264 research outputs found
Amica Mutual Insurance v. Carl F. Schettler : Carl F. Schettler v. James M. Black, dba Black Nichols and Guiver; and R. LaMar Guiver : Brief of Respondent
No full textBRIEF OF THIRD-PARTY DEFENDANTS & RESPONDENTS JAMES M. BLACK d/b/a BLACK, NICHOLS & GUIVER and R. LAMAR GUIVER
Language Understanding in the Wild: Combining Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning
No full textSocial media has led to the democratisation of opinion sharing. A wealth of information about public opinions, current events, and authors’ insights into specific topics can be gained by understanding the text written by users. However, there is a wide variation in the language used by different authors in different contexts on the web. This diversity in language makes interpretation an extremely challenging task. Crowdsourcing presents an opportunity to interpret the sentiment, or topic, of free-text. However, the subjectivity and bias of human interpreters raise challenges in inferring the semantics expressed by the text. To overcome this problem, we present a novel Bayesian approach to language understanding that relies on aggregated crowdsourced judgements. Our model encodes the relationships between labels and text features in documents, such as tweets, web articles, and blog posts, accounting for the varying reliability of human labellers. It allows inference of annotations that scales to arbitrarily large pools of documents. Our evaluation shows that by efficiently exploiting language models learnt from aggregated crowdsourced labels, we can provide up to 25% improved classifications when only a small portion, less than 4% of documents has been labelled. Compared to the six state-of-the-art methods, we reduce by up to 67% the number of crowd responses required to achieve comparable accuracy. Our method was a joint winner of the CrowdFlower - CrowdScale 2013 Shared Task challenge at the conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2013)
A clustered sulfonated poly(ether sulfone) based on a new fluorene-based bisphenol monomer
No full textA new fluorene-based bisphenol monomer containing two pendant phenyl groups, 9,9-bis(3-phenyl-4-hydroxy) phenyl-fluorene, was readily synthesized in high yield by a one-step reaction from inexpensive starting materials. A series of poly(ether sulfone)s with clustered sulfonic acid groups was prepared for fuel cell applications by polycondensation of the new monomer with bis(4-hydroxyphenyl)sulfone and bis(4-fluorophenyl)sulfone, followed by sulfonation exclusively on the fluorene rings and pendant phenyl rings, using concentrated sulfuric acid at room temperature. The sulfonated polymers gave tough, flexible, and transparent membranes by solvent casting. The ionic exchange capacity (IEC), water-uptake, dimensional stabilities, mechanical properties, thermal and oxidative stabilities as well as proton conductivities and single fuel cell properties of the membranes were investigated. The membranes with high IEC values show high proton transport properties, and their proton conductivities exhibit lower dependence on relative humidity compared with typical aromatic ion exchange membranes. 4-SPES-38 with an IEC value of 2.23 mequiv. g(-1) displays comparable fuel cell performance with Nafion 212 under low humidity conditions
Polyethylene-based radiation grafted anion-exchange membranes for alkaline fuel cells
No full textVinyl benzyl chloride was grafted onto ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene powder (UHMWPE) by radiation grafting. The grafted powder was subsequently fabricated into membrane by melt pressing. The effect of absorbed radiation dose on the degree of grafting (DG) is discussed. The melt-flow properties of PVBC grafted PE with low degree of grafting was conducive to forming homogeneous pore-free membranes, which was confirmed by scanning electron microscopic analysis. The grafted polyethylene membranes were post functionalized with trimethylamine, followed by alkalization to obtain anion-exchange membranes (AEMs). The structures of the resulting AEMs were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, which showed that the grafted membranes were successfully functionalized. The properties of the AEMs, including ion exchange capacity, water uptake, in-plane swelling, methanol uptake, methanol permeability and hydroxide ion conductivity were investigated. The AEMs showed reasonably good chemical stability, as evidenced by the ion exchange capacity being maintained for a long duration, even in highly alkaline conditions. The membranes exhibited a maximum ionic conductivity of 47.5 mS cm?1 at 90 °C (30 mS cm?1 at 60 °C). Methanol permeability was found to be in the order of 10?8 cm2 s?1, which is considerably lower than that of Nafion®. The membranes have useful properties consistent with anion exchange membranes suitable for alkaline fuel cells.Funding for the project by the WCU program (No. R31-2008-000-10092-0) and Nano-Materials Program (2012M3A7B4049745), National Research Foundation (NRF) of the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology is greatly appreciated
Time-sensitive Bayesian information aggregation for crowdsourcing systems
