Degree Of Unevenness Research Articles

Unevenness of flow distribution in plate-fin heat exchanger batteries

Problems of uneven flow distribution in plate-fin heat exchanger batteries operating in air separation and natural gas liquefaction plants are discussed. It is shown that uneven flow distribution in the battery between individual apparatuses reduces the integral characteristics of the entire battery markedly. A concept is proposed for ensuring a fixed degree of flow unevenness in batteries of such heat exchangers.

Design of the Positive and Negative Buses Voltage-Sharing Converter

The converter can supply auxiliary power and ensure bus balances on the hardware. The converter used design method of single-ended flyback, clamping-diodes balanced the positive and negative buses. The design plan and parameter are described. The practice shows that the circuit can provide auxiliary power capability of 60W and the uneven degree of the positive and negative buses is 1.8V. The circuit can be used in any switching power supply, whose bus voltage range is ±(260-450)V.

The Spatial Distribution and Impact of Organic Certification Information Center in China

Organic certification system is an important part of organic agricultural production network. As the core of information network, Organic certification agencies are pivotal to our understanding of the structure, organization and effects of the network. This paper, taking the spatial distribution, organization and the influential area of the information center as the basis, suggests that the information network of organic agriculture in China is characterized by high degree of unevenness, and hierarchical order in development level. The analysis shows that the whole network can be divided into three tiers. Through a case study of some key areas such as Beijing, Zhejiang and Liaoning, the study put forward some suggestions for the sustainable development of organic information network.

"It's so little money you could make as much at home" - options for work in an impoverished rural region of high unemployment.

Hungary has a higher unemployment rate than the member states of the European Union and even most former socialist countries. This rate for 15-64 year-olds has been around 56% since 1999, as against 66% in the European Union (OECD Employment Database). There is also a high degree of regional unevenness within the country. The situation is worst in North Hungary, an area of multiple economic and social deprivations. Several pieces of research have analysed the causes of long-term unemployment and have highlighted the main social, geographical and institutional factors behind it. People of low educational attainment who live in small villages and members of the Roma minority are particularly likely to have been without jobs for a long time.

The Finite Element Mesomechanics Simulation of Polycrystal Martensitic Transformation’s Plastic Strain

The plastic strain finite element mesomechanics simulation of polycrystal martensitic transformation bring up non-linear model of influence microscopic phase transition rate and stress. Further developement and application of Marc and on the base of microscopic chemical energy distribution, evenly. As the simulation showed: 1) Early into the plasticity than that of single crystal.2) Microplastic strain distribution is not uniform, microplastic strain maximum, minimum value ratio in different incremental step fluctuate greatly. 3) Meso martensitic transformation is not uniformly distributed, and uneven degree decreases with increment step. 4) The macro transformation rate simulation curves are exponential trend, and into the fully plastic state reached the point.

Concentration in Internet Access and Entrepreneurial Truncation of Innovation

With a concentrated supply of broadband Internet access, will the future of the Internet be as innovative as the past? This essay reconsiders contemporary debates that view broadband providers as gatekeepers. Instead, it offers an alternative perspective, viewing carriers as platform leaders. That framework focuses attention on the importance of platforms for innovation, and highlights issues missed in contemporary debates. The essay stresses the differences between open and proprietary systems, and between systems with overlapping but competing leadership. Viewed through this lens, platform leadership leads to lower transactions for affiliated partners, but a narrowing of the range of innovation by young firms in comparison to an open and unrestricted structure, a process labeled as “entrepreneurial truncation.” Platform leaders with market power also provide uneven degrees of transparency, use more discriminatory practices, and put unaffiliated business partners at disadvantages, which can deter entrepreneurial innovation as well. The essay concludes that innovation arises in all systems, so the exaggerated claims of contemporary debate lack merit. However, contemporary debate also misses the key point addressed by this essay: that open platforms are superior at addressing a wider and unexpected set of exploratory activities, and that policy can, and should, play an important role in fostering openness.

