Economic Development in China and Its Implications for East Asia

Economic development in China, East Asia, trade adjustment

QUANTIFYING sEMG IN PRE-FATIGUE AND FATIGUE STATES DURING THE FASTBALL BASEBALL PITCH

Injuries to baseball pitchers typically occur as a result of constant repetitive overuse. In attempt to eventually prevent overhead throwing overuse injuries, it is important that the biomechanics and muscle activations are understood. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to describe upper and lower extremity muscle activations involved in the pitching motion while in a pre-fatigue and fatigued state. Fourteen male pitchers volunteered to participate in the study. Participants were analyzed with surface electromyography and motion analysis software. The muscle firing patterns were described during the phases of the baseball pitch while in a pre-fatigued and fatigued state

GROUND REACTION FORCES, KINEMATICS, AND MUSCLE ACTIVATIONS DURING THE SOFTBALL PITCH

Research has shown that ground reaction forces and lower extremity muscle activation are essential elements to the windmill softball pitch. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to quantify ground reaction forces, motion kinematics and muscle activations during the phases of stride foot plant to ball release of the windmill pitching motion. Ten female windmill softball pitchers participated. Fastballs for strikes were thrown and data revealed that as the windmill softball pitcher had increased ball velocity their vertical ground reaction forces also increased. As the medial forces increased the stride leg gluteus maximus had decreased activation. Proper conditioning of the lumbopelvic-hip complex, including the gluteals, is essential for injury prevention

Direct Dark Matter Detection with Velocity Distribution in the Eddington approach

Exotic dark matter together with the vacuum energy (associated with the cosmological constant) seem to dominate the Universe. Thus its direct detection is central to particle physics and cosmology. Supersymmetry provides a natural dark matter candidate, the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). One essential ingredient in obtaining the direct detection rates is the density and the velocity distribution of the LSP in our vicinity. In the present paper we study simultaneously density profiles and velocity distributions in the context of the Eddington approach. In such an approach, unlike the commonly assumed Maxwell-Boltzmann (M-B) distribution, the upper bound of the velocity arises naturally from the potential.Comment: 21 LaTex pages, 27 figure

Automatic speech recognition research at NASA-Ames Research Center

A trainable acoustic pattern recognizer manufactured by Scope Electronics is presented. The voice command system VCS encodes speech by sampling 16 bandpass filters with center frequencies in the range from 200 to 5000 Hz. Variations in speaking rate are compensated for by a compression algorithm that subdivides each utterance into eight subintervals in such a way that the amount of spectral change within each subinterval is the same. The recorded filter values within each subinterval are then reduced to a 15-bit representation, giving a 120-bit encoding for each utterance. The VCS incorporates a simple recognition algorithm that utilizes five training samples of each word in a vocabulary of up to 24 words. The recognition rate of approximately 85 percent correct for untrained speakers and 94 percent correct for trained speakers was not considered adequate for flight systems use. Therefore, the built-in recognition algorithm was disabled, and the VCS was modified to transmit 120-bit encodings to an external computer for recognition

Germination responses of a dry sclerophyll forest soil-stored seedbank to fire related cues

Fire is an integral component of many ecosystems worldwide. Many plant species require fire-related cues, primarily heat and smoke, to trigger germination. Despite the importance of this process, the responses of many Australian species to these cues are unknown. Without this knowledge fire management strategies may be developed that are inappropriate for individual species and vegetation communities. In this study we examined the responses of a dry sclerophyll forest seed bank to heat and smoke germination cues. Analysis was possible for 48 taxa within the soil seedbank with 34 of these showing a response to one or both of the germination cues. 10 species responded to the heat treatment, 11 species responded to the smoke treatment and 13 species responded to both the heat and smoke treatments. Germination cues acted independently for all species considered. Results in this study were consistent with published reports for most species, although some differences were seen at the species and genus level. The study highlights the importance of fire-related cues in enhancing germination of a large proportion of the species occurring in dry sclerophyll forests

A Field Effect Transitor based on the Mott Transition in a Molecular Layer

Here we propose and analyze the behavior of a FET--like switching device, the Mott transition field effect transistor, operating on a novel principle, the Mott metal--insulator transition. The device has FET-like characteristics with a low ``ON'' impedance and high ``OFF'' impedance. Function of the device is feasible down to nanoscale dimensions. Implementation with a class of organic charge transfer complexes is proposed.Comment: Revtex 11pages, Figures available upon reques

Decoupled and inhomogeneous gas flows in S0 galaxies

A recent analysis of the "Einstein" sample of early-type galaxies has revealed that at any fixed optical luminosity Lb S0 galaxies have lower mean X-ray luminosity Lx per unit Lb than ellipticals. Following a previous analytical investigation of this problem (Ciotti & Pellegrini 1996), we have performed 2D numerical simulations of the gas flows inside S0 galaxies in order to ascertain the effectiveness of rotation and/or galaxy flattening in reducing the Lx/Lb ratio. The flow in models without SNIa heating is considerably ordered, and essentially all the gas lost by the stars is cooled and accumulated in the galaxy center. If rotation is present, the cold material settles in a disk on the galactic equatorial plane. Models with a time decreasing SNIa heating host gas flows that can be much more complex. After an initial wind phase, gas flows in energetically strongly bound galaxies tend to reverse to inflows. This occurs in the polar regions, while the disk is still in the outflow phase. In this phase of strong decoupling, cold filaments are created at the interface between inflowing and outflowing gas. Models with more realistic values of the dynamical quantities are preferentially found in the wind phase with respect to their spherical counterparts of equal Lb. The resulting Lx of this class of models is lower than in spherical models with the same Lb and SNIa heating. At variance with cooling flow models, rotation is shown to have only a marginal effect in this reduction, while the flattening is one of the driving parameters for such underluminosity, in accordance with the analytical investigation.Comment: 32 pages LaTex file, plus 5 .ps figures and macro aasms4.sty -- Accepted on Ap

Characterizations in Domination Theory

Let G = (V,E) be a graph. A set R is a restrained dominating set (total restrained dominating set, resp.) if every vertex in V − R (V) is adjacent to a vertex in R and (every vertex in V −R) to a vertex in V −R. The restrained domination number of G (total restrained domination number of G), denoted by gamma_r(G) (gamma_tr(G)), is the smallest cardinality of a restrained dominating set (total restrained dominating set) of G. If T is a tree of order n, then gamma_r(T) is greater than or equal to (n+2)/3. We show that gamma_tr(T) is greater than or equal to (n+2)/2. Moreover, we show that if n is congruent to 0 mod 4, then gamma_tr(T) is greater than or equal to (n+2)/2 + 1. We then constructively characterize the extremal trees achieving these lower bounds. Finally, if G is a graph of order n greater than or equal to 2, such that both G and G\u27 are not isomorphic to P_3, then gamma_r(G) + gamma_r(G\u27) is greater than or equal to 4 and less than or equal to n +2. We provide a similar result for total restrained domination and characterize the extremal graphs G of order n achieving these bounds