.\ hardness tester, especially adapted for grain, was cor~structecl by modifying a commercial portable soft metal tester known as the Barcol Impressor. h preloaded stylus is forced into grain sections preparetl by rneans ot a microtome. The displacement of the stylus, nleasured by a dial micrometer, is used as a hardness index. This has been related to tlie l'ickers tlianlontl pyramid hardness ...

Mastication is continually modified throughout the chewing sequence in response to the texture of the food. The aim of this work was to compare the effects of an increase in hardness of two model food types, presenting either elastic or plastic rheological properties, on mastication. Each model food type consisted of four products of different hardness. Sensory testing experiments conducted wit...

A method to find hard logic synthesis examples with known upper bound is presented. The circuits can be small and yet difficult to synthesize. Any area-related metric can be used in finding the circuits and testing synthesis tools. The hardness of the examples is robust with respect to the metric used and to minor alterations in the circuit.

An artificial intelligence tool is exploited to discover and characterize a new molybdenum-base alloy that is the most likely to simultaneously satisfy targets of cost, phase stability, precipitate content, yield stress, and hardness. Experimental testing demonstrates that the proposed alloy fulfills the computational predictions, and furthermore the physical properties exceed those of other co...

We introduce the notion of covering complexity of a probabilistic verifier. The covering complexity of a verifier on a given input is the minimum number of proofs needed to “satisfy” the verifier on every random string, i.e., on every random string, at least one of the given proofs must be accepted by the verifier. The covering complexity of PCP verifiers offers a promising route to getting str...

The amorphous hydrogenated carbon coatings (a-C:H) deposited by plasmaassisted chemical vapour deposition (PACVD), and tetrahedral amorphous carbon coatings (ta-C) deposited by pulsed vacuum arc discharge were evaluated by scratch adhesion testing, load-carrying capacity testing and tribological testing in unlubricated and lubricated sliding conditions. The wear surfaces of the coatings and cou...

Recommending packages of items to groups of users has several applications, including recommending vacation packages to groups of tourists, entertainment packages to groups of friends, or sets of courses to groups of students. In this paper, we focus on a novel aspect of package-to-group recommendations, that of fairness. Specifically, when we recommend a package to a group of people, we ask th...

Independent sets, induced matchings and cliques are examples of regular induced subgraphs in a graph. In this paper, we prove that finding a maximum cardinality k-regular induced subgraph is an NP-hard problem for any value of k. We propose a convex quadratic upper bound on the size of a k-regular induced subgraph and characterize those graphs for which this bound is attained. Finally, we exten...

This paper deals with the possibility of using Schmidt hardness test, which does not require much preliminary preparation and is easy to perform, in production commercial blocks a quarry. Previous recommendations for testing rock materials were specifically related tests performed geomechanical purposes. They also referred mostly smaller samples, but has some special features, mainly because th...