Inheritance and Innovation : A Study of the Animation Character Design Education Based on the Chinese Mythology

As the essential component of Chinese culture, Chinese mythology is the manifestation of ethnic heritage and epitome of 5000 years of history, which offers great resources and inspirations for animation creation and production. The design education is the base for the design of original animation. The educational model from traditional resources can not only exploit the innovative thinking but also dig deeply the core connotation of traditional culture aiming at aesthetic experience of the public, which can target the teaching practice integrating with art creation and market demand. Firstly, the study creates an animation mythological character design model according to the literature review to provide the operational theory for animation design education, which consists of three main parts: central idea, research method and conceptual model. Secondly, the research sums up the animation character creative process framework through the case of Shisa with the specific ideas of creative design. Four steps are used to design a mythological Character: set a scenario (Illustration), tell a story (Interpretation), write a script (Reaction), and design a character (Reflection). It has analyzed how to integrate the information about the mythology and stimulate the designers’ creative imagination in the animation character design in order to create the artworks with unique oriental charm.Theme II : Transnational Design in and around Asi

Effects of System Characteristics on Adopting Web-Based Advanced Traveller Information System: Evidence from Taiwan

This study proposes a behavioural intention model that integrates information quality, response time, and system accessibility into the original technology acceptance model (TAM) to investigate whether system characteristics affect the adoption of Web-based advanced traveller information systems (ATIS). This study empirically tests the proposed model using data collected from an online survey of Web-based advanced traveller information system users. Con­firmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement model, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to evaluate the structural model. The results indicate that three system characteristics had indirect effects on the intention to use through perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attitude toward using. Information quality was the most im­portant system characteristic factor, followed by response time and system accessibility. This study presents implica­tions for practitioners and researchers, and suggests direc­tions for future research.</p

From Technological Design to Service Innovation : A Case Study of the Development of Design Education in Taiwan

In today’s competitive market, “innovation” serves as a competitive advantage allowing companies to dominate particular market segments. Service design has increased attention in the academic and business communities over the past decade. Based on the “Taiwan experience”, the purpose of this study is to explore the development of design education by integrating the difference between technological product design and the service innovation design. Two cases are expounded for the development of Taiwan design education in this article. One is the cover design of industrial design magazine which reflected the change of product design education from function, friendly, fun, fancy to feeling. The other case is the development of The National Taiwan University of Arts which being used as an example to illustrate how to link the service innovation design and cultural and creative industries through Our Museum, Our Studio and Our Factory respectively. The results showed that the development of Taiwan design education along with the economic development from OEM, ODM, to OBM that joins design, culture, creativities and economy, and further illustrates some implications through the cultural perspective.Theme II : Transnational Design in and around Asi

Interrogation of alternative splicing events in duplicated genes during evolution

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gene duplication provides resources for developing novel genes and new functions while retaining the original functions. In addition, alternative splicing could increase the complexity of expression at the transcriptome and proteome level without increasing the number of gene copy in the genome. Duplication and alternative splicing are thought to work together to provide the diverse functions or expression patterns for eukaryotes. Previously, it was believed that duplication and alternative splicing were negatively correlated and probably interchangeable.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We look into the relationship between occurrence of alternative splicing and duplication at different time after duplication events. We found duplication and alternative splicing were indeed inversely correlated if only recently duplicated genes were considered, but they became positively correlated when we took those ancient duplications into account. Specifically, for slightly or moderately duplicated genes with gene families containing 2 - 7 paralogs, genes were more likely to evolve alternative splicing and had on average a greater number of alternative splicing isoforms after long-term evolution compared to singleton genes. On the other hand, those large gene families (contain at least 8 paralogs) had a lower proportion of alternative splicing, and fewer alternative splicing isoforms on average even when ancient duplicated genes were taken into consideration. We also found these duplicated genes having alternative splicing were under tighter evolutionary constraints compared to those having no alternative splicing, and had an enrichment of genes that participate in molecular transducer activities.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We studied the association between occurrences of alternative splicing and gene duplication. Our results implicate that there are key differences in functions and evolutionary constraints among singleton genes or duplicated genes with or without alternative splicing incidences. It implies that the gene duplication and alternative splicing may have different functional significance in the evolution of speciation diversity.</p

