Determination of the angular distribution of cosmic rays at sea level

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 59).In this thesis, a muon telescope is setup in order to measure the zenith angular distribution of cosmic ray muons at sea level. The setup consists of two long scintillator counters with double-ended readout. Previous measurements have shown that the intensity of muons obey the cos 2 0 distribution. In this thesis, two methods are used. The first method is by rotating the whole setup to point at the zenith angle under measurement. The second method is by time of flight measurement. With the double-ended readout, the position of the muon pass through can be reconstructed from the time difference between the two ends. Therefore, the paths of muons can be also reconstructed. Both measurements confirmed the cos 2 0 distribution, with 'tails' at large zenith angles, which is also found in previous measurements.by Yi-Hong Kuo.S.B

Hospital treatment, mortality and healthcare costs in relation to socioeconomic status among people with bipolar affective disorder

BACKGROUND: Evidence regarding the relationships between the socioeconomic status and long-term outcomes of individuals with bipolar affective disorder (BPD) is lacking. AIMS: We aimed to estimate the effects of baseline socioeconomic status on longitudinal outcomes. METHOD: A national cohort of adult participants with newly diagnosed BPD was identified in 2008. The effects of personal and household socioeconomic status were explored on outcomes of hospital treatment, mortality and healthcare costs, over a 3-year follow-up period (2008–2011). RESULTS: A total of 7987 participants were recruited. The relative risks of hospital treatment and mortality were found elevated for the ones from low-income households who also had higher healthcare costs. Low premium levels did not correlate with future healthcare costs. CONCLUSIONS: Socioeconomic deprivation is associated with poorer outcome and higher healthcare costs in BPD patients. Special care should be given to those with lower socioeconomic status to improve outcomes with potential benefits of cost savings in the following years. DECLARATION OF INTEREST: None. COPYRIGHT AND USAGE: © 2016 The Royal College of Psychiatrists. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence

Evaluation of Robust Feature Descriptors for Texture Classification

Texture is an important characteristic in real and synthetic scenes. Texture analysis plays a critical role in inspecting surfaces and provides important techniques in a variety of applications. Although several descriptors have been presented to extract texture features, the development of object recognition is still a difficult task due to the complex aspects of texture. Recently, many robust and scaling-invariant image features such as SIFT, SURF and ORB have been successfully used in image retrieval and object recognition. In this paper, we have tried to compare the performance for texture classification using these feature descriptors with k-means clustering. Different classifiers including K-NN, Naive Bayes, Back Propagation Neural Network , Decision Tree and Kstar were applied in three texture image sets - UIUCTex, KTH-TIPS and Brodatz, respectively. Experimental results reveal SIFTS as the best average accuracy rate holder in UIUCTex, KTH-TIPS and SURF is advantaged in Brodatz texture set. BP neuro network works best in the test set classification among all used classifiers

Evaluation of Robust Feature Descriptors for Texture Classification

Texture is an important characteristic in real and synthetic scenes. Texture analysis plays a critical role in inspecting surfaces and provides important techniques in a variety of applications. Although several descriptors have been presented to extract texture features, the development of object recognition is still a difficult task due to the complex aspects of texture. Recently, many robust and scaling-invariant image features such as SIFT, SURF and ORB have been successfully used in image retrieval and object recognition. In this paper, we have tried to compare the performance for texture classification using these feature descriptors with k-means clustering. Different classifiers including K-NN, Naive Bayes, Back Propagation Neural Network , Decision Tree and Kstar were applied in three texture image sets - UIUCTex, KTH-TIPS and Brodatz, respectively. Experimental results reveal SIFTS as the best average accuracy rate holder in UIUCTex, KTH-TIPS and SURF is advantaged in Brodatz texture set. BP neuro network works best in the test set classification among all used classifiers

Separation, characterization and leaching behaviors of heavy metals in contaminated river sediments

In this research, the sequential extraction test was conducted to understand the characteristic of heavy metals in the sediment. Subsequently, the pH-dependent leaching test, percolation test were subjected to explore the possible leaching of heavy metals and stabilizing mechanism. Finally, based on the resuts of pH dependent test,the acid/chemical washing were applied to predict long-term, leaching characteristics. The results from the sediment characteristic analyses showed that the concentrations of heavy metals (such as Cu, Pb, Zn, Ni, and Cr) in river sediments exceeded the upper limit of Sediment Quality Standard of Taiwan, implying further decontamination works should be addressed. Results from the chemical washing (extraction) showed that the heavy metal removal efficiency was good when washed with 2N HCl for 120 minutes; the order of removal efficiency was Ni 90% > Zn 87% > Pb 85% > Cu 83% > Cr 70%. For chelation extraction, the suitable operating condition was achieved with 0.5M Citric Acid after 120 minutes contact; the order of heavy metal ion capturing efficiency was Zn 61% > Ni 54% > Pb 40% > Cu 36% > Cr 24%. Comparing the heavy metal bonding types before and after chemical washing (extraction) showed that some metal ions exist in residual forms in the sediments (Ni, Zn, Cu); however, after the washing process, the heavy metal ions became more exchangeable forms with higher bioavailability. Keywords: sediment, heavy metal, leaching test, chemical washing

BIOMECHANICAL EFFECT OF GROUP EXERCISE PROGRAM USING STABILITY BALL ON THE COUNTER MOVEMENT JUMP

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the training effect of three-month group exercise program using stability ball. Ten female subjects were recruited to join this group exercise class for three months. The biomechanical parameters of counter-movement jump were collected before and after class. The average of maximal jumping height and the take-off velocity have significantly increased after three months. The group exercise program accoring American College of Sport Medicine trainig guideline which was designed in this study was helpful to increase the jump height of counter movement jump and to improve the biomechanical parameters of the landing

Cascaded Local Implicit Transformer for Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution

Implicit neural representation has recently shown a promising ability in representing images with arbitrary resolutions. In this paper, we present a Local Implicit Transformer (LIT), which integrates the attention mechanism and frequency encoding technique into a local implicit image function. We design a cross-scale local attention block to effectively aggregate local features. To further improve representative power, we propose a Cascaded LIT (CLIT) that exploits multi-scale features, along with a cumulative training strategy that gradually increases the upsampling scales during training. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of these components and analyze various training strategies. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that LIT and CLIT achieve favorable results and outperform the prior works in arbitrary super-resolution tasks

Hospital treatment, mortality and healthcare costs in relation to socioeconomic status among people with bipolar affective disorder

BACKGROUND: Evidence regarding the relationships between the socioeconomic status and long-term outcomes of individuals with bipolar affective disorder (BPD) is lacking. AIMS: We aimed to estimate the effects of baseline socioeconomic status on longitudinal outcomes. METHOD: A national cohort of adult participants with newly diagnosed BPD was identified in 2008. The effects of personal and household socioeconomic status were explored on outcomes of hospital treatment, mortality and healthcare costs, over a 3-year follow-up period (2008–2011). RESULTS: A total of 7987 participants were recruited. The relative risks of hospital treatment and mortality were found elevated for the ones from low-income households who also had higher healthcare costs. Low premium levels did not correlate with future healthcare costs. CONCLUSIONS: Socioeconomic deprivation is associated with poorer outcome and higher healthcare costs in BPD patients. Special care should be given to those with lower socioeconomic status to improve outcomes with potential benefits of cost savings in the following years. DECLARATION OF INTEREST: None. COPYRIGHT AND USAGE: © 2016 The Royal College of Psychiatrists. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence