prey-predator systems. To examine the impact of initial population on exploitation, we analyze a single species model with strong Allee effect. It is found that even when the MSY exists, the dynamic solution may not converge to the equilibrium stock if the initial population level is higher but near the critical threshold level. In a prey-predator system with Allee effect in the prey species, the initial population does not have such important impact neither on MSY nor on maximum sustainable total yield (MSTY). However, harvesting the top predator may cause extinction of all species if odd number of trophic levels exist in the ecosystem. With regard to the second problem, we study two prey-predator models and establish that increasing harvesting effort either on prey, predator or both prey and predator destroys previously existing oscillation. Moreover, equilibrium stock both at MSY and MSTY level is stable. We also discuss the validity of found results to other prey-predator systems. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Fostering the Exploitation of Open Educational Resources

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thomas Richter

2014-07-01

Full Text Available The central concept behind Open Educational Resources (OER is opening up the access to educational resources for stakeholders who are not the usual target user group. This concept must be perceived as innovative because it describes a general economic and social paradigm shift: Education, which formerly was limited to a specific group of learners, now, is promoted as a public good. However, despite very good intentions, internationally agreed quality standards, and the availability of the required technological infrastructure, the critical threshold is not yet met. Due to several reasons, the usefulness of OER is often limited to the originally targeted context. Questions arise if the existing quality standards for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL actually meet the specific requirements within the OER value chain, if the existing quality standards are applicable to OER in a meaningful way, and under which conditions related standards generally could support the exploitation of OER.We analyze quality standards for TEL and contrast the life cycle model of commercial learning resources against the life cycle model of OER. We investigate special demands on quality from the context of OER and, taking the former results into account, derive emergent quality criteria for OER. The paper concludes with recommendations for the design of OER and a future standard development.

Accelerating Large Data Analysis By Exploiting Regularities

Science.gov (United States)

Moran, Patrick J.; Ellsworth, David

2003-01-01

We present techniques for discovering and exploiting regularity in large curvilinear data sets. The data can be based on a single mesh or a mesh composed of multiple submeshes (also known as zones). Multi-zone data are typical to Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. Regularities include axis-aligned rectilinear and cylindrical meshes as well as cases where one zone is equivalent to a rigid-body transformation of another. Our algorithms can also discover rigid-body motion of meshes in time-series data. Next, we describe a data model where we can utilize the results from the discovery process in order to accelerate large data visualizations. Where possible, we replace general curvilinear zones with rectilinear or cylindrical zones. In rigid-body motion cases we replace a time-series of meshes with a transformed mesh object where a reference mesh is dynamically transformed based on a given time value in order to satisfy geometry requests, on demand. The data model enables us to make these substitutions and dynamic transformations transparently with respect to the visualization algorithms. We present results with large data sets where we combine our mesh replacement and transformation techniques with out-of-core paging in order to achieve significant speed-ups in analysis.

Regulatory Framework on Exploration and Exploitation of Croatian Part of Adriatic

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Mudric, M.

2015-01-01

As the prelude to the regulation of marine exploration and exploitation activities in the Croatian Adriatic waters, the new Mining Act and Act on exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons have provided a general legal framework for the natural resources exploration and exploitation. The latter Act also appropriated the establishment of the independent regulatory body, the Hydrocarbon Agency. It is important to mention the Decree on Fees for exploration and production of hydrocarbons, and the Decree on main technical requirements on safety and security of offshore exploration and production of hydrocarbons in the Republic of Croatia, that are of special relevance for the current activities with regard the proposed project of exploration and exploitation of the Croatian waters in search for gas and oil sea-bed deposits. The Hydrocarbon Agency has published the Strategic Study of the Likely Significant Environmental Impact of the Framework Plan and Program of Exploration and Production of Hydrocarbons in the Adriatic, a document receiving a lot of criticism from the legal experts and general public. At the same time, the experts tend to support the general idea of sea-bed exploration and exploitation, with the major antagonism still being present in the general public, with several initiatives introducing the possibility of a public referenda to oppose the sea-bed exploration and exploitation. The Government is currently preparing the Act on the Safety of Offshore Hydrocarbon Exploration and Production Operations, based on the Directive 94/22/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 1994 on the conditions for granting and using authorizations for the prospection, exploration and production of hydrocarbons, the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 1112/2014 of 13 October 2014 determining a common format for sharing of information on major hazard indicators by the operators and owners of offshore oil and gas installations and a common format

Exploitation of Factory Workers: A Study of Union Dicon Salt, Lagos ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The study examined labour exploitation in Nigeria with particular reference to Union Dicon Salt Plc., Lagos. The review of literature points to the fact that exploitation of the factory workers in the long run leads to strained relationships between management and staff. The situation becomes conflictual to the extent that both ...

Economic factors of vulnerability trade and exploitation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Allodi, L.

2017-01-01

Cybercrime markets support the development and diffusion of new attack technologies, vulnerability exploits, and malware. Whereas the revenue streams of cyber attackers have been studied multiple times in the literature, no quantitative account currently exists on the economics of attack acquisition

Numerical simulation of gas hydrate exploitation from subsea reservoirs in the Black Sea

Science.gov (United States)

Janicki, Georg; Schlüter, Stefan; Hennig, Torsten; Deerberg, Görge

2017-04-01

Natural gas (methane) is the most environmental friendly source of fossil energy. When coal is replace by natural gas in power production the emission of carbon dioxide is reduced by 50 %. The vast amount of methane assumed in gas hydrate deposits can help to overcome a shortage of fossil energy resources in the future. To increase their potential for energy applications new technological approaches are being discussed and developed worldwide. Besides technical challenges that have to be overcome climate and safety issues have to be considered before a commercial exploitation of such unconventional reservoirs. The potential of producing natural gas from subsea gas hydrate deposits by various means (e. g. depressurization and/or carbon dioxide injection) is numerically studied in the frame of the German research project »SUGAR - Submarine Gas Hydrate Reservoirs«. In order to simulate the exploitation of hydrate-bearing sediments in the subsea, an in-house simulation model HyReS which is implemented in the general-purpose software COMSOL Multiphysics is used. This tool turned out to be especially suited for the flexible implementation of non-standard correlations concerning heat transfer, fluid flow, hydrate kinetics, and other relevant model data. Partially based on the simulation results, the development of a technical concept and its evaluation are the subject of ongoing investigations, whereby geological and ecological criteria are to be considered. The results illustrate the processes and effects occurring during the gas production from a subsea gas hydrate deposit by depressurization. The simulation results from a case study for a deposit located in the Black Sea reveal that the production of natural gas by simple depressurization is possible but with quite low rates. It can be shown that the hydrate decomposition and thus the gas production strongly depend on the geophysical properties of the reservoir, the mass and heat transport within the reservoir, and

A Novel Approach to Model Earth Fissure Caused by Extensive Aquifer Exploitation and its Application to the Wuxi Case, China

Science.gov (United States)

Ye, Shujun; Franceschini, Andrea; Zhang, Yan; Janna, Carlo; Gong, Xulong; Yu, Jun; Teatini, Pietro

2018-03-01

Initially observed in the semiarid basins of southwestern USA, earth fissures due to aquifer over-exploitation are presently threatening a large number of subsiding basins in various countries worldwide. Different mechanics have been proposed to explain this process, such as differential compaction, horizontal movements, and fault reactivation. Numerical modeling and prediction of this major geohazard caused by overuse of groundwater resources are challenging because of two main requirements: shifting from the classical continuous to discontinuous geomechanics and incorporating two-dimensional features (the earth fissures) into large three-dimensional (3-D) modeling domain (the subsiding basin). In this work, we proposed a novel modeling approach to simulate earth fissure generation and propagation in 3-D complex geological settings. A nested two-scale approach associated with an original nonlinear elastoplastic finite element/interface element simulator allows modeling the mechanics of earth discontinuities, in terms of both sliding and opening. The model is applied on a case study in Wuxi, China, where groundwater pumping between 1985 and 2004 has caused land subsidence larger than 2 m. The model outcomes highlight that the presence of a shallow (˜80 m deep) bedrock ridge crossing the Yangtze River delta is the key factor triggering the earth fissure development in this area. Bending of the alluvial deposits around the ridge tip and shear stress due to the uneven piezometric change and asymmetrical shape of the bedrock have caused the earth fissure to onset at the land surface and propagate downward to a maximum depth of about 20-30 m. Maximum sliding and opening are computed in the range of 10-40 cm, in agreement with the order of magnitude estimated in the field.

Principles of Sonar Performance Modeling

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ainslie, M.A.

2010-01-01

Sonar performance modelling (SPM) is concerned with the prediction of quantitative measures of sonar performance, such as probability of detection. It is a multidisciplinary subject, requiring knowledge and expertise in the disparate fields of underwater acoustics, acoustical oceanography, sonar

Sexual slavery without borders: trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in India

Science.gov (United States)

Joffres, Christine; Mills, Edward; Joffres, Michel; Khanna, Tinku; Walia, Harleen; Grund, Darrin

2008-01-01

Trafficking in women and children is a gross violation of human rights. However, this does not prevent an estimated 800 000 women and children to be trafficked each year across international borders. Eighty per cent of trafficked persons end in forced sex work. India has been identified as one of the Asian countries where trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation has reached alarming levels. While there is a considerable amount of internal trafficking from one state to another or within states, India has also emerged as a international supplier of trafficked women and children to the Gulf States and South East Asia, as well as a destination country for women and girls trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation from Nepal and Bangladesh. Trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation is a highly profitable and low risk business that preys on particularly vulnerable populations. This paper presents an overview of the trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation (CSE) in India; identifies the health impacts of CSE; and suggest strategies to respond to trafficking and related issues. PMID:18817576

Sexual slavery without borders: trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in India.

Science.gov (United States)

Joffres, Christine; Mills, Edward; Joffres, Michel; Khanna, Tinku; Walia, Harleen; Grund, Darrin

2008-09-25

Trafficking in women and children is a gross violation of human rights. However, this does not prevent an estimated 800 000 women and children to be trafficked each year across international borders. Eighty per cent of trafficked persons end in forced sex work. India has been identified as one of the Asian countries where trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation has reached alarming levels. While there is a considerable amount of internal trafficking from one state to another or within states, India has also emerged as a international supplier of trafficked women and children to the Gulf States and South East Asia, as well as a destination country for women and girls trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation from Nepal and Bangladesh. Trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation is a highly profitable and low risk business that preys on particularly vulnerable populations. This paper presents an overview of the trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation (CSE) in India; identifies the health impacts of CSE; and suggest strategies to respond to trafficking and related issues.

Piloting the older adult financial exploitation measure in adult safeguarding services.

Science.gov (United States)

Phelan, A; Fealy, G; Downes, C

Financial abuse is arguably the most complex form of elder abuse as it may occur remote to the older person and it is impacted by issues such as cultural values, perpetrator intent and family expectations. Financial abuse may not be recognised by either the older person or the perpetrator, thus, its prevention, early identification and amelioration are important. The (Irish) National Centre for the Protection of Older People undertook a study to determine the appropriateness of the Older Adult Financial Exploitation Measure for use by the national safeguarding older person services. Findings from a small pilot study involving 16 safeguarding staff's use of the Older Adult Financial Exploitation Measure with 52 community dwelling older people referred to their service demonstrate a higher suspicion of financial abuse as well as identifying multiple instances of possible financial exploitation in a single individual. Thus, the Older Adult Financial Exploitation Measure is considered appropriate to assist safeguarding personnel's assessment of older people related to a suspicion of financial abuse. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Algorithms exploiting ultrasonic sensors for subject classification

Science.gov (United States)

Desai, Sachi; Quoraishee, Shafik

2009-09-01

Proposed here is a series of techniques exploiting micro-Doppler ultrasonic sensors capable of characterizing various detected mammalian targets based on their physiological movements captured a series of robust features. Employed is a combination of unique and conventional digital signal processing techniques arranged in such a manner they become capable of classifying a series of walkers. These processes for feature extraction develops a robust feature space capable of providing discrimination of various movements generated from bipeds and quadrupeds and further subdivided into large or small. These movements can be exploited to provide specific information of a given signature dividing it in a series of subset signatures exploiting wavelets to generate start/stop times. After viewing a series spectrograms of the signature we are able to see distinct differences and utilizing kurtosis, we generate an envelope detector capable of isolating each of the corresponding step cycles generated during a walk. The walk cycle is defined as one complete sequence of walking/running from the foot pushing off the ground and concluding when returning to the ground. This time information segments the events that are readily seen in the spectrogram but obstructed in the temporal domain into individual walk sequences. This walking sequence is then subsequently translated into a three dimensional waterfall plot defining the expected energy value associated with the motion at particular instance of time and frequency. The value is capable of being repeatable for each particular class and employable to discriminate the events. Highly reliable classification is realized exploiting a classifier trained on a candidate sample space derived from the associated gyrations created by motion from actors of interest. The classifier developed herein provides a capability to classify events as an adult humans, children humans, horses, and dogs at potentially high rates based on the tested sample

Exploiting indigenous knowledge in the environmental conservation ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

... of agriculture and reared livestock (especially goats). Over several years, they developed sustainable and effective exploitation mechanisms of the existing biodiversity resources to satisfy their individual needs and those of their societies in general. Journal of Language, Technology and Entrepreneurship in Africa Vol.

