Robust and efficient video/image transmission

The Internet has become a primary medium for information transmission. The unreliability of channel conditions, limited channel bandwidth and explosive growth of information transmission requests, however, hinder its further development. Hence, research on robust and efficient delivery of video/