The House of Kwee Sik Poo an Indonesian-Chinese Merchant From Pasuruan

The Kwee family is an old Indonesian-Chinese family from Pasuruan, in East Java, and one of a few merchant families of either Chinese or Arab ethnic origin which led successful lives in this small town in the nineteenth century. From their Chinese ancestral village, Liu Chuan in Fujian province, China, a Kwee ancestor travelled to Southeast Asia and settled in Pasuruan, probably in the eighteen century. As with many families who held important positions in the ethnic Chinese community, it also owned large homes, mostly in a mixed architectural style, called “eclecticism” and later in what was known as “the Indies-empire style”. The early family history is still clouded in mystery, as not much concrete information has survived. Its descendants worked hard and prospered and dealt among economic undertakings such as sugar production, opium sales, buying and selling of property and land as well as running pawnshops

Laser power stabilization for second-generation gravitational wave detectors

We present results on the power stabilization of a Nd:YAG laser in the frequency band from 1 Hz to 100 kHz. High-power, low-noise photodetectors are used in a dc-coupled control loop to achieve relative power fluctuations down to 5×10−9 Hz−1/2 at 10 Hz and 3.5×10−9 Hz−1/2 up to several kHz, which is very close to the shot-noise limit for 80 mA of detected photocurrent on each detector. We investigated and eliminated several noise sources such as ground loops and beam pointing. The achieved stability level is close to the requirements for the Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detector

Optical ac coupling to overcome limitations in the detection of optical power fluctuations

A high-sensitivity detection method for optical power fluctuations is demonstrated based on photodetection in reflection of an optical resonator with a specific impedance matching. That resonator is used to reduce the carrier power reflected by the resonator while preserving the power fluctuation sidebands for frequencies above the resonator bandwidth. A sensitivity of 7×10−10 Hz−1/2 for relative power fluctuations was achieved with only 3 mA of detected photocurrent and 99.6% of the power remained for downstream experiments. As in the widely used ac coupling of electrical signals, this technique overcomes dynamic-range limits and reduces detector noise associated with large carrier amplitudes of the optical field

Laser beam quality and pointing measurement with an optical resonator

We present a compact diagnostic breadboard that is based on an optical ring resonator for measuring beam quality and pointing of single-frequency continuous wave lasers at a wavelength of 1064 nm. To determine the beam quality of the coherent test beam, this optical resonator is used to perform a mode decomposition into Hermite-Gaussian modes. For our laser system, a power fraction in the fundamental Gaussian mode of 97.2%±0.2% was measured. Residual misalignment and mis-mode-matching to the resonator as well as the astigmatism and/or ellipticity of the test beam have been determined. Numerical simulations showed that measurements of the M2 factor and transversal intensity distribution are not suitable for determining this power fraction. To measure the beam pointing, the fundamental mode of the optical resonator was used as a stable reference. The pointing of the test beam was measured with the differential wave front sensing technique up to Fourier frequencies of 1 kHz with a sensitivity to relative pointing of |epsilon|=1×10−6/sqrt(Hz)

Conversion of brain cytosol profile from fetal to adult type during the perinatal period: Taurine-NAA exchange

Mammals face drastic environmental changes at birth. Appropriate adjustments of various systems must take place rapidly to accommodate this once in a life time event. The brain undergoes significant adjustments as well, the most obvious of which is in its need to meet the drastic increase in energy consumption at the neuronal cell membrane due to the explosive increase in neural activities after birth. Actual changes were found to be taken place in two systems, namely, acid base balance control and cytosolic energy transport. The adjustments are accomplished by converting cytosol microenvironment from a taurine rich fetal type environment to an N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA) rich adult type environment during the post-natal period. High concentrations of taurine are necessary to provide effective buffering in the fetal brain, because the fetus cannot utilize the adult type of pCO2 dependent acid–base balance control system, namely respiration driven pCO2 changes. To accommodate the significantly higher demand of energy consumption at the membrane due to the increased neuronal activities, taurine has to be replaced by NAA, since the latter facilitates HEP transport from mitochondria to the membrane by passive diffusion

The Clusters AgeS Experiment (CASE). I. V209 omega Cen - An Eclipsing Post-Common Envelope Binary in the Globular Cluster omega Cen

We use photometric and spectroscopic observations of the detached eclipsing binary V209 omega Cen to derive the masses, radii, and luminosities of the component stars. The system exhibits total eclipses and, based on the measured systemic velocity and the derived distance, is a member of the globular cluster omega Cen. We obtain 0.945 +/- 0.043 Msun, 0.983 +/- 0.015 Rsun and 6.68 +/- 0.88 Lsun for the cooler, but larger and more luminous primary component. The secondary component has 0.144 +/- 0.008 Msun, 0.425 +/- 0.008 Rsun and 2.26 +/- 0.28 Lsun. The effective temperatures are estimated at 9370 K for the primary and at 10866 K for the secondary. On the color-magnitude diagram of the cluster, the primary component occupies a position between the tip of the blue straggler region and the extended horizontal branch while the secondary component is located close to the red border of the area occupied by hot subdwarfs. However, its radius is too large and its effective temperature is too low for it to be an sdB star. We propose a scenario leading to the formation of a system with such unusual properties with the primary component ``re-born'' from a former white dwarf which accreted a new envelope through mass transfer from its companion. The secondary star has lost most of its envelope while starting its ascent onto the sub-giant branch. It failed to ignite helium in its core and is currently powered by a hydrogen burning shell.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figures, AJ, in pres

The effect of consumer perceptions towards intention to buy air tickets online in Malaysia

Abstract As the airline industry struggles to be profitable in the face of high operating costs and intense competition, electronic ticketing has emerged to be an effective way to reduce costs. While market research shows an increasing trend among travellers to book air tickets online, they are mostly from advanced nations such as the United States and United Kingdom. Online booking is somewhat lower in Malaysia. To increase online ticket purchases in Malaysia, it is imperative to understand the factors that influence consumers’ buying intention. Academic research remains limited in Malaysia. Therefore, this paper reviews the literature on the main variables influencing online buying intention. It starts with an overview of the airline business environment, and air travellers’ behaviour pertaining to tickets booking. Subsequently, the Technology Acceptance Model and its relevant variables are discussed. Next, the research methodology and conceptual model are presented. Finally, the paper concludes with recommendations for airline companies. Keywords: air tickets, online, intentio

Enhanced dynamic bandwidth allocation proportional to queue length with threshold value for VBR traffic

In Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network, Variable Bit Rate (VBR) service category has been defined to support any application for which the end-system can benefit from statistical multiplexing, by sending information at a variable rate, and can tolerate or recover from a potentially small random loss ratio. Due to its burst characteristic, bandwidth allocation strategy is necessary in order to share the network resources with other traffics fairly. The implementation of proposed approaches; heuristic, Unused Buffer Reallocation (UnBR) and Higher-priority Queue Sharing (HQS), in bandwidth strategy perform better improvement if compare to the proposed strategy. In addition, we observed that a bandwidth strategy did not always perform well, hence, suitable strategies should be chosen depending on the different conditions in order to fulfill its network demand