Analysing the temporal dynamics of model performance for hydrological models

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Reusser, D.E.; Blume, T.; Schaefli, B.; Zehe, E.

2009-01-01

The temporal dynamics of hydrological model performance gives insights into errors that cannot be obtained from global performance measures assigning a single number to the fit of a simulated time series to an observed reference series. These errors can include errors in data, model parameters, or

Quantification of exploitable shallow geothermal energy by using Borehole Heat Exchanger coupled Ground Source Heat Pump systems

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hein, Philipp; Zhu, Ke; Bucher, Anke; Kolditz, Olaf; Pang, Zhonghe; Shao, Haibing

2016-01-01

Highlights: • The amount of technically exploitable shallow geothermal energy was quantified. • Therefore, a comprehensive numerical borehole heat exchanger model was employed. • The concept of equivalent temperature drop is introduced. • For one BHE, an equivalent temperature drop of 1.8–2.8 °C over 30 years is realistic • The average extractable energy amount evaluates to be 3.5–5.4 kW h m"−"2 a"−"1. - Abstract: In previous studies, the amount of exploitable shallow geothermal energy was estimated by assuming a uniform temperature drop of 2–6 °C in the aquifer. In this work, a more comprehensive numerical model has been employed to evaluate the available amount of shallow geothermal energy by using Borehole Heat Exchanger coupled Ground Source Heat Pump systems. Numerical experiments have been performed by simulating the long-term evolution of the subsurface temperature field, which is subject to the operation of borehole heat exchangers and varying parameters like subsurface thermal conductivity and groundwater flow velocity. The concept of equivalent temperature drop is proposed as an auxiliary quantity for the subsurface. With the help of this parameter, a procedure has been established to quantify the amount of shallow geothermal potential. Following this approach, a realistic equivalent temperature reduction is found to be from −1.8 to −4.4 °C in the subsurface over a period of 30 years. This can be translated to an annual extractable geothermal energy value in a unit surface area, and it ranges from 3.5 to 8.6 kW h m"−"2 a"−"1. The exact value is site specific and heavily depends on the soil thermal conductivity, groundwater velocity, and borehole arrangement.

Water Exploitation and Its Outcomes Caused by Capitalism as Reflected on Gore Verbinski's Rango Movie

OpenAIRE

SETIAWAN, DANIEL NUGRAHA

2014-01-01

Nugraha Setiawan, Daniel. 2014. Water Exploitation and Its Outcome Caused byCapitalism as Reflected on Gore Verbinski's Rango Movie. Study Program ofEnglish, Universitas Brawijaya.Supervisor: Yusri Fajar, Co-supervisor: Melania Shinta Harendika.Keywords: water exploitation, environment, capitalism, Rango movie. Water exploitation threats ecosystem and causes a great damage to environment. One of the causes of the water exploitation is capitalism. The movie entitled Rango reveals some causes a...

Helix Nebula and CERN: A Symbiotic approach to exploiting commercial clouds

Science.gov (United States)

Barreiro Megino, Fernando H.; Jones, Robert; Kucharczyk, Katarzyna; Medrano Llamas, Ramón; van der Ster, Daniel

2014-06-01

The recent paradigm shift toward cloud computing in IT, and general interest in "Big Data" in particular, have demonstrated that the computing requirements of HEP are no longer globally unique. Indeed, the CERN IT department and LHC experiments have already made significant R&D investments in delivering and exploiting cloud computing resources. While a number of technical evaluations of interesting commercial offerings from global IT enterprises have been performed by various physics labs, further technical, security, sociological, and legal issues need to be address before their large-scale adoption by the research community can be envisaged. Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud is an initiative that explores these questions by joining the forces of three European research institutes (CERN, ESA and EMBL) with leading European commercial IT enterprises. The goals of Helix Nebula are to establish a cloud platform federating multiple commercial cloud providers, along with new business models, which can sustain the cloud marketplace for years to come. This contribution will summarize the participation of CERN in Helix Nebula. We will explain CERN's flagship use-case and the model used to integrate several cloud providers with an LHC experiment's workload management system. During the first proof of concept, this project contributed over 40.000 CPU-days of Monte Carlo production throughput to the ATLAS experiment with marginal manpower required. CERN's experience, together with that of ESA and EMBL, is providing a great insight into the cloud computing industry and highlighted several challenges that are being tackled in order to ease the export of the scientific workloads to the cloud environments.

Tailored model abstraction in performance assessments

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kessler, J.H.

1995-01-01

Total System Performance Assessments (TSPAs) are likely to be one of the most significant parts of making safety cases for the continued development and licensing of geologic repositories for the disposal of spent fuel and HLW. Thus, it is critical that the TSPA model capture the 'essence' of the physical processes relevant to demonstrating the appropriate regulation is met. But how much detail about the physical processes must be modeled and understood before there is enough confidence that the appropriate essence has been captured? In this summary the level of model abstraction that is required is discussed. Approaches for subsystem and total system performance analyses are outlined, and the role of best estimate models is examined. It is concluded that a conservative approach for repository performance, based on limited amount of field and laboratory data, can provide sufficient confidence for a regulatory decision

Exploiting citation contexts for physics retrieval

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dabrowska, Anna; Larsen, Birger

2015-01-01

The text surrounding citations within scientific papers may contain terms that usefully describe cited documents and can benefit retrieval. We present a preliminary study that investigates appending ci- tation contexts from citing documents to cited documents in the iSearch test collection. We ex...... in a large collection of physics papers, paving the way for future research that exploits citation contexts for retrieval....

Normative Beliefs about Aggression as a Mediator of Narcissistic Exploitativeness and Cyberbullying

Science.gov (United States)

Ang, Rebecca P.; Tan, Kit-Aun; Mansor, Abu Talib

2011-01-01

The current study examined normative beliefs about aggression as a mediator between narcissistic exploitativeness and cyberbullying using two Asian adolescent samples from Singapore and Malaysia. Narcissistic exploitativeness was significantly and positively associated with cyberbullying and normative beliefs about aggression and normative beliefs…

Exploiting Instability: A Model for Managing Organizational Change.

Science.gov (United States)

Frank, Debra; Rocks, William

In response to decreased levels of funding and declining enrollments, increased competition, and major technological advances, Allegany Community College, in Maryland, has developed a model for managing organizational change. The model incorporates the following four components for effective transition and change: conceptualization; communication;…

SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN IN THE TOURISM – THE DARK SIDE OF TOURISM

OpenAIRE

Janez Mekinc; Katarina Music

2015-01-01

The underlying causes of sexual exploitation and prostitution are poverty, inequality between women and men, high population growth and rural - urban migration. Victims are, predominantly, women and children with lower socio-economic status. One particular form of sexual exploitation is child sex tourism. This ruthless exploitation of children can be found throughout the world, predominantly in the third world and developing countries. Children, mainly between the ages of 6 to 14 years, are t...

Can better modelling improve tokamak control?

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lister, J.B.; Vyas, P.; Ward, D.J.; Albanese, R.; Ambrosino, G.; Ariola, M.; Villone, F.; Coutlis, A.; Limebeer, D.J.N.; Wainwright, J.P.

1997-01-01

The control of present day tokamaks usually relies upon primitive modelling and TCV is used to illustrate this. A counter example is provided by the successful implementation of high order SISO controllers on COMPASS-D. Suitable models of tokamaks are required to exploit the potential of modern control techniques. A physics based MIMO model of TCV is presented and validated with experimental closed loop responses. A system identified open loop model is also presented. An enhanced controller based on these models is designed and the performance improvements discussed. (author) 5 figs., 9 refs

Exploiting mitochondrial dysfunction for effective elimination of imatinib-resistant leukemic cells.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jérome Kluza

Full Text Available Challenges today concern chronic myeloid leukemia (CML patients resistant to imatinib. There is growing evidence that imatinib-resistant leukemic cells present abnormal glucose metabolism but the impact on mitochondria has been neglected. Our work aimed to better understand and exploit the metabolic alterations of imatinib-resistant leukemic cells. Imatinib-resistant cells presented high glycolysis as compared to sensitive cells. Consistently, expression of key glycolytic enzymes, at least partly mediated by HIF-1α, was modified in imatinib-resistant cells suggesting that imatinib-resistant cells uncouple glycolytic flux from pyruvate oxidation. Interestingly, mitochondria of imatinib-resistant cells exhibited accumulation of TCA cycle intermediates, increased NADH and low oxygen consumption. These mitochondrial alterations due to the partial failure of ETC were further confirmed in leukemic cells isolated from some imatinib-resistant CML patients. As a consequence, mitochondria generated more ROS than those of imatinib-sensitive cells. This, in turn, resulted in increased death of imatinib-resistant leukemic cells following in vitro or in vivo treatment with the pro-oxidants, PEITC and Trisenox, in a syngeneic mouse tumor model. Conversely, inhibition of glycolysis caused derepression of respiration leading to lower cellular ROS. In conclusion, these findings indicate that imatinib-resistant leukemic cells have an unexpected mitochondrial dysfunction that could be exploited for selective therapeutic intervention.

Escaping from the exploitation trap by shaping the digital future

OpenAIRE

Füzes, Péter; Gódor, Zoltán; Szabó, Zsolt Roland

2017-01-01

Even Fortune 500 firms can disappear quickly, because many of them falls into an exploitation trap. Examples show that certain organizations – that manifest ambidextrous features – can avoid the exploitation trap. But, how can they do it? Authors tracked the digital transformation of a Fortune 500 company in order to understand the strategic and organizational challenges and solutions to become resilient and prosperous. A cutting edge example is shown in the paper about how an industry leader...

Intra-annual wave resource characterization for energy exploitation: A new decision-aid tool

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Carballo, R.; Sánchez, M.; Ramos, V.; Fraguela, J.A.; Iglesias, G.

2015-01-01

Highlights: • A decision-aid tool is developed for computing the monthly performance of WECs. • It allows the generation of high-resolution monthly characterization matrices. • The decision-aid tool is implemented to the Death Coast (N Spain). • The monthly matrices can be obtained at any coastal location within the Death Coast. • The tool is applied to a coastal location of a proposed wave farm. - Abstract: The wave energy resource is usually characterized by a significant variability throughout the year. In estimating the power performance of a Wave Energy Converter (WEC) it is fundamental to take into account this variability; indeed, an estimate based on mean annual values may well result in a wrong decision making. In this work, a novel decision-aid tool, iWEDGE (intra-annual Wave Energy Diagram GEnerator) is developed and implemented to a coastal region of interest, the Death Coast (Spain), one of the regions in Europe with the largest wave resource. Following a comprehensive procedure, and based on deep water wave data and high-resolution numerical modelling, this tool provides the monthly high-resolution characterization matrices (or energy diagrams) for any location of interest. In other words, the information required for the accurate computation of the intra-annual performance of any WEC at any location within the region covered is made available. Finally, an application of iWEDGE to the site of a proposed wave farm is presented. The results obtained highlight the importance of the decision-aid tool herein provided for wave energy exploitation

Impact socio-environnemental de l'exploitation du sable marin sur le ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

En effet, l'exploitation du sable marin dans cette contrée s'est ouverte et évolue du fait de l'urbanisation galopante de la Commune liée à l'érection des ... In addition, the uncontrolled exploitation increased coastal erosion and does little to improve the conditions of economic and social life of the people who indulge ...

Calibration of PMIS pavement performance prediction models.

Science.gov (United States)

2012-02-01

Improve the accuracy of TxDOTs existing pavement performance prediction models through calibrating these models using actual field data obtained from the Pavement Management Information System (PMIS). : Ensure logical performance superiority patte...

Growth, Mortality and Exploitation Rates of Sarotherodon ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Evans

ABSTRACT. Sarotherodon melanotheron population of Dominli Lagoon in the Western Region of Ghana was studied for its growth and mortality parameters as well as exploitation rate. The study generally aimed at providing basic information necessary for the assessment and management of the fish stock in the lagoon.

The exploitation of "Exploitation" in the tenofovir prep trial in Cameroon: Lessons learned from media coverage of an HIV prevention trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Mack, Natasha; Robinson, Elizabeth T; MacQueen, Kathleen M; Moffett, Jill; Johnson, Laura M

2010-06-01

media coverage influences how clinical trials are perceived internationally and in communities where trials occur, affecting recruitment, retention, and political support for research. We conducted a discourse analysis of news coverage from 2004-2005 of a trial in Cameroon on oral PrEP for HIV prevention, to identify messages, communication techniques, and sources of messages that were amplified via media. We identified two parallel discourses: one on ethical concerns about the Cameroon trial, and a second, more general "science exploitation" discourse concerned with the potential for trials with vulnerable participant populations to be conducted unethically, benefiting only wealthy populations. Researchers should overtly address exploitation as an integral, ongoing component of research, particularly where historical or cultural conditions set the stage for controversy to emerge.

Exploiting parallel R in the cloud with SPRINT.

