Chitosan is an important biomaterial used widely in medical applications. One of the key concerns about its use is the fragile nature of chitosan films. By comparing the component molecular interactions using FTIR, this study attempts to understand how the ductility of chitosan can be improved by blending and copolymerizing with poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). An improvement in ductility was obtai...

We study the enhanced dewetting of ultrathin Polystyrene (PS)/Poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) blend films in a mixed solution, and reveal the dewetting can act as a simple and effective method to fabricate large-area surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate. A bilayer structure consisting of under PMMA layer and upper PS layer forms due to vertical phase separation of immiscible PS/...

Starting from the assumption that meaning in electroacoustic music is an outcome of the listener’s mental processes, it is the goal of this essay to explicate the mental processes whereby feeling and emotion contribute to meaning when listening to electroacoustic music. This essay begins with a broad consideration of feeling and emotion with an eye toward artistic experience, spanning from basi...

In-process testing requirements for adequacy of mixing are established in 21 CFR 211.110(a)(3). Considering also, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's draft guidance published in 1999 (Guidance for Industry, ANDAs: Blend Uniformity Analysis; http://www.fda.gov/cder/guidance/index.htm), the importance of when and how to perform blend uniformity analysis is obvious. Near-infrared (NIR) spectro...

Biomaterials that can stimulate stem cell differentiation without growth factor supplementation provide potent and cost-effective scaffolds for regenerative medicine. We hypothesize that a scaffold prepared from cellulose and silk blends can direct stem cell chondrogenic fate. We systematically prepared cellulose blends with silk at different compositions using an environmentally benign process...

Sustainable support for educational development using new technologies in higher education depends on having a basic roadmap that links current demands for developmental support to a plan for ways in which longer term needs will be recognized and met. The growing demand for lifelong learning of a second language is evident within the workplace where new technologies offer flexible solutions. In...

Blended solutions provide a means to orchestrate various types of activities and to schedule interactions at different times, nonetheless it is difficult to maintain a general overview of the class. In this paper, we build on the LearnWeb Design Framework to design and implement a Formative Assessment extension that supports the monitoring of the learning process in order to increase awareness ...

This paper is testing a DUAL-based model of memory. The model assumes decentralized representation of episodes as a coalition of agents and analogical transfer processes as the basis for memory reconstruction of our past. It is a model of active reconstruction thereby allowing memory insertions and blending of episodes. The experiment explores the role of the degree of internal connectivity of ...

Several large cloze-style context-questionanswer datasets have been introduced recently: the CNN and Daily Mail news data and the Children’s Book Test. Thanks to the size of these datasets, the associated text comprehension task is well suited for deep-learning techniques that currently seem to outperform all alternative approaches. We present a new, simple model that uses attention to directly...

Humans are complex, evolved, social and cognitive beings. Thus, understanding their behavior is a complex task that requires a comprehensive theoretical repertoire. In this paper, we study the role of human nature in technology acceptance. We come to understand that by expanding our theoretical ontology and blending theories of evolutionary psychology, social, and cognitive psychology into a si...