Trapping effects on inflation

We develop a Lagrangian approach based on the influence functional method so as to derive self-consistently the Langevin equation for the inflaton field in the presence of trapping points along the inflaton trajectory. The Langevin equation exhibits the backreaction and the fluctuation-dissipation relation of the trapping. The fluctuation is induced by a multiplicative colored noise that can be identified as the the particle number density fluctuations and the dissipation is a new effect that may play a role in the trapping with a strong coupling. In the weak coupling regime, we calculate the power spectrum of the noise-driven inflaton fluctuations for a single trapping point and studied its variation with the trapping location. We also consider a case with closely spaced trapping points and find that the resulting power spectrum is blue.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Cultural Discourse in Taiwan. Ed. Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek.

The collected volume Cultural Discourse in Taiwan — edited by Chin-Chuan Cheng, I-Chun Wang, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and published by National Sun Yat-sen Uiniversity Press in 2009 — is intended as an addition to scholarship in the field of Taiwan Studies. The articles in the volume are in many aspects comparative and the topics discussed are in the context of literary and culture scholarship. At the same time, the volume is interdisciplinary as the articles cover historical perspectives, analyses of texts by Taiwan authors, and cultural discourse as related to Taiwan consciousness, language, and linguistic issues. Copyright release to the authors

The restoration of sediment-related disasters and driftwood from national forest in Taiwan caused by Typhoon Morakot in 2009

The number and area of new landslide, according to the interpreted SPOT images, caused by Typhoon Morakot in 2009 is estimated as 30,223 and 43,996 ha, respectively. The new landslide area in 2009 increased by about 16,392 ha in comparison with the landslide area in 2008. The heavy rainfall with a return period well over 200 years during Typhoon Morakot centralized in southwestern and southeastern Taiwan, and that also resulted in serious landslide disasters in national forest. Four forest working circles, including Chishan, Laonong, Pintung, and Dawu, are the most serious landslide zones with the landslide ratio over 8.0%. The Forestry Bureau assesses and ranks the seriousness of the disasters by using slope, the number of protected objects, the distance from the disaster to the protected objects to execute the restoration of sediment disasters and landslide in national forest. Due to the most torrential rain in the past 50 years caused by Typhoon Morakot, a large number of trees in the mountain area were destroyed. They became the driftwood, with a total weight of about 1.52 million tons, which ended up at the farmlands and ports. In order to recover agricultural products and livelihoods, Forestry Bureau made strategy for disaster prevention and reduction. Based on the strategy, Forestry Bureau sweeps away the driftwood by estimating its distribution, overcomes the issues caused by the heavy rainfall disaster, and helps the victims to recover their life

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS OF CHINESE MICROBLOG MESSAGE USING NEURAL NETWORK-BASED VECTOR REPRESENTATION FOR MEASURING REGIONAL PREJUDICE

Regional prejudice is prevalent in Chinese cities in which native residents and migrants lack a basic level of trust in the other group. Like Twitter, Sina Weibo is a social media platform where people actively engage in discussions on various social issues. Thus, it provides a good data source for measuring individuals’ regional prejudice on a large scale. We find that a resentful tone dominates in Weibo messages related to migrants. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named DKV, for recognizing polarity and direction of sentiment for Weibo messages using distributed real-valued vector representation of keywords learned from neural networks. Such a representation can project rich context information (or embedding) into the vector space, and subsequently be used to infer similarity measures among words, sentences, and even documents. We provide a comprehensive performance evaluation to demonstrate that by exploiting the keyword embeddings, DKV paired with support vector machines can effectively recognize a Weibo message into the predefined sentiment and its direction. Results demonstrate that our method can achieve the best performances compared to other approaches

Hypoxia-inducible factor-1α regulates matrix metalloproteinase-1 activity in human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells

AbstractWe examined the mRNA levels of hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) in bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (bmMSCs) of eight osteoarthritis patients. BmMSC-1, expressing higher HIF-1α mRNA and protein than bmMSC-5, elicited higher matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP1) activity and stronger invasive capacity. In vitro invasion assays and quantitative PCR analyses showed that targeted inhibition of HIF-1α in bmMSC-1 decreased its invasion and expressions of MMP1 and MMP3, whereas overexpression of HIF-1α in bmMSC-5 increased its invasion and expressions of MMP1 and MMP3. Therefore, HIF-1α can regulate MMP1 and MMP3 expressions in human bmMSCs, which might suggest a pathophysiological role of bmMSC expressing high HIF-1α in bone diseases

