How large is the potential market of microwave food in China?

In China, food industry brings huge profit in every year, but the microwave food industry still faces the problem of underdevelopment. To explore the extent of the potential market of microwave food, a research on it can be contributed. However, there are rare similar researches on the circumstances of microwave food in China, so it is valuable to design a research project which particularly focuses on the mainland conditions of microwave food. Shanghai is one of the most desirable places among the major mainland cities. Thus, its market of microwave food can perform as a model for other cities to develop a wider and sustainable expansion in the entire mainland market. To study the microwave food’s market in China, we will gather and analyze the information about the trend of microwave food and the effect of demographic and sociocultural factors on the growth of microwave food in Shanghai from primary and secondary sources. For the primary source, a survey was conducted and 150 samples were collected. We try to analyze our research hypotheses through the survey and useful data was collected. Besides, the secondary information was also collected through the Internet, books, journals, etc. With the information, we will analyze the circumstances of mainland food market, describe the environment factors in Shanghai and its current status of food market, and use the case study to predict the growing phenomenon of microwave food in China. We hope that this research can contribute in creating a favorable environment of microwave food market for the future and designing an appropriate strategy to implement into the microwave food industry. Besides, the potential for microwave ready meals in this convenience-led society is a huge opportunity for manufacturers. Consequently, they can gain an appreciable return through the development of microwave food in China. As an effectual marketing strategy should be designed for a specific company, we choose the famous frozen food company in Hong Kong, Tao Fa, Amoy. We take it as an example and suggest the marketing plan for its development of microwave food in China

Optimum nonuniform transmultiplexer design

This paper considers an optimum nonuniform FIR transmultiplexer design subject to specifications in the frequency domain. Our objective is to minimize the sum of the ripple energy for all the individual filters, subject to the specifications on amplitude and aliasing distortions, and to the passband and stopband specifications for the individual filters. This optimum nonuniform transmultiplexer design problem can be formulated as a quadratic semi-infinite programming problem. The dual parametrization algorithm is extended to the design of this nonuniform transmultiplexer problem. If the lengths of the filters are sufficiently long and the set of decimation integers is compatible, then our algorithm guarantees that the solution obtained will give rise to the global minimum, and the required specifications are satisfied

A Pilot Study on the Effect of Outpatient Schroth Exercises on Thoracolumbar and Lumbar Curves in Adult Scoliosis Patients

Study design: This is a pilot prospective cohort study

Optimal design of nonuniform FIR transmultiplexer using semi-infinite programming

This paper considers an optimum nonuniform FIR transmultiplexer design problem subject to specifications in the frequency domain. Our objective is to minimize the sum of the ripple energy for all the individual filters, subject to the specifications on amplitude and aliasing distortions, and to the passband and stopband specifications for the individual filters. This optimum nonuniform transmultiplexer design problem can be formulated as a quadratic semi-infinite programming problem. The dual parametrization algorithm is extended to this nonuniform transmultiplexer design problem. If the lengths of the filters are sufficiently long and the set of decimation integers is compatible, then a solution exists. Since the problem is formulated as a convex problem, if a solution exists, then the solution obtained is unique and the local solution is a global minimum

Optimal PWM control of switched-capacitor DC/DC power converters via model transformation and enhancing control techniques

Abstract—This paper presents an efficient and effective method for an optimal pulse width modulated (PWM) control of switched-capacitor DC/DC power converters. Optimal switching instants are determined based on minimizing the output ripple magnitude, the output leakage voltage and the sensitivity of the output load voltage with respect to both the input voltage and the load resistance. This optimal PWM control strategy has several advantages over conventional PWM control strategies: 1) It does not involve a linearization, so a large signal analysis is performed. 2) It guarantees the optimality. The problem is solved via both the model transformation and the optimal enhancing control techniques. A practical example of the PWM control of a switched-capacitor DC/DC power converter is presented

Fuzzy switching systems: minimizing discontinuities and ripple magnitude and energy

This paper presents an efficient and effective method to determine optimal switching instants of fuzzy switching systems such that both the ripple magnitude and energy of the fuzzy switching systems are minimized. The method is based on optimal switching control techniques, where an optimal enhancing control method is used. This method has several advantages over the traditional methods. Firstly, it does not require the process of linearization. Secondly, it guarantees to achieve optimality. For illustration, a practical example of an optimal pulse width modulated fuzzy control of a switched-capacitor DC/DC power converter is presented

Efficient algorithm for solving semi-infinite programming problems and their applications to nonuniform filter bank designs

An efficient algorithm for solving semi-infinite programming problems is proposed in this paper. The index set is constructed by adding only one of the most violated points in a refined set of grid points. By applying this algorithm for solving the optimum nonuniform symmetric/antisymmetric linear phase finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter bank design problems, the time required to obtain a globally optimal solution is much reduced compared with that of the previous proposed algorith

Design of nonuniform near allpass complementary FIR filters via a semi-infinite programming technique

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing a set of nonuniform near allpass complementary FIR filters. This problem can be formulated as a quadratic semi-infinite programming problem, where the objective is to minimize the sum of the ripple energy for the individual filters, subject to the passband and stopband specifications as well as to the allpass complementary specification. The dual parameterization method is used for solving the linear quadratic semi-infinite programming problem

A data-mining approach for multiple structural alignment of proteins

Comparing the 3D structures of proteins is an important but computationally hard problem in bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose studying the problem when much less information or assumptions are available. We model the structural alignment of proteins as a combinatorial problem. In the problem, each protein is simply a set of points in the 3D space, without sequence order information, and the objective is to discover all large enough alignments for any subset of the input. We propose a data-mining approach for this problem. We first perform geometric hashing of the structures such that points with similar locations in the 3D space are hashed into the same bin in the hash table. The novelty is that we consider each bin as a coincidence group and mine for frequent patterns, which is a well-studied technique in data mining. We observe that these frequent patterns are already potentially large alignments. Then a simple heuristic is used to extend the alignments if possible. We implemented the algorithm and tested it using real protein structures. The results were compared with existing tools. They showed that the algorithm is capable of finding conserved substructures that do not preserve sequence order, especially those existing in protein interfaces. The algorithm can also identify conserved substructures of functionally similar structures within a mixture with dissimilar ones. The running time of the program was smaller or comparable to that of the existing tools

Design of near allpass strictly stable minimal phase real valued rational IIR filters

In this brief, a near-allpass strictly stable minimal-phase real-valued rational infinite-impulse response filter is designed so that the maximum absolute phase error is minimized subject to a specification on the maximum absolute allpass error. This problem is actually a minimax nonsmooth optimization problem subject to both linear and quadratic functional inequality constraints. To solve this problem, the nonsmooth cost function is first approximated by a smooth function, and then our previous proposed method is employed for solving the problem. Computer numerical simulation result shows that the designed filter satisfies all functional inequality constraints and achieves a small maximum absolute phase error