Development of the NTP Pool Project in Taiwan

Among the standard time reporting systems, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) provides an easy and accurate way for the accessing the Universal time. The NTP is taking the benefit of the pervasiveness of the computer network during the recent information-oriented modern world. The NTP Pool Project is the project to provide a distributed framework of the NTP servers. As the ever-increasing amounts of the requests of the standard time, the number of the NTP servers provided by the NTP Pool Project will be extended correspondingly. This paper will provide the detailed introduction on the framework of the NTP Pool Project, the development of the NTP Pool Project in Taiwan at the present time, and the followed by the suggestions of the implementation of the NTP pool project

Profiling time course expression of virus genes---an illustration of Bayesian inference under shape restrictions

There have been several studies of the genome-wide temporal transcriptional program of viruses, based on microarray experiments, which are generally useful in the construction of gene regulation network. It seems that biological interpretations in these studies are directly based on the normalized data and some crude statistics, which provide rough estimates of limited features of the profile and may incur biases. This paper introduces a hierarchical Bayesian shape restricted regression method for making inference on the time course expression of virus genes. Estimates of many salient features of the expression profile like onset time, inflection point, maximum value, time to maximum value, area under curve, etc. can be obtained immediately by this method. Applying this method to a baculovirus microarray time course expression data set, we indicate that many biological questions can be formulated quantitatively and we are able to offer insights into the baculovirus biology.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS258 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Evolution of Density Structure of Starless and Protostellar Cores

We present a near-infrared extinction study of nine dense cores at evolutionary stages between starless to Class I. Our results show that the density structure of all but one observed cores can be modeled with a single power law rho \propto r^p between ~ 0.2R-R of the cores. The starless cores in our sample show two different types of density structures, one follows p ~ -1.0 and the other follows p ~ -2.5, while the protostellar cores all have p ~ -2.5. The similarity between the prestellar cores with p ~ -2.5 and protostellar cores implies that those prestellar cores could be evolving towards the protostellar stage. The slope of p ~ -2.5 is steeper than that of an singular isothermal sphere, which may be interpreted with the evolutionary model of cores with finite mass.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

The squeeze film effect on micro-electromechanical resonators

The air squeeze film damping effect on the dynamic responses of clamped micro- electromechanical resonators is investigated in this study. A dynamic model for a clamped micro-electromechanical resonator with the damping consideration is derived using Lagrange’s equation. The corresponding resonator eigen solutions are formulated and solved by employing the assumed-mode method. The effect of different parameters; i.e. the resonator size, ambient temperature and pressure on the squeeze film damping characteristics were simulated and investigated. The results indicate that the squeeze film damping effect may significantly affect the dynamic responses of micro-scale electromechanical resonator

Taiwan Oscillation Network

The Taiwan Oscillation Network (TON) is a ground-based network to measure solar intensity oscillations to study the internal structure of the Sun. K-line full-disk images of 1000 pixels diameter are taken at a rate of one image per minute. Such data would provide information onp-modes withl as high as 1000. The TON will consist of six identical telescope systems at proper longitudes around the world. Three telescope systems have been installed at Teide Observatory (Tenerife), Huairou Solar Observing Station (near Beijing), and Big Bear Solar Observatory (California). The telescopes at these three sites have been taking data simultaneously since October of 1994. Anl – v diagram derived from 512 images is included to show the quality of the data