Aquatic Ranunculus communities in the northern hemisphere: A global review

This study offers a general review of aquatic ranunculi communities in the northern hemisphere, and includes aspects of their ecology, syntaxonomy and distribution. White-flowered ranunculi communities (Ranunculus subgenus Batrachium) grow in a wide range of habitats, including different types of water regime (still and flowing waters; permanent and seasonal waters) and nutrient states. They are mainly found in Eurasia. High richness is detected in Western Europe and the Mediterranean area of heterophyllous and laminar-leaved species, and in Asia of species with only dissected leaves. The western centre of the heterophyllous species has been related to waters with low mineralization and oscillation events occurring between the Mediterranean and Temperate climates. Yellow-flowered ranunculi communities (R. Xanthobatrachium) include heterophyllous species with a tendency to helophytism. They also are found in a wide range of aquatic habitats. There is an uneven degree of knowledge on the ecology of aquatic ranunculi communities, and further research is required into aquatic ranunculi habitats in Asia and North America.

‘Life is War’: Informal Transport Workers and Neoliberalism in Tanzania 1998-2009

This article analyses how informal labourers fare under flexible labour markets and economic liberalization, through a case study of transport workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It highlights the mainstream conceptualization of urban informality as self‐employment and its influence on policy. The article stresses the importance of class differentiation in the Dar es Salaam transport sector and the predominance of informal wage employment, the uneven degree of power commanded by bus owners vis‐a‐vis informal unskilled wage workers and the pernicious consequences of the lack of regulation of the employment relationship on the workforce itself and on society. It then interrogates the criminalization of the workforce and shows how labour over‐supply, its fragmentation and geographical dispersion explain workers' lack of response to their plight. The longitudinal study of the rise and fall (1998-2005) of a labour association within the sector further highlights the tensions among the workforce and the forms and limits of their solidarity. The conclusion of this study suggests some policy implications.

Numerical and Experimental Pore Network Study on Drying of Grain Materials

A pore network model for drying of grain materials was established on the base of pore network theory and transport process principle, and a corn drying experiment was conducted to verify the validity of this model. The experiment and simulation results indicated that this model could explain the drying process of grain materials well. There is a significant difference between the corn and pore vapor temperature, and it is unreasonable to confuse the two kinds of temperature. The particle size distribution has a great effect on the drying process. The higher the uneven degree of particle size distribution was, the slower the grain materials were dried and the more unbalanced the moisture distribution appeared.

PubChem3D: Similar conformers

BackgroundPubChem is a free and open public resource for the biological activities of small molecules. With many tens of millions of both chemical structures and biological test results, PubChem is a sizeable system with an uneven degree of available information. Some chemical structures in PubChem include a great deal of biological annotation, while others have little to none. To help users, PubChem pre-computes "neighboring" relationships to relate similar chemical structures, which may have similar biological function. In this work, we introduce a "Similar Conformers" neighboring relationship to identify compounds with similar 3-D shape and similar 3-D orientation of functional groups typically used to define pharmacophore features.ResultsThe first two diverse 3-D conformers of 26.1 million PubChem Compound records were compared to each other, using a shape Tanimoto (ST) of 0.8 or greater and a color Tanimoto (CT) of 0.5 or greater, yielding 8.16 billion conformer neighbor pairs and 6.62 billion compound neighbor pairs, with an average of 253 "Similar Conformers" compound neighbors per compound. Comparing the 3-D neighboring relationship to the corresponding 2-D neighboring relationship ("Similar Compounds") for molecules such as caffeine, aspirin, and morphine, one finds unique sets of related chemical structures, providing additional significant biological annotation. The PubChem 3-D neighboring relationship is also shown to be able to group a set of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), despite limited PubChem 2-D similarity.In a study of 4,218 chemical structures of biomedical interest, consisting of many known drugs, using more diverse conformers per compound results in more 3-D compound neighbors per compound; however, the overlap of the compound neighbor lists per conformer also increasingly resemble each other, being 38% identical at three conformers and 68% at ten conformers. Perhaps surprising is that the average count of conformer neighbors per conformer increases rather slowly as a function of diverse conformers considered, with only a 70% increase for a ten times growth in conformers per compound (a 68-fold increase in the conformer pairs considered).Neighboring 3-D conformers on the scale performed, if implemented naively, is an intractable problem using a modest sized compute cluster. Methodology developed in this work relies on a series of filters to prevent performing 3-D superposition optimization, when it can be determined that two conformers cannot possibly be a neighbor. Most filters are based on Tanimoto equation volume constraints, avoiding incompatible conformers; however, others consider preliminary superposition between conformers using reference shapes.ConclusionThe "Similar Conformers" 3-D neighboring relationship locates similar small molecules of biological interest that may go unnoticed when using traditional 2-D chemical structure graph-based methods, making it complementary to such methodologies. The computational cost of 3-D similarity methodology on a wide scale, such as PubChem contents, is a considerable issue to overcome. Using a series of efficient filters, an effective throughput rate of more than 150,000 conformers per second per processor core was achieved, more than two orders of magnitude faster than without filtering.

