Reverse Logistics: Mattress Recycling

This study investigates U.S. manufacturing industries that can utilize raw materials obtained from mattress recycling as an input. To achieve this, a material analysis is conducted to determined the types of raw materials that can be obtained from a variety of mattresses. This research also focuses on the utilization of bed coils and wood as decorative parts while elaborating on their sales via online platforms

Influence of laser spot size at diffuser plane on the longitudinal spatial coherence function of optical coherence microscopy system

Coherence properties and wavelength of light sources are indispensable for optical coherence microscopy/tomography as they greatly influence the signal to noise ratio, axial resolution, and penetration depth of the system. In the present letter, we investigated the longitudinal spatial coherence properties of the pseudo-thermal light source (PTS) as a function of spot size at the diffuser plane, which is controlled by translating microscope objective lens towards or away from the diffuser plane. The axial resolution of PTS is found to be maximum ~ 13 microns for the beam spot size of 3.5 mm at the diffuser plane. The change in the axial resolution of the system as the spot size is increased at the diffuser plane is further confirmed by performing experiments on standard gauge blocks of height difference of 15 microns. Thus, by appropriately choosing the beam spot size at the diffuser plane, any monochromatic laser light source depending on the biological window can be utilized to obtain high axial-resolution with large penetration depth and speckle-free tomographic images of multilayered biological specimens irrespective of the source temporal coherence length. In addition, PTS could be an attractive alternative light source for achieving high axial-resolution without needing chromatic aberration corrected optics and dispersion-compensation mechanism, unlike conventional setups.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.0199

Characterization of color cross-talk of CCD detectors and its influence in multispectral quantitative phase imaging

Multi-spectral quantitative phase imaging (QPI) is an emerging imaging modality for wavelength dependent studies of several biological and industrial specimens. Simultaneous multi-spectral QPI is generally performed with color CCD cameras. However, color CCD cameras are suffered from the color crosstalk issue, which needed to be explored. Here, we present a new approach for accurately measuring the color crosstalk of 2D area detectors, without needing prior information about camera specifications. Color crosstalk of two different cameras commonly used in QPI, single chip CCD (1-CCD) and three chip CCD (3-CCD), is systematically studied and compared using compact interference microscopy. The influence of color crosstalk on the fringe width and the visibility of the monochromatic constituents corresponding to three color channels of white light interferogram are studied both through simulations and experiments. It is observed that presence of color crosstalk changes the fringe width and visibility over the imaging field of view. This leads to an unwanted non-uniform background error in the multi-spectral phase imaging of the specimens. It is demonstrated that the color crosstalk of the detector is the key limiting factor for phase measurement accuracy of simultaneous multi-spectral QPI systems.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Immediate 3-dimensional ridge augmentation after extraction of periodontally hopeless tooth using chinblock graft

Background: The aim of the present study was to evaluate clinically and radiographically, the efficacy of immediate ridge augmentation to reconstruct the vertical and horizontal dimensions at extraction sites of periodontally hopeless tooth using an autogenous chin block graft. Material and Methods: A total of 11 patients (7 male & 4 female) with localized advanced bone loss around single rooted teeth having hopeless prognosis and indicated for extraction were selected for the study. The teeth were atraumatically extracted and deficient sites were augmented using autogenous chin block graft. Parameters like clinically soft tissue height - width and also radiographic ridge height -width were measured before and 6 months after augmentation. Obtained results were tabulated and analysed statistically. Results: After 6 months of immediate ridge augmentation, the mean gain in radiographic vertical height and horizontal width was 7.64 + 1.47 mm ( P = 0.005) and 5.28 + 0.46 mm ( P = 0.007) respectively which was found to be statistically significant ( P < 0.05). Mean change of width gain of 0.40mm and height loss of 0.40mm of soft tissue parameters, from the baseline till completion of the study at 6 months was observed. Conclusions: The present study showed predictable immediate ridge augmentation with autogenous chin block graft at periodontally compromised extraction site. It can provide adequate hard and soft tissue foundation for perfect 3-Dimensional prosthetic positioning of implant in severely deficient ridges