Science.gov (United States)

Piotrowski, M; McGilvary, G A; Sloan, T M; Mewissen, M; Lloyd, A D; Forster, T; Mitchell, L; Ghazal, P; Hill, J

2013-01-01

Advances in DNA Microarray devices and next-generation massively parallel DNA sequencing platforms have led to an exponential growth in data availability but the arising opportunities require adequate computing resources. High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Cloud offers an affordable way of meeting this need. Bioconductor, a popular tool for high-throughput genomic data analysis, is distributed as add-on modules for the R statistical programming language but R has no native capabilities for exploiting multi-processor architectures. SPRINT is an R package that enables easy access to HPC for genomics researchers. This paper investigates: setting up and running SPRINT-enabled genomic analyses on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the advantages of submitting applications to EC2 from different parts of the world and, if resource underutilization can improve application performance. The SPRINT parallel implementations of correlation, permutation testing, partitioning around medoids and the multi-purpose papply have been benchmarked on data sets of various size on Amazon EC2. Jobs have been submitted from both the UK and Thailand to investigate monetary differences. It is possible to obtain good, scalable performance but the level of improvement is dependent upon the nature of the algorithm. Resource underutilization can further improve the time to result. End-user's location impacts on costs due to factors such as local taxation. Although not designed to satisfy HPC requirements, Amazon EC2 and cloud computing in general provides an interesting alternative and provides new possibilities for smaller organisations with limited funds.

Combining satellite data and appropriate objective functions for improved spatial pattern performance of a distributed hydrologic model

Science.gov (United States)

Demirel, Mehmet C.; Mai, Juliane; Mendiguren, Gorka; Koch, Julian; Samaniego, Luis; Stisen, Simon

2018-02-01

evolution optimiser. The calibration results reveal a limited trade-off between streamflow dynamics and spatial patterns illustrating the benefit of combining separate observation types and objective functions. At the same time, the simulated spatial patterns of AET significantly improved when an objective function based on observed AET patterns and a novel spatial performance metric compared to traditional streamflow-only calibration were included. Since the overall water balance is usually a crucial goal in hydrologic modelling, spatial-pattern-oriented optimisation should always be accompanied by traditional discharge measurements. In such a multi-objective framework, the current study promotes the use of a novel bias-insensitive spatial pattern metric, which exploits the key information contained in the observed patterns while allowing the water balance to be informed by discharge observations.

Exploiting Quantum Resonance to Solve Combinatorial Problems

Science.gov (United States)

Zak, Michail; Fijany, Amir

2006-01-01

Quantum resonance would be exploited in a proposed quantum-computing approach to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. In quantum computing in general, one takes advantage of the fact that an algorithm cannot be decoupled from the physical effects available to implement it. Prior approaches to quantum computing have involved exploitation of only a subset of known quantum physical effects, notably including parallelism and entanglement, but not including resonance. In the proposed approach, one would utilize the combinatorial properties of tensor-product decomposability of unitary evolution of many-particle quantum systems for physically simulating solutions to NP-complete problems (a class of problems that are intractable with respect to classical methods of computation). In this approach, reinforcement and selection of a desired solution would be executed by means of quantum resonance. Classes of NP-complete problems that are important in practice and could be solved by the proposed approach include planning, scheduling, search, and optimal design.

Base Station Performance Model

OpenAIRE

Walsh, Barbara; Farrell, Ronan

2005-01-01

At present the testing of power amplifiers within base station transmitters is limited to testing at component level as opposed to testing at the system level. While the detection of catastrophic failure is possible, that of performance degradation is not. This paper proposes a base station model with respect to transmitter output power with the aim of introducing system level monitoring of the power amplifier behaviour within the base station. Our model reflects the expe...

Legal Approaches to Combating the Exploitation of Third-Country National Seasonal Workers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rijken, Conny

2015-01-01

The Directive on Seasonal workers is aimed at combating exploitative practices vis-a-vis seasonal workers from outside the EU. After a thorough analysis of the conditions under which practices can be qualified as exploitative, this article assesses the extent to which the directive is equipped to

Performance Evaluation Model for Application Layer Firewalls.

Science.gov (United States)

Xuan, Shichang; Yang, Wu; Dong, Hui; Zhang, Jiangchuan

2016-01-01

Application layer firewalls protect the trusted area network against information security risks. However, firewall performance may affect user experience. Therefore, performance analysis plays a significant role in the evaluation of application layer firewalls. This paper presents an analytic model of the application layer firewall, based on a system analysis to evaluate the capability of the firewall. In order to enable users to improve the performance of the application layer firewall with limited resources, resource allocation was evaluated to obtain the optimal resource allocation scheme in terms of throughput, delay, and packet loss rate. The proposed model employs the Erlangian queuing model to analyze the performance parameters of the system with regard to the three layers (network, transport, and application layers). Then, the analysis results of all the layers are combined to obtain the overall system performance indicators. A discrete event simulation method was used to evaluate the proposed model. Finally, limited service desk resources were allocated to obtain the values of the performance indicators under different resource allocation scenarios in order to determine the optimal allocation scheme. Under limited resource allocation, this scheme enables users to maximize the performance of the application layer firewall.

Performance Evaluation Model for Application Layer Firewalls.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shichang Xuan

Full Text Available Application layer firewalls protect the trusted area network against information security risks. However, firewall performance may affect user experience. Therefore, performance analysis plays a significant role in the evaluation of application layer firewalls. This paper presents an analytic model of the application layer firewall, based on a system analysis to evaluate the capability of the firewall. In order to enable users to improve the performance of the application layer firewall with limited resources, resource allocation was evaluated to obtain the optimal resource allocation scheme in terms of throughput, delay, and packet loss rate. The proposed model employs the Erlangian queuing model to analyze the performance parameters of the system with regard to the three layers (network, transport, and application layers. Then, the analysis results of all the layers are combined to obtain the overall system performance indicators. A discrete event simulation method was used to evaluate the proposed model. Finally, limited service desk resources were allocated to obtain the values of the performance indicators under different resource allocation scenarios in order to determine the optimal allocation scheme. Under limited resource allocation, this scheme enables users to maximize the performance of the application layer firewall.

Exploitation and Optimization of Reservoir Performance in Hunton Formation, Oklahoma, Budget Period I, Class Revisit

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kelkar, Mohan

2002-04-02

This report explains the unusual characteristics of West Carney Field based on detailed geological and engineering analyses. A geological history that explains the presence of mobile water and oil in the reservoir was proposed. The combination of matrix and fractures in the reservoir explains the reservoir?s flow behavior. We confirm our hypothesis by matching observed performance with a simulated model and develop procedures for correlating core data to log data so that the analysis can be extended to other, similar fields where the core coverage may be limited.

Smart Healthcare Digitalization: Using ICT to Effectively Balance Exploration and Exploitation Within Hospitals

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Luca Gastaldi

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Most of the literature on healthcare digitalization is focused on the benefits, the barriers and the determinants of the adoption of ICT‐based solutions within hospitals. Little is understood about how hospital digitalization can be accomplished or how this digitalization fosters an increase in hospital performance — both in terms of quality improvement and cost rationalization — by ambidextrously combining the exploration and exploitation of hospital assets. This paper sheds a preliminary light on the topic, identifying a set of action‐oriented propositions for smart healthcare digitalization within hospitals.

Analytical performance modeling for computer systems

CERN Document Server

Tay, Y C

2013-01-01

This book is an introduction to analytical performance modeling for computer systems, i.e., writing equations to describe their performance behavior. It is accessible to readers who have taken college-level courses in calculus and probability, networking and operating systems. This is not a training manual for becoming an expert performance analyst. Rather, the objective is to help the reader construct simple models for analyzing and understanding the systems that they are interested in.Describing a complicated system abstractly with mathematical equations requires a careful choice of assumpti

Modelling and evaluation of surgical performance using hidden Markov models.

Science.gov (United States)

Megali, Giuseppe; Sinigaglia, Stefano; Tonet, Oliver; Dario, Paolo

2006-10-01

Minimally invasive surgery has become very widespread in the last ten years. Since surgeons experience difficulties in learning and mastering minimally invasive techniques, the development of training methods is of great importance. While the introduction of virtual reality-based simulators has introduced a new paradigm in surgical training, skill evaluation methods are far from being objective. This paper proposes a method for defining a model of surgical expertise and an objective metric to evaluate performance in laparoscopic surgery. Our approach is based on the processing of kinematic data describing movements of surgical instruments. We use hidden Markov model theory to define an expert model that describes expert surgical gesture. The model is trained on kinematic data related to exercises performed on a surgical simulator by experienced surgeons. Subsequently, we use this expert model as a reference model in the definition of an objective metric to evaluate performance of surgeons with different abilities. Preliminary results show that, using different topologies for the expert model, the method can be efficiently used both for the discrimination between experienced and novice surgeons, and for the quantitative assessment of surgical ability.

Residual coal exploitation and its impact on sustainable development of the coal industry in China

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhang, Yujiang; Feng, Guorui; Zhang, Min; Ren, Hongrui; Bai, Jinwen; Guo, Yuxia; Jiang, Haina; Kang, Lixun

2016-01-01

Although China owns large coal reserves, it now faces the problem of depletion of its coal resources in advance. The coal-based energy mix in China will not change in the short term, and a means of delaying the coal resources depletion is therefore urgently required. The residual coal was exploited first with a lower recovery percentage and was evaluated as commercially valuable damaged coal. This approach is in comparison to past evaluations when the residual coal was allocated as exploitation losses. Coal recovery rates, the calculation method of residual coal reserves and statistics of its mines in China were given. On this basis, a discussion concerning the impacts on the delay of China's coal depletion, development of coal exploitation and sustainable developments, as well as technologies and relevant policies, were presented. It is considered that the exploitation of residual coal can effectively delay China's coal depletion, inhibit the construction of new mines, redress the imbalance between supply and demand of coal in eastern China, improve the mining area environment and guarantee social stability. The Chinese government supports the exploitation technologies of residual coal. Hence, exploiting residual coal is of considerable importance in sustainable development of the coal industry in China. - Highlights: •Pay attention to residual coal under changing energy-mix environment in China. •Estimate residual coal reserves and investigate its exploitation mines. •Discuss impacts of residual coal exploitation on delay of coal depletion in China. •Discuss impacts on coal mining industry and residual coal exploitation technology. •Give corresponding policy prescriptions.

Automated motion imagery exploitation for surveillance and reconnaissance

Science.gov (United States)

Se, Stephen; Laliberte, France; Kotamraju, Vinay; Dutkiewicz, Melanie

2012-06-01

Airborne surveillance and reconnaissance are essential for many military missions. Such capabilities are critical for troop protection, situational awareness, mission planning and others, such as post-operation analysis / damage assessment. Motion imagery gathered from both manned and unmanned platforms provides surveillance and reconnaissance information that can be used for pre- and post-operation analysis, but these sensors can gather large amounts of video data. It is extremely labour-intensive for operators to analyse hours of collected data without the aid of automated tools. At MDA Systems Ltd. (MDA), we have previously developed a suite of automated video exploitation tools that can process airborne video, including mosaicking, change detection and 3D reconstruction, within a GIS framework. The mosaicking tool produces a geo-referenced 2D map from the sequence of video frames. The change detection tool identifies differences between two repeat-pass videos taken of the same terrain. The 3D reconstruction tool creates calibrated geo-referenced photo-realistic 3D models. The key objectives of the on-going project are to improve the robustness, accuracy and speed of these tools, and make them more user-friendly to operational users. Robustness and accuracy are essential to provide actionable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information. Speed is important to reduce operator time on data analysis. We are porting some processor-intensive algorithms to run on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in order to improve throughput. Many aspects of video processing are highly parallel and well-suited for optimization on GPUs, which are now commonly available on computers. Moreover, we are extending the tools to handle video data from various airborne platforms and developing the interface to the Coalition Shared Database (CSD). The CSD server enables the dissemination and storage of data from different sensors among NATO countries. The CSD interface allows

System Advisor Model: Flat Plate Photovoltaic Performance Modeling Validation Report

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Freeman, Janine [National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Whitmore, Jonathan [National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Kaffine, Leah [National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Blair, Nate [National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Dobos, Aron P. [National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

2013-12-01

The System Advisor Model (SAM) is a free software tool that performs detailed analysis of both system performance and system financing for a variety of renewable energy technologies. This report provides detailed validation of the SAM flat plate photovoltaic performance model by comparing SAM-modeled PV system generation data to actual measured production data for nine PV systems ranging from 75 kW to greater than 25 MW in size. The results show strong agreement between SAM predictions and field data, with annualized prediction error below 3% for all fixed tilt cases and below 8% for all one axis tracked cases. The analysis concludes that snow cover and system outages are the primary sources of disagreement, and other deviations resulting from seasonal biases in the irradiation models and one axis tracking issues are discussed in detail.

Advances in HTGR fuel performance models

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Stansfield, O.M.; Goodin, D.T.; Hanson, D.L.; Turner, R.F.

