Over the past 20 years, there have been many studies looking at how highlight disparity affects an observer's perception of glossiness. Most of these studies have used relatively smooth surfaces, and simple lighting models. We are using surfaces which are rougher and more naturalistic than those used before, using a rendering method which takes into account physically accurate properties of lig...

A nanocomposite containing polypropylene (PP) and nano α-Al2O3 particles was prepared using a Haake internal mixer. Mechanical tests, such as tensile and flexural tests, showed that mechanical properties of the composite were enhanced by addition of nano α-Al2O3 particles and dispersant agent to the polymer. Tensile strength was approximately ∼ 16% higher than pure PP by increasing the nano α-A...

In Bayesian nonparametric models, Gaussian processes provide a popular prior choice for regression function estimation. Existing literature on the theoretical investigation of the resulting posterior distribution almost exclusively assume a fixed design for covariates. The only random design result we are aware of (van der Vaart and van Zanten, 2011) assumes the assigned Gaussian process to be ...

Three homologous spectrin domains have remarkably different folding characteristics. We have previously shown that the slow-folding R16 and R17 spectrin domains can be altered to resemble the fast folding R15, in terms of speed of folding (and unfolding), landscape roughness and folding mechanism, simply by substituting five residues in the core. Here we show that, by contrast, R15 cannot be en...

Fully-strained single-crystal metastable Ge12xSnx alloys were grown on Ge~001! up to their critical epitaxial thickness values tepi(x) in order to probe surface roughening pathways leading to heteroepitaxial breakdown during low-temperature molecular-beam epitaxy under large compressive strain. All films with x.0.09 have comparable roughnesses while films with x,0.09 are considerably rougher wi...

An efficient algorithm for wave scattering from two-dimensional lossy rough surfaces is proposed. It entails the use of a single magnetic field integral equation (SMFIE) in conjunction with a multilevel sparse-matrix canonical-grid (MSMCG) method. The Rao–Wilton–Glisson (RWG) triangular discretization is adopted to better model the rough surface than the pulse basis functions used in the well-e...

Magnetron sputtering techniques were used to prepare molecularly smooth titanium thin films possessing an average roughness between 0.18 nm and 0.52 nm over 5 μm × 5 μm AFM scanning areas. Films with an average roughness of 0.52 nm or lower were found to restrict the extent of P. aeruginosa cell attachment, with less than 0.5% of all available cells being retained on the surface. The attachment...

In this paper, we examine whether Bayesian networks are sensitive to precision of their parameters in the context of Hepar II, a sizeable Bayesian network model for diagnosis of liver disorders. Rather than entering noise into probability distributions, which was done in prior studies, we change their precision, starting with the original values and rounding them systematically to progressively...

Meaningful tests of theoretical predictions of magnetic multilayer properties require the fabrication of multilayers with nearly the same atomic scale precision as the theoretical models. Multilayers grown epitaxially on single crystal Fe whisker substrates come very close to this ideal standard. We have investigated the growth, magnetic structure, and exchange coupling of Fe/(Ag, Au, Cr, Mn, V...

Introduction: Impact craters are very helpful for studies of many aspects of surface processes on the Solar system bodies. Here we analyze population of impact craters in the Northern Lowlands of Mars, more specifically, within the typical Vastitas Borealis Formation (VBF) [1]. This is the largest geological unit on Mars. It is thought to have rather uniform age approximately at the Hesperian/A...