Dynamic region of interest transcoding for multipoint video conferencing

This paper presents a region of interest transcoding scheme for multipoint video conferencing to enhance the visual quality. In a multipoint videoconference, usually there are only one or two active conferees at one time which are the regions of interest to the other conferees involved. We propose a Dynamic Sub-Window Skipping (DSWS) scheme to firstly identify the active participants from the multiple incoming encoded video streams by calculating the motion activity of each sub-window, and secondly reduce the frame-rates of the motion inactive participants by skipping these less-important subwindows. The bits saved by the skipping operation are reallocated to the active sub-windows to enhance the regions of interest. We also propose a low-complexity scheme to compose and trace the unavailable motion vectors with a good accuracy in the dropped inactive sub-windows after performing the DSWS. Simulation results show that the proposed methods not only significantly improve the visual quality on the active subwindows without introducing serious visual quality degradation in the inactive ones, but also reduce the computational complexity and avoid whole-frame skipping. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is fully compatible with the H.263 video coding standard. 1

Competence Set Expansion Decision-making Analysis Based on Important Degree Coefficient

The talented person competence is cultivated and expanded to the actual requisite competence set that has many competence subsets，then carrying on the arrangement of these many competences subset according to its important degree coefficient for providing powerful basis to get the optimal expansion process of expanding from the obtained competence set Sk(E) to the actual requisite competence set Tr(E)．This article uses the fuzzy thought to get various competences subset important degree coefficient in the actual requisite competence set Tr(E)． Key words: Expansion of competence set, Important degree coefficient, Decision analysis Résumé: La compétence douée de personne est cultivée et étendue à l’ensemble requis réel de compétence qui comprend beaucoup de sous-ensembles. On procède ensuite à la gestion de ces sous-ensembles de compétence selon leur coefficient de degré important pour fournir la base puissante, dans le but d’obtenir le processus d’expansion optimal de l’ensemble obtenu de compétence Sk(E) à l’ensemble requis réel de compétence Tr(E). Le présent article utilise des pensées brouillées pour obtenir le coefficient de degré important de l’ensemble de compétences variées dans l’ensemble requis réel de compétence Tr(E). Mots-Clés: expansion de l’ensemble de compétence, coefficient de degré important, analyse de décisio

Ameliorative effect of Draba nemorosa extract on chronic heart failure in rats

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of Draba nemorosa extract (DNE) on oxidative stress and hemodynamics in rats with chronic congestive heart failure (CHF).Methods: Adriamycin was used to establish CHF in Sprague Dawley (SD) rat model. Six groups of SD rats were used in this study: control group, CHF group, captopril group (0.1 g/kg), as well as high-, medium- and low-dose DNE groups (5.2, 2.6 and 1.3 g/kg, respectively). Treatment for all groups lasted 4 weeks. Blood pressure and heart index were measured. In addition, serum creatine kinase (CK), superoxide dismutase (SOD), malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide (NO) and nitric oxide synthase (NOS) were determined with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits.Results: In the CHF group, arterial systolic pressure (SBP, 84.22 ± 16.23 mmHg); diastolic pressure (DBP, 77.36 ± 20.29 mmHg); mean arterial pressure (MAP, 78.45 ± 10.56 mmHg); heart rate (HR, 357.18 ± 37.34 beats/min) and left ventricular systolic peak (LVSP, 102.34 ± 16.37 mmHg) were significantly decreased (p &lt; 0.05) when compared with the control group. However, left ventricular end diastolic pressure (LVEDP, 23.38 ± 1.78 mmHg); heart index (2.74 ± 0.16 mg/g); serum CK (0.87 ± 0.15 U/mL); MDA (19.34 ± 2.57 nmol/mL), NO (38.43 ± 3.32 umol/L) and NOS (42.65 ± 3.32 U/mL) were increased. Treatment with high-dose DNE significantly ameliorated hemodynamic function, and reduced MDA (9.13 ± 2.12 nmol/mL) and NO (22.37 ± 3.16 umol/L) levels (p &lt; 0.05). High-dose DNE also led to significant decreases in CK (0.53 ± 0.35 U/mL) and NOS (24.27 ± 3.55U/mL) in the CHF rats (p &lt; 0.05).Conclusion: DNE significantly improves hemodynamic function in CHF rats. Thus, it has a potential for development into a new drug for clinical treatment of CHF.Keywords: Draba nemorosa, Adriamycin, Chronic heart failure, Hemodynamic function, Oxidative stres

A Comparative Study for 2D and 3D Computer-aided Diagnosis Methods for Solitary Pulmonary Nodules

Many computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) methods, including 2D and 3D approaches, have been proposed for solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs). However, the detection and diagnosis of SPNs remain challenging in many clinical circumstances. One goal of this work is to investigate the relative diagnostic accuracy of 2D and 3D methods. An additional goal is to develop a two-stage approach that combines the simplicity of 2D and the accuracy of 3D methods. The experimental results show statistically significant differences between the diagnostic accuracy of 2D and 3D methods. The results also show that with a very minor drop in diagnostic performance the two-stage approach can significantly reduce the number of nodules needed to be processed by the 3D method, streamlining the computational demand