Shifting Into Gear: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating a Car Ownership Program

Offers detailed strategies for organizations pursuing car ownership programs to help low-income residents obtain vehicles for employment access and family economic improvement

Optimizing personal computer configurations with heuristic-based search methods

Given the diversity and limited compatibility for personal computer hardware, obtaining an (sub-)optimal configuration for different usage restricted to some budget limits and other possible criteria can be challenging. In this paper, we firstly formulated these common configuration problems as discrete optimization problems to flexibly add in or modify users' requirements. More interestingly, we proposed two intelligent optimizers: a simple-yet-powerful beam search method and a min-conflict heuristic-based micro-genetic algorithm (MGA) to solve this real-life optimization problem. The heuristic-based MGA consistently outperformed the beam search and branch-and-bound method in most test cases. Furthermore, our work opens up exciting directions for investigation.postprin

Combining meta-heuristics to effectively solve the vehicle routing problems with time windows

The vehicle routing problems with time windows are challenging delivery problems in which instances involving 100 customers or more can be difficult to solve. There were many interesting heuristics proposed to handle these problems effectively. In this paper, we examined two well-known meta-heuristics and carefully combined the short-term and long-term memory-like mechanisms of both methods to achieve better results. Our prototype was shown to compare favorably against the original search methods and other related search hybrids on the Solomon's test cases. More importantly, our proposal of integration opens up many exciting directions for further investigation.postprin

Spleen tyrosine kinase: a crucial player and potential therapeutic target in renal disease

Spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk), a 72 kDa cytoplasmic non-receptor protein-tyrosine kinase, plays an important role in signal transduction in a variety of cell types. Ever since its discovery in the early 1990s, there has been accumulating evidence to suggest a pathogenic role of Syk in various allergic disorders, autoimmune diseases and malignancies. Additionally, there is emerging data from both pre-clinical and clinical studies that Syk is implicated in the pathogenesis of proliferative glomerulonephritis, including anti-glomerular basement membrane (anti-GBM) disease, ANCA-associated glomerulonephritis (AAGN), lupus nephritis (LN), and immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN). Moreover, recent animal studies have shed light on the importance of Syk in mediating acute renal allograft rejection, Epstein Barr virus (EBV)-associated post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD) and kidney fibrosis. Fostamatinib, an oral Syk inhibitor, has undergone clinical testing in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), refractory immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), leukemia, and lymphoma. The recent STOP-IgAN trial showed that the addition of non-selective immunosuppressive therapy to intensive supportive care did not improve clinical outcomes in high-risk IgAN patients. A Syk-targeted approach may be beneficial and is currently being evaluated in a phase II randomized controlled trial. In this review, we will discuss the pathogenic role of Syk and potential use of Syk inhibitor in a variety of renal diseases

Icosahedral quasicrystals for visible wavelengths by optical interference holography

Quasicrystals, realized in metal alloys, are a class of lattices exhibiting symmetries that fall outside the usual classification for periodic crystals. They do not have translational symmetry and yet the lattice points are well ordered. Furthermore, they exhibit higher rotational symmetry than periodic crystals. Because of the higher symmetry (more spherical), they are more optimal than periodic crystals in achieving complete photonic bandgaps in a new class of materials called photonic crystals in which the propagation of light in certain frequency ranges is forbidden. The potential of quasicrystals has been demonstrated in two dimensions for the infrared range and, recently, in three-dimensional icosahedral quasicrystals fabricated using a stereo lithography method for the microwave range. Here, we report the fabrication and optical characterization of icosahedral quasicrystals using a holographic lithography method for the visible range. The icosahedral pattern, generated using a novel 7-beam optical interference holography, is recorded on photoresists and holographic plates. Electron micrographs of the photoresist samples show clearly the symmetry of the icosahedral quasicrytals in the submicron range, while the holographic plate samples exhibit bandgaps in the angular-dependent transmission spectra in the visible range. Calculations of the bandgaps due to reflection planes inside the icosahedral quasicrystal show good agreement with the experimental results.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

PCR amplification of alleles at locus D17S5: population genetic study in Hong Kong Chinese and detection of allelic loss in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract no. 2184published_or_final_versio