Application Of Remote Sensing And Hydrological Model For Runoff Estimation And Prediction At Upper Langat Watershed

Rapid land development in recent years have degraded the environment and created a need for watershed modeling to quantify the impacts. During land development activities, natural flow paths in the watershed is normally being replaced or supplemented by paved gutters, storm sewers, or other form of artificial drainage. During rainfall, water remains above the land surface generating large amount of runoff within a short time. This study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of using HEC-HMS hydrologic model, developed in the United States for predicting surface runoff from tropical watershed. The current and future impacts of land development on runoff rate were studied. The Upper Langat River Basin with a total area of 385km2 was chosen for this study. The watershed is located in Selangor. For this study, various datasets including topographical, hydrometeorological, river cross-section and land use data were used. The land use map was derived from Landsat TM images. In order to extract land use information from remotely sensed data, two classification techniques were examined, namely pixel-based and object oriented classification. The result shows that the object oriented classification provides better accuracy (91.429%) as compared to pixel-based classification which has an overall accuracy of 81.667%. The results from model application and statistical analysis show that HEC-HMS estimated an average gap of 27% at moderate flow. During heavy rainfall, the designed model seriously overestimated the runoff with an average gap of 70%. As a conclusion, the HEC-HMS provides a conservative estimate of runoff output. It was also observed that the impact of land development on peak flow is directly proportional. Land development of 24.40km2 in year 1994 caused a peak flow of 74.62m3/s while in 1999, 50.23km2 of land development caused the peak flow of 84.04m3/s. In the proposed MSC land use plan for the year 2020, total area of 148.14km2 will be developed. This development is predicted to cause 128.15m3/s of peak flow. Therefore, it is important for urban planner to take into consideration the effect of the urbanization on the rate of runoff before developing a desired area. A well designed drainage system must be put in place during land development in order to prevent the flooding

Micro Balloon Actuators for Aerodynamic Control

A robust, large-force, large-deflection micro balloon actuator for aerodynamic (manoeuvring) control of transonic aircraft has been developed. Using a novel process, high yield linear arrays of silicone balloons on a robust silicon substrate have been fabricated that can deflect vertically in excess of one mm. Balloon actuators have been tested under cyclic conditions to assess reliability. The actuators have been characterized in a wind tunnel to assess their suitability as aerodynamic control surfaces and flight-tested on a jet fighter to assess their resistance to varied temperatures and pressures at high velocity

Robustness analysis of signaling transduction networks based on Monte-Carlo method

The dynamic behaviors of cell system were deep ly affected by structural complexity of cell signal transduction networks and uncertainty of kinetics parameters. How to quantitatively determinate the relation between system behaviors and parameters variations was an important p roblem of systems biology. In order to study robustness of NF - κB signal transduction networks, the parameters of system model were assigned to subject to stochastic distributions. Then, robustness of system output signal NF - κBn with respect to 64 parameters variations and amp litude variation of step input signal IKK was studied by means of Monte - Carlo method. The simulation results demonstrate that the oscillation behavior of system output signal NF - κBn is closely relative to 6 key rate constantswhose robustness isweak, and the amp litude variation of step input signal IKKmakes a great impact on the oscillation behavior of system output

Glorified optics and wave propagation in nonplanar structure

Waves propagating in varying nonplanar structure can produce many interesting phenomena, such as focusing, caustics, and triplications. A high-frequency technique based on the first-motion approximation, referred to as glorified optics, has been developed to generate synthetic seismograms for these types of problems. The technique, in its simplest form, uses the spreading rate of a beam with transmission and reflection coefficients along each possible ray path. The time behavior of each arrival is either that of the original pulse or its Hilbert transform depending on the position of caustics. The geophysically interesting structure of a soft basin over a half-space is investigated in detail by this method. Synthetic seismograms appropriate for various locations are compared with the results of finite difference and finite element methods. The technique appears rich in insight and should prove very useful in modeling problems

On the Origins and Control of Community Types in the Human Microbiome

Microbiome-based stratification of healthy individuals into compositional categories, referred to as "community types", holds promise for drastically improving personalized medicine. Despite this potential, the existence of community types and the degree of their distinctness have been highly debated. Here we adopted a dynamic systems approach and found that heterogeneity in the interspecific interactions or the presence of strongly interacting species is sufficient to explain community types, independent of the topology of the underlying ecological network. By controlling the presence or absence of these strongly interacting species we can steer the microbial ecosystem to any desired community type. This open-loop control strategy still holds even when the community types are not distinct but appear as dense regions within a continuous gradient. This finding can be used to develop viable therapeutic strategies for shifting the microbial composition to a healthy configurationComment: Main Text, Figures, Methods, Supplementary Figures, and Supplementary Tex

Biomimetic Homogeneous Oxidation Catalyzed by Metalloporphyrins with Green Oxidants

Cytochrome P-450 mono-oxygenase enzymes play a key role in the oxidative transformation in living systems. As one kind of cytochrome P-450 models, metalloporphyrins have been widely used in selective oxygenation of hydrocarbons under mild conditions. The chapter focuses on reviewing the biomimetic homogeneous oxidation of organic compounds catalyzed by metalloporphyrins with green oxidants such as dioxygen or hydrogen peroxide, in which the oxidized substrates include alkanes, olefins, alcohols, aldehydes, sulfides etc. The mechanisms for the oxidation of different substrates were also described. We can assume that the coming decade is going to be dedicated to the development of metalloporphyrins biomimetic catalyst in petrochemical and fine chemical industries. Keywords: Biomimetic, Cytochrome, Metalloporphyrins, Oxidation, Homogegeou

Economics of neuraminidase inhibitor stock piling for pandemic influenza, Singapore.

We compared strategies for stock piling neuraminidase inhibitors to treat and prevent influenza in Singapore. Cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses, with Monte Carlo simulations, were used to determine economic outcomes. A pandemic in a population of 4.2 million would result in an estimated 525-1,775 deaths, 10,700-38,600 hospitalization days, and economic costs of 0.7 dollars to 2.2 billion Singapore dollars. The treatment-only strategy had optimal economic benefits: stock piles of antiviral agents for 40% of the population would save an estimated 418 lives and 414 million dollars, at a cost of 52.6 million dollars per shelf-life cycle of the stock pile. Prophylaxis was economically beneficial in high-risk subpopulations, which account for 78% of deaths, and in pandemics in which the death rate was >0.6%. Prophylaxis for pandemics with a 5% case-fatality rate would save 50,000 lives and 81 billion dollars. These models can help policymakers weigh the options for pandemic planning