No full textMany aspects of the design of efficient crowdsourcing processes, such as defining worker’s bonuses, fair prices and time limits of the tasks, involve knowledge of the likely duration of the task at hand. In this work we introduce a new time–sensitive Bayesian aggregation method that simultaneously estimates a task’s duration and obtains reliable aggregations of crowdsourced judgments. Our method, called BCCTime, uses latent variables to represent the uncertainty about the workers’ completion time, the tasks’ duration and the workers’ accuracy. To relate the quality of a judgment to the time a worker spends on a task, our model assumes that each task is completed within a latent time window within which all workers with a propensity to genuinely attempt the labelling task (i.e., no spammers) are expected to submit their judgments. In contrast, workers with a lower propensity to valid labelling, such as spammers, bots or lazy labellers, are assumed to perform tasks considerably faster or slower than the time required by normal workers. Specifically, we use efficient message-passing Bayesian inference to learn approximate posterior probabilities of (i) the confusion matrix of each worker, (ii) the propensity to valid labelling of each worker, (iii) the unbiased duration of each task and (iv) the true label of each task. Using two real- world public datasets for entity linking tasks, we show that BCCTime produces up to 11% more accurate classifications and up to 100% more informative estimates of a task’s duration compared to state–of–the–art methods
Sorption of CO2/CH4 Mixtures in a Polymer of Intrinsic Microporosity (PIM-1): Effect of Temperature
No full textPrior analysis of permselectivity in high free volume glassy polymers for gas separation shows that solubility selectivity is an important factor. The aim of this work is the study of solubility selectivity with respect to CO2/CH4 mixture of a polymer of intrinsic microporosity (PIM-1). Sorption experiments were carried out at 25°C, 35°C and 50°C up to a pressure of 35 atm at three molar fractions of CO2 (10.9, 31.3, 50.9%). Pressure decay equipped with gas chromatograph was used for the experiments.
The results show that solubility coefficient of CO2 is lower for mixed gas experiment than for pure gas experiment, as well as the solubility coefficient of CH4, however the decrease of solubility coefficient of CH4 is higher than that of CO2. This behaviour gives rise to mixed gas solubility selectivity values higher than corresponding pure gas solubility selectivity. Sorption enthalpies were calculated at different gas mixture compositions
Sorption of CO2/CH4 Mixtures in TZ-PIM Membrane at Different Temperatures
No full textMixed gas sorption of CO2/CH4 in TZ-PIM (PIM containing tetrazole unit) was characterized at three different temperatures 25°C, 35°C and 50°C and three molar fraction of CO2, 11.3% CO2, 30.7% CO2 and 50.3% CO2 up to a pressure of 35 atm. Pressure decay equipped with gas chromatograph was used for the experiment.
Solubility selectivity of TZ-PIM for CO2/CH4 mixture is higher than solubility selectivity of PIM-1. This is due to the tetrazole group which improves the solubility of CO2 while leaving unaffected the solubility of CH4. Solubility coefficient for both gases decreases with increasing temperature
MBL2 deficiency is associated with higher genomic bacterial loads during meningococcemia in young children
No full textMannose binding lectin (MBL2) is a soluble pattern recognition receptor that is key to generating innate immune responses to invasive infection, including against the cardinal Gram-negative bacterium Neisseria meningitidis. Individuals homozygous or heterozygous for any of three variant alleles of MBL2 (O/O or A/O genotypes) have deficient concentrations of MBL2 in circulating blood, but previous studies linking MBL deficiency to susceptibility to meningococcal disease have not revealed a consistent association. We genotyped 741 patients with microbiologically-proven meningococcal disease and correlated MBL2 genotype with plasma bacterial load of N. meningitidis with blood samples taken during hospital admission. We show that individuals with genotypes compatible with MBL2 deficiency have higher measurable levels of bacterial plasma genomic load with the greatest effect seen in children <2 years of age. However, the overall impact of this is minor, because there was no evidence that such genotypes are more common in children with meningococcal disease compared with uninfected cohorts. The findings suggest that MBL2 supports innate immune defence against meningococcal disease in the early months of life, before acquired immunity is sufficiently robust for effective natural protection.</p
Mixed gas sorption of CO2/CH4 mixtures in PIM-1 and PTMSP membranes: experiments and modeling
