Ambient‐cured polyesteramide‐based anticorrosive coatings from linseed oil—A sustainable resource

Ambient‐cured polyesteramide (APEA) coating resin synthesized from dihydroxy fatty amide obtained from linseed oil, a sustainable resource, and poly(styrene‐co‐maleic anhydride), a bifunctional acid component, was found to exhibit improved physicomechanical and anticorrosive properties. The structural elucidation of APEA resin has been carried out by FTIR, ¹H‐NMR, and ¹³C‐NMR spectroscopies. The physicomechanical and chemical resistance properties were investigated by standard methods. The corrosion resistance performance was evaluated in acid, alkali, and organic solvent. The thermal behavior was studied by TGA technique. A comparative study of these properties of APEA with reported baked polyesteramide (PEA) coatings was carried out. A remarkable improvement in the drying property of APEA was observed. The APEA coatings also showed improved physicomechanical and anticorrosive properties as compared to the baked PEA coatings. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 97: 1818–1824, 2005     

Ubi-App: a ubiquitous application for universal access from handheld devices

Universal access from a handheld device (such as a PDA, cell phone) at any time or anywhere is now a reality. Ubicomp Assistant (UA) (Sharmin et al. in Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on applied computing (ACM SAC 2006), Dijon, France, pp 1013–1017, 2006) is an integral service of MARKS (Sharmin et al. in Proceedings of the third international conference on information technology: new generations (ITNG 2006), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp 306–313, 2006). It is a middleware developed for handheld devices, and has been designed to accommodate different types of users (e.g., education, healthcare, marketing, or business). This customizable service employs the ubiquitous nature of current short range, low-power wireless connectivity and readily available, low-cost lightweight mobile devices. These devices can reach other neighbouring devices using a free short-range ad hoc network. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the UA service is the only service designed for these devices. This paper presents the details of Ubi-App, a ubiquitous application for universal access from any handheld device, which uses UA as a service. The results of a usability test and performance evaluation of the prototype show that Ubi-App is useful, easy to use, easy to install, and does not degrade the performance of the device.     

Improving the performance of 1D object classification by using the Electoral College

It has been proven that districted matching schemes (e.g., the US presidential election scheme, also called the Electoral College) are more stable than undistricted matching schemes (e.g., the popular voting scheme for selecting a governor in California), and that the theory can be used in pattern classification applications, such as image classification, where by its nature an object to be classified consists of elements distributed in a bounded 2D space. However, the objects of some pattern classification applications consist of features/values of elements lying on a limited 1D line segment. This paper will prove that districted matching scheme can still outperform undistricted matching scheme in these applications, and the improved performance of districted vote scheme is even more substantial for these 1D objects than for 2D objects. The theoretical result suggests the use of districted matching schemes for pattern recognition of 1D objects. We verified the theoretical analysis through artificial neural network-based approaches for the prediction of start codons of nucleotide sequences. Liang Chen received his Doctor' degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 1994. He is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science Department, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada. His research interests include general artificial intelligence, image processing, bioinformatics, intelligent language tutoring system, computational intelligence, and fast approximate practical algorithms for solving some NP hard problems. Ruoyu Chen is now an undergraduate student (Class 2, Grade 2002) in Computer Science and Technology College at Jilin University, China, majoring Computer Science and Technology. He started to work with Dr. L. Chen in voting theory from 2003. He holds one Chinese Patent. His main research interests include artificial intelligence, natural language tutoring systems, data mining, and networks. Sharmin Nilufar received an MSc degree in Computer Science from Rajshahi University, Bangladesh. She is now a graduate student at University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada. Her research interests include information retrieval, image retrieval, and bioinformatics.     

