Electrocatalysis of fuel cell reactions: Investigation of alternate electrolytes

Oxygen reduction and transport properties of the electrolyte in the phosphoric acid fuel cell are studied. The areas covered were: (1) development of a theoretical expression for the rotating ring disk electrode technique; (2) determination of the intermediate reaction rate constants for oxygen reduction on platinum in phosphoric acid electrolyte; (3) determination of oxygen reduction mechanism in trifluoreomethanesulfonic acid (TFMSA) which was considered as an alternate electrolyte for the acid fuel cells; and (4) the measurement of transport properties of the phosphoric acid electrolyte at high concentrations and temperatures

Electrocatalysis of fuel cell reactions: Investigation of alternate electrolytes

Oxygen reduction and transport properties of the electrolyte in the phosphoric acid fuel cell are studied. A theoretical expression for the rotating ring-disk electrode technique; the intermediate reaction rate constants for oxygen reduction on platinum in phosphoric acid electrolyte; oxygen reduction mechanism in trifluoromethanesulfonic acid (TFMSA), considered as an alternate electrolyte for the acid fuel cells; and transport properties of the phosphoric acid electrolyte at high concentrations and temperatures are covered

A Study on Tourism Development Strategy of Kaohsiung City in Taiwan after Urban Style Regeneration

Urban tourism has gradually been emphasized in past years; especially, it is regarded as a savior of urban regeneration in old industrial cities. When losing the competitive advantages and getting declined, old industrial cities are facing the challenge of transformation. The development of urban tourism is considered as the opportunity of industrial cities in dark recession that they start to involve in the development of tourism. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied in this study to evaluate key success factors in the tourism development strategy of Kaohsiung City after the urban style regeneration. AHP is used for confirming the levels of various evaluation factors. The first hierarchy contains four evaluation dimensions, and 14 evaluation standards are covered in the second hierarchy. The results reveal the important sequence of four evaluation factors in the second hierarchy as (1) marketing activity, (2) management strategy, (3) recreational environment, and (4) infrastructure, where the importance of evaluation factors in the third hierarchy is sequenced as (1) urban attraction, (2) environmental facility maintenance, (3) celebrations, (4) local characteristics, and (5) natural landscape. The research results and suggestions in this study are expected to enhance the tourism development of Kaohsiung City in Taiwan after the urban style regeneration.     Keywords: urban style, tourism development strategy, key success factors, Delphi method, AH

Time-course of effects of external beam radiation on [18F]FDG uptake in healthy tissue and bone marrow.

The utility of PET for monitoring responses to radiation therapy have been complicated by metabolically active processes in surrounding normal tissues. We examined the time-course of [18F]FDG uptake in normal tissues using small animal-dedicated PET during the 2 month period following external beam radiation. Four mice received 12 Gy of external beam radiation, in a single fraction to the left half of the body. Small animal [18F]FDG-PET scans were acquired for each mouse at 0 (pre-radiation), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 19, 24, and 38 days following irradiation. [18F]FDG activity in various tissues was compared between irradiated and non-irradiated body halves before, and at each time point after irradiation. Radiation had a significant impact on [18F]FDG uptake in previously healthy tissues, and time-course of effects differed in different types of tissues. For example, liver tissue demonstrated increased uptake, particularly over days 3-12, with the mean left to right uptake ratio increasing 52% over mean baseline values (p < 0.0001). In contrast, femoral bone marrow uptake demonstrated decreased uptake, particularly over days 2-8, with the mean left to right uptake ratio decreasing 26% below mean baseline values (p = 0.0005). Significant effects were also seen in lung and brain tissue. Radiation had diverse effects on [18F]FDG uptake in previously healthy tissues. These kinds of data may help lay groundwork for a systematically acquired database of the time-course of effects of radiation on healthy tissues, useful for animal models of cancer therapy imminently, as well as interspecies extrapolations pertinent to clinical application eventually

Stress fluctuation, crack renucleation and toughening in layered materials

It has been established that contrast in the elastic properties can lead to enhancement of fracture toughness in heterogeneous materials. Focussing on layered materials as a model system, we show that this enhancement is a result of two distinct phenomena – first, fluctuations in stress leading to regions where the stress intensity at the crack is considerably smaller than that of the macroscopically applied value; and second, the lack of stress intensity when a crack is at a compliant to stiff interface thereby requiring renucleation. Using theoretical, computational and experimental methods, we study two geometries – a layered material and a layered material with a narrow channel – to separate the two phenomena. The stress fluctuation is present in both, but renucleation is present only in the layered medium. We provide quantitative estimates for the enhanced toughness

Piezoelectric control of the magnetic anisotropy via interface strain coupling in a composite multiferroic structure

We investigate theoretically the magnetic dynamics in a ferroelectric/ferromagnetic heterostructure coupled via strain-mediated magnetoelectric interaction. We predict an electric field-induced magnetic switching in the plane perpendicular to the magneto-crystalline easy axis, and trace this effect back to the piezoelectric control of the magnetoelastic coupling. We also investigate the magnetic remanence and the electric coercivity

THE SURFACE EMG ACTIVITY OF THE UPPER LIMB MUSCLES IN TABLE TENNIS FOREHAND DRIVES

The purpose of this study was to analyze the 3D kinematics variables and the upper limb muscle surface EMG activity of Taiwan elite table tennis players when they were performing forehand drives after receiving topspin and backspin services. Ten Vicon MX-13 2+cameras (Vicon, Oxford, UK, 250Hz) were used to record the 3D kinematics data and measured the EMG signals of seven upper limb muscles of the players. The results showed that the tactics of the table tennis players performed the forehand drive to receive backspin were both to increase the racket tilt angle in advance and to raise the path angle during the upswing phase. The players exerted greater muscular activity during receiving the backspin forehand drive than receiving topspin forehand drive in the wrist extensor, the biceps and the triceps

Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts

Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng' 201