Paradoxes of Democracy and Citizenship in Brazil

Paradoxes of Democracy and Citizenship in Brazil Frances Hagopian (bio) Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil. By Leonardo Avritzer. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 205. $49.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro. By Brodwyn Fischer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 464. $65.00 cloth. $24.95 paper. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. By James Holston. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii + 396. $27.95 paper. Democratic Brazil Revisited. Edited by Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy J. Power. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 342. $65.00 cloth. $26.95 paper. Judging Policy: Courts and Policy Reform in Democratic Brazil. By Matthew M. Taylor. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 227. $55.00 cloth. Participatory Budgeting in Brazil: Contestation, Cooperation, and Accountability. By Brian Wampler. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi + 312. $56.95 cloth. $28.00 paper. Democracy in Brazil has now endured for more than a quarter century. It is solid and mature, with several presidential successions and no extraconstitutional threats to the regime; suffrage is universal; and political institutions function as well as they ever have. Yet nettlesome questions about the quality of Brazil’s democracy remain. Brazil has long been known as a “democracy with adjectives,” in no small part because of its elitist qualities, most notably, the inequality of economic advantage, life’s chances, and access to law and justice.1 Even today, as Brazil leads South America’s democracies on the world stage in international politics and trade negotiations, and as economic stability and growth have brought greater social progress in the past fifteen years than at any time in Brazil’s history, its democracy engenders deep ambivalence among scholars and citizens, principally because of the apparent inability to escape the weighty legacy of unequal citizenship. [End Page 216] Brazil is not unique in its inability to guarantee T. H. Marshall’s famous trilogy of civil, political, and social rights.2 Demands for social rights have almost everywhere far outstripped the responses of governments to deliver them. Less commonly, in Brazil, not only has the long road to securing the rights of citizenship traveled by every modern democracy been blocked and even plagued by reversals, with repeated lapses into authoritarianism and restricted democracies violating the elemental political rights of citizenship, but also it has been marked by a high degree of unevenness. Income inequality, which long defined voting rights and workplace protection, still differentiates legal rights, property rights, and even personal security. Citizenship has expanded, but not for everyone—at least not the same citizenship. Even in a continent with a legacy of grotesque inequality, perhaps in no country have rights been so unequally distributed, conceded in such an out-of-sequence patchwork, and so contested in the daily struggles of ordinary people and in large-scale and sustained mobilization as in Brazil. The debate about the performance of Brazil’s democracy, and even whether citizenship is deepening or remains deeply flawed, has heretofore stalled, as Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy J. Power rightly point out, because answers have all too often depended on who presents them and what the presenters are looking at: rising growth rates and institutional performance or limited progressive reform and degenerating public security. More subtly, improving outputs for citizens buoy some scholars, whereas others decry the continuing poverty of citizenship, which makes any gains for the poor only tenuous at best. The debate also hinges on where one looks—at the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court or at the neighborhood councils, police precincts, and land courts that constitute spaces of civic and political engagement, where everyday battles to extend and deepen rights and citizenship are fought, as Alberto Carlos Almeida pithily puts it, “on the 364 days a year when citizens are not voters” (Kingstone and Power, 233). An impressive collection of recent books opens a remarkable window onto Brazil’s march along multiple avenues toward a genuinely democratic society and polity in the late twentieth and early twenty...