1985-01-01

Advances in HTGR fuel performance models have improved the agreement between observed and predicted performance and contributed to an enhanced position of the HTGR with regard to investment risk and passive safety. Heavy metal contamination is the source of about 55% of the circulating activity in the HTGR during normal operation, and the remainder comes primarily from particles which failed because of defective or missing buffer coatings. These failed particles make up about 5 x 10 -4 fraction of the total core inventory. In addition to prediction of fuel performance during normal operation, the models are used to determine fuel failure and fission product release during core heat-up accident conditions. The mechanistic nature of the models, which incorporate all important failure modes, permits the prediction of performance from the relatively modest accident temperatures of a passively safe HTGR to the much more severe accident conditions of the larger 2240-MW/t HTGR. (author)

Child Exploitation: Some Pieces of the Puzzle.

Science.gov (United States)

Rohlader, Dorothy

The report addresses the status in North Carolina and in the nation of child exploitation. Legislative and judicial backgrounds of child pornography and child prostitution are reviewed, and difficulties in obtaining statistical data are noted. Law enforcement issues in pornography are cited, and suggestions for further legislation regarding child…

Fishing elevates variability in the abundance of exploited species.

Science.gov (United States)

Hsieh, Chih-Hao; Reiss, Christian S; Hunter, John R; Beddington, John R; May, Robert M; Sugihara, George

2006-10-19

The separation of the effects of environmental variability from the impacts of fishing has been elusive, but is essential for sound fisheries management. We distinguish environmental effects from fishing effects by comparing the temporal variability of exploited versus unexploited fish stocks living in the same environments. Using the unique suite of 50-year-long larval fish surveys from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations we analyse fishing as a treatment effect in a long-term ecological experiment. Here we present evidence from the marine environment that exploited species exhibit higher temporal variability in abundance than unexploited species. This remains true after accounting for life-history effects, abundance, ecological traits and phylogeny. The increased variability of exploited populations is probably caused by fishery-induced truncation of the age structure, which reduces the capacity of populations to buffer environmental events. Therefore, to avoid collapse, fisheries must be managed not only to sustain the total viable biomass but also to prevent the significant truncation of age structure. The double jeopardy of fishing to potentially deplete stock sizes and, more immediately, to amplify the peaks and valleys of population variability, calls for a precautionary management approach.

Exploitation of manipulators: 'hitch-hiking' as a parasite transmission strategy.

Science.gov (United States)

Thomas; Renaud; Poulin

1998-07-01

For many parasites with complex life cycles, manipulation of host behaviour is an adaptation to increase the probability of successful transmission. Since manipulation is likely to be costly, other parasites may exploit hosts already manipulated so as to ensure their transmission without investing in manipulation. Such a cheating strategy, called 'hitch-hiking', could be adaptive in a range of situations. We first propose and discuss criteria that should be met by any parasite to be considered a hitch-hiker. Then, to understand the evolution of the hitch-hiking strategy, we use simple mathematical models to analyse the influence of several variables on the potential benefits for a nonmanipulative parasite of actively seeking a ride to the definitive host with a manipulative parasite. The models suggest that the prevalence or abundance of manipulative parasites will be a key determinant of whether hitch-hiking can be an advantageous option for other parasites. Copyright 1998 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.

Performance model for a CCTV-MTI

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Dunn, D.R.; Dunbar, D.L.

1978-01-01

CCTV-MTI (closed circuit television--moving target indicator) monitors represent typical components of access control systems, as for example in a material control and accounting (MC and A) safeguards system. This report describes a performance model for a CCTV-MTI monitor. The performance of a human in an MTI role is a separate problem and is not addressed here. This work was done in conjunction with the NRC sponsored LLL assessment procedure for MC and A systems which is presently under development. We develop a noise model for a generic camera system and a model for the detection mechanism for a postulated MTI design. These models are then translated into an overall performance model. Measures of performance are probabilities of detection and false alarm as a function of intruder-induced grey level changes in the protected area. Sensor responsivity, lens F-number, source illumination and spectral response were treated as design parameters. Some specific results are illustrated for a postulated design employing a camera with a Si-target vidicon. Reflectance or light level changes in excess of 10% due to an intruder will be detected with a very high probability for the portion of the visible spectrum with wavelengths above 500 nm. The resulting false alarm rate was less than one per year. We did not address sources of nuisance alarms due to adverse environments, reliability, resistance to tampering, nor did we examine the effects of the spatial frequency response of the optics. All of these are important and will influence overall system detection performance

A unified tool for performance modelling and prediction

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gilmore, Stephen; Kloul, Leila

2005-01-01

We describe a novel performability modelling approach, which facilitates the efficient solution of performance models extracted from high-level descriptions of systems. The notation which we use for our high-level designs is the Unified Modelling Language (UML) graphical modelling language. The technology which provides the efficient representation capability for the underlying performance model is the multi-terminal binary decision diagram (MTBDD)-based PRISM probabilistic model checker. The UML models are compiled through an intermediate language, the stochastic process algebra PEPA, before translation into MTBDDs for solution. We illustrate our approach on a real-world analysis problem from the domain of mobile telephony

Exploiting multi-scale parallelism for large scale numerical modelling of laser wakefield accelerators

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fonseca, R A; Vieira, J; Silva, L O; Fiuza, F; Davidson, A; Tsung, F S; Mori, W B

2013-01-01

A new generation of laser wakefield accelerators (LWFA), supported by the extreme accelerating fields generated in the interaction of PW-Class lasers and underdense targets, promises the production of high quality electron beams in short distances for multiple applications. Achieving this goal will rely heavily on numerical modelling to further understand the underlying physics and identify optimal regimes, but large scale modelling of these scenarios is computationally heavy and requires the efficient use of state-of-the-art petascale supercomputing systems. We discuss the main difficulties involved in running these simulations and the new developments implemented in the OSIRIS framework to address these issues, ranging from multi-dimensional dynamic load balancing and hybrid distributed/shared memory parallelism to the vectorization of the PIC algorithm. We present the results of the OASCR Joule Metric program on the issue of large scale modelling of LWFA, demonstrating speedups of over 1 order of magnitude on the same hardware. Finally, scalability to over ∼10 6 cores and sustained performance over ∼2 P Flops is demonstrated, opening the way for large scale modelling of LWFA scenarios. (paper)

Information-guided transmission in decode-and-forward relaying systems: Spatial exploitation and throughput enhancement

KAUST Repository

Yang, Yuli

2011-07-01

In addressing the issue of achieving high throughput in half-duplex relay channels, we exploit a concept of information-guided transmission for the network consisting of a source node, a destination node, and multiple half-duplex relay nodes. For further benefiting from multiple relay nodes, the relay-selection patterns are defined as the arbitrary combinations of given relay nodes. By exploiting the difference among the spatial channels states, in each relay-help transmission additional information to be forwarded is mapped onto the index of the active relay-selection pattern besides the basic information mapped onto the traditional constellation, which is forwarded by the relay node(s) in the active relay-selection pattern, so as to enhance the relay throughtput. With iterative decoding, the destination node can achieve a robust detection by decoupling the signals forwarded in different ways. We investigate the proposed scheme considering "decode-and-forward" protocol and establish its achievable transmission rate. The analytical results on capacity behaviors prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme by showing that it achieves better capacity performance than the conventional scheme. © 2011 IEEE.

Administrative, institutional and legislative issues on agricultural waste exploitation in Turkey

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kaya, Durmus; Baban, Ahmet; Dikec, Stephanie; Canka Kilic, Fatma

2008-01-01

In this study, the influence of non-technical issues on the exploitation of agricultural waste in Turkey was investigated in accordance with the work program requirements for the project entitled ''Exploitation of Agricultural Waste in Turkey'' under the EU Life Third Countries Program. The study has been organized and presented according to the following four phases: (i) study of existing Turkish legislation and the administrative and institutional framework, (ii) review and analysis of the EU policy and legislation relevant to agricultural waste, including identification of potential market instruments, (iii) identification of barriers to the promotion of agricultural waste exploitation in Turkey, and (iv) Identification of gaps and formulation of recommendations. An ultimate objective of this study is to transfer the European experience and practices relative to the overall framework of managing agricultural waste. (author)

Exhibition Exploitation: the artful use of art and advertising in urban spaces

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alessandro Campolo

2013-11-01

Full Text Available Urban space can be a powerful display that offers great chances to media marketing and communication in general. Nowadays, every kind of architecture or structure in the city is part of an expanded scenic backdrop suitable to perform spectacular acts expressing either ephemeral or permanent values. Mutating faster than its architecture, the urban scenario becomes the archetype of social and cultural changes. The contemporary city is the favored place for any kind of communication or intensive propagation of ideas and “suggestions”. Its spaces are contended by art and advertising which, through interventions and a constant crossover process, find a confluence in their specific intents. While the artistic act often exploits urban space for social or promotional purposes, trying to give more visibility to the city’s abandoned or deteriorating places, instead advertising exploits the city’s most visible spots for commercial purposes. But all over the years art and advertising have changed, too. Both have reinforced their connection with each other and both have borrowed tools from each other; in fact, today their parameters and strategies are mixed. The observer or the city user, who is often unaware of this ambiguous communication, frequently assimilates the message but confuses its real meaning.

Performance modeling of Beamlet

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Auerbach, J.M.; Lawson, J.K.; Rotter, M.D.; Sacks, R.A.; Van Wonterghem, B.W.; Williams, W.H.

1995-01-01

Detailed modeling of beam propagation in Beamlet has been made to predict system performance. New software allows extensive use of optical component characteristics. This inclusion of real optical component characteristics has resulted in close agreement between calculated and measured beam distributions

Exploitation of the Saturne synchrotron during the forth quarter of 1961

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1962-01-01

This document reports data describing the availability and operation (maintenance, failures, operation, beam availability, repetition period), main incidents, experiments related to the machine itself (adjustment of the beam median plane, influence of pressure on the number of accelerated particles, influence of noise on the HF chain on the number of accelerated particles, oscillator test, phase servo-control, detection of the extracted beam), other studies (beam striker, ejection, target propulsion, field measurement), physics experiments (electronic experiments), measures and measurements regarding the protection against radiation, and the liquefier activity which occurred or took place during the exploitation of the Saturne synchrotron during the second three-month period of 1961. It also indicates external works performed in the CERN hydrogen bubble chamber

STRESSES AND DEFORMABILITY OF ROCK MASS UPON OPEN PIT EXPLOITATION OF DIMENSION STONE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Siniša Dunda

2003-12-01

Full Text Available The appearance of increased stresses and deformability of rock mass in the quarry of Zečevo (exploitation field of Selca – island of Brač has caused a considerable decrease of usability of mineral raw materials, which put into question the survival of the pit. Therefore the research and measurements of the state of stresses and deformability of rock mass within the pit were carried out. Besides detailed laboratory testings (testings on small samples performed were trial in-situ testings on large samples including the corresponding numerical analyses. The exploitation of dimension stone by sowing regularly shaped rectangular blocks has been proved to be appropriate for in-situ testing of bending strength. The paper presents the results of carried out laboratory testings, in-situ testings of bending strength including measuring of deformations after sowing cuts and numerical analyses by which the possible range of horizontal stresses was determined. Since for the case of massive rocks, for which the continuum concept is applied, there are no specifically defined methods of corrections, presented is a possible relation for correction of input size values based on the carried out laboratory and in-situ testings.

Un simulateur de production de puits exploité en gas-lift A Production Simulator for Gas-Lift Wells

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caralp L.

2006-11-01

Full Text Available Le procédé d'exploitation assisté de pétrole par gas-lift " est utilisé dans les applications off-shore. Sa dynamique lente nuit à la réalisation in situ d'études de conditions d'exploitation optimales. Si l'on veut apprendre à conduire ce type de procédé ou optimiser les conditions d'exploitation sur un ensemble de puits, disposer d'un logiciel de simulation est une nécessité. Réalisé à partir des modèles de connaissance : - d'écoulement diphasique incluant le taux de gaz dans les bouchons d'huile (régime poches-bouchons et les échanges de masse entre phases; - de gisement; - de l'injection de gaz; le simulateur, qui emploie les corrélations les plus fréquemment utilisées décrivant les mélanges huile-gaz, fournit des résultats physiquement acceptables qui sont présentés. Le processus est non linéaire et asymétrique. Help oil well process by gas-liftare use in off shore application. Slow dynamic is an handicap for a study of optimal exploitation conditions. To learn to drive this process and to optimize exploitation conditions on an oil field it is necessary to set of a simulator. It is realized from knowledge models :(a two-phases flows, (b oil pool,(c gaz injection, including gas rate in oil slug (slug regime and mass exchange into phases. The simulator work with the most commonly use oil-gas mixture correlations. This results are physically reasonable. Process is non linear and asymetrical.

Dealing with BIG Data - Exploiting the Potential of Multicore Parallelism and Auto-Tuning

CERN Multimedia

CERN. Geneva

2012-01-01

Physics experiments nowadays produce tremendous amounts of data that require sophisticated analyses in order to gain new insights. At such large scale, scientists are facing non-trivial software engineering problems in addition to the physics problems. Ubiquitous multicore processors and GPGPUs have turned almost any computer into a parallel machine and have pushed compute clusters and clouds to become multicore-based and more heterogenous. These developments complicate the exploitation of various types of parallelism within different layers of hardware and software. As a consequence, manual performance tuning is non-intuitive and tedious due to the large search space spanned by numerous inter-related tuning parameters. This talk addresses these challenges at CERN and discusses how to leverage multicore parallelization techniques in this context. It presents recent advances in automatic performance tuning to algorithmically find sweet spots with good performance. The talk also presents results from empiri...