No full textSorption of pure methane, carbon dioxide and their binary mixtures in two glassy polymers, poly(1-trimethylsilyl-1-propyne) (PTMSP), and the first polymer of intrinsic microporosity (PIM-1), has been studied experimentally and theoretically, at 35.0 \ubaC. Measurements were obtained on a newly designed pressure decay sorption apparatus for mixtures of gases, having the basic construction according to Sanders et al. [1], but with a more versatile procedure than that used in [1], which allowed to measure sorption isotherms at constant partial pressure of one component of the gas mixture. Indeed this novel method allows one to measure sorption isotherms i) at constant composition of the gaseous phase, ii) at constant fugacity of one component or iii) at constant equilibrium pressure. The first protocol, in particular, allows to mimic better the real constraints faced when dealing with a membrane separation process, where one has a gas stream of fixed composition, in which only the total pressure can be varied, by compression. The pressure decay apparatus is coupled to a gas chromatograph Varian CP-4900 Micro-GC equipped with a capillary column and with a thermal conductivity detector for analysis of the gas phase composition. In the case of PTMSP, the mixture n-C4/CH4 was initially considered, to provide a direct comparison with literature data [2] and validation of the method. Indeed, the sorption of n-C4/CH4mixtures showed a reasonable agreement with the existing mixed gas sorption data [2]. On the other hand, the CO2/CH4mixed sorption data in PTMSP are completely new, and were measured in the range from 0 to 33 atm of total equilibrium pressure, and from 5 to 90 mol.% of carbon dioxide in the gaseous phase. Furthermore, the same characterization of CO2/CH4 mixed sorption was performed in PIM-1: the pressure range inspected was the same as in PTMSP, while the composition of CO2 ranged from 10 to 50 mol.%. PTMSP membrane was cast from a solution of toluene, immersed in methanol and then dried under vacuum before characterization; its density was 0.77\ub10.01 g/cm3. The PIM-1 membrane was prepared from a filtered ca. 2.0 wt.% chloroform solution of PIM-1 and heated in vacuum at 70 \ub0C, then submerged in methanol and dried under vacuum at 70 \ub0C. The density of pure PIM-1 was (1.143\ub10.008) g/cm3at 25\ub0C. For both PTMSP and PIM-1, the mixed gas solubility differs significantly from the pure gas value, and, in particular, the solubility of both components is depressed by the presence of the second one, as it often happens in glassy polymers.[3] The solubility selectivity ranges between 2 and 6 for PTMSP and between 5 and 10 for PIM-1. The methane solubility, however, is more significantly depressed by CO2 than that of CO2 is decreased by CH4, therefore the real solubility selectivity (CO2/CH4) for PTMSP and PIM-1 is higher than the ideal solubility selectivity. Such effect becomes more significant with increasing the mole fraction of CO2 in the gaseous phase and with pressure, and is more significant for PIM-1 than for PTMSP. Indeed, the real solubility selectivity becomes 3 times higher than the ideal one in PTMSP for a fraction of 70 mol.% of CO2 in the gas phase, while for PIM-1 such point is reached with a lower concentration of CO2(50 mol.%). Both results indicate the presence of a competition for available polymer matrix sites, which is not surprising due to the nature of physical sorption in glassy matrices, and possibly also of different interactions between polymer and penetrants. To investigate that behavior, the Non-Equilibrium Lattice Fluid model (NELF) was used [3], while the widely used Dual Mode Sorption (DMS) model was also considered as a reference tool. The NELF model, as well as the DMS, does not require additional parameters for the prediction of the mixed gas behavior, and is fully predictive provided a few pure gas sorption data in the polymer matrix. Indeed, binary interaction parameters are the same as in the pure gas case, and the swelling induced by the mixture is estimated from pure gas swelling. Remarkably, in the DMS model, only competition (depression) effects are accounted for, because the mixed gas additional term (positive) appears only in the denominator of the expression for solubility. The NELF model provided quantitative predictions of the mixed gas sorption of CO2 and CH4under pure- and mixed-gas conditions in PTMSP and in PIM-1. The solubility selectivity is also predicted, although with less accuracy, by the NELF model. The DMS model works fairly well in the case of PTMSP, but provides poorer predictions than the NELF model of the mixed gas solubility in PIM-1. Sorption of mixtures of CO2 and CH4 in PTMSP and in PIM-1 was predictable with the NELF model with an accuracy that is comparable to the experimental one, which could reduce the need for the laborious measurements of mixed gas sorption in polymers. Better insights and interpretation of the mixed gas sorption mechanism can also be obtained by using the NELF model.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye
Bacterial genomic detection within cerebrospinal fluid of patients with meningococcal disease is influenced by microbial and host characteristics
No full textAmong 384 patients with confirmed meningococcal disease, the likelihood of detecting Neisseria meningitidis DNA in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) increased with age, serogroup B infection, and prehospitalization antibiotic treatment. Plasma and CSF genomic bacterial loads of non-B N. meningitidis serogroups correlated significantly. Serogroup B-infected patients with genotype TNF2 (-308A) had significantly higher CSF bacterial loads
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