Multispectral data restoration study

A digital resampling technique for LANDSAT data is reported that incorporates a deconvolution concept to minimize spatial and radiometric degradation of data during resampling for geometric correction. A quantitative comparison of cubic convolution and digital restoration methods establishes the latter as the superior technique

Improving the energy efficiency of room air conditioners in China: Costs and benefits

China is the world's largest consumer of room air conditioners, and it contributes about a quarter of global space cooling CO2 emissions. We model the costs and benefits of recently proposed new room air conditioner minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) in China. Our results suggest that newly proposed MEPS brings accumulative CO2 emissions reductions of 12.8% between 2019 and 2050, and accumulative bill saving of 2620 billion RMB to China's consumers. The benefits of the proposed MEPS decrease with longer MEPS revision intervals and increase with shorter intervals—indicating that the intervals should be balanced to maximize benefits while accommodating constraints due to air conditioner manufacturer design cycles. We also model potential nationwide benefits from higher MEPS. Across two increasingly aggressive MEPS scenarios, China's room air conditioner electricity consumption and CO2 emissions in 2050 are both reduced by 15–53% compared to the proposed MEPS. The highest-efficiency scenario (reaching MEPS of annual performance factor 5.4 in 2025) provides the largest long-term national benefits. These results could inform development of a Chinese regulatory regime that effectively updates room air conditioner MEPS. Because China is the world's largest manufacturer of room air conditioners, the economic, energy, and emissions benefits resulting from higher Chinese MEPS could also have a global reach

Prediction of the capacitance lineshape in two-channel quantum dots

We propose a set-up to realize two-channel Kondo physics using quantum dots. We discuss how the charge fluctuations on a small dot can be accessed by using a system of two single electron transistors arranged in parallel. We derive a microscopic Hamiltonian description of the set-up that allows us to make connection with the two-channel Anderson model (of extended use in the context of heavy-Fermion systems) and in turn make detailed predictions for the differential capacitance of the dot. We find that its lineshape, which we determined precisely, shows a robust behavior that should be experimentally verifiable.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Recognition of Human Actions in Video

Recognition and analysis of Human actions is an important task in the area of computer vision. There are many applications of this research which include surveillance systems, patient monitoring systems, human performance analysis, con tent - based image/video retrieval/storage, virtual reality and a variety of syst ems that involve interactions between persons or interactions between person and devices, etc. The need for such system is increasing day - by - day, with the increase in number of surveillance cameras deployed in public spaces. Automated systems are required that can detect, categorize and recognize human activities and request the human attention only when necessary. In this paper, important steps of such a system are described that can robustly tracks human in various environments and recognizes their actions through image sequences acquired from a single fixed camera. The overall system consists of major th ree steps: blob extraction, feature extraction, and human action recognition. Given the sequence of images, a statistical method is demonstrated to extract the blobs and to remove the shadows and highlights in order to obtain a more accurate object silhouet te. Shape context is used to extract features in next step and at - last human action is recognized using neural networ

Laparoscopic management of an endometrioma complicated by an ovarian abscess

An ovarian abscess is defined as a primary infection of the ovary without the involvement of the fallopian tube. The possible factors for the cause of ovarian abscess are: disruption of the ovarian capsule, giving access to bacteria, haematogenous and lymphatic spread. A woman with a ruptured ovarian abscess presents with features of diffuse peritonitis. An unruptured abscess is more difficult to diagnose. Unruptured abscess can be dealt with either laparotomy or laparoscopy. Ruptured ovarian abscess requires an aggressive and primarily surgical approach.

Dietary elimination of children with food protein induced gastrointestinal allergy – micronutrient adequacy with and without a hypoallergenic formula?

Background: The cornerstone for management of Food protein-induced gastrointestinal allergy (FPGIA) is dietary exclusion; however the micronutrient intake of this population has been poorly studied. We set out to determine the dietary intake of children on an elimination diet for this food allergy and hypothesised that the type of elimination diet and the presence of a hypoallergenic formula (HF) significantly impacts on micronutrient intake. Method: A prospective observational study was conducted on children diagnosed with FPIGA on an exclusion diet who completed a 3 day semi-quantitative food diary 4 weeks after commencing the diet. Nutritional intake where HF was used was compared to those without HF, with or without a vitamin and mineral supplement (VMS). Results: One-hundred-and-five food diaries were included in the data analysis: 70 boys (66.7%) with median age of 21.8 months [IQR: 10 - 67.7]. Fifty-three children (50.5%) consumed a HF and the volume of consumption was correlated to micronutrient intake. Significantly (p <0.05) more children reached their micronutrient requirements if a HF was consumed. In those without a HF, some continued not to achieve requirements in particular for vitamin D and zinc, in spite of VMS. Conclusion: This study points towards the important micronutrient contribution of a HF in children with FPIGA. Children, who are not on a HF and without a VMS, are at increased risk of low intakes in particular vitamin D and zinc. Further studies need to be performed, to assess whether dietary intake translates into actual biological deficiencies

Epistemic Schmagency?

Constructivist approaches in epistemology and ethics offer a promising account of normativity. But constructivism faces a powerful Schmagency Objection, raised by David Enoch. While Enoch’s objection has been widely discussed in the context of practical norms, no one has yet explored how the Schmagency Objection might undermine epistemic constructivism. In this paper, I rectify that gap. First, I develop the objection against a prominent form of epistemic constructivism, Belief Constitutivism. Belief Constitutivism is susceptible to a Schmagency Objection, I argue, because it locates the source of normativity in the belief rather than the agent. In the final section, I propose a version of epistemic constructivism that locates epistemic normativity as constitutive of agency. I argue that this version has the resources to respond to the Schmagency Objection

Hardness of Low Delay Network Scheduling

We consider a communication network and study the problem of designing a high-throughput and low-delay scheduling policy that only requires a polynomial amount of computation at each time step. The well-known maximum weight scheduling policy, proposed by Tassiulas and Ephremides (1992), has favorable performance in terms of throughput and delay but, for general networks, it can be computationally very expensive. A related randomized policy proposed by Tassiulas (1998) provides maximal throughput with only a small amount of computation per step, but seems to induce exponentially large average delay. These considerations raise some natural questions. Is it possible to design a policy with low complexity, high throughput, and low delay for a general network? Does Tassiulas' randomized policy result in low average delay? In this paper, we answer both of these questions negatively. We consider a wireless network operating under two alternative interference models: (a) a combinatorial model involving independent set constraints and (b) the standard SINR (signal to interference noise ratio) model. We show that unless NP ⊆ BPP (or P = NP for the case of determistic arrivals and deterministic policies), and even if the required throughput is a very small fraction of the network's capacity, there does not exist a low-delay policy whose computation per time step scales polynomially with the number of queues. In particular, the average delay of Tassiulas' randomized algorithm must grow super-polynomially. To establish our results, we employ a clever graph transformation introduced by Lund and Yannakakis (1994).National Science Foundation (U.S.). (Grant number CCF-0728554