High-Throughput Workflow for Computer-Assisted Human Parsing of Biological Specimen Label Data

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersHundreds of thousands of specimens in herbaria and natural history museums worldwide are potential candidates for digitization, making them more accessible to researchers. An herbarium contains collections of preserved plant specimens created for scientific use. Herbarium specimens are ideal natural history objects for digitization, as the plants are pressed flat and dried, and mounted on individual sheets of paper, creating a nearly two-dimensional object. Building digital repositories of herbarium specimens can increase use and exposure of the collections while simultaneously reducing physical handling. As important as the digitized specimens are, the data contained on the associated specimen labels provide critical information about each specimen (e.g., scientific name, geographic location of specimen, etc.). The volume and heterogeneity of these printed label data present challenges in transforming them into meaningful digital form to support research. The Apiary Project is addressing these challenges by exploring and developing transformation processes in a systematic workflow that yields high-quality machine-processable label data in a cost- and time-efficient manner. The University of North Texas's Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK) and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), with funding from an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant, are conducting fundamental research with the goal of identifying how human intelligence can be combined with machine processes for effective and efficient transformation of specimen label information. The results of this research will yield a new workflow model for effective and efficient label data transformation, correction, and enhancement.Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Gran

Focused Ion Beam Tomography

To study the fundamental effect of shape and morphology of any material on its properties, it is very essential to know and study its morphology. Focused ion beam (FIB) tomography is a 3D chemical and structural relationship studying technique. The instrumentation of FIB looks like that of the scanning electron microscopy (SEM), but there is a major difference in the beam used for scanning. For SEM, a beam of electrons is used with scanning medium whereas in FIB, a much focused beam of ions is used for scanning. FIB can be used for lithography and ablation purposes, but due to advancements and high-energy focused beam, it is nowadays being used as a tomographic technique. Tomography is defined as imaging by sectoring or cross-sectioning any desired area. The hyphenation of FIB with energy-dispersive spectrometry or secondary ion mass spectrometry can give us elemental analysis with very high-resolution 3D images for a sample. This technique contributes to acquaintance of qualitative and quantitative analyses, 3D volume creations, and image processing. In this chapter, we will discuss the advancements in FIB instrumentation and its use as 3D imaging tool for different samples ranging from nanometer (nm)-sized materials to micrometer (μm)-sized biological samples

Anthocyanins and their physiologically relevant metabolites alter the expression of IL-6 and VCAM-1 in CD40L and oxidized LDL challenged vascular endothelial cells

Scope In vitro and in vivo studies suggest that dietary anthocyanins modulate cardiovascular disease risk; however, given anthocyanins extensive metabolism, it is likely that their degradation products and conjugated metabolites are responsible for this reported bioactivity. Methods and results Human vascular endothelial cells were stimulated with either oxidized LDL (oxLDL) or cluster of differentiation 40 ligand (CD40L) and cotreated with cyanidin-3-glucoside and 11 of its recently identified metabolites, at 0.1, 1, and 10 μM concentrations. Protein and gene expression of IL-6 and VCAM-1 was quantified by ELISA and RT-qPCR. In oxLDL-stimulated cells the parent anthocyanin had no effect on IL-6 production, whereas numerous anthocyanin metabolites significantly reduced IL-6 protein levels; phase II conjugates of protocatechuic acid produced the greatest effects (>75% reduction, p ≤ 0.05). In CD40L-stimulated cells the anthocyanin and its phase II metabolites reduced IL-6 protein production, where protocatechuic acid-4-sulfate induced the greatest reduction (>96% reduction, p ≤ 0.03). Similarly, the anthocyanin and its metabolites reduced VCAM-1 protein production, with ferulic acid producing the greatest effect (>65% reduction, p ≤ 0.04). Conclusion These novel data provide evidence to suggest that anthocyanin metabolites are bioactive at physiologically relevant concentrations and have the potential to modulate cardiovascular disease progression by altering the expression of inflammatory mediators

Spectrum of abdominal organ injury in a primary blast type

Research articl

Multi-Layer Cyber-Physical Security and Resilience for Smart Grid

The smart grid is a large-scale complex system that integrates communication technologies with the physical layer operation of the energy systems. Security and resilience mechanisms by design are important to provide guarantee operations for the system. This chapter provides a layered perspective of the smart grid security and discusses game and decision theory as a tool to model the interactions among system components and the interaction between attackers and the system. We discuss game-theoretic applications and challenges in the design of cross-layer robust and resilient controller, secure network routing protocol at the data communication and networking layers, and the challenges of the information security at the management layer of the grid. The chapter will discuss the future directions of using game-theoretic tools in addressing multi-layer security issues in the smart grid.Comment: 16 page

Dynamics of oscillating scalar field in thermal environment

There often appear coherently oscillating scalar fields in particle physics motivated cosmological scenarios, which may have rich phenomenological consequences. Scalar fields should somehow interact with background thermal bath in order to decay into radiation at an appropriate epoch, but introducing some couplings to the scalar field makes the dynamics complicated. We investigate in detail the dynamics of a coherently oscillating scalar field, which has renormalizable couplings to another field interacting with thermal background. The scalar field dynamics and its resultant abundance are significantly modified by taking account of following effects : (1) thermal correction to the effective potential, (2) dissipation effect on the scalar field in thermal bath, (3) non-perturbative particle production events and (4) formation of non-topological solitons. There appear many time scales depending on the scalar mass, amplitude, couplings and the background temperature, which make the efficiencies of these effects non-trivial.Comment: 45 pages, 6 figures; v2: several typos corrected; v3: minor corrections and references added; v4: minor corrections to reflect the published version; v5: minor correction

Delamination-and electromigration-related failures in solar panels—a review

The reliability of photovoltaic (PV) modules operating under various weather conditions attracts the manufacturer’s concern since several studies reveal a degradation rate higher than 0.8% per year for the silicon-based technology and reached up to 2.76% per year in a harsh climate. The lifetime of the PV modules is decreased because of numerous degradation modes. Electromigration and delamination are two failure modes that play a significant role in PV modules’ output power losses. The correlations of these two phenomena are not sufficiently explained and understood like other failures such as corrosion and potential-induced degradation. Therefore, in this review, we attempt to elaborate on the correlation and the influence of delamination and electromigration on PV module components such as metallization and organic materials to ensure the reliability of the PV modules. Moreover, the effects, causes, and the sites that tend to face these failures, particularly the silicon solar cells, are explained in detail. Elsewhere, the factors of aging vary as the temperature and humidity change from one country to another. Hence, accelerated tests and the standards used to perform the aging test for PV modules have been covered in this review