Incubator of Indigenous Baseball Dream: A case study of Fantasy Association in luye, Taiwan

The objective of this essay is to examine baseball incubator is facilitated by governance failure of regional policies as opposed to initiating an alternative way of living for indigenous in Eastern Taiwan. With the perspective of regional planning, the discussion focuses on how space planning affects baseball industrial development from regional to local scale. Furthermore, the cultural meaning of baseball supplements the reason that baseball turns into the answer to this declined area. Finally, the case study of the Fantasy Association would provide a possible solution to the Eastern Taiwan, the home of indigenous baseball, in this epoch of deadlock

Rhythm-Flexible Voice Conversion without Parallel Data Using Cycle-GAN over Phoneme Posteriorgram Sequences

Speaking rate refers to the average number of phonemes within some unit time, while the rhythmic patterns refer to duration distributions for realizations of different phonemes within different phonetic structures. Both are key components of prosody in speech, which is different for different speakers. Models like cycle-consistent adversarial network (Cycle-GAN) and variational auto-encoder (VAE) have been successfully applied to voice conversion tasks without parallel data. However, due to the neural network architectures and feature vectors chosen for these approaches, the length of the predicted utterance has to be fixed to that of the input utterance, which limits the flexibility in mimicking the speaking rates and rhythmic patterns for the target speaker. On the other hand, sequence-to-sequence learning model was used to remove the above length constraint, but parallel training data are needed. In this paper, we propose an approach utilizing sequence-to-sequence model trained with unsupervised Cycle-GAN to perform the transformation between the phoneme posteriorgram sequences for different speakers. In this way, the length constraint mentioned above is removed to offer rhythm-flexible voice conversion without requiring parallel data. Preliminary evaluation on two datasets showed very encouraging results.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to SLT 201

Nursing Home Organizational Characteristics and Utilization of Cancer-Related Medical Services

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S and is more common among the elderly. Since frailty and other age related conditions put the elderly at risk for nursing home care, nursing homes may be the site of care and death for many elderly cancer patients. However, there is a large gap in knowledge concerning cancer treatment of elderly nursing home residents. Since residents rely heavily on their nursing facilities, nursing homes might influence them in their treatment decisions. After controlling for resident and nursing home market characteristics, this study applies Andersen’s Behavioral Model to examine whether nursing home organizational characteristics (nurse staffing level, nursing skill mix, and quality deficiencies) are related to the use of cancer-related medical services for treatment (oncologist visits, cancer-directed surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy), and palliative care (pain medication and hospice services) among 1,183 Medicaid and Medicare insured residents of nursing homes in Michigan from 1996-2000. Using data from the Medicare claim file, Medicaid claim file, Michigan tumor registry, Area Resource File, Michigan Medicaid Nursing Home Cost Report, and Online Survey, Certification and Reporting (OSCAR), the study used logistic regression to predict the utilization of cancer-related medical services. The results generally did not support the hypotheses. Nursing staffing level and nursing skill mix did not predict any cancer-related medical service utilization. Cancer care may be more associated with patient characteristics, such as age, which are usually taken into consideration when physicians suggest treatments, than nursing home organizational characteristics. However, relative to residents of nursing homes with the highest quartile of quality deficiencies, residents of nursing homes in the lowest quartile of quality deficiencies had a decreased likelihood of utilizing hospice care (OR=.509; 95%CI=.325 to .796; p=.003). Residents in high quality nursing homes may want to stay in the same place and not transfer to another facility for hospice care while residents in poor quality nursing homes may be motivated to use hospice care. Even though this study did not successfully find that higher nurse staffing level, nursing skill mix, quality of care are associated with greater opportunity of utilizing cancer-related medical services, this study was successful in laying out an empirically sound base framework to analyze this association. Future research can incorporate other states or nationwide data to re-examine this relationship using this study as a base model

Implementation of H.264 Decoder in Bluespec SystemVerilog

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 75).In this thesis, I present a implementation of a H.264 decoder designed in Bluespec SystemVerilog, a high level hardware description language. This design is intended to serve both as a more understandable reference code, as well as a starting point for efficient hardware implementations. I illustrate this by modifying this initial design to meet a performance requirement of 720p at 60 frames per second.by Chun-Chieh Li.M.Eng