An optimized procedure greatly improves EST vector contamination removal

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The enormous amount of sequence data available in the public domain database has been a gold mine for researchers exploring various themes in life sciences, and hence the quality of such data is of serious concern to researchers. Removal of vector contamination is one of the most significant operations to obtain accurate sequence data containing only a cDNA insert from the basecalls output by an automatic DNA sequencer. Popular bioinformatics programs to accomplish vector trimming include LUCY, cross_match and SeqClean.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In a recent study, where the program SeqClean was used to remove vector contamination from our test set of EST data compiled through various library construction systems, however, a significant number of errors remained after preliminary trimming. These errors were later almost completely corrected by simply using a re-linearized form of the cloning vector to compare against the target ESTs. The modified trimming procedure for SeqClean was also compared with the trimming efficiency of the other two popular programs, LUCY2, and cross_match. Using SeqClean with a re-linearized form of the cloning vector significantly surpassed the other two programs in all tested conditions, while the performance of the other two programs was not influenced by the modified procedure. Vector contamination in dbEST was also investigated in this study: 2203 out of the 48212 ESTs sampled from dbEST (2007-04-18 freeze) were found to match sequences in UNIVEC.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Vector contamination remains a serious concern to the data quality in the public sequence database nowadays. Based on the results presented here, we feel that our modified procedure with SeqClean should be recommended to all researchers for the task of vector removal from EST or genomic sequences.</p

Empiric antibiotic choices for community-acquired biliary tract infections

SummaryBackgroundThe study was conducted to reveal the most appropriate empiric antibiotics for the treatment of community-acquired biliary tract infections (CA-BTI) at a regional hospital in Taiwan.MethodsThe study was performed between October 1, 2010 and October 31, 2012. All positive bile culture results of presumptive community-acquired origins were collected. The associated etiologic microorganisms and their antimicrobial susceptibilities were analyzed. The appropriateness of empiric therapy (defined as the effectiveness of the antibiotics against the etiologic agents) and the subsequent treatment response were examined through the review of medical records.ResultsA total of 115 patients (cholecystitis, 83 cases, 72.2%; cholangitis, 32 cases, 27.8%) and 189 isolates (136 Gram-negative bacilli, 37 Gram-positive cocci, and 16 anaerobes) were analyzed. The most frequent pathogens were Escherichia coli (n = 69, 36.5%), Klebsiella spp. (n = 37, 19.6%), enterococci (n = 29, 15.3%), and Bacteroides spp. (n = 11, 5.8%). Penicillin resistance (5.4%) was low in Gram-positive cocci, whereas higher resistance (>20%) to cefazolin, cefuroxime, and ampicillin–sulbactam was found in Gram-negative bacilli. Anaerobes also demonstrated high resistance to clindamycin (37.5%) but less to metronidazole (12.5%). Appropriate empiric therapy was found in 92 (80%) cases, and among them, 83 (90.2%) were treated successfully. The treatment success rate (69.6%) was significantly lower among the remaining 23 cases with inappropriate empiric therapy (16 of 23 vs. 83 of 92, p < 0.05). A high treatment success rate (97.2%) was observed among cases empirically treated with ceftriaxone plus metronidazole.ConclusionThe combination of ceftriaxone plus metronidazole appears to be the most appropriate empiric antibiotics for the treatment of CA-BTI at this hospital. Because different hospitals may encounter microorganisms of different antimicrobial susceptibilities, similar approaches may be followed by other hospitals where appropriate empiric therapy has not yet been established for the treatment of CA-BTI

Preparation of a Counter Electrode with P

This study investigates the applicability of a counter electrode with a P-type semiconductor oxide (such as NiO) on a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC). The counter electrode is fabricated by depositing an NiO film on top of a Pt film, which has been deposited on a Fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass using an ion-sputtering coater (or E-beam evaporator), using a simple spin coating method. This study also examines the effect of the average thickness of TiO2 film deposited on a working electrode upon the power conversion efficiency of a DSSC. This study shows that the power conversion efficiency of a DSSC with a Pt(E)/NiO counter electrode (4.28%) substantially exceeds that of a conventional DSSC with a Pt(E) counter electrode (3.16%) on which a Pt film was deposited using an E-beam evaporator. This result is attributed to the fact that the NiO film coated on the Pt(E) counter electrode improves the electrocatalytic activity of the counter electrode