Circumferential burden distribution behaviors at bell-less top blast furnace with parallel type hoppers

It is of critical importance to master the circumferential burden distribution behaviors at bell-less top blast furnace with parallel type hoppers, targeting to reduce the uneven degree (UD) of burden distribution along the circumference. Combining with the burden motion conditions, both circumferential falling point (FP) and mass flow (MF) models are established in present work to determine the basic distribution behaviors systematically. The results show that the positive amplitude of either FP or MF is not equal to the negative counterpart in the circumferential direction. Besides, the UD of MF is nearly 10 times as large as that of FP, which could be ignored in actual production. After validating the circumferential MF model against both laboratory and industry-scale measurements from previous literatures, alternating the hoppers while keeping the same chute rotating direction in burden charging process is considered as the best countermeasure to promote even burden circumferential distribution at bell-less top blast furnace with parallel type hoppers.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Agriculture and Industry (review)

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 153 moral guardians of their families, took responsibility upon themselves to encourage and promote personal piety in their family through their own actions and example. In every area of their lives, from courtship and marriage to childbirth and death, the belief that God held a plan for their lives provided many southern women with reassurance and with the belief that their life had purpose. Indeed, their domestic devotion in many ways became an active expression of their piety and promoted the spread of evangelicalism throughout the antebellum South. Thus the emphasis of evangelicalism upon personal piety and the importance of family led women to play a “central role in both the construction and the maintenance of the Bible Belt” (p. 3). This thoroughly researched and well-written book provides insightful analysis of the role women played in the spread of evangelicalism throughout the South. Historians of the antebellum South will find this book particularly useful and interesting. JENNIFER NEWMAN TREVIÑO University of Texas-Pan American The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Agriculture and Industry. Edited by Melissa Walker and James C. Cobb. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xviii, 354 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8078-32400 . $19.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8078-5909-4. In 1989 the University of North Carolina Press, together with the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture (CSSC), published the much anticipated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture to considerable acclaim. Believing that “the extent of changes in the American South and in Southern Studies” over the past two decades has made “the need for a new edition of that work . . . clear,” UNC Press and the CSSC have released “a new edition of the Encyclopedia that will remain relevant to a changing region” (pp. xiv, xii). In contrast to its forebearer, a single volume that ran to more than 1,600 pages, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is divided into twenty-four individual volumes, with the intent of facilitating “the use of the Encyclopedia in academic courses” and offering a measure of convenience “for readers with more focused interests within the larger context of southern culture” (p. xiv). The eleventh volume of the New Encyclopedia takes up the topics of agriculture and industry, which fell under separate sections in 1989 but have now been combined “to provide a connected story of how southerners have made a living” (p. xvii). This ambitious aim was aided by T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 154 the selection of two prominent and exceptionally capable scholars to edit the volume: Melissa Walker and James Cobb, whose introductions to the agriculture and industry sections respectively are ably crafted and thought-provoking. Both sections are divided roughly in half, with thematic entries constituting the first portion and topical ones the second. Predictably, the thematic essays (Rural Life and Globalization, for instance) are generally, though not invariably, longer than topical entries such as Horses and Mules or Naval Stores. While a reader might object to the incorporation of an entry or two into one category rather than the other—why, for instance , are Garden Patches and Country Stores considered thematic and Home Extension Services topical?—the volume is tightly and coherently organized. Not surprisingly, the entries cover a remarkably broad diversity of subjects and include brief bibliographies. And, as promised, they reflect the transformations wrought in the South over the past two decades, with entries on aquaculture, Research Triangle Park, and Wal-Mart, for example . As with any work of this sort, there is a degree of unevenness in the entries, but the editors have ensured that each entry is capably done. Although none of the entries in this volume are superfluous, there are some curious absences. Thomas M. Campbell, for example, an Alabamian of signal importance in African American agricultural education in the South, does not so much as appear in the index. Nor, for that matter, does Noah B. Cloud, another Alabamian and one of the most influential advocates of agricultural reform and industrial development in the antebellum South...

1A2-D30 不整地度を用いたロボットのための地形評価

We proposed the uneven terrain measure, named "Degree of Unevenness" (DOU) to estimate robot mobility on uneven terrain for path planning for mobile robot. When we evaluate the ability of robot mobility on terrain, not only the surface of the ground but also the size and the shape of the robot are crucial factors. The proposed DOU takes into account these factors to achieve estimation of the unevenness of the terrain for the robot. In this paper, we describe the definition of DOU and its effectiveness is demonstrated through simulations.

