268 research outputs found
Field Monitoring in the Yilan River Experimental Watershed
Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive
Containership Flag Selection: The Opening of Direct Shipping between Taiwan and China
The signature of the cross-strait sea transport (CST) Agreement in 2008 has not only established the cross-strait direct shipping link, but also lifted the ban on the involvement of Taiwanese flagged ships to call at China’s ports. This paper focuses on the flag selection for Taiwanese container shipping companies under the provisions of the CST Agreement, and embraces the empirical investigation based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Grey Relation Analysis (GRA) with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The results show Hong Kong is the optimal choice rather than China and Taiwan. Although cross-strait shipping is highly controlled by both sides of the strait, economic factors are still taken seriously in commercial activities. Further, to assist shipping companies to get direct shipping approvals from China and revising a package of financial measures under current shipping policies are recommended for the Taiwanese government
Multi-user lattice coding for the multiple-access relay channel
This paper considers the multi-antenna multiple access relay channel (MARC),
in which multiple users transmit messages to a common destination with the
assistance of a relay. In a variety of MARC settings, the dynamic decode and
forward (DDF) protocol is very useful due to its outstanding rate performance.
However, the lack of good structured codebooks so far hinders practical
applications of DDF for MARC. In this work, two classes of structured MARC
codes are proposed: 1) one-to-one relay-mapper aided multiuser lattice coding
(O-MLC), and 2) modulo-sum relay-mapper aided multiuser lattice coding
(MS-MLC). The former enjoys better rate performance, while the latter provides
more flexibility to tradeoff between the complexity of the relay mapper and the
rate performance. It is shown that, in order to approach the rate performance
achievable by an unstructured codebook with maximum-likelihood decoding, it is
crucial to use a new K-stage coset decoder for structured O-MLC, instead of the
one-stage decoder proposed in previous works. However, if O-MLC is decoded with
the one-stage decoder only, it can still achieve the optimal DDF
diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime.
As for MS-MLC, its rate performance can approach that of the O-MLC by
increasing the complexity of the modulo-sum relay-mapper. Finally, for
practical implementations of both O-MLC and MS-MLC, practical short length
lattice codes with linear mappers are designed, which facilitate efficient
lattice decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed coding schemes
outperform existing schemes in terms of outage probabilities in a variety of
channel settings.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figure
Filter and nested-lattice code design for fading MIMO channels with side-information
Linear-assignment Gel'fand-Pinsker coding (LA-GPC) is a coding technique for
channels with interference known only at the transmitter, where the known
interference is treated as side-information (SI). As a special case of LA-GPC,
dirty paper coding has been shown to be able to achieve the optimal
interference-free rate for interference channels with perfect channel state
information at the transmitter (CSIT). In the cases where only the channel
distribution information at the transmitter (CDIT) is available, LA-GPC also
has good (sometimes optimal) performance in a variety of fast and slow fading
SI channels. In this paper, we design the filters in nested-lattice based
coding to make it achieve the same rate performance as LA-GPC in multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) channels. Compared with the random Gaussian codebooks
used in previous works, our resultant coding schemes have an algebraic
structure and can be implemented in practical systems. A simulation in a
slow-fading channel is also provided, and near interference-free error
performance is obtained. The proposed coding schemes can serve as the
fundamental building blocks to achieve the promised rate performance of MIMO
Gaussian broadcast channels with CDIT or perfect CSITComment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, Feb, 200
Cognitive Radio with Partial Channel State Information at the Transmitter
In this paper, we present the cognitive radio system design with partial
channel state information known at the transmitter (CSIT).We replace the dirty
paper coding (DPC) used in the cognitive radio with full CSIT by the linear
assignment Gel'fand-Pinsker coding (LA-GPC), which can utilize the limited
knowledge of the channel more efficiently. Based on the achievable rate derived
from the LA-GPC, two optimization problems under the fast and slow fading
channels are formulated. We derive semianalytical solutions to find the
relaying ratios and precoding coefficients. The critical observation is that
the complex rate functions in these problems are closely related to ratios of
quadratic form. Simulation results show that the proposed semi-analytical
solutions perform close to the optimal solutions found by brute-force search,
and outperform the systems based on naive DPC. Asymptotic analysis also shows
that these solutions converge to the optimal ones solved with full CSIT when
the K-factor of Rician channel approaches infinity. Moreover, a new coding
scheme is proposed to implement the LA-GPC in practice. Simulation results show
that the proposed practical coding scheme can efficiently reach the theoretical
rate performance.Comment: resubmitted to IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communications, May 200
Macrophage-released ADAMTS1 promotes muscle stem cell activation.
Coordinated activation of muscle stem cells (known as satellite cells) is critical for postnatal muscle growth and regeneration. The muscle stem cell niche is central for regulating the activation state of satellite cells, but the specific extracellular signals that coordinate this regulation are poorly understood. Here we show that macrophages at sites of muscle injury induce activation of satellite cells via expression of Adamts1. Overexpression of Adamts1 in macrophages in vivo is sufficient to increase satellite cell activation and improve muscle regeneration in young mice. We demonstrate that NOTCH1 is a target of ADAMTS1 metalloproteinase activity, which reduces Notch signaling, leading to increased satellite cell activation. These results identify Adamts1 as a potent extracellular regulator of satellite cell activation and have significant implications for understanding the regulation of satellite cell activity and regeneration after muscle injury.Satellite cells are crucial for growth and regeneration of skeletal muscle. Here the authors show that in response to muscle injury, macrophages secrete Adamts1, which induces satellite cell activation by modulating Notch1 signaling
Weekly and Holiday-Related Patterns of Panic Attacks in Panic Disorder: A Population-Based Study
Background: While chronobiological studies have reported seasonal variation in panic attacks (PA) episodes, information on the timing of PA by week-days may enable better understanding of the triggers of PA episodes and thereby provide pointers for suitable interventional approaches to minimize PA attacks. This study investigated weekly variation in potential PA admissions including associations with holidays using a population-based longitudinal, administrative claims-based dataset in an Asian population.
Methods: This study used ambulatory care data from the ‘‘Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000. We identified 993 patients with panic disorder (PD), and they had 4228 emergency room (ER) admissions for potential PA in a 3-year period between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2011. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to examine associations between the potential PA admissions and holidays/weekend days/work-days of the week.
Results: The daily mean number of potential PA admissions was 3.96 (standard deviation 2.05). One-way ANOVA showed significant differences in potential PA admissions by holiday and day of the week (p,0.001). Daily frequencies showed a trough on Wednesday-Thursday, followed by a sharp increase on Saturday and a peak on Sunday. Potential PA admissions were higher than the daily mean for the sample patients by 29.4% and 22.1%, respectively on Sundays and holidays. Furthermore, the weekly variations were similar for females and males, although females always had higher potential PA admissions on both weekdays and holidays than the males.
Conclusions: We found that potential PA admissions among persons with PD varied systematically by day of the week, with a significant peak on weekends and holidays
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