131,860 research outputs found

    Effect of soluble inhibitors on the corrosion behaviour of galvanized steel in fresh concrete

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    The effect of some soluble inhibitors on the passivation time of galvanized steel reinforcements in fresh concrete was studied in order to reduce H2 evolution associated with the active corrosion. The investigation was performed by means of corrosion potential monitoring, scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis. The obtained results indicate that the passivation of galvanized steel in concrete containing chromates occurs in three steps with different mechanisms and that dissolved oxygen is necessary for the beginning of passivation process. Among the inhibitors studied as alternative to Cr VI, nitrite seem the most promising one, even if it is less effective than chromate. Diethanolamine and molybdate ions do not have significant effect on the passivation time of galvanized steel in fresh concrete

    Computational convergence of the path integral for real dendritic morphologies

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    Neurons are characterised by a morphological structure unique amongst biological cells, the core of which is the dendritic tree. The vast number of dendritic geometries, combined with heterogeneous properties of the cell membrane, continue to challenge scientists in predicting neuronal input-output relationships, even in the case of sub-threshold dendritic currents. The Green’s function obtained for a given dendritic geometry provides this functional relationship for passive or quasi-active dendrites and can be constructed by a sum-over-trips approach based on a path integral formalism. In this paper, we introduce a number of efficient algorithms for realisation of the sum-over-trips framework and investigate the convergence of these algorithms on different dendritic geometries. We demonstrate that the convergence of the trip sampling methods strongly depends on dendritic morphology as well as the biophysical properties of the cell membrane. For real morphologies, the number of trips to guarantee a small convergence error might become very large and strongly affect computational efficiency. As an alternative, we introduce a highly-efficient matrix method which can be applied to arbitrary branching structures

    Editorial for special issue on neurodynamics

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    “Neurodynamics” is an interdisciplinary area of mathematics where dynamical systems theory (deterministic and stochastic) is the primary tool for elucidating the fundamental mechanisms responsible for the behaviour of neural systems (whether biological or synthetic). A meeting on this topic was held at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh from March 5–7 in 2012. In this special issue, we have invited seven of the main contributors to this event to expand on their presentations and highlight the use of mathematics in understanding the dynamics of neural systems

    MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations

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    Information overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    "Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"

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    Both spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.

    A. D. Fricke, author

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    Black and white photograph of author, A. D. Fricke

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #11: The ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund

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    At the May 2014 talk, you will learn about the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund--what it is, why we do it, how it works, and how the program is going so far
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