Leaks represent a very important hazard for the buildings and they can affect all sorts of building materials and specially wood due to its hygroscopic properties. Excessive moisture content can affect in a negative way building processes such as the installation of wooden floors or the use of wood as a structural material. Moisture meters can provide prompt and non-destructive determination of...

In this thesis, we present an approach to perform measurements in the worldwide research network PlanetLab. We describe a framework for developing and deploying Java applications on PlanetLab and show how it can be used to develop data gathering applications. In particular, we implement a latency and a bandwidth test of which we also present some ndings derived from its analyses.

The objective of this study was to determine if measurements of breast morphology computed from three-dimensional (3D) stereophotogrammetry are equivalent to traditional anthropometric measurements obtained directly on a subject using a tape measure. 3D torso images of 23 women ranged in age from 36 to 63 who underwent or were scheduled for breast reconstruction surgery were obtained using a 3d...

The orbits of fluid particles in two dimensions effectively act as topological obstacles to material lines. A spacetime plot of the orbits of such particles can be regarded as a braid whose properties reflect the underlying dynamics. For a chaotic flow, the braid generated by the motion of three or more fluid particles is computed. A "braiding exponent" is then defined to characterize the compl...

We conduct experiments on two-dimensional packings of colloidal thermosensitive hydrogel particles whose packing fraction can be tuned above the jamming transition by varying the temperature. By measuring displacement correlations between particles, we extract the vibrational properties of a corresponding "shadow" system with the same configuration and interactions, but for which the dynamics o...

Optical tweezers instruments use the forces of laser radiation pressure to trap small particles. Using various techniques, these trapped particles can then be manipulated and forces on the objects in the trap can be measured. The forces that such an instrument is capable of measuring are of the order of one to 100 piconewtons (pN). While this technique has been used for over 20 years to manipul...

A method is described for the preparation of catalase particles from homogenates made from suspensions of epithelial cells of the small intestine of the guinea pig. Electron microscope examination of the preparations revealed the presence of small diaminobenzidine-positive particles measuring 0.1-0.3 nm in diameter and resembling the microperoxisomes observed by Novikoff and Novikoff (1972. J. ...

The design and fabrication of a dielectrophoretic ‘lab-on-a-chip’ device for bioparticle processing and counting is presented. The device consists of a multi-layer travelling wave dielectrophoretic electrode array for manipulating particles and/or fluids, microchannels for delivering samples and optical fibres for counting particles and/or measuring their velocities. Single particles were detec...

To overcome the shortcomings of standard particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO), such as premature convergence and low precision, a dynamic multi-swarm PSO with global detection mechanism (DMS-PSO-GD) is proposed. In DMS-PSO-GD, whole population divided into two kinds sub-swarms: several same-sized sub-swarms sub-swarm. The achieve information interaction sharing among themselves through r...

We analyze the glassy dynamics of binary mixtures of hard disks in two dimensions. Predictions of the mode-coupling theory (MCT) are tested with extensive Brownian dynamics simulations. Measuring the collective particle density correlation functions in the vicinity of the glass transition, we verify four predicted mixing effects. For instance, for large size disparities, adding a small amount o...