PREMOR: a point reactor exposure model computer code for survey analysis of power plant performance

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Vondy, D.R.

1979-10-01

The PREMOR computer code was written to exploit a simple, two-group point nuclear reactor power plant model for survey analysis. Up to thirteen actinides, fourteen fission products, and one lumped absorber nuclide density are followed over a reactor history. Successive feed batches are accounted for with provision for from one to twenty batches resident. The effect of exposure of each of the batches to the same neutron flux is determined

PREMOR: a point reactor exposure model computer code for survey analysis of power plant performance

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Vondy, D.R.

1979-10-01

The PREMOR computer code was written to exploit a simple, two-group point nuclear reactor power plant model for survey analysis. Up to thirteen actinides, fourteen fission products, and one lumped absorber nuclide density are followed over a reactor history. Successive feed batches are accounted for with provision for from one to twenty batches resident. The effect of exposure of each of the batches to the same neutron flux is determined.

On the dynamics of exploited fish populations

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Beverton, R. J. H; Holt, Sidney J

1993-01-01

...-brooding cichlids, and viviparity in many sharks and toothcarps. Moreover, fish are of considerable importance to the survival of the human species in the form of nutritious, delicious and diverse food. Rational exploitation and management of our global stocks of fishes must rely upon a detailed and precise insight of their biology. The...

25 CFR 20.516 - How are child abuse, neglect or exploitation cases to be handled?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false How are child abuse, neglect or exploitation cases to be... FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE AND SOCIAL SERVICES PROGRAMS Child Assistance Foster Care § 20.516 How are child abuse, neglect or exploitation cases to be handled? Reported child abuse, neglect or exploitation cases and the...

Exploiting HPC Platforms for Metagenomics: Challenges and Opportunities (MICW - Metagenomics Informatics Challenges Workshop: 10K Genomes at a Time)

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Canon, Shane

2011-10-12

DOE JGI's Zhong Wang, chair of the High-performance Computing session, gives a brief introduction before Berkeley Lab's Shane Canon talks about "Exploiting HPC Platforms for Metagenomics: Challenges and Opportunities" at the Metagenomics Informatics Challenges Workshop held at the DOE JGI on October 12-13, 2011.

Comparisons of Faulting-Based Pavement Performance Prediction Models

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Weina Wang

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Faulting prediction is the core of concrete pavement maintenance and design. Highway agencies are always faced with the problem of lower accuracy for the prediction which causes costly maintenance. Although many researchers have developed some performance prediction models, the accuracy of prediction has remained a challenge. This paper reviews performance prediction models and JPCP faulting models that have been used in past research. Then three models including multivariate nonlinear regression (MNLR model, artificial neural network (ANN model, and Markov Chain (MC model are tested and compared using a set of actual pavement survey data taken on interstate highway with varying design features, traffic, and climate data. It is found that MNLR model needs further recalibration, while the ANN model needs more data for training the network. MC model seems a good tool for pavement performance prediction when the data is limited, but it is based on visual inspections and not explicitly related to quantitative physical parameters. This paper then suggests that the further direction for developing the performance prediction model is incorporating the advantages and disadvantages of different models to obtain better accuracy.

Genomic selection improves response to selection in resilience by exploiting genotype by environment interactions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Han Mulder

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Genotype by environment interactions (GxE are very common in livestock and hamper genetic improvement. On the other hand, GxE is a source of genetic variation: genetic variation in response to environment, e.g. environmental perturbations such as heat stress or disease. In livestock breeding, there is tendency to ignore GxE because of increased complexity of models for genetic evaluations and lack of accuracy in extreme environments. GxE, however, creates opportunities to increase resilience of animals towards environmental perturbations. The main aim of the paper is to investigate to which extent GxE can be exploited with traditional and genomic selection methods. Furthermore, we investigated the benefit of reaction norm models compared to conventional methods ignoring GxE. The questions were addressed with selection index theory. GxE was modelled according to a linear reaction norm model in which the environmental gradient is the contemporary group mean. Economic values were based on linear and non-linear profit equations.Accuracies of environment-specific (GEBV were highest in intermediate environments and lowest in extreme environments. Reaction norm models had higher accuracies of (GEBV in extreme environments than conventional models ignoring GxE. Genomic selection always resulted in higher response to selection in all environments than sib or progeny testing schemes. The increase in response was with genomic selection between 9% and 140% compared to sib testing and between 11% and 114% compared to progeny testing when the reference population consisted of 1 million animals across all environments. When the aim was to decrease environmental sensitivity, the response in slope of the reaction norm model with genomic selection was between 1.09 and 319 times larger than with sib or progeny testing and in the right direction in contrast to sib and progeny testing that still increased environmental sensitivity. This shows that genomic selection

A note on the paper ‘On dynamical multi-team Cournot game in exploitation of a renewable resource’

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bischi, Gian Italo; Kopel, Michael; Szidarovszky, Ferenc

2014-01-01

In a recent paper (Asker, 2007) [1] a dynamic Cournot oligopoly game is proposed and it is claimed that this model represents competition among firms that exploit a common access natural resource. According to the author’s claim, the feature that relates the model with renewable natural resource harvesting is given by the presence of a particular cost function where the total cost of each fisherman is proportional to the square of the own quantity of harvesting and inversely proportional to the total harvesting quantity. In contrast, the usual function used in the literature on the exploitation of natural resources (such as fisheries) is inversely proportional to the available resource stock, and not to the total harvesting. This, in some sense, assumes exactly the opposite (as the available resource is inversely proportional to the total harvesting). So, we believe that the paper (Asker, 2007) [1] contains an error which is probably due to a misunderstanding or a misreading and misinterpretation of the (well-established) literature on bioeconomic modelling, but nevertheless misleading to researchers interested in bioeconomic modelling. The aim of this short note is to explain the mistake and to summarize the correct derivation and interpretation of the cost function. Our goal is to avoid the propagation of a subtle (but nevertheless misleading) error

Reference Manual for the System Advisor Model's Wind Power Performance Model

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Freeman, J.; Jorgenson, J.; Gilman, P.; Ferguson, T.

2014-08-01

This manual describes the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's System Advisor Model (SAM) wind power performance model. The model calculates the hourly electrical output of a single wind turbine or of a wind farm. The wind power performance model requires information about the wind resource, wind turbine specifications, wind farm layout (if applicable), and costs. In SAM, the performance model can be coupled to one of the financial models to calculate economic metrics for residential, commercial, or utility-scale wind projects. This manual describes the algorithms used by the wind power performance model, which is available in the SAM user interface and as part of the SAM Simulation Core (SSC) library, and is intended to supplement the user documentation that comes with the software.

Administrative, institutional and legislative issues on agricultural waste exploitation in Turkey

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Kaya, Durmus; Baban, Ahmet; Dikec, Stephanie [TUBITAK MRC Chemistry and Enviorenment Institute, P.O. Box 21, 41470 Gebze-Kocaeli (Turkey); Canka Kilic, Fatma [Kocaeli University, KMYO, Department of Air Conditioning and Refrigeration, Kullar/Kocaeli (Turkey)

2008-02-15

In this study, the influence of non-technical issues on the exploitation of agricultural waste in Turkey was investigated in accordance with the work program requirements for the project entitled ''Exploitation of Agricultural Waste in Turkey'' under the EU Life Third Countries Program. The study has been organized and presented according to the following four phases: (i) study of existing Turkish legislation and the administrative and institutional framework, (ii) review and analysis of the EU policy and legislation relevant to agricultural waste, including identification of potential market instruments, (iii) identification of barriers to the promotion of agricultural waste exploitation in Turkey, and (iv) Identification of gaps and formulation of recommendations. An ultimate objective of this study is to transfer the European experience and practices relative to the overall framework of managing agricultural waste. (author)

Environmental Impacts of Sand Exploitation. Analysis of Sand Market

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marius Dan Gavriletea

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Sand is an indispensable natural resource for any society. Despite society’s increasing dependence on sand, there are major challenges that this industry needs to deal with: limited sand resources, illegal mining, and environmental impact of sand mining. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to present an overview of the sand market, highlighting the main trends and actors for production, export and import, and to review the main environmental impacts associated with sand exploitation process. Based on these findings, we recommend different measures to be followed to reduce negative impacts. Sand mining should be done in a way that limits environmental damage during exploitation and restores the land after mining operations are completed.

Helix Nebula and CERN: A Symbiotic approach to exploiting commercial clouds

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Megino, Fernando H Barreiro; Jones, Robert; Llamas, Ramón Medrano; Ster, Daniel van der; Kucharczyk, Katarzyna

2014-01-01

The recent paradigm shift toward cloud computing in IT, and general interest in 'Big Data' in particular, have demonstrated that the computing requirements of HEP are no longer globally unique. Indeed, the CERN IT department and LHC experiments have already made significant R and D investments in delivering and exploiting cloud computing resources. While a number of technical evaluations of interesting commercial offerings from global IT enterprises have been performed by various physics labs, further technical, security, sociological, and legal issues need to be address before their large-scale adoption by the research community can be envisaged. Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud is an initiative that explores these questions by joining the forces of three European research institutes (CERN, ESA and EMBL) with leading European commercial IT enterprises. The goals of Helix Nebula are to establish a cloud platform federating multiple commercial cloud providers, along with new business models, which can sustain the cloud marketplace for years to come. This contribution will summarize the participation of CERN in Helix Nebula. We will explain CERN's flagship use-case and the model used to integrate several cloud providers with an LHC experiment's workload management system. During the first proof of concept, this project contributed over 40.000 CPU-days of Monte Carlo production throughput to the ATLAS experiment with marginal manpower required. CERN's experience, together with that of ESA and EMBL, is providing a great insight into the cloud computing industry and highlighted several challenges that are being tackled in order to ease the export of the scientific workloads to the cloud environments.

Constrained bayesian inference of project performance models

OpenAIRE

Sunmola, Funlade

2013-01-01

Project performance models play an important role in the management of project success. When used for monitoring projects, they can offer predictive ability such as indications of possible delivery problems. Approaches for monitoring project performance relies on available project information including restrictions imposed on the project, particularly the constraints of cost, quality, scope and time. We study in this paper a Bayesian inference methodology for project performance modelling in ...

Un premier service mobile en Égypte qui relie les petits exploitants ...

International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Digital Library (Canada)

Un premier service mobile en Égypte qui relie les petits exploitants aux acheteurs. Un homme qui parle sur un téléphone mobile. Les petits exploitants agricoles dominent l'agriculture égyptienne, mais leur manque de connaissances en matière de commercialisation et de compétences techniques, ainsi qu'une mauvaise ...

Exploiting MIC architectures for the simulation of channeling of charged particles in crystals

Science.gov (United States)

Bagli, Enrico; Karpusenko, Vadim

2016-08-01

Coherent effects of ultra-relativistic particles in crystals is an area of science under development. DYNECHARM + + is a toolkit for the simulation of coherent interactions between high-energy charged particles and complex crystal structures. The particle trajectory in a crystal is computed through numerical integration of the equation of motion. The code was revised and improved in order to exploit parallelization on multi-cores and vectorization of single instructions on multiple data. An Intel Xeon Phi card was adopted for the performance measurements. The computation time was proved to scale linearly as a function of the number of physical and virtual cores. By enabling the auto-vectorization flag of the compiler a three time speedup was obtained. The performances of the card were compared to the Dual Xeon ones.

Human trafficking and exploitation: A global health concern.

Science.gov (United States)

Zimmerman, Cathy; Kiss, Ligia

2017-11-01

In this collection review, Cathy Zimmerman and colleague introduce the PLOS Medicine Collection on Human Trafficking, Exploitation and Health, laying out the magnitude of the global trafficking problem and offering a public health policy framework to guide responses to trafficking.

Exploiting magnetic resonance angiography imaging improves model estimation of BOLD signal.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhenghui Hu

Full Text Available The change of BOLD signal relies heavily upon the resting blood volume fraction ([Formula: see text] associated with regional vasculature. However, existing hemodynamic data assimilation studies pretermit such concern. They simply assign the value in a physiologically plausible range to get over ill-conditioning of the assimilation problem and fail to explore actual [Formula: see text]. Such performance might lead to unreliable model estimation. In this work, we present the first exploration of the influence of [Formula: see text] on fMRI data assimilation, where actual [Formula: see text] within a given cortical area was calibrated by an MR angiography experiment and then was augmented into the assimilation scheme. We have investigated the impact of [Formula: see text] on single-region data assimilation and multi-region data assimilation (dynamic cause modeling, DCM in a classical flashing checkerboard experiment. Results show that the employment of an assumed [Formula: see text] in fMRI data assimilation is only suitable for fMRI signal reconstruction and activation detection grounded on this signal, and not suitable for estimation of unobserved states and effective connectivity study. We thereby argue that introducing physically realistic [Formula: see text] in the assimilation process may provide more reliable estimation of physiological information, which contributes to a better understanding of the underlying hemodynamic processes. Such an effort is valuable and should be well appreciated.

Energy for lunar resource exploitation

Science.gov (United States)

Glaser, Peter E.