Simplifying and Understanding State Space Models with Diagonal Linear RNNs

Sequence models based on linear state spaces (SSMs) have recently emerged as a promising choice of architecture for modeling long range dependencies across various modalities. However, they invariably rely on discretization of a continuous state space, which complicates their presentation and understanding. In this work, we dispose of the discretization step, and propose a model based on vanilla Diagonal Linear RNNs ($\mathrm{DLR}$). We empirically show that, despite being conceptually much simpler, $\mathrm{DLR}$ is as performant as previously-proposed SSMs on a variety of tasks and benchmarks including Long Range Arena and raw speech classification. Moreover, we characterize the expressivity of SSMs (including $\mathrm{DLR}$) and attention-based models via a suite of $13$ synthetic sequence-to-sequence tasks involving interactions over tens of thousands of tokens, ranging from simple operations, such as shifting an input sequence, to detecting co-dependent visual features over long spatial ranges in flattened images. We find that while SSMs report near-perfect performance on tasks that can be modeled via $\textit{few}$ convolutional kernels, they struggle on tasks requiring $\textit{many}$ such kernels and especially when the desired sequence manipulation is $\textit{context-dependent}$. Despite these limitations, $\mathrm{DLR}$ reaches high performance on two higher-order reasoning tasks $\mathrm{ListOpsSubTrees}$ and $\mathrm{PathfinderSegmentation}\text{-}\mathrm{256}$ with input lengths $8K$ and $65K$ respectively, and gives encouraging performance on $\mathrm{PathfinderSegmentation}\text{-}\mathrm{512}$ with input length $262K$ for which attention is not a viable choice.Comment: added Long Range Arena, language modeling with mixture of expert

Applying Brain Computer Interface Technology for Playing Games

Brain Computer Interfaces are specialized systems that allows users to control computer applications using their brain waves. Initially, BCI were mostly used in medical field. But after some research and thanks to consumer-grade electroencephalography (EEG) devices, many applications and research opportunities were opened outside of the medical field. One particular area that is gaining more evidence due to the arrival consumer-grade devices is that of computer games, as it allows more user-friendly applications of BCI technology for the general public. In this report, we are going to talk about one of those games, Maze game. It will be a 2D maze, path known to the user. Using the EEG device named Neurosky Brain Wave Kit user will be able to move the avatar in order to reach the goal from the starting position

Nucleation Mechanism during WS2 Plasma Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition on Amorphous Al2O3 and Sapphire Substrates

The structure, crystallinity and properties of as-deposited two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides are determined by nucleation mechanisms in the deposition process. 2D materials grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD) in absence of a template, are polycrystalline or amorphous. Little is known about their nucleation mechanisms. Therefore, we investigate the nucleation behavior of WS2 during plasma enhanced ALD from WF6, H2 plasma and H2S at 300 °C on amorphous ALD Al2O3 starting surface and on monocrystalline, bulk sapphire. Preferential interaction of the precursors with the Al2O3 starting surface promotes fast closure of the WS2 layer. The WS2 layers are fully continuous at WS2 content corresponding to only 1.2 WS2 monolayers. On amorphous Al2O3, (0002) textured and polycrystalline WS2 layers form with grain size of 5 nm to 20 nm due to high nucleation density (~1014 nuclei/cm2). The WS2 growth mode changes from 2D (layer-by-layer) growth on the initial Al2O3 surface to three-dimensional (Volmer-Weber) growth after WS2 layer closure. Further growth proceeds from both WS2 basal planes in register with the underlying WS2 grain, and from or over grain boundaries of the underlying WS2 layer with different in-plane orientation. In contrast, on monocrystalline sapphire, WS2 crystal grains can locally align along a preferred in-plane orientation. Epitaxial seeding occurs locally albeit a large portion of crystals remain randomly oriented, presumably due to the low deposition temperature. The WS2 sheet resistance is 168 MΩµm suggesting that charge transport in the WS2 layers is limited by grain boundaries.status: publishe