Issue: The moisture content of a fill material will affect its compaction characteristics and needs to be evaluated during quality control of the fill operation. When the fill is drier than its optimum moisture content, any moisture in the fill serves as a lubricant and helps the relative movement of the particles when densifying under vibratory compaction. When the fill is wetter than its opti...

Real-time monitoring during soil compaction can be made possible by utilizing the vibration signature of a vibratory roller compactor. The compactor and soil constitute a coupled dynamic system, albeit complex and nonlinear. As the soil density increases and its mechanical properties change, the dynamic response of the compactor will change. Developing a thorough knowledge of the relationship b...

This paper proposes a new automatic speech summarization method having two stages: important sentence extraction and sentence compaction. Relatively important sentences are extracted from the results of large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) based on the amount of information and the confidence measures of constituent words. The set of extracted sentences is compressed by our se...

The role of microtubules during compaction of the 8-cell-stage mouse embryo was investigated using the drugs Taxol (which leads to a non-controlled polymerization of tubulin) and Nocodazole (which causes depolymerization of microtubules). Taxol inhibits compaction in most non-compacted embryos and reverses it in already compacted embryos. These effects were observed on both cell flattening (as ...

Cell competition is a quality control mechanism that eliminates unfit cells. How cells compete is poorly understood, but it is generally accepted that molecular exchange between cells signals elimination of unfit cells. Here we report an orthogonal mechanism of cell competition, whereby cells compete through mechanical insults. We show that MDCK cells silenced for the polarity gene scribble (sc...

We present a general mathematical theory for the mechanical interplay in tissue-equivalents (cell-populated collagen gels): Cell traction leads to compaction of the fibrillar collagen network, which for certain conditions such as a mechanical constraint or inhomogeneous cell distribution, can result in inhomogeneous compaction and consequently fibril alignment, leading to cell contact guidance,...

Operating systems for sensor networks must provide energy and memory-space efficient execution environments for applications because of the resource constraints of the sensor nodes. The shared-stack cooperative threads have been proposed to conserve stack memory-space and to minimize the possibility of stack overflow in the sensor operating systems. However, stack switching brings about externa...

We read with great interest the article by Falase et al. in the November 2012 issue of this journal. They stated that there are no documented cases of left ventricular non-compaction in Africa. Furthermore, they propose that this is due to a lack of awareness of this condition among African cardiologists. The purpose of this letter is to highlight that this statement is not entirely accurate. I...

Dynamic compaction is a soil improvement method which has been widely used for the increase of bearing capacity through stress wave propagation during heavy tamping. The cost and time of project implementation can be effectively curtailed by developing a model that can be used in the design of dynamic compaction operations. The numerical models offered so far are mostly one or two-dimensional, ...

The paper considers the Baer-Nunziato model for two-phase flow in porous media, with discontinuous porosity. Computing solutions of the Riemann problem rests on capturing the jump in the solution across the porosity jump. A recent study [8] showed that numerical discretizations may fail to correctly capture the jump conditions across the so-called compaction wave, and yield incorrect solutions....