The stepwise hydrogenation of the C=C bond and C=O group of acrolein on Au3 and Au5 model systems is investigated using the density functional theory(DFT) PW91 functional. Our results show that the C=C hydrogenation is more favorable than that of C=O bond on Au3 with the barriers of the rate-determining step being 0.35 and 0.62 eV respectively. On the other hand, the C=O reduction is preferred ...

From winter 2009 to spring 2010, due to decreasing precipitation and high temperature, Southwest China experienced the worst meteorological drought in 60 years. The drought has impacted large areas of Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi and Sichuan provinces. In this paper, climate data (precipitation and temperature) and SPOT VGT Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data were combined with land ...

Transition systems are a basic semantic model for formal description , speciication, and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. In order to describe and analyze aspects of reliability, such as the likelihood of trace and failure, this model has been extended in various ways to handle probabilistic behavior. To use these models for specii-cation and stepwise development of systems, it i...

The work focuses on potential employment of MicroOxymax O2/CO2/CH4 automatic analyzer (Columbus, U.S.A.) for assessing aerobic and anaerobic biodegradability (biostability) of composites. Convenience of the given analyzer was assessed in degradation of PVAL-based mixed films.The objective of the work was confronting results of these tests with results obtained through “classic” standard respira...

In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for performing stepwise selection in the class of decomposable models. We focus on the forward selection procedure, but we also discuss how backward selection and the combination of the two can be performed efficiently. The main contributions of this paper are (1) a simple characterization for the edges that can be added to a decomposable model w...

Precise control of the growth of thiolate-protected gold nanoclusters is a prerequisite for their applications in catalysis and bioengineering. Here, we bring to bear a new series of thiolate-protected nanoclusters with a unique growth pattern, i.e., Au20(SR)16, Au28(SR)20, Au36(SR)24, Au44(SR)28, and Au52(SR)32. These nanoclusters can be viewed as resulting from the stepwise addition of a comm...

The aim of the current study is to investigate the contextual conditions of devoicing of phonologically voiced stops (bilabial and velar). Articulatory and acoustic data from four male speakers were recorded by means of EMMA and EPG. Devoicing was observed more frequently for the velar stops than for the bilabials. The highest occurrence of devoicing was observed when the voiced stop was follow...

A production technology specification in electricity distribution leads to many product aspects that together with detailed input data gives a high dimensionality. Non-parametric methods may give meaningful results when parametric methods lack degrees of freedom, but have problems with collinear or irrelevant variables. Aggregate efficiency estimates will be little affected, but rates of transf...

This paper shows that an integrable approximation of the spring pendulum, when tuned to be in 1 : 1 : 2 resonance, has monodromy. The stepwise precession angle of the swing plane of the resonant spring pendulum is shown to be a rotation number of the integrable approximation. Due to the monodromy, this rotation number is not a globally defined function of the integrals. In fact at lowest order ...

The purpose of this paper is to deal with questions of instability and economic crisis, deriving theoretical arguments from Schumpeter’s works and presenting relevant empirical evidence for the case of the US economy by sector of economic activity in the time period 19572006, just before the first signs of the global recession made their appearance. More precisely, we make an attempt to interpr...