Correlation between Defects and Technical Wear of Materials Used in Traditional Construction

The degree of technical wear of old buildings, which are made of basic materials (cement, concrete, steel, timber, plaster, brick) using traditional technology, is expressed by the size and intensity of damage to their elements. The topic of the research concerns old residential buildings from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which are located in the downtown district of Wroclaw, Poland. The descriptive analysis and the analysis of the definitions of defects that occur in the elements of residential buildings, which were performed as random analyzes, do not allow defects to be considered as measurable variables at a level of visual investigation. The major drawback of the method that is used by experts when assessing the technical condition of civil engineering buildings is that it does not numerically express the magnitude (strength) of the defects. Therefore, an attempt was made to numerically express the relationship (if such a relationship exists) between the occurred defects of buildings and the extent of their technical wear process. When calculating the strength of this relationship, the method of determining the point biserial correlation coefficient for the measurable property and the dichotomous property was used. It was found that the direction of the relation is right-hand for all the tested building elements, but the strength of the correlation between the detected defects and technical wear shows a considerable span and depends on the conditions of the apartment house’s maintenance. As a rule, damage caused by water penetration and moisture penetration always shows correlations of at least moderate strength.

The Population Genetics of Pleiotropy, and the Evolution of Collateral Resistance and Sensitivity in Bacteria

Pleiotropic fitness tradeoffs and their opposite, buttressing pleiotropy, underlie many important phenomena in ecology and evolution. Yet, predicting whether a population adapting to one (“home”) environment will concomitantly gain or lose fitness in another (“non-home”) environment remains challenging, especially when adaptive mutations have diverse pleiotropic effects. Here, we address this problem using the concept of the joint distribution of fitness effects (JDFE), a local measurable property of the fitness landscape. We derive simple statistics of the JDFE that predict the expected slope, variance and co-variance of non-home fitness trajectories. We estimate these statistics from published data from the Escherichia coli knock-out collection in the presence of antibiotics. We find that, for some drug pairs, the average trend towards collateral sensitivity may be masked by large uncertainty, even in the absence of epistasis. We provide simple theoretically grounded guidelines for designing robust sequential drug protocols.

What does ‘quality’ add? Towards an ethics of healthcare improvement

In this paper, we argue that there are important ethical questions about healthcare improvement which are underexplored. We start by drawing on two existing literatures: first, the prevailing, primarily governance-oriented, application of ethics to healthcare ‘quality improvement’ (QI), and second, the application of QI to healthcare ethics. We show that these are insufficient for ethical analysis of healthcare improvement. In pursuit of a broader agenda for an ethics of healthcare improvement, we note that QI and ethics can, in some respects, be treated as closely related concerns and not simply as externally related agendas. To support our argument, we explore the gap between ‘quality’ and ‘ethics’ discourses and ask about the possible differences between ‘good quality healthcare’ and ‘good healthcare’. We suggest that the word ‘quality’ both adds to and subtracts from the idea of ‘good healthcare’, and in particular that the technicist inflection of quality discourses needs to be set in the context of broader conceptualisations of healthcare improvement. We introduce the distinction between quality as a measurable property and quality as an evaluative judgement, suggesting that a core, but neglected, question for an ethics of healthcare improvement is striking the balance between these two conceptions of quality.

Pre-linguistic segmentation of speech into syllable-like units

Syllables are often considered to be central to infant and adult speech perception. Many theories and behavioral studies on early language acquisition are also based on syllable-level representations of spoken language. There is little clarity, however, on what sort of pre-linguistic “syllable” would actually be accessible to an infant with no phonological or lexical knowledge. Anchored by the notion that syllables are organized around particularly sonorous (audible) speech sounds, the present study investigates the feasibility of speech segmentation into syllable-like chunks without any a priori linguistic knowledge. We first operationalize sonority as a measurable property of the acoustic input, and then use sonority variation across time, or speech rhythm, as the basis for segmentation. The entire process from acoustic input to chunks of syllable-like acoustic segments is implemented as a computational model inspired by the oscillatory entrainment of the brain to speech rhythm. We analyze the output of the segmentation process in three different languages, showing that the sonority fluctuation in speech is highly informative of syllable and word boundaries in all three cases without any language-specific tuning of the model. These findings support the widely held assumption that syllable-like structure is accessible to infants even when they are only beginning to learn the properties of their native language.

System of Management of Uncertainty and Risk of Renewable Resources

The article deals mainly with the risk analysis and uncertainty of a risk of renewable resources. It also mentions the importance of managing the risks associated with the uncertainty of a risk of renewable resources. Specifically, in the paper addressed the relationship between risk and uncertainty, their interdependence, and the possibilities of how to work with uncertainty at risk. The distinguishing factor between the risk and the uncertainty is that risk is seen as a measurable property and has a place in the calculation of probability, while uncertainty does not have such property. The paper deals with an approach to this situation.

Electric double layer and electrokinetic potential of pectic macromolecules in sugar beet

Electrokinetic potential is an important property of colloidal particles and, regarding the fact that it is a well defined and easily measurable property, it is considered to be a permanent characteristic of a particular colloidal system. In fact, it is a measure of electrokinetic charge that surrounds the colloidal particle in a solution and is in direct proportion with the mobility of particles in an electric field. Gouy-Chapman-Stern-Graham's model of electric double layer was adopted and it was proven experimentally that the addition of Cu++ ions to sugar beet pectin caused a reduction in the negative electrokinetic potential proportional to the increase of Cu++ concentration. Higher Cu++ concentrations increased the proportion of cation specific adsorption (Cu++ and H+) with regard to electrostatic Coulombic forces. Consequently, there is a shift in the shear plane between the fixed and diffuse layers directed towards the diffuse layer, i.e. towards its compression and decrease in the electrokinetic potential or even charge inversion of pectin macromolecules.

Binding of tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin to sodium channels

A useful first step in any chemical characterization of the sodium channels in nerve membrane would clearly be the identification of some measurable property of the channel that does not depend on the intactness of the tissue. To this end, tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin, which bind specifically to sodium channels, have been tritiated and their binding to rabbit, lobster and garfish non-myelinated nerve fibres examined. In each case, a component of the binding curve was found that saturated at concen­ trations of a few nanomolar. In addition, non-specific binding, indicated by a linear dependence of the amount bound on concentration, occurred. A solubilized membrane preparation from garfish nerve shows the same specific binding component as that of the intact nerve. The saturable component of binding seems to reflect the sodium channel density in nerve, and this is extremely small, being about 27/m 2 in the rabbit nerve and as small as 6/jtfjtm 2 in the garfish nerve.

RAPID DETERMINATION OF AURORAL HEIGHTS

A method using wide-angle cameras has been developed which reduces the time and labor required for the parallactic determination of auroral heights. The system consists of two wide-angle or "all-sky" cameras at a fixed separation of 21.65 km. Simultaneous photographs from the two stations are projected on a predetermined grid from which the parallax can be read directly. Heights on arcs and bands having well-defined borders can be found over a much greater length than before and with comparative ease. The system is particularly useful during the flight of rockets into aurora and for studies of height versus any other measurable property of aurora. The accuracy obtainable is approximately ± 3%.