Summary of discussion on ‘Sciences related to pitch and coke usage in carbon manufacture’

This article is a brief summary of the Discussion session held after the presentation of the preceding papers at the conference organized by the Industrial Carbon and Graphite Group of the Society of Chemical Industry, London, March 1984.     

Nicholas Hobbs (1915–1983).

Presents an obituary for Nicholas Hobbs. Just at the end of his stellar career of public service through psychology, Nick Hobbs received very appropriate honors showing that psychologists and many others knew what a precious national resource his life had been. Only days before his death from cancer on January 23, 1983, he participated in the dedication of the Nicholas Hobbs Laboratory of Human Development of the Peabody College for Teachers of Vanderbilt University, part of the Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development that he founded and directed at its beginning. Two years earlier, he had received two parallel American Psychological Association (APA) awards--one for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest and another for Distinguished Professional Contributions "utilizing psychological knowledge in the public interest and social policy." As the citations and testimonials on these occasions variously noted, Nick gave creative, responsible, and effective service to the institutions that he helped administer, to the Southern region from which he sprang, to the APA, and to the profession of psychology, but above all to the nation's children and youth, especially those who grew up with disadvantage and difficulty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Introduction of a nonlinearity measure for principal component models

Although principal component analysis (PCA) is an important tool in standard multivariate data analysis, little interest has been devoted to assessing whether the underlying relationship within a given variable set can be described by a linear PCA model or whether nonlinear PCA must be utilized. This paper addresses this deficiency by introducing a nonlinearity measure for principal component models. The measure is based on the following two principles: (i) the range of recorded process operation is divided into smaller regions; and (ii) accuracy bounds are determined for the sum of the discarded eigenvalues. If this sum is within the accuracy bounds for each region, the process is assumed to be linear and vice versa. This procedure is automated through the use of cross-validation. Finally, the paper shows the utility of the new nonlinearity measure using two simulation studies and with data from an industrial melter process.     

Results of benchmark calculations based on OLHF-1 test

The subject of this paper is to compare the results of the different calculations performed by the benchmark participants in the framework of the OECD Lower Head Failure (OLHF) program. The benchmark consists in the finite element (FE) calculation or in analytical calculations of the mechanical behavior of the OLHF-1 experiment. Seven participants from six countries and seven companies or organizations (AVN, VTT, GRS, UJV, SNL, IPSN and CEA) have performed the benchmark.The OLHF experiment program extends the NRC-sponsored SNL LHF program (NUREG/CR-5582) completed in 1998: these experiments where intended to simulate the thermal/mechanical loads to a 1/4.85-scale model of a reactor pressure vessel. The pressure vessel material (SA533B1 steel) used in these experiments is prototypic of reactor PWR vessel material and has been well characterized by material property testing as part of this program. The OLHF tests advance the results of the previous testing program by examining the effects of large temperature differences across the vessel wall. Large temperature differences in excess of 150–400 K are more prototypic of accident conditions.Most of the participants performed 2-D axisymmetric analyses and doesn’t study the crack opening. The global mechanical behaviour of OLHF-1 experiment is well represented but prediction of the maximum vertical displacement is not in good agreement with the experimental value. Failure time and location are in quite good agreement with experimental results but large discrepancies are observed on the mode of failure: creep or plasticity. To improve predictions, more investigation and work is needed on the choice of the failure criteria and failure mode.     

Linear demosaicing inspired by the human visual system.

There is an analogy between single-chip color cameras and the human visual system in that these two systems acquire only one limited wavelength sensitivity band per spatial location. We have exploited this analogy, defining a model that characterizes a one-color per spatial position image as a coding into luminance and chrominance of the corresponding three colors per spatial position image. Luminance is defined with full spatial resolution while chrominance contains subsampled opponent colors. Moreover, luminance and chrominance follow a particular arrangement in the Fourier domain, allowing for demosaicing by spatial frequency filtering. This model shows that visual artifacts after demosaicing are due to aliasing between luminance and chrominance and could be solved using a preprocessing filter. This approach also gives new insights for the representation of single-color per spatial location images and enables formal and controllable procedures to design demosaicing algorithms that perform well compared to concurrent approaches, as demonstrated by experiments.     

The social consequences of expressive suppression.

At times, people keep their emotions from showing during social interactions. The authors' analysis suggests that such expressive suppression should disrupt communication and increase stress levels. To test this hypothesis, the authors conducted 2 studies in which unacquainted pairs of women discussed an upsetting topic. In Study 1, one member of each pair was randomly assigned to (a) suppress her emotional behavior, (b) respond naturally, or (c) cognitively reappraise in a way that reduced emotional responding. Suppression alone disrupted communication and magnified blood pressure responses in the suppressors' partners. In Study 2, suppression had a negative impact on the regulators' emotional experience and increased blood pressure in both regulators and their partners. Suppression also reduced rapport and inhibited relationship formation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)