1992-02-01

Humanity stands at the threshold of exploiting the known lunar resources that have opened up with the access to space. America's role in the future exploitation of space, and specifically of lunar resources, may well determine the level of achievement in technology development and global economic competition. Space activities during the coming decades will significantly influence the events on Earth. The 'shifting of history's tectonic plates' is a process that will be hastened by the increasingly insistent demands for higher living standards of the exponentially growing global population. Key to the achievement of a peaceful world in the 21st century, will be the development of a mix of energy resources at a societally acceptable and affordable cost within a realistic planning horizon. This must be the theme for the globally applicable energy sources that are compatible with the Earth's ecology. It is in this context that lunar resources development should be a primary goal for science missions to the Moon, and for establishing an expanding human presence. The economic viability and commercial business potential of mining, extracting, manufacturing, and transporting lunar resource based materials to Earth, Earth orbits, and to undertake macroengineering projects on the Moon remains to be demonstrated. These extensive activities will be supportive of the realization of the potential of space energy sources for use on Earth. These may include generating electricity for use on Earth based on beaming power from Earth orbits and from the Moon to the Earth, and for the production of helium 3 as a fuel for advanced fusion reactors.

Revisiting of Channel Access Mechanisms in Mobile Wireless Networks through Exploiting Physical Layer Technologies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Junmei Yao

2018-01-01

Full Text Available The wireless local area networks (WLANs have been widely deployed with the rapid development of mobile devices and have further been brought into new applications with infrastructure mobility due to the growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs. However, the WLANs still face persistent challenge on increasing the network throughput to meet the customer’s requirement and fight against the node mobility. Interference is a well-known issue that would degrade the network performance due to the broadcast characteristics of the wireless signals. Moreover, with infrastructure mobility, the interference becomes the key obstacle in pursuing the channel capacity. Legacy interference management mechanism through the channel access control in the MAC layer design of the 802.11 standard has some well-known drawbacks, such as exposed and hidden terminal problems, inefficient rate adaptation, and retransmission schemes, making the efficient interference management an everlasting research topic over the years. Recently, interference management through exploiting physical layer mechanisms has attracted much research interest and has been proven to be a promising way to improve the network throughput, especially under the infrastructure mobility scenarios which provides more indicators for node dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a series of representative physical layer techniques and analyze how they are exploited for interference management to improve the network performance. We also provide some discussions about the research challenges and give potential future research topics in this area.

Model for measuring complex performance in an aviation environment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hahn, H.A.

1988-01-01

An experiment was conducted to identify models of pilot performance through the attainment and analysis of concurrent verbal protocols. Sixteen models were identified. Novice and expert pilots differed with respect to the models they used. Models were correlated to performance, particularly in the case of expert subjects. Models were not correlated to performance shaping factors (i.e. workload). 3 refs., 1 tab

Photovoltaic Reliability Performance Model v 2.0

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

2016-12-16

PV-RPM is intended to address more “real world” situations by coupling a photovoltaic system performance model with a reliability model so that inverters, modules, combiner boxes, etc. can experience failures and be repaired (or left unrepaired). The model can also include other effects, such as module output degradation over time or disruptions such as electrical grid outages. In addition, PV-RPM is a dynamic probabilistic model that can be used to run many realizations (i.e., possible future outcomes) of a system’s performance using probability distributions to represent uncertain parameter inputs.

Understanding and Responding to the Needs of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth: Recommendations for the Mental Health Provider.

Science.gov (United States)

Ijadi-Maghsoodi, Roya; Cook, Mekeila; Barnert, Elizabeth S; Gaboian, Shushanik; Bath, Eraka

2016-01-01

Mental health providers are frequently at the forefront of addressing the multifaceted needs of commercially sexually exploited youth. This article provides an overview of the definition of commercial sexual exploitation of children and relevant legislation including the shift toward decriminalization of commercially sexually exploited youth. To provide clinicians with tools needed to deliver competent care to this population, a review of risk factors for commercial sexual exploitation of children and the role of the clinician in identification, assessment, and treatment of commercially sexually exploited youth are discussed. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Electric properties of organic and mineral electronic components, design and modelling of a photovoltaic chain for a better exploitation of the solar energy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Aziz, A.

2006-11-01

The research carried out in this thesis relates to the mineral, organic electronic components and the photovoltaic systems. Concerning the mineral semiconductors, we modelled the conduction properties of the structures metal/oxide/semiconductor (MOS) strongly integrated in absence and in the presence of charges. We proposed a methodology allowing characterizing the ageing of structures MOS under injection of the Fowler Nordheim (FN) current type. Then, we studied the Schottky diodes in polymers of type metal/polymer/metal. We concluded that: The mechanism of the charges transfer, through the interface metal/polymer, is allotted to the thermo-ionic effect and could be affected by the lowering of the potential barrier to the interface metal/polymer. In the area of photovoltaic energy, we conceived and modelled a photovoltaic system of average power (100 W). We showed that the adaptation of the generator to the load allows a better exploitation of solar energy. This is carried out by the means of the converters controlled by an of type MPPT control provided with a detection circuit of dysfunction and restarting of the system. (author)

Human trafficking for labour exploitation: Interpreting the crime

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Coster van Voorhout, J.E.B.

2007-01-01

The definition of human trafficking for labour exploitation, as follows from the European Council Framework Decision, proves to be unclear. Literal interpretation does not suffice, because it does not clarify all elements of what is deemed to be criminal behaviour, and hermeneutical interpretation

Indicators of Nuclear safety and exploitation in ANAV

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Quintana Prieto, M.; Jorda Alcove, M.

2013-01-01

The use of indicators by ANAV plants, aims to be a tool to facilitate the assessment of the behaviour of the plants nuclear over a specific time period. The following are and are they explain those related to Nuclear safety and exploitation.

Human trafficking and exploitation: A global health concern.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cathy Zimmerman

2017-11-01

Full Text Available In this collection review, Cathy Zimmerman and colleague introduce the PLOS Medicine Collection on Human Trafficking, Exploitation and Health, laying out the magnitude of the global trafficking problem and offering a public health policy framework to guide responses to trafficking.

Performance Modeling of Communication Networks with Markov Chains

CERN Document Server

Mo, Jeonghoon

2010-01-01

This book is an introduction to Markov chain modeling with applications to communication networks. It begins with a general introduction to performance modeling in Chapter 1 where we introduce different performance models. We then introduce basic ideas of Markov chain modeling: Markov property, discrete time Markov chain (DTMe and continuous time Markov chain (CTMe. We also discuss how to find the steady state distributions from these Markov chains and how they can be used to compute the system performance metric. The solution methodologies include a balance equation technique, limiting probab

Atmospheric statistical dynamic models. Model performance: the Lawrence Livermore Laboratoy Zonal Atmospheric Model

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Potter, G.L.; Ellsaesser, H.W.; MacCracken, M.C.; Luther, F.M.

1978-06-01

Results from the zonal model indicate quite reasonable agreement with observation in terms of the parameters and processes that influence the radiation and energy balance calculations. The model produces zonal statistics similar to those from general circulation models, and has also been shown to produce similar responses in sensitivity studies. Further studies of model performance are planned, including: comparison with July data; comparison of temperature and moisture transport and wind fields for winter and summer months; and a tabulation of atmospheric energetics. Based on these preliminary performance studies, however, it appears that the zonal model can be used in conjunction with more complex models to help unravel the problems of understanding the processes governing present climate and climate change. As can be seen in the subsequent paper on model sensitivity studies, in addition to reduced cost of computation, the zonal model facilitates analysis of feedback mechanisms and simplifies analysis of the interactions between processes

Critical review of glass performance modeling

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bourcier, W.L.

1994-07-01

Borosilicate glass is to be used for permanent disposal of high-level nuclear waste in a geologic repository. Mechanistic chemical models are used to predict the rate at which radionuclides will be released from the glass under repository conditions. The most successful and useful of these models link reaction path geochemical modeling programs with a glass dissolution rate law that is consistent with transition state theory. These models have been used to simulate several types of short-term laboratory tests of glass dissolution and to predict the long-term performance of the glass in a repository. Although mechanistically based, the current models are limited by a lack of unambiguous experimental support for some of their assumptions. The most severe problem of this type is the lack of an existing validated mechanism that controls long-term glass dissolution rates. Current models can be improved by performing carefully designed experiments and using the experimental results to validate the rate-controlling mechanisms implicit in the models. These models should be supported with long-term experiments to be used for model validation. The mechanistic basis of the models should be explored by using modern molecular simulations such as molecular orbital and molecular dynamics to investigate both the glass structure and its dissolution process

Critical review of glass performance modeling

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bourcier, W.L. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)

1994-07-01

Borosilicate glass is to be used for permanent disposal of high-level nuclear waste in a geologic repository. Mechanistic chemical models are used to predict the rate at which radionuclides will be released from the glass under repository conditions. The most successful and useful of these models link reaction path geochemical modeling programs with a glass dissolution rate law that is consistent with transition state theory. These models have been used to simulate several types of short-term laboratory tests of glass dissolution and to predict the long-term performance of the glass in a repository. Although mechanistically based, the current models are limited by a lack of unambiguous experimental support for some of their assumptions. The most severe problem of this type is the lack of an existing validated mechanism that controls long-term glass dissolution rates. Current models can be improved by performing carefully designed experiments and using the experimental results to validate the rate-controlling mechanisms implicit in the models. These models should be supported with long-term experiments to be used for model validation. The mechanistic basis of the models should be explored by using modern molecular simulations such as molecular orbital and molecular dynamics to investigate both the glass structure and its dissolution process.

zipHMMlib: a highly optimised HMM library exploiting repetitions in the input to speed up the forward algorithm.

Science.gov (United States)

Sand, Andreas; Kristiansen, Martin; Pedersen, Christian N S; Mailund, Thomas

2013-11-22

Hidden Markov models are widely used for genome analysis as they combine ease of modelling with efficient analysis algorithms. Calculating the likelihood of a model using the forward algorithm has worst case time complexity linear in the length of the sequence and quadratic in the number of states in the model. For genome analysis, however, the length runs to millions or billions of observations, and when maximising the likelihood hundreds of evaluations are often needed. A time efficient forward algorithm is therefore a key ingredient in an efficient hidden Markov model library. We have built a software library for efficiently computing the likelihood of a hidden Markov model. The library exploits commonly occurring substrings in the input to reuse computations in the forward algorithm. In a pre-processing step our library identifies common substrings and builds a structure over the computations in the forward algorithm which can be reused. This analysis can be saved between uses of the library and is independent of concrete hidden Markov models so one preprocessing can be used to run a number of different models.Using this library, we achieve up to 78 times shorter wall-clock time for realistic whole-genome analyses with a real and reasonably complex hidden Markov model. In one particular case the analysis was performed in less than 8 minutes compared to 9.6 hours for the previously fastest library. We have implemented the preprocessing procedure and forward algorithm as a C++ library, zipHMM, with Python bindings for use in scripts. The library is available at http://birc.au.dk/software/ziphmm/.

Sensory exploitation and cultural transmission: the late emergence of iconic representations in human evolution.

Science.gov (United States)

Verpooten, Jan; Nelissen, Mark

2010-09-01

Iconic representations (i.e., figurative imagery and realistic art) only started to appear consistently some 45,000 years ago, although humans have been anatomically modern since 200,000-160,000 years ago. What explains this? Some authors have suggested a neurocognitive change took place, leading to a creative explosion, although this has been contested. Here, we examine the hypothesis that demographic changes caused cultural "cumulative adaptive evolution" and as such the emergence of modern symbolic behavior. This approach usefully explains the evolution of utilitarian skills and tools, and the creation of symbols to identify groups. However, it does not equally effectively explain the evolution of behaviors that may not be directly adaptive, such as the production of iconic representations like figurines and rock art. In order to shed light on their emergence, we propose to combine the above-mentioned cultural hypothesis with the concept of sensory exploitation. The concept essentially states that behavioral traits (in this case iconic art production) which exploit pre-existing sensory sensitivities will evolve if not hindered by costs (i.e., natural selection). In this view, iconic art traditions are evolved by piggy-backing on cumulative adaptive evolution. Since it is to date uncertain whether art has served any adaptive function in human evolution, parsimony demands paying more attention to the primary and a functional mechanism of sensory exploitation as opposed to mechanisms of models based exclusively on secondary benefits (such as Miller's, for instance, in which art is proposed to evolve as a sexual display of fitness).

Augmented reality enabling intelligence exploitation at the edge

Science.gov (United States)

Kase, Sue E.; Roy, Heather; Bowman, Elizabeth K.; Patton, Debra

2015-05-01

Today's Warfighters need to make quick decisions while interacting in densely populated environments comprised of friendly, hostile, and neutral host nation locals. However, there is a gap in the real-time processing of big data streams for edge intelligence. We introduce a big data processing pipeline called ARTEA that ingests, monitors, and performs a variety of analytics including noise reduction, pattern identification, and trend and event detection in the context of an area of operations (AOR). Results of the analytics are presented to the Soldier via an augmented reality (AR) device Google Glass (Glass). Non-intrusive AR devices such as Glass can visually communicate contextually relevant alerts to the Soldier based on the current mission objectives, time, location, and observed or sensed activities. This real-time processing and AR presentation approach to knowledge discovery flattens the intelligence hierarchy enabling the edge Soldier to act as a vital and active participant in the analysis process. We report preliminary observations testing ARTEA and Glass in a document exploitation and person of interest scenario simulating edge Soldier participation in the intelligence process in disconnected deployment conditions.

