Open Problems in Affine Differential Geometry and Related Topics

The following problems were raised in the workshop “Affine Differential Geometry and Related Topics" at Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University at December 16-18, 1996

Phenological Development in Relation to Temperature of Winter Wheat Iwainodaichi Seeded Early in Southwestern Japan

The phenological development of winter wheat Iwainodaichi seeded early was compared with that of spring wheat Chikugoizumi based on the temperature. In this paper, the developmental phase from the sowing to double ridge is referred to phase 1, that from double ridge to anthesis phase 2 and that from the anthesis to maturity phase 3. The duration of phase 1 in Iwainodaichi was almost constant independent of the mean temperature in this phase, but that in Chikugoizumi decreased as the mean temperature in this phase increased. When seeded early, the duration of phase 1 was obviously longer in Iwainodaichi than in Chikugoizumi since the mean temperature in this phase was higher when seeded early. The duration of phase 2 decreased in both varieties as the mean temperature and photoperiod in this phase increased. When seeded early, phase 2 was shorter in Iwainodaichi than in Chikugoizumi, since the mean temperature was higher and photoperiod longer in this phase in Iwainodaichi than in Chikugoizumi. The duration of phase 3 decreased as the mean temperature in this phase increased in both varieties and was shorter in Iwainodaichi than in Chikugoizumi at the same mean temperature. Consequently, Iwainodaichi reached the double ridge stage later but reached maturity at about the same time as Chikugoizumi when seeded early

A museum object repository using LIDO schema

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014Posters, Demos and Developer "How-To's"Many of the research resources are collected for study by researchers and are put away into warehouses without indexing when the researchers left their research institute. Moreover, in most of cases, these resources become inaccessible although they are cited in research papers. To overcome this situation, we have built a repository system for acquiring, organizing, preserving, and disseminating the research resources especially museum objects in research institutions such as universities and also have formed a research community. We attempt to implement Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) framework on a repository system for describing and sharing the museum objects. LIDO is an XML harvesting schema which designed by the Documentation Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CDOC) that intended for delivering metadata of museum objects. We also utilize WEKO , an open source repository software, as based the repository system.Hayashi, Masaharu (Hitotsubashi University)Horii, Hiroshi (AMANE LLC.)Horii, Misato (AMANE LLC.)Takata, Yoshihiro (Kanazawa University)Yamaji, Kazutuna (National Institute of Informatics)Ueda, Hiromi (Kanazawa University)Furuhata, Taro (Kanazawa University

Investigation of Legionella Contamination in Bath Water Samples by Culture, Amoebic Co-Culture, and Real-Time Quantitative PCR Methods

We investigated Legionella contamination in bath water samples, collected from 68 bathing facilities in Japan, by culture, culture with amoebic co-culture, real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR), and real-time qPCR with amoebic co-culture. Using the conventional culture method, Legionella pneumophila was detected in 11 samples (11/68, 16.2%). Contrary to our expectation, the culture method with the amoebic co-culture technique did not increase the detection rate of Legionella (4/68, 5.9%). In contrast, a combination of the amoebic co-culture technique followed by qPCR successfully increased the detection rate (57/68, 83.8%) compared with real-time qPCR alone (46/68, 67.6%). Using real-time qPCR after culture with amoebic co-culture, more than 10-fold higher bacterial numbers were observed in 30 samples (30/68, 44.1%) compared with the same samples without co-culture. On the other hand, higher bacterial numbers were not observed after propagation by amoebae in 32 samples (32/68, 47.1%). Legionella was not detected in the remaining six samples (6/68, 8.8%), irrespective of the method. These results suggest that application of the amoebic co-culture technique prior to real-time qPCR may be useful for the sensitive detection of Legionella from bath water samples. Furthermore, a combination of amoebic co-culture and real-time qPCR might be useful to detect viable and virulent Legionella because their ability to invade and multiply within free-living amoebae is considered to correlate with their pathogenicity for humans. This is the first report evaluating the efficacy of the amoebic co-culture technique for detecting Legionella in bath water samples

An efficient mel-LPC analysis method for speech recognition

This paper proposes a simple and efficient time domain technique to estimate an all-pole model on a mel-frequency axis (Mel-LPC), i.e., a bilinear transformed all-pole model by Strube. Autocorrelation coefficients on the mel-frequency axis are exactly derived by computing cross-correlation coefficients between speech signal and all-pass filtered one without any approximation. This method requires only two-fold computational cost as compared to conventional linear prediction analysis. The recognition performance of mel-cepstral parameters obtained by the Mel LPC analysis is compared with those of conventional LP mel-cepstra and the mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) through gender-dependent phoneme and word recognition tests. The results show that the Mel-LPC cepstrum attains a significant improvement in recognition accuracy over conventional LP mel-cepstrum, and gives slightly higher accuracy for male speakers and slightly lower accuracy for female speakers than MFCC.5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 98), November 30 -- December 4, 1998, Sydney, Australi