Generation Mechanism of Unevenness of Ultra Low Carbon Steel at Initial Stage of Solidification

Cooling curve of sample surface of ultra low carbon steel at initial stage of solidification was measured using a new temperature measurement system that consisted of a two-dimensional optical pyrometer and a chill plate which was made of transparent sapphire glass. The presence of recalescence phenomena was observed on the measured cooling curve of ultra low carbon steel sample and the recalescence temperature existed in the range of peritectic transformation temperature as well as low carbon and middle carbon steel samples. The difference of temperature at each measured point of a sample surface was very small until the temperature reached the recalescence temperature, but the difference of temperature became larger after recalescence because the thermal deformation of solidifying shell seemed to be generated. From experimental results for tensile strength and density during solidification, these values changed depending on the phase and the change of values between δ phase and γ phase was large. As the unevenness of solidified shell was generated by deformation accompanying peritectic transformation and the degree of unevenness could be arranged by both temperature ranges, there was a difference of tensile strength and difference of density during peritectic transformation.

Kharms-Avangard by Kornelija Ičin , Ratko Nešković (review)

REVIEWS III As the most exhaustive English-language study of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva's relationship, The Same Solitude is an important work, particularly because of the analysis of the poets' correspondence after 1926 that has only recently been published. Ciepiela demonstrates that the 1926 riftwas not final and that the poets influenced each other well into the 1930s, despite the increasing differences in their creative trajectories. What may be uncom fortable for some isCiepiela's strictadherence to her psychoanalytic stance. Theses such as 'Rilke was uniquely, even perfectly suited to play the poet-mother for Tsvetaeva' (p. 190) or 'Tsvetaeva's ambivalent embrace of maternity leaves her, finally,unable to imagine herself as a poet but only as a woman without a lifeline' (p. 240)might be perceived as reductive. Yet even for those who do not share Ciepiela's methodological position, her investi gations of the poets' linguistic and formal parallels will be stimulating ? they are reminiscent of her earlier, more formalist approach to Tsvetaeva in particular. Newnham College U. B. C. Stock UniversityofCambridge Icin, Kornelija and Neskovic, Ratko (eds). Kharms-Avangard.Filiologicheskii fakul'tet Belgradskogo Universiteta, Belgrade, 2006. 503 pp. Notes. Illustrations. Price unknown. A subtitle (not featuring here on its title page, but on the final page) announces this sizeable volume as 'Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii "Daniil Kharms: avangard v deistvii iv otmiranii. K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia poeta'" (p. 503). The conference took place in Belgrade in December 2005 and the proceedings, at least as printed here (in a print-run of just 400 copies), amount to forty-fiveessays, including an 'Epilogue' (on 'Prayer', as 'the hero's final act in the work of Kharms') by the principal editor, togetherwith Milovoje Jovanovic, followed by a 'PS'. This final item (entitled 'bela krila', by Vladimir Medenica) appears in Serbian. The rest of thebook ispublished inRussian, with the exception of two articles inEnglish: 'kharms effect: progression through demise', by Branislav Jakovljevic; and 'harms and gogol, or the reality of the absurd', by Tanja Popovic. (Aswill already be apparent, this volume eschews the use of capitals in the titles of essays, and [for that matter too] in the names of its contributors, who [unlisted as such] appear to be identified by workplace city, rather than institution;neither does it include a listof illustrations.) The contributors range from Mikhail Meilakh, who must be counted as the earliest (and, as iswell illustrated here, perhaps themost vital) scholar of Kharms, to the editor and another translator of the recent OBERIU: An AnthologyofRussian Absurdism (Evanston, IL, 2006), Evgenii Ostashevskii and Matvei Iankelevich. Other established Kharmsians represented in the collec tion include Dmitrii Tokarev and Aleksandr Kobrinskii. Contributors are drawn from France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Croatia, Israel and Japan, as well as Russia, the USA and, of course, Serbia. 112 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g As might be expected, attention ispaid to the full range of theKharmsian oeuvre:prose stories (mini- and longer), poetry, dramatic works, children's writing, lettersand notebooks. Kharms isdiscussed in relation to such themes (inaddition to the absurd) as: anarchism, arithmetic, art (Duchamp, Malevich, Zal'tsman and others), the body (male and female), dandyism, Detgiz, food, the 'image', the ludic,music, political satire, pseudonyms, religion, rhythmics, semantics and (modes of) transport.Among the figures discussed in compari son with, or in relation to, Kharms, we find: Gogol', Kafka, Meyrink, Sukhovo-Kobylin and Lev Tolstoi ? as well as the obvious OBERIU adher ents and a number of more extraneous minor personalities or groupings (such as 'Nepokoi') of the late avant-garde period in Soviet Russian culture. Keener readers will not fail to notice the underlying (or indeed at times surface) current of dispute persisting within the ranks of oberiutovedenie. There is, perhaps inevitably, a considerable degree of both overlap and unevenness within the contributions taken as a whole, and the volume may be said to incorporate certain editorial infelicitiesand peculiarities. Neverthe less, this ample collection certainly does include a number of valuable and interesting items and it is likely to represent a significant landmark in the now burgeoning field ofOBERIU scholarship. School of Modern Languages ? Russian Neil Cornwell Universityof Bristol Karcz, Andrzej. The Polish Formalist School andRussian Formalism.University...