Amoeba-inspired Tug-of-War algorithms for exploration-exploitation dilemma in extended Bandit Problem.

Science.gov (United States)

Aono, Masashi; Kim, Song-Ju; Hara, Masahiko; Munakata, Toshinori

2014-03-01

The true slime mold Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled amoeboid organism, is capable of efficiently allocating a constant amount of intracellular resource to its pseudopod-like branches that best fit the environment where dynamic light stimuli are applied. Inspired by the resource allocation process, the authors formulated a concurrent search algorithm, called the Tug-of-War (TOW) model, for maximizing the profit in the multi-armed Bandit Problem (BP). A player (gambler) of the BP should decide as quickly and accurately as possible which slot machine to invest in out of the N machines and faces an "exploration-exploitation dilemma." The dilemma is a trade-off between the speed and accuracy of the decision making that are conflicted objectives. The TOW model maintains a constant intracellular resource volume while collecting environmental information by concurrently expanding and shrinking its branches. The conservation law entails a nonlocal correlation among the branches, i.e., volume increment in one branch is immediately compensated by volume decrement(s) in the other branch(es). Owing to this nonlocal correlation, the TOW model can efficiently manage the dilemma. In this study, we extend the TOW model to apply it to a stretched variant of BP, the Extended Bandit Problem (EBP), which is a problem of selecting the best M-tuple of the N machines. We demonstrate that the extended TOW model exhibits better performances for 2-tuple-3-machine and 2-tuple-4-machine instances of EBP compared with the extended versions of well-known algorithms for BP, the ϵ-Greedy and SoftMax algorithms, particularly in terms of its short-term decision-making capability that is essential for the survival of the amoeba in a hostile environment. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Performance through thickfolds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sack-Nielsen, Torsten

2017-01-01

in the fold pattern [kinematics]. In this PhD project, folding is investigated phenomenologically, exploratively as well as experimentally, to exploit and document on how climate-responsive performance potentials can be utilised in architecture. ‘Origami technology’, as the emerging, cross-disciplinary field...

Evaluating Maximum Wind Energy Exploitation in Active Distribution Networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Siano, Pierluigi; Chen, Peiyuan; Chen, Zhe

2010-01-01

The increased spreading of distributed and renewable generation requires moving towards active management of distribution networks. In this paper, in order to evaluate maximum wind energy exploitation in active distribution networks, a method based on a multi-period optimal power flow (OPF......) analysis is proposed. Active network management schemes such as coordinated voltage control, energy curtailment and power factor control are integrated in the method in order to investigate their impacts on the maximization of wind energy exploitation. Some case studies, using real data from a Danish...... distribution system, confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method in evaluating the optimal applications of active management schemes to increase wind energy harvesting without costly network reinforcement for the connection of wind generation....

Predicting Protein Secondary Structure with Markov Models

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fischer, Paul; Larsen, Simon; Thomsen, Claus

2004-01-01

we are considering here, is to predict the secondary structure from the primary one. To this end we train a Markov model on training data and then use it to classify parts of unknown protein sequences as sheets, helices or coils. We show how to exploit the directional information contained...... in the Markov model for this task. Classifications that are purely based on statistical models might not always be biologically meaningful. We present combinatorial methods to incorporate biological background knowledge to enhance the prediction performance....

Transmutation Fuel Performance Code Thermal Model Verification

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Gregory K. Miller; Pavel G. Medvedev

2007-09-01

FRAPCON fuel performance code is being modified to be able to model performance of the nuclear fuels of interest to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). The present report documents the effort for verification of the FRAPCON thermal model. It was found that, with minor modifications, FRAPCON thermal model temperature calculation agrees with that of the commercial software ABAQUS (Version 6.4-4). This report outlines the methodology of the verification, code input, and calculation results.

Combining satellite data and appropriate objective functions for improved spatial pattern performance of a distributed hydrologic model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. C. Demirel

2018-02-01

shuffled complex evolution optimiser. The calibration results reveal a limited trade-off between streamflow dynamics and spatial patterns illustrating the benefit of combining separate observation types and objective functions. At the same time, the simulated spatial patterns of AET significantly improved when an objective function based on observed AET patterns and a novel spatial performance metric compared to traditional streamflow-only calibration were included. Since the overall water balance is usually a crucial goal in hydrologic modelling, spatial-pattern-oriented optimisation should always be accompanied by traditional discharge measurements. In such a multi-objective framework, the current study promotes the use of a novel bias-insensitive spatial pattern metric, which exploits the key information contained in the observed patterns while allowing the water balance to be informed by discharge observations.

Wideband Low Noise Amplifiers Exploiting Thermal Noise Cancellation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bruccoleri, F.; Klumperink, Eric A.M.; Nauta, Bram

2005-01-01

Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) are commonly used to amplify signals that are too weak for direct processing for example in radio or cable receivers. Traditionally, low noise amplifiers are implemented via tuned amplifiers, exploiting inductors and capacitors in resonating LC-circuits. This can render

Wave and Wind Model Performance Metrics Tools

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, J. K.; Wang, D. W.

2016-02-01

Continual improvements and upgrades of Navy ocean wave and wind models are essential to the assurance of battlespace environment predictability of ocean surface wave and surf conditions in support of Naval global operations. Thus, constant verification and validation of model performance is equally essential to assure the progress of model developments and maintain confidence in the predictions. Global and regional scale model evaluations may require large areas and long periods of time. For observational data to compare against, altimeter winds and waves along the tracks from past and current operational satellites as well as moored/drifting buoys can be used for global and regional coverage. Using data and model runs in previous trials such as the planned experiment, the Dynamics of the Adriatic in Real Time (DART), we demonstrated the use of accumulated altimeter wind and wave data over several years to obtain an objective evaluation of the performance the SWAN (Simulating Waves Nearshore) model running in the Adriatic Sea. The assessment provided detailed performance of wind and wave models by using cell-averaged statistical variables maps with spatial statistics including slope, correlation, and scatter index to summarize model performance. Such a methodology is easily generalized to other regions and at global scales. Operational technology currently used by subject matter experts evaluating the Navy Coastal Ocean Model and the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model can be expanded to evaluate wave and wind models using tools developed for ArcMAP, a GIS application developed by ESRI. Recent inclusion of altimeter and buoy data into a format through the Naval Oceanographic Office's (NAVOCEANO) quality control system and the netCDF standards applicable to all model output makes it possible for the fusion of these data and direct model verification. Also, procedures were developed for the accumulation of match-ups of modelled and observed parameters to form a data base

Hybrid Corporate Performance Prediction Model Considering Technical Capability

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joonhyuck Lee

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Many studies have tried to predict corporate performance and stock prices to enhance investment profitability using qualitative approaches such as the Delphi method. However, developments in data processing technology and machine-learning algorithms have resulted in efforts to develop quantitative prediction models in various managerial subject areas. We propose a quantitative corporate performance prediction model that applies the support vector regression (SVR algorithm to solve the problem of the overfitting of training data and can be applied to regression problems. The proposed model optimizes the SVR training parameters based on the training data, using the genetic algorithm to achieve sustainable predictability in changeable markets and managerial environments. Technology-intensive companies represent an increasing share of the total economy. The performance and stock prices of these companies are affected by their financial standing and their technological capabilities. Therefore, we apply both financial indicators and technical indicators to establish the proposed prediction model. Here, we use time series data, including financial, patent, and corporate performance information of 44 electronic and IT companies. Then, we predict the performance of these companies as an empirical verification of the prediction performance of the proposed model.

Does model performance improve with complexity? A case study with three hydrological models

Science.gov (United States)

Orth, Rene; Staudinger, Maria; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Seibert, Jan; Zappa, Massimiliano

2015-04-01

In recent decades considerable progress has been made in climate model development. Following the massive increase in computational power, models became more sophisticated. At the same time also simple conceptual models have advanced. In this study we validate and compare three hydrological models of different complexity to investigate whether their performance varies accordingly. For this purpose we use runoff and also soil moisture measurements, which allow a truly independent validation, from several sites across Switzerland. The models are calibrated in similar ways with the same runoff data. Our results show that the more complex models HBV and PREVAH outperform the simple water balance model (SWBM) in case of runoff but not for soil moisture. Furthermore the most sophisticated PREVAH model shows an added value compared to the HBV model only in case of soil moisture. Focusing on extreme events we find generally improved performance of the SWBM during drought conditions and degraded agreement with observations during wet extremes. For the more complex models we find the opposite behavior, probably because they were primarily developed for prediction of runoff extremes. As expected given their complexity, HBV and PREVAH have more problems with over-fitting. All models show a tendency towards better performance in lower altitudes as opposed to (pre-) alpine sites. The results vary considerably across the investigated sites. In contrast, the different metrics we consider to estimate the agreement between models and observations lead to similar conclusions, indicating that the performance of the considered models is similar at different time scales as well as for anomalies and long-term means. We conclude that added complexity does not necessarily lead to improved performance of hydrological models, and that performance can vary greatly depending on the considered hydrological variable (e.g. runoff vs. soil moisture) or hydrological conditions (floods vs. droughts).

Modeling the Mechanical Performance of Die Casting Dies

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

R. Allen Miller

2004-02-27

The following report covers work performed at Ohio State on modeling the mechanical performance of dies. The focus of the project was development and particularly verification of finite element techniques used to model and predict displacements and stresses in die casting dies. The work entails a major case study performed with and industrial partner on a production die and laboratory experiments performed at Ohio State.

Integrated Main Propulsion System Performance Reconstruction Process/Models

Science.gov (United States)

Lopez, Eduardo; Elliott, Katie; Snell, Steven; Evans, Michael

2013-01-01

The Integrated Main Propulsion System (MPS) Performance Reconstruction process provides the MPS post-flight data files needed for postflight reporting to the project integration management and key customers to verify flight performance. This process/model was used as the baseline for the currently ongoing Space Launch System (SLS) work. The process utilizes several methodologies, including multiple software programs, to model integrated propulsion system performance through space shuttle ascent. It is used to evaluate integrated propulsion systems, including propellant tanks, feed systems, rocket engine, and pressurization systems performance throughout ascent based on flight pressure and temperature data. The latest revision incorporates new methods based on main engine power balance model updates to model higher mixture ratio operation at lower engine power levels.

Exploitative Learning by Exporting

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Golovko, Elena; Lopes Bento, Cindy; Sofka, Wolfgang

Decisions on entering foreign markets are among the most challenging but also potentially rewarding strategy choices managers can make. In this study, we examine the effect of export entry on the firm investment decisions in two activities associated with learning about new technologies...... and learning about new markets ? R&D investments and marketing investments, in search of novel insights into the content and process underlying learning by exporting. We draw from organizational learning theory for predicting changes in both R&D and marketing investment patterns that accompany firm entry......, it is predominantly the marketing-related investment decisions associated with starting to export that lead to increases in firm productivity. We conclude that learning-by-exporting might be more properly characterized as ?learning about and exploiting new markets? rather than ?learning about new technologies...

Exploiting a natural auxotrophy for genetic selection.

Science.gov (United States)

Ramage, Elizabeth; Gallagher, Larry; Manoil, Colin

2012-08-01

We exploited the natural histidine auxotrophy of Francisella species to develop hisD (encodes histidinol dehydrogenase) as a positive selection marker. A shuttle plasmid (pBR103) carrying Escherichia coli hisD and designed for cloning of PCR fragments replicated in both attenuated and highly virulent Francisella strains. During this work, we formulated a simplified defined growth medium for Francisella novicida.

CellSs: Scheduling Techniques to Better Exploit Memory Hierarchy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pieter Bellens

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Cell Superscalar's (CellSs main goal is to provide a simple, flexible and easy programming approach for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E. that automatically exploits the inherent concurrency of the applications at a task level. The CellSs environment is based on a source-to-source compiler that translates annotated C or Fortran code and a runtime library tailored for the Cell/B.E. that takes care of the concurrent execution of the application. The first efforts for task scheduling in CellSs derived from very simple heuristics. This paper presents new scheduling techniques that have been developed for CellSs for the purpose of improving an application's performance. Additionally, the design of a new scheduling algorithm is detailed and the algorithm evaluated. The CellSs scheduler takes an extension of the memory hierarchy for Cell/B.E. into account, with a cache memory shared between the SPEs. All new scheduling practices have been evaluated showing better behavior of our system.

Accurate Modeling and Analysis of Isolation Performance in Multiport Amplifiers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marinella Aloisio

2012-01-01

Full Text Available A Multiport Amplifier (MPA is an implementation of the satellite power amplification section that allows sharing the payload RF power among several beams/ports and guarantees a highly efficient exploitation of the available DC satellite power. This feature is of paramount importance in multiple beam satellite systems where the use of MPAs allows reconfiguring the RF output power among the different service beams in order to handle unexpected traffic unbalances and traffic variations over time. This paper presents Monte Carlo simulations carried out by means of an ESA in-house simulator developed in Matlab environment. The objective of the simulations is to analyse how the MPA performance, in particular in terms of isolation at the MPA output ports, is affected by the amplitude and phase tracking errors of the high power amplifiers within the MPA.

