Physiological Parameters Useful to Interface with Computers to Respond to Two Dimensional Emotions

Computers may be designed to regularly observe one’s emotion and respond intelligently to his/ her negative emotion such as stress, fatigue, boredom, and etc. This certainly requires quantification of human emotion and this study aims to find out the parameters that may be useful to differentiate one’s emotion. In this study, human emotion was artificially induced by having 26 undergraduate students exposed to four different types of emotion-evoking sounds and smells. Then the participants were asked to rate subjectively their emotion that was later categorized into one of the four quadrants made up by pleasantness vs. unpleasantness and arousal vs. relaxation. Physiological changes in EEG (F3, F4, P3, and P4), EDA, ECG and skin temperature were recorded and analyzed to differentiate among two dimensional emotions. As a result, a number of physiological measures were found in this study to successfully classify two dimensional emotions

A Method for the Preparation of Differentiated transtrans-1,2-Diol Derivatives with Enantio- and Diastereocontrol

We describe a synthetic sequence that allows for the preparation of optically active $trans$-1,2-diol monosilyl ether derivatives from ketones, providing a new means for retrosynthetic simplification of differentiated diol and polyol targets. The sequence involves silyl enol ether formation, Shi asymmetric epoxidation, and then regio- and stereospecific addition of hydride, methide, or higher alkylide. The tactical combination presented has not been integrated in synthetic problem solving, so far as we are aware, but has promise for broad application.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

A Defected Ground Structure without Ground Contact Problem and Application to Branch Line Couplers

A new defected ground structure (DGS) microstrip line that is free from the ground contact problem is described together with its application example. The proposed DGS microstrip line adopts a double-layered substrate. The first layer contains the microstrip line and DGS patterns on the top and bottom planes as with the conventional DGS line. The second substrate, of which upper metal plane has already been removed, is attached to the bottom ground plane of the first layer. This structure prevents the ground plane of the first substrate with DGS patterns from making contact with the metal housing. The proposed DGS microstrip line has advantageous transmission and rejection characteristics, without the ground contact problem of DGS patterns, which has been a critical problem of previous DGS lines. A 10 dB branch line hybrid coupler is designed and measured, as an example of application of the proposed DGS microstrip line

A comparative study of the use of executive information systems between Korea and the United States

Since their conception, EIS have been developed and adopted in many firms. The importance of EIS is now increasing with the need of accessing data from many sources under the high-velocity environment. Although many of the Korean firms are now in the process of introducing EIS with the faster growing economy, most research has been conducted on the use of EIS in Western firms. This study aims to explore the current state of EIS usage in Korean firms and make a comparison with that of the United States. Based upon Watson et al. (1992), a questionnaire instrument was constructed. The questionnaires were distributed to 136 Korean companies that were reported to use EIS and 50 of the questionnaires returned. We found that there were many differences in the use of EIS between Korea and the United States. This was mainly due to the fact that the use of EIS in Korea was at a very early stage and executives in Korea did not realize and/or understand the benefits from the use of EIS yet

Impact time control based on time-to-go prediction for sea-skimming antiship missiles

This paper proposes a novel approach for guidance law design to satisfy the impact-time constraints for a certain class of homing missiles. The proposed guidance law provides proper lateral acceleration commands that make the impact time error converge to zero by the time of impact. This scheme can be applied to any existing guidance law for which a formula of predicted time to go is available. Convergence of time-to-go errors is supported by Lyapunov stability. The optimal guidance law and the impact angle control guidance law are extended by the proposed method for impact-time-control guidance and impact-time-and-angle-control guidance, respectively. The performance of the extended guidance laws is demonstrated by numerical simulation

Staphylococcal enterotoxin sensitization in a community-based population : a potential role in adult-onset asthma

Background: Recent studies suggest that Staphylococcus aureus enterotoxin sensitization is a risk factor for asthma. However, there is a paucity of epidemiologic evidence on adult-onset asthma in community-based populations. Objective: We sought to evaluate the epidemiology and the clinical significance of staphylococcal enterotoxin sensitization in community-based adult populations. Methods: The present analyses were performed using the baseline data set of Korean adult population surveys, consisting of 1080 adults (mean age=60.2years) recruited from an urban and a rural community. Questionnaires, methacholine challenge tests, and allergen skin tests were performed for defining clinical phenotypes. Sera were analysed for total IgE and enterotoxin-specific IgE using ImmunoCAP. Results: Staphylococcal enterotoxin sensitization (0.35kU/L) had a prevalence of 27.0%. Risk factors were identified as male sex, current smoking, advanced age (61years), and inhalant allergen sensitization. Current asthma was mostly adult onset (18years old) and showed independent associations with high enterotoxin-specific IgE levels in multivariate logistic regression tests. In multivariate linear regressions, staphylococcal enterotoxin-specific IgE level was identified as the major determinant factor for total IgE level. Conclusions and Clinical Relevance: Staphylococcal enterotoxin sensitization was independently associated with adult-onset asthma in adult community populations. Strong correlations between the enterotoxin-specific IgE and total IgE levels support the clinical significance. The present findings warrant further studies for the precise roles of staphylococcal enterotoxin sensitization in the asthma pathogenesis

Development of Fluorescent Probes for Cancer Cell Lines

Fluorescence imaging is a powerful tool that permits visualization of specific cell states within a population; however, existing methods for fluorescence labeling cannot be easily applied in many biological systems. Unlike antibodies, small molecule proteins can be cell permeable and therefore useful in live-cell and in vivo imaging experiments; moreover, small molecule probes do not require genetic manipulation of cells. Protein kinases are in many ways ideal targets for the development of selective fluorescent small molecule probes. This is because protein kinases are involved in most cellular processes and changes in their localization, accessibility, and abundance are associated with changes in cellular state. In addition, drug discovery and chemical biology efforts have in recent decades produced many selective, cell permeable small molecule ligands of specific cellular kinases. Here we describe our attempts to leverage existing, well-characterized kinase inhibitors to develop fluorescent small molecule probes for use as imaging tools in cancer biology. BODIPY-conjugated kinase inhibitors, such as Mps1-IN-11 and BI25362 were synthesized. Their inhibition ability and immunofluorescence staining were tested.3We demonstrated the utility of BI-BODIPY as a cell permeable probe for monitoring PLK localization. This result serves as the foundation for more sophisticated live-cell and in vivo imaging experiments that we are currently pursuing. This study also provides proof of concept for extension of this strategy to convert other small molecule kinase inhibitors to probes that can analogously be used to monitor localization of their respective kinases

Flexible Microwave Tag System Based on DGS Multiple Resonators

A new flexible microwave tag system using a frequency-scanning type RFID is proposed with multiple resonators based on defected ground structures (DGSs). The proposed system achieves fully passive tag systems using multiple resonators with a spiral-shaped DGS over a wide frequency range. The resonator implemented on the rear side of a transmission line has the advantages of excellent band notch characteristics as well as bit-error avoidance from the frequency selective reflection. In addition, the tag system is designed on a thin flexible substrate in order to be applicable for amorphous surfaces. The proposed microwave tags have been implemented with wideband antennas at 3–7 GHz on thick and thin flexible substrates. The flexibility of the thin substrate has been evaluated in terms of cognitive capability for various radiuses of curvatures. From the experimental results in an anechoic chamber, the excellent recognition of various multibits identification codes in a wireless transmission environment has been verified