Museum of Formosan Aborigines

In the beginning, the purpose of this thesis was to explore the feasibility of creating a computer-based visual museum. I wanted to experiment with 3-D interactivity, such as how to set up the cursor movement in a 3-D world and how to use 3-D animation in interactive multimedia. I wanted to use Native Americans as the subject of this 3-D museum project. After I sent my thesis proposal to our department, I found my classmate\u27s project was about Native Americans also. Therefore, I decided on another topic. In July 1995, 1 went back to Taiwan to visit my friends. I found that Sinorama magazine had a series of articles discussing Taiwan\u27s indigenous culture. By this chance, I reviewed their culture from hunting to battle, agriculture to fishing; from weddings to funerals, worship to exorcism, prayers for good harvests to harvest celebrations; from leg ends to stories, myths to ethnic-origin tales, concepts of nature to the view of the world. Their culture was so exciting to me. I started to think about changing the subject of my thesis. I discussed the idea with my friends. All of them encouraged me to do this project and also helped me to do research. This thesis still focuses on the 3-D museum, which attempts to preserve the tribes\u27 rich past and present it in an intuitive way. Interactive media is used to maintain the audience\u27s attention while introducing them to a foreign society. The interactive program was created using numerous computer software packages, combined together to comprise the heart of the thesis. The program has been built around Macromind Director,Video Fusion, Strata StudioPro, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and SoundEditl6. The combination of all these programs results in the end product: an inter active program

An Opposite Effect of the CDK Inhibitor, p18^INK4c on Embryonic Stem Cells Compared with Tumor and Adult Stem Cells

Self-renewal is a feature common to both adult and embryonic stem (ES) cells, as well as tumor stem cells (TSCs). The cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor, p18INK4c, is a known tumor suppressor that can inhibit self-renewal of tumor cells or adult stem cells. Here, we demonstrate an opposite effect of p18 on ES cells in comparison with teratoma cells. Our results unexpectedly showed that overexpression of p18 accelerated the growth of mouse ES cells and embryonic bodies (EB); on the contrary, inhibited the growth of late stage teratoma. Up-regulation of ES cell markers (i.e., Oct4, Nanog, Sox2, and Rex1) were detected in both ES and EB cells, while concomitant down-regulation of various differentiation markers was observed in EB cells. These results demonstrate that p18 has an opposite effect on ES cells as compared with tumor cells and adult stem cells. Mechanistically, expression of CDK4 was significantly increased with overexpression of p18 in ES cells, likely leading to a release of CDK2 from the inhibition by p21 and p27. As a result, self-renewal of ES cells was enhanced. Our current study suggests that targeting p18 in different cell types may yield different outcomes, thereby having implications for therapeutic manipulations of cell cycle machinery in stem cells. © 2012 Li et al

Cross-Domain Employability Related to E-Business in Printing Industry

The study aims at introducing the cross-domain employability of Electronic Business (E-Business) that the printing industry professionals should have in Taiwan. The pilot study aims at confirming and developing a questionnaire based on indicator of employability on E-Business in Printing Industry. Secondly, designing Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) questionnaire and builds its weight. The study presents the cross-domain employability indicators related to E-Business. The contribution can benefit the printing industry when recruiting human resources, and to serve as reference for the printing related departments in higher education

P-type tin monoxide thin-film transistors on cellulose nanopaper substrates

Oxide-based thin-film transistors (TFTs) possess advantages such as relatively high mobility, low process temperature and good uniformity, which make them attractive for flexible electronics applications. Most flexible oxide-based TFTs reported today were made on plastic substrates. In this work, flexible inverted-staggered bottom-gate p-type tin monoxide (SnO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) were demonstrated on cellulose nanopaper substrates using a photolithography-compatible direct-fabrication approach. The paper substrate was formed by drop-casting suspension containing cellulose nanofibers and cellulose nanocrystals on a rigid carrier substrate. A buffer layer consisting of parylene, SiNx and SiO2 was then deposited to protect the paper substrate from processing gases and chemicals. The processing temperatures of the TFT were kept ≤ 200°C to ensure the paper substrate remained intact during the process. The channel, gate, source, and drain patterns were defined by using conventional photolithography techniques. Fig. 1(a) shows the micrograph of p-type SnO TFTs made on a cellulose nanopaper substrate. The channel width and length are 60 μm and 30 μm, respectively. Figs. 1(b), (c), and (d) illustrate the transfer characteristics, output characteristics and linear field-effect mobility as a function gate voltage of a p-type SnO TFT fabricated on a cellulose nanopaper substrate. The on-paper SnO TFT exhibits a field-effect mobility of 1.21 cm2V-1s-1, threshold voltage of 3.56 V, subthreshold swing of 2.36 V/dec and on/off current ratio of 2.06×103. Please click Download on the upper right corner to see the full abstract

FuXi: A cascade machine learning forecasting system for 15-day global weather forecast

Over the past few years, due to the rapid development of machine learning (ML) models for weather forecasting, state-of-the-art ML models have shown superior performance compared to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)'s high-resolution forecast (HRES) in 10-day forecasts at a spatial resolution of 0.25 degree. However, the challenge remains to perform comparably to the ECMWF ensemble mean (EM) in 15-day forecasts. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of mitigating the accumulation of forecast errors for effective long-term forecasts. Despite numerous efforts to reduce accumulation errors, including autoregressive multi-time step loss, using a single model is found to be insufficient to achieve optimal performance in both short and long lead times. Therefore, we present FuXi, a cascaded ML weather forecasting system that provides 15-day global forecasts with a temporal resolution of 6 hours and a spatial resolution of 0.25 degree. FuXi is developed using 39 years of the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis dataset. The performance evaluation, based on latitude-weighted root mean square error (RMSE) and anomaly correlation coefficient (ACC), demonstrates that FuXi has comparable forecast performance to ECMWF EM in 15-day forecasts, making FuXi the first ML-based weather forecasting system to accomplish this achievement

A Reversible Steganography Scheme of Secret Image Sharing Based on Cellular Automata and Least Significant Bits Construction

Secret image sharing schemes have been extensively studied by far. However, there are just a few schemes that can restore both the secret image and the cover image losslessly. These schemes have one or more defects in the following aspects: (1) high computation cost; (2) overflow issue existing when modulus operation is used to restore the cover image and the secret image; (3) part of the cover image being severely modified and the stego images having worse visual quality. In this paper, we combine the methods of least significant bits construction (LSBC) and dynamic embedding with one-dimensional cellular automata to propose a new lossless scheme which solves the above issues and can resist differential attack and support parallel computing. Experimental results also show that this scheme has the merit of big embedding capacity