Pheromonal signaling and trans-synaptic tracing in Drosophila

Animals use olfactory cues for navigating complex environments. Food odors in particular provide crucial information regarding potential foraging sites. Many social behaviors are known to occur at such food sites, such as aggregation, courtship, and egg-laying. Yet how food odors might regulate such behaviors at these sites is unclear. Pheromones are specialized animal-derived odorants used to communicate critical social information between members of the same species. If connections exist between food odors and pheromone signaling remains largely unexplored. Using Drosophila melanogaster as an animal model, we found that Drosophila males actively deposit the pheromone 9-tricosene upon food-odor stimulation. This male specific pheromone acts as a potent aggregation pheromone for both genders, as an aphrodisiac to increase successful courtship, and as a cue to guide female oviposition decisions. We use genetic, molecular, electrophysiological, and behavioral approaches to show that 9-tricosene activates antennal basiconic Or7a receptors. We also demonstrate that loss of Or7a+ neurons or the Or7a receptor abolishes aggregation behavior and oviposition site- selection. Bioinformatic analysis of olfactory receptors indicates that Or7a is one of the most rapidly evolving odorant receptors. All together, our results indicate that 9-tricosene is a close range olfactory signal in Drosophila, deposited in response to food-odors, which influences social behaviors via the Or7a odorant receptor. Males utilize 9-tricosene to influence egg-laying site preferences in females. These studies link food-odor perception to male pheromone deposition, aggregation behavior and subsequent female decision-making. We demonstrated that Or7a+ neurons are responsible for 9-tricosene guided oviposition decisions. Recently, Or19a+ neurons were found to detect citrus fruit as oviposition substrates. Interestingly, the Or7a DL5 and Or19a DC1 projection neurons (PNs) share highly similar axonal projection patterns in the higher olfactory brain region that are distinct from previously described food and pheromone regions. Characterizing the olfactory circuits in higher olfactory centers that are activated by Or7a+ and Or19a+ neurons would reveal how chemosensory cues are processed in the oviposition decision- making process. We therefore sought to decipher the connectivity and functions of higher olfactory brain regions. To this end, my other research goal has been to develop a novel and unbiased genetically encoded method (CLAMP, Cell Labeling Across Membrane Partners) that enables the identification and functional manipulation of downstream neurons based solely on neuronal connectivity- a task not previously possible in Drosophila. This technique allows me to identify candidate second and tertiary olfactory neurons that mediate pheromone signaling and perform functional manipulation with optogenetic and thermogenetic tools. In combination with behavior assays, I will be able to decipher the full circuit basis for oviposition decision-making. Furthermore, CLAMP can also be applied to the mapping and manipulating of any uncharacterized Drosophila circuit and might be applicable in other model systems

Effect of non-lattice oxygen on ZrO2-based resistive switching memory

ZrO2-based resistive switching memory has attracted much attention according to its possible application in the next-generation nonvolatile memory. The Al/ZrO2/Pt resistive switching memory with bipolar resistive switching behavior is revealed in this work. The thickness of the ZrO2 film is only 20 nm. The device yield improved by the non-lattice oxygen existing in the ZrO2 film deposited at room temperature is firstly proposed. The stable resistive switching behavior and the long retention time with a large current ratio are also observed. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the resistive switching mechanism agrees with the formation and rupture of a conductive filament in the ZrO2 film. In addition, the Al/ZrO2/Pt resistive switching memory is also possible for application in flexible electronic equipment because it can be fully fabricated at room temperature

Submandibular Cavernous Hemangiomas with Multiple Phleboliths Masquerading as Sialolithiasis

Vasoformative tumors (almost exclusively hemangiomas) are the most common lesions of the major salivary glands during infancy and early childhood. They are more common in the parotid gland but are particularly rare in the submandibular gland. Changes in blood flow dynamics within hemangiomas result in thrombus formation and phleboliths. Hemangiomas of the salivary glands in adults are histologically unlike those in infants, the former being characteristically of the cavernous variant. Most cavernous hemangiomas require surgery since they do not show a tendency to regress. A case of an adult man with cavernous hemangioma affecting the submandibular salivary gland that clinically simulated sialolithiasis is presented to alert surgeons to the possibility of such a lesion. We describe the clinical course and review the literature