Reparatory and Manufacturing Hard-Facing of Working Parts Made of Stainless Steels in Confectionary Industry

In this paper, for the sake of improving the reparatory hard-facing technology is especially analyzed reparatory hard-facing of tools for manufacturing compressed products in confectionary industry. Those products are being made of a mixture consisting of several powdery components, which is compressed under high pressure. In that way the connection between particles is realized, thus achieving certain hardness and strength of the confectionary product. The considered tool is made of high-alloyed stainless steel. The tool contains 30 identical working places. Besides the production process wear, on those tools, from time to time, appear mechanical damage on some of the products' shape punches, as cracks at the edges, where the products' final shapes are formed. Those damages are small, size wise, but they cause strong effect on the products' final shape. The aggravating circumstance is that the shape punch is extremely loaded in pressure, thus after the reparatory hard-facing, the additional heat treatment is necessary. Mechanical properties in the heat affected zone (HAZ) are being leveled by annealing and what also partially reduces the residual internal stresses

EVIL: Exploiting Software via Natural Language

Writing exploits for security assessment is a challenging task. The writer needs to master programming and obfuscation techniques to develop a successful exploit. To make the task easier, we propose an approach (EVIL) to automatically generate exploits in assembly/Python language from descriptions in natural language. The approach leverages Neural Machine Translation (NMT) techniques and a dataset that we developed for this work. We present an extensive experimental study to evaluate the feasibility of EVIL, using both automatic and manual analysis, and both at generating individual statements and entire exploits. The generated code achieved high accuracy in terms of syntactic and semantic correctness

Cross-sectional associations between personality traits and device-based measures of step count and sedentary behaviour in older age: the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936

Background: While the associations between personality traits and self-reported physical activity are well replicated, few studies have examined the associations between personality and device-based measures of both physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Low levels of physical activity and high levels of sedentary behaviour are known risk factors for poorer health outcomes in older age. Methods: We used device-based measures of physical activity and sedentary behaviour recorded over 7 days in 271 79-year-old participants of the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936. Linear regression models were used to assess whether personality traits were cross-sectionally associated with step count, sedentary time, and the number of sit-to-stand transitions. Personality traits were entered one at a time, and all-together, controlling for age and sex in Model 1 and additionally for BMI and limiting long-term illness in Model 2. Results: None of the associations between personality traits and measures of physical activity and sedentary behaviours remained significant after controlling for multiple-comparisons using the False Discovery Rate test (all ps &gt;.07). Conclusions: We found no evidence that personality traits are associated with device-based measures of physical activity or sedentary behaviour in older age. More studies are needed to replicate and examine the nature of these relationships.</p

Improvement Opportunities and Suggestions for Benchmarking

During the past 10 years, the amount of effort put on setting up benchmarking repositories has considerably increased at the organizational, national and even at international levels to help software managers to determine the performance of software activities and to make better software estimates. This has enabled a number of studies with an emphasis on the relationship between software product size, effort and cost factors in order to either measure the average performance for similar software projects or develop reliable estimation models and then refine them using the collected data. However, despite these efforts, none of those methods are yet deemed to be universally applicable and there is still no agreement on which cost factors are significant in the estimation process. This study discusses some of the possible reasons why in software engineering, practitioners and researchers have not yet been able to come up with well defined relationships between effort and cost drivers although considerable amounts of data on software projects have been collected.Volume 5891/200

Direct-current-dependent shift of theta-burst-induced plasticity in the human motor cortex

Animal studies using polarising currents have shown that induction of synaptic long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) by bursts of patterned stimulation is affected by the membrane potential of the postsynaptic neurone. The aim of the present experiments was to test whether it is possible to observe similar phenomena in humans with the aim of improving present protocols of inducing synaptic plasticity for therapeutic purposes. We tested whether the LTP/LTD-like after effects of transcranial theta-burst stimulation (TBS) of human motor cortex, an analogue of patterned electrical stimulation in animals, were affected by simultaneous transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive method of polarising cortical neurones in humans. Nine healthy volunteers were investigated in a single-blind, balanced cross-over study; continuous TBS (cTBS) was used to introduce LTD-like after effects, whereas intermittent TBS (iTBS) produced LTP-like effects. Each pattern was coupled with concurrent application of tDCS (<200 s, anodal, cathodal, sham). Cathodal tDCS increased the response to iTBS and abolished the effects of cTBS. Anodal tDCS changed the effects of cTBS towards facilitation, but had no impact on iTBS. Cortical motor thresholds and intracortical inhibitory/facilitatory networks were not altered by any of the stimulation protocols. We conclude that the after effects of TBS can be modulated by concurrent tDCS. We hypothesise that tDCS changes the membrane potential of the apical dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurones and that this changes the response to patterned synaptic input evoked by TBS. The data show that it may be possible to enhance LTP-like plasticity after TBS in the human cortex

Water resources assessment as the basic tool for sustainable and environmentally sound river basin management

This paper deals with the methodology used for conducting a water resources assessment as the core component of water resources master plans. It is basically a quantitative and qualitative water resources balance (WRB) and an essential element of any short or long-term planning of sustainable and environmentally sound river basin development and management. The use of a water resources management balance instead of the water resources balance (water budget) that includes the water withdrawals and discharges in the balance equation should be favoured in water resources assessment. By using a water resource management balance, the multiple use of a given volume of water is accounted for so that it is possible to satisfy larger water demands than by using the natural water budget approach. This approach forces planners to look at a much wider scope of alternatives (reservoirs versus water recirculation and conservation for example) to meet the demands and also reinforces the role of water quality in water resources assessment.</jats:p

Nonlinear dynamics of meteorological variables: Multifractality and chaotic invariants in daily records from Pastaza, Ecuador

Weather represents the daily state of the atmosphere. It is usually considered as a chaotic nonlinear dynamical system. The objectives of the present study were (1) to investigate multifractal meteorological trends and rhythms at the Amazonian area of Ecuador and (2) to estimate some nonlinear invariants for describing the meteorological dynamics. Six meteorological variables were considered in the study. Datasets were collected on a daily basis from January 1st 2001 to January 1st 2005 (1,460 observations). Based on a new multifractal method, we found interesting fractal rhythms and trends of antipersistence patterns (Fractal Dimension >1.5). Nonlinear time series analyses rendered Lyapunov exponent spectra containing more than one positive Lyapunov exponent in some cases. This sort of hyperchaotic structures could explain, to some extent, larger fractal dimension values as the Kaplan-Yorke dimension was also in most cases larger than two. The maximum prediction time ranged from ξ = 1.69 days (approximately 41 h) for E/P ratio to ξ = 14.71 days for evaporation. Nonlinear dynamics analyses could be combined with multifractal studies for describing the time evolution of meteorological variables. © 2009 Springer-Verlag

Combining Fault Avoidance, Removal and Tolerance: An Integrated Basis for Software Verification and Validation

Fault avoidance, fault removal and fault tolerance represent three successive lines of defense against the contingency of faults in software systems and their impact on system reliability. The law of diminishing returns advocates that these three sets of methods be put to bear to achieve effective software verification and validation: each method is used in the context where it is most effective. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to verification and validation, where we identify what aspects each set of methods is best adapted to deal with. Keywords Fault avoidance, Fault removal, Fault tolerance, Formal specifications, Verification and validation. 1 Successive Lines of Defense Despite three decades of intensive research, the verification and validation of software products remains an active research area. A great deal of progress has been achieved in this field, but the advent of new programming languages and new software development paradigms, combined with the incre..