Exploiting nonlinear dynamics in a coupled-core fluxgate magnetometer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bulsara, Adi R; In, Visarath; Kho, Andy; Longhini, Patrick; Neff, Joe; Anderson, Gregory; Obra, Christopher; Palacios, Antonio; Baglio, Salvatore; Ando, Bruno

2008-01-01

Unforced bistable dynamical systems having dynamics of the general form τ F x-dot (t)=-∇ x U(x) cannot oscillate (i.e. switch between their stable attractors). However, a number of such systems subject to carefully crafted coupling schemes have been shown to exhibit oscillatory behavior under carefully chosen operating conditions. This behavior, in turn, affords a new mechanism for the detection and quantification of target signals having magnitude far smaller than the energy barrier height in the potential energy function U(x) for a single (uncoupled) element. The coupling-induced oscillations are a feature that appears to be universal in systems described by bi- or multi-stable potential energy functions U(x), and are being exploited in a new class of dynamical sensors being developed by us. In this work we describe one of these devices, a coupled-core fluxgate magnetometer (CCFM), whose operation is underpinned by this dynamic behavior. We provide an overview of the underlying dynamics and, also, quantify the performance of our test device; in particular, we provide a quantitative performance comparison to a conventional (single-core) fluxgate magnetometer via a 'resolution' parameter that embodies the device sensitivity (the slope of its input–output transfer characteristic) as well as the noise floor

Assessment of the potential for exploitation of the remaining reserves of coal in Poland

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Wodarski, K.; Bijanska, J.

2014-01-01

In mining areas belonging to the Polish mining companies, there is a significant amount of coal, contained in remaining reserves, that have not been exploited so far. For years, the mines have been evaluating the possibility of its exploitation, since it would expand its resource base and would extend its useful life. In addition, exploitation of the remaining reserves can minimize stress concentration zones in the soil, the rebel y improving conditions for maintenance of excavations and limiting the risk of shock rock. (Author)

Potentially exploitable supercritical geothermal resources in the ductile crust

Science.gov (United States)

Watanabe, Noriaki; Numakura, Tatsuya; Sakaguchi, Kiyotoshi; Saishu, Hanae; Okamoto, Atsushi; Ingebritsen, Steven E.; Tsuchiya, Noriyoshi

2017-01-01

The hypothesis that the brittle–ductile transition (BDT) drastically reduces permeability implies that potentially exploitable geothermal resources (permeability >10−16 m2) consisting of supercritical water could occur only in rocks with unusually high transition temperatures such as basalt. However, tensile fracturing is possible even in ductile rocks, and some permeability–depth relations proposed for the continental crust show no drastic permeability reduction at the BDT. Here we present experimental results suggesting that the BDT is not the first-order control on rock permeability, and that potentially exploitable resources may occur in rocks with much lower BDT temperatures, such as the granitic rocks that comprise the bulk of the continental crust. We find that permeability behaviour for fractured granite samples at 350–500 °C under effective confining stress is characterized by a transition from a weakly stress-dependent and reversible behaviour to a strongly stress-dependent and irreversible behaviour at a specific, temperature-dependent effective confining stress level. This transition is induced by onset of plastic normal deformation of the fracture surface (elastic–plastic transition) and, importantly, causes no ‘jump’ in the permeability. Empirical equations for this permeability behaviour suggest that potentially exploitable resources exceeding 450 °C may form at depths of 2–6 km even in the nominally ductile crust.

Human performance modeling for system of systems analytics: combat performance-shaping factors.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Lawton, Craig R.; Miller, Dwight Peter

2006-01-01

The US military has identified Human Performance Modeling (HPM) as a significant requirement and challenge of future systems modeling and analysis initiatives. To support this goal, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has undertaken a program of HPM as an integral augmentation to its system-of-system (SoS) analytics capabilities. The previous effort, reported in SAND2005-6569, evaluated the effects of soldier cognitive fatigue on SoS performance. The current effort began with a very broad survey of any performance-shaping factors (PSFs) that also might affect soldiers performance in combat situations. The work included consideration of three different approaches to cognition modeling and how appropriate they would be for application to SoS analytics. This bulk of this report categorizes 47 PSFs into three groups (internal, external, and task-related) and provides brief descriptions of how each affects combat performance, according to the literature. The PSFs were then assembled into a matrix with 22 representative military tasks and assigned one of four levels of estimated negative impact on task performance, based on the literature. Blank versions of the matrix were then sent to two ex-military subject-matter experts to be filled out based on their personal experiences. Data analysis was performed to identify the consensus most influential PSFs. Results indicate that combat-related injury, cognitive fatigue, inadequate training, physical fatigue, thirst, stress, poor perceptual processing, and presence of chemical agents are among the PSFs with the most negative impact on combat performance.

The ESA Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions element

Science.gov (United States)

Desnos, Yves-Louis; Regner, Peter; Zehner, Claus; Engdahl, Marcus; Benveniste, Jerome; Delwart, Steven; Gascon, Ferran; Mathieu, Pierre-Philippe; Bojkov, Bojan; Koetz, Benjamin; Arino, Olivier; Donlon, Craig; Davidson, Malcolm; Goryl, Philippe; Foumelis, Michael

2014-05-01

The objectives of the ESA Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions (SEOM) programme element are • to federate, support and expand the research community • to strengthen the leadership of European EO research community • to enable the science community to address new scientific research As a preparation for the SEOM element a series of international science users consultation has been organized by ESA in 2012 and 2013 In particular the ESA Living Planet Symposium was successfully organized in Edinburgh September 2013 and involving 1700 participants from 60 countries. The science users recommendations have been gathered and form the basis for the 2014 SEOM work plan approved by ESA member states. The SEOM element is organized along the following action lines: 1. Developing open-source, multi-mission, scientific toolboxes : the new toolboxes for Sentinel 1/2/3 and 5P will be introduced 2. Research and development studies: the first SEOM studies are being launched such as the INSARAP studies for Sentinel 1 interferometry in orbit demonstration , the IAS study to generate an improved spectroscopic database of the trace gas species CH4, H2O, and CO in the 2.3 μm region and SO2 in the UV region for Sentinel 5 P. In addition larger Sentinels for science call will be tendered in 2014 covering grouped studies for Sentinel 1 Land , Sentinel 1 Ocean , Sentinel 2 Land, Sentinel 3 SAR Altimetry ,Sentinel 3 Ocean color, Sentinel 3 Land and Sentinels Synergy . 3. Science users consultation : the Sentinel 2 for Science workshop is planned from 20 to 22 may 2014 at ESRIN to prepare for scientific exploitation of the Sentinel-2 mission (http://seom.esa.int/S2forScience2014 ) . In addition the FRINGE workshop focusing on scientific explotation of Sentinel1 using SAR interferometry is planned to be held at ESA ESRIN in Q2 2015 4. Training the next generation of European EO scientists on the scientific exploitation of Sentinels data: the Advanced Training course Land

A statistical model for predicting muscle performance

Science.gov (United States)

Byerly, Diane Leslie De Caix

The objective of these studies was to develop a capability for predicting muscle performance and fatigue to be utilized for both space- and ground-based applications. To develop this predictive model, healthy test subjects performed a defined, repetitive dynamic exercise to failure using a Lordex spinal machine. Throughout the exercise, surface electromyography (SEMG) data were collected from the erector spinae using a Mega Electronics ME3000 muscle tester and surface electrodes placed on both sides of the back muscle. These data were analyzed using a 5th order Autoregressive (AR) model and statistical regression analysis. It was determined that an AR derived parameter, the mean average magnitude of AR poles, significantly correlated with the maximum number of repetitions (designated Rmax) that a test subject was able to perform. Using the mean average magnitude of AR poles, a test subject's performance to failure could be predicted as early as the sixth repetition of the exercise. This predictive model has the potential to provide a basis for improving post-space flight recovery, monitoring muscle atrophy in astronauts and assessing the effectiveness of countermeasures, monitoring astronaut performance and fatigue during Extravehicular Activity (EVA) operations, providing pre-flight assessment of the ability of an EVA crewmember to perform a given task, improving the design of training protocols and simulations for strenuous International Space Station assembly EVA, and enabling EVA work task sequences to be planned enhancing astronaut performance and safety. Potential ground-based, medical applications of the predictive model include monitoring muscle deterioration and performance resulting from illness, establishing safety guidelines in the industry for repetitive tasks, monitoring the stages of rehabilitation for muscle-related injuries sustained in sports and accidents, and enhancing athletic performance through improved training protocols while reducing

Features for Exploiting Black-Box Optimization Problem Structure

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Tierney, Kevin; Malitsky, Yuri; Abell, Tinus

2013-01-01

landscape of BBO problems and show how an algorithm portfolio approach can exploit these general, problem indepen- dent features and outperform the utilization of any single minimization search strategy. We test our methodology on data from the GECCO Workshop on BBO Benchmarking 2012, which contains 21...

Relativistic quantum metrology: exploiting relativity to improve quantum measurement technologies.

Science.gov (United States)

Ahmadi, Mehdi; Bruschi, David Edward; Sabín, Carlos; Adesso, Gerardo; Fuentes, Ivette

2014-05-22

We present a framework for relativistic quantum metrology that is useful for both Earth-based and space-based technologies. Quantum metrology has been so far successfully applied to design precision instruments such as clocks and sensors which outperform classical devices by exploiting quantum properties. There are advanced plans to implement these and other quantum technologies in space, for instance Space-QUEST and Space Optical Clock projects intend to implement quantum communications and quantum clocks at regimes where relativity starts to kick in. However, typical setups do not take into account the effects of relativity on quantum properties. To include and exploit these effects, we introduce techniques for the application of metrology to quantum field theory. Quantum field theory properly incorporates quantum theory and relativity, in particular, at regimes where space-based experiments take place. This framework allows for high precision estimation of parameters that appear in quantum field theory including proper times and accelerations. Indeed, the techniques can be applied to develop a novel generation of relativistic quantum technologies for gravimeters, clocks and sensors. As an example, we present a high precision device which in principle improves the state-of-the-art in quantum accelerometers by exploiting relativistic effects.

Exploitation of puddles for breakthroughs in claustrum research

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

John Irwin Johnson

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Since its first identification as a thin strip of gray matter enclosed between stretches of neighboring fiber bundles, the claustrum has been considered impossible to study by many modern techniques that need a certain roominess of tissue for their application. The claustrum was known as the front wall, vormauren in German from 1822, and is still called avant-mur in French. We here propose a means for breaking into and through this wall, by utilizing the instances where the claustral tissue itself has broken free into more spacious dimensions. This has occurred several times in the evolution of modern mammals, and all that needs be done is to exploit these natural expansions in order to take advantage of a great panoply of technological advances now at our disposal. So here we review the kinds of breakout puddles that await productive exploitation, to bring our knowledge of structure and function up to the level enjoyed for other more accessible regions of the brain..

Shock circle model for ejector performance evaluation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Zhu, Yinhai; Cai, Wenjian; Wen, Changyun; Li, Yanzhong

2007-01-01

In this paper, a novel shock circle model for the prediction of ejector performance at the critical mode operation is proposed. By introducing the 'shock circle' at the entrance of the constant area chamber, a 2D exponential expression for velocity distribution is adopted to approximate the viscosity flow near the ejector inner wall. The advantage of the 'shock circle' analysis is that the calculation of ejector performance is independent of the flows in the constant area chamber and diffuser. Consequently, the calculation is even simpler than many 1D modeling methods and can predict the performance of critical mode operation ejectors much more accurately. The effectiveness of the method is validated by two experimental results reported earlier. The proposed modeling method using two coefficients is shown to produce entrainment ratio, efficiency and coefficient of performance (COP) accurately and much closer to experimental results than those of 1D analysis methods

Expelling Slavery from the Nation: Representations of labour exploitation in Australia’s supply chain

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anna Szörényi

2016-09-01

Full Text Available On 4 May 2015, the Australian national broadcaster’s current affairs programme Four Corners aired an episode titled ‘Slaving Away: The dirty secrets behind Australia’s fresh food’, that provided revelations of labour exploitation of migrant workers on working holiday visas. The government reacted swiftly to these allegations with an ‘operation’ ostensibly designed to stop the exploitation. In reports of Operation Cloudburst, however, there was a shift in the media’s definition of the problem: worker exploitation became visa violations and newspapers shortly reported the resulting action taken: the ‘illegal workers’ in Australia’s food industry had been arrested. This paper tracks the competing discursive and visual representations of this case that ultimately made questions of labour rights become questions of immigration, making it plausible and acceptable that concern over exploitation of workers should be addressed by deportation of ‘illegal immigrants’. Such discursive slippage is enabled by cultural amnesia over Australia’s history of exploitation of racialised and migrant labourers, which allows ‘slavery’ to be represented as a ‘foreign’ problem that can be expelled in defence of the purity of the national domestic space.

Preliminary studies of dry rock geothermal exploitation in south west England