PANIC: an integrated approach to the preservation of composite digital objects using Semantic Web services

To date, long-term preservation approaches have comprised of emulation, migration, normalization, and metadata – or some combination of these. Most existing work has focussed on applying these approaches to digital objects of a singular media type: text, HTML, images, video or audio. In this paper, we consider the preservation of composite, mixed-media digital objects, a rapidly growing class of resources. We describe an integrated, flexible system that we have developed, which leverages existing tools and services and assists organizations to dynamically discover the optimum preservation strategy as it is required. The system captures and periodically compares preservation metadata with software and format registries to determine those objects (or sub-objects) at risk. By making preservation software modules available as Web services and describing them semantically using a machine-processable ontology (OWL-S), the most appropriate preservation service(s) for each object (or sub-object) can then be dynamically discovered, composed and invoked by software agents (with optional human input at critical decision-making steps). The PANIC system successfully illustrates how the growing array of available preservation tools and services can be integrated to provide a sustainable, collaborative solution to the long-term preservation of large-scale collections of complex digital objects.     

Implementation of M-PFI method in design of steel plate walls

To demonstrate implementation of the modified-plate frame interaction (M-PFI) method in the design of a steel plate wall (SPW) system, three SPWs of different heights were designed for this paper using the M-PFI method. Evaluation of the M-PFI design methodology was performed using the finite element (FE) method to analyze each of the three SPWs under a pushover load to determine its load displacement diagram. FE results were then compared with M-PFI model results. Good agreement was observed for stiffness and strength of the SPW models obtained from both the M-PFI and FE methods. The FE method was used not only to evaluate the three SPW designs, but also to investigate the effects of beam size and material hardening on SPW design. This paper also presents a step-by-step M-PFI design procedure and a simplified flow chart to better illustrate the design process.     

Studies on self cured zinc-containing Pongamia glabra oil based polyesteramide

Efforts have been made for the development of high performance protective coating materials from non drying oil such as Pongamia glabra oil and their commercialization. Zn-containing self cured Pongamia glabra oil based polyesteramide [Zn-APGPEA] resin was synthesized in situ by the reaction of Pongamia glabra fatty amide diol [HEPGA], poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride) [SMA] and zinc acetate (different ratios) at 100 ± 5 °C in the presence of an acid catalyst. The physico-chemical characterizations of the resin were carried out by standard laboratory methods. The structural elucidation of the prepared resin was carried out by FTIR, ¹H NMR and ¹³C NMR spectral techniques. The thermal behavior was studied by TGA technique. Antibacterial activity was measured by agar diffusion method against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. The effect of the loading of zinc on properties of Zn-APGPEA film was also investigated. The properties of Zn-APGPEA compared with reported self cured Pongamia glabra polyesteramide [APGPEA]. Physico-mechanical and chemical/corrosion resistance test of Zn-APGPEA coatings showed that the presence of zinc metal in APGPEA considerably enhances the overall film performance and also improves antibacterial activity. Therefore, Zn-APGPEA can be used as an anti-corrosive and antibacterial coatings material which may substitute polymers obtained from petroleum.     

High-rate dual-target DC magnetron sputter deposition of “blue” electrochromic Mo oxide films

Mo oxide films were prepared by dual-target reactive DC magnetron sputtering under conditions leading to films that were blue in as-deposited state. The deposition rate for this “blue” Mo oxide was as high as 1.5 nm/s, to be compared to 0.85 and 0.1 nm/s for highly transparent Mo oxide films made with dual-target and single-target sputtering, respectively. Good electrochromic properties of the “blue” films evolved after 5 colour/bleach cycles in a Li⁺ conducting electrolyte.     

When customers lash out: The effects of customer interactional injustice on emotional labor and the mediating role of discrete emotions.

Using affective events theory to integrate multifoci justice and emotional labor (EL), this lab study examined the effects of customer interactional justice on EL perceived by both the self and others. Participants played the role of customer-service representatives in a workplace simulation and were exposed to either interactionally fair or unfair customers. Results showed that unfairly treated participants engaged in higher levels of EL and found it more difficult to comply with display rules than did participants who were fairly treated. The above link was partially mediated by anger. Our findings suggest that customers are a viable source of justice, and customer behavior impacts the effort required of service workers to adhere to organizationally sanctioned emotional display rules. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)