The Polish Formalist School and Russian Formalism by Andrzej Karcz (review)

112 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g As might be expected, attention ispaid to the full range of theKharmsian oeuvre:prose stories (mini- and longer), poetry, dramatic works, children's writing, lettersand notebooks. Kharms isdiscussed in relation to such themes (inaddition to the absurd) as: anarchism, arithmetic, art (Duchamp, Malevich, Zal'tsman and others), the body (male and female), dandyism, Detgiz, food, the 'image', the ludic,music, political satire, pseudonyms, religion, rhythmics, semantics and (modes of) transport.Among the figures discussed in compari son with, or in relation to, Kharms, we find: Gogol', Kafka, Meyrink, Sukhovo-Kobylin and Lev Tolstoi ? as well as the obvious OBERIU adher ents and a number of more extraneous minor personalities or groupings (such as 'Nepokoi') of the late avant-garde period in Soviet Russian culture. Keener readers will not fail to notice the underlying (or indeed at times surface) current of dispute persisting within the ranks of oberiutovedenie. There is, perhaps inevitably, a considerable degree of both overlap and unevenness within the contributions taken as a whole, and the volume may be said to incorporate certain editorial infelicitiesand peculiarities. Neverthe less, this ample collection certainly does include a number of valuable and interesting items and it is likely to represent a significant landmark in the now burgeoning field ofOBERIU scholarship. School of Modern Languages ? Russian Neil Cornwell Universityof Bristol Karcz, Andrzej. The Polish Formalist School andRussian Formalism.University of Rochester Press and Jagiellonian University Press, Rochester, NY and Krakow, 2002. 203 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?50.00: $70.00. This book is organized into four chapters, inwhich the author traces the development of Polish Formalism from its 'Anticipations' in chapter one to its integration as a scholarly method in chapter four. Chapters two and three are devoted to investigations of critical approaches employed by the founder of Polish formalism, Kazimierz Woycicki, and the critic Manfred Kridl respectively. Karcz begins with an overview of post-positivist critical effortssuch as those ofMaksymilian Kawczyriski, afterwhich he traces the emergence and devel opment of Polish formalism to the publications by Kazimierz Budzyk and Maria Rzeuszka in the late 1940swhen 'the devastations of thewar and the post-war imposition of communist rule in Poland cut short the existence of the school' (p. 181). From this brief overview it becomes apparent that Russian Formalism plays less of a role than the tide of thebook would suggest. Instead of offering a comparative study of two twentieth-century critical schools in different countries, Karcz's book investigates the shift in Polish literary criticism from positivism and its 'utter subordination [...] to the issues of national identity, social ideology, biographism, and psychology' (p. 21) to the objective, scien tificunderstanding of literary texts thatmarks formalist criticism.The various evolutionary steps that the emerging Polish formalistmethod underwent, bear at times a striking resemblance to the Russian Formalist method, as Karcz REVIEWS 113 points out. However, as his study unfolds, Karcz offers littledetail on the development of formalism inRussia (see below). The book's strongest assets are Karcz's insightfulanalyses of the critical works byWoycicki and Kridl. Without a doubt they constitute a valuable addition to the discussion of the history of Polish criticism in the twentieth century. For example: Karcz introduces the evolution ofWoycicki's critical thoughtwith great care, tracing itfrom itspedagogically motivated beginnings (Woycicki was a school teacher looking for a useable method to relate litera ture to his pupils) to itsmost sophisticated development inworks such as Jednosc stylowa utworu poetyckiego' (1914) or 'Z pogranicza gramatyki i stylistiki' (1922). One would have hoped to read more of Karcz's investigation into the evolution of Polish formalistmethods on itsown terms, along with a deeper analysis of concrete textual examples by the critics he discusses, particularly Woycicki. The profiling of these ideas against the backdrop of Russian Formalism could have been more focused and perhaps even reserved for passages where they are absolutely pertinent: in the discussion ofManfred Kridl's later studies and in chapter four, for example. Instead, Karcz gets somewhat mired, particularly in the Woycicki chapter, in his attempt to demonstrate that the Polish school emerged as an indepen dent evolutionary step inPolish critical thought, rather than under the influ ence of Russian Formalism. This perhaps...

