144 research outputs found
Subject Assessment of Thermal Transition in a Museum: a Case Study
Thermal sensation and comfort evaluation schemes typically address thermally adapted people under static circumstances. A disregard of thermal evaluation processes pertaining to transitional states may result in inappropriate temperature settings, inefficient thermal control, and poor thermal comfort. Thus, recently studies have been carried out, which consider thermal perception under dynamic (transitional) conditions. This paper represents an example of such a study. It investigates people's subjective thermal sensation assessment immediately after a spatial transition, i.e., entering or exiting a building or moving between different spaces within a building. Field experiments were conducted in the Museum of Art History (Kunsthistorisches Museum) in Vienna, Austria. Multiple groups of participants moved through a predefined route throughout the building. This route involved five spatial transitions. Immediately after each transition, the participants expressed their thermal sensation vote (TSV) via a questionnaire. Participants' responses were analyzed in the context of monitored temperature differences between the spaces along the participants' route through the building
Exploring Indoor Thermal environment and cognitive performance in a short-term occupancy setting
It is general knowledge that the thermal comfort strongly influences people's wellbeing,
health, and productivity. Many studies point to a significant relationship between working performance and indoor thermal conditions. This contribution presents the results of a related large scale experiment with a group of architectural students. Participants were separated in two groups, placed in two identical rooms (seated at tables), and shown a brief video lecture. One of the test rooms was heated, the other one was cool. After watching the video, participants were asked to work on a test involving a few multiple choice and open questions. The test cells were monitored with regard to temperature, relative humidity and CO2 concentration. We discuss the test performance of the two groups of participants in the context of the corresponding indoor climate conditions
An Efficient Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking with Compressed and Event-triggered Communication
Distributed Nash equilibrium (NE) seeking problems for networked games have
been widely investigated in recent years. Despite the increasing attention,
communication expenditure is becoming a major bottleneck for scaling up
distributed approaches within limited communication bandwidth between agents.
To reduce communication cost, an efficient distributed NE seeking (ETC-DNES)
algorithm is proposed to obtain an NE for games over directed graphs, where the
communication efficiency is improved by event-triggered exchanges of compressed
information among neighbors. ETC-DNES saves communication costs in both
transmitted bits and rounds of communication. Furthermore, our method only
requires the row-stochastic property of the adjacency matrix, unlike previous
approaches that hinged on doubly-stochastic communication matrices. We provide
convergence guarantees for ETC-DNES on games with restricted strongly monotone
mappings and testify its efficiency with no sacrifice on the accuracy. The
algorithm and analysis are extended to a compressed algorithm with stochastic
event-triggered mechanism (SETC-DNES). In SETC-DNES, we introduce a random
variable in the triggering condition to further enhance algorithm efficiency.
We demonstrate that SETC-DNES guarantees linear convergence to the NE while
achieving even greater reductions in communication costs compared to ETC-DNES.
Finally, numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed
algorithms
Expression of mTOR conduction pathway in human osteosarcoma MG-63 cells and their stem cells, and the inhibitory effect of different doses of rapamycin
Purpose: To investigate the expressions of rapamycin target protein (mTOR) conduction pathway in human osteosarcoma MG-63 cells and their stem cells, and to examine the inhibitory effect of different doses of rapamycin.Methods: mTOR mRNA in osteosarcoma stem-like cells and human osteosarcoma MG-63 cells were determined by quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The cells were treated with different doses of rapamycin and divided into low dose group (0.5 mg), medium dose group (1.0 mg), high dose group (2.0 mg) and blank (control) group. Apoptosis and cell cycle of MG-63 cells were determined by flow cytometry, while proliferation of MG-63 cells up was assessed by CCK-8 kit.Results: mTOR in human osteosarcoma MG-63 cells was significantly lower than that in osteosarcoma stem-like cells. Compared with the control group, mRNA expression levels of mTOR in MG-63 cells and osteosarcoma stem-like cells were significantly decreased after treatment with different concentrations of rapamycin (p < 0.05). MG-63 cells treated with various doses of rapamycin exhibited a significant decrease in their proliferation, compared with control group, while only the high rapamycin concentration group exhibited a significant decrease in osteosarcoma stem-like cell proliferation (p < 0.05). Treatment with rapamycin in MG-63 cells and osteosarcoma stem-like cells resulted in a significant increase in apoptosis, prolonged G0/G1 phase and shortened S phase (p < 0.05).Conclusion: Rapamycin inhibits the expression of mTOR mRNA in osteosarcoma stem-like and MG-63 cells. It also inhibits the proliferation and cell cycle formation of osteosarcoma stem-like cells and MG-63 cells via mTOR signal pathway. These findings may provide a new target for the treatment of osteosarcoma
Conglomerate Multi-Fidelity Gaussian Process Modeling, with Application to Heavy-Ion Collisions
In an era where scientific experimentation is often costly, multi-fidelity
emulation provides a powerful tool for predictive scientific computing. While
there has been notable work on multi-fidelity modeling, existing models do not
incorporate an important ``conglomerate'' property of multi-fidelity
simulators, where the accuracies of different simulator components (modeling
separate physics) are controlled by different fidelity parameters. Such
conglomerate simulators are widely encountered in complex nuclear physics and
astrophysics applications. We thus propose a new CONglomerate multi-FIdelity
Gaussian process (CONFIG) model, which embeds this conglomerate structure
within a novel non-stationary covariance function. We show that the proposed
CONFIG model can capture prior knowledge on the numerical convergence of
conglomerate simulators, which allows for cost-efficient emulation of
multi-fidelity systems. We demonstrate the improved predictive performance of
CONFIG over state-of-the-art models in a suite of numerical experiments and two
applications, the first for emulation of cantilever beam deflection and the
second for emulating the evolution of the quark-gluon plasma, which was
theorized to have filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang
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