Detection of race 1 strains of Ralstonia solanacearum in field samples in Taiwan using a BIO-PCR method

Bacterial wilt caused by race 1 strains of Ralstonia solanacearum is endemic on tomato produced in diverse agro-ecosystems in Taiwan. Using a new BIO-PCR protocol developed in this study, R. solanacearum was detected in soil, weed, and water samples collected from eight fields with different disease histories and cropping systems located in major tomato production areas. The sensitivity of the BIO-PCR was 1.9 CFU ml−1 and 17 CFU g−1 of soil for pure suspension and infested soil, respectively. The positive detection frequency of the BIO-PCR method was 66.6, 39.6, 23.1, and 31.8% for all tested samples of soil, weed rhizosphere soil, weed root, and water, respectively, and was higher than plating on MSM-1 medium. Detection of R. solanacearum from field soil indicated that spatial distribution of the pathogen in the field was not even regardless of the presence or absence of the disease and the different agro-ecosystems where the sampled fields were located, and the degree of unevenness was higher when tomato was absent from the field. Weed rhizosphere soils could be good sampling targets to monitor the pathogen in the field, because a higher positive detection proportion and population of R. solanacearum were found in the rhizosphere rather than the root of the collected weed samples. Symptomless weeds and contaminated irrigation, standing, or drainage waters were found to be important for the over-season survival and dissemination of R. solanacearum.

Pressure window analysis for thin laminated composites in autoclave process

AbstractThe curing temperature, pressure, and curing time have significant influence on finished thermosetting composite products. The external pressure and the time of pressure application are two major factors affecting the laminate thickness, fiber volume fraction, and void content. Based on the resin flow/fiber compaction model and corresponding program developed by our group, the genetic algorithm is accepted to design the pressure window for the consolidation of thin laminate. The objective of the optimization is to find the time of pressure application that achieves the desired average fiber volume fraction under given pressure. The pressure windows are analyzed for S‐2 glass fiber/5228 and T700S/5228 laminates with unidirectional and bidirectional lay‐up. It is found that no special viscosity region can be defined as pressure window for many factors affecting the consolidation process. The fiber and lay‐up type largely affect the time of pressure application. For laminates with the same fiber and lay‐up type, the fiber distribution is not much influenced by pressure cycle. The uneven degree of fiber distribution is larger for the fiber bed having higher deformation properties. With the genetic algorithm optimization system, the time of pressure application can be gotten quickly. It is helpful for the improvement of composite parts quality, reduction of the fabrication cost. POLYM. COMPOS., 2009. © 2008 Society of Plastics Engineers

The formation and failure of debris flow-dams, background, key factors and model tests: case studies from China

Temporary dams can be formed by the sudden injection of debris flow into main streams by some favorable geomorphologic and hydraulic conditions, resulting in extensive inundations upstream and catastrophic floods downstream due to dam breaches and consequently dramatic changes of channels and valleys. Expeditious means of assessing dam-forming potential are necessary, particularly in geologically active regions. Complete blockages or dam formations are significantly related to the discharge ratio and velocity ratio between the tributary and the main stream, the bulk density of the debris flow, confluent angles and the degree of unevenness of grain sizes. In order to set up a critical index/C for dam formation, 19 groups of flume tests were conducted. The results showed that there were three types of blockage in the intersections, and dam-forming processes were mainly controlled by the product of the dimensionless momentum ratio and the degree of unevenness of grain sizes in the debris flow. Complete blockages or dam formations occurred when C > 83.4, whereas semi-blockages were formed or no dams were formed when C < 71.5, which had been judged to be feasible by historical instances of dam formation in China. Dam failures commonly resulted from overtopping. No piping was observed in the course of dam failure, and the time elapsed between dams can be denoted by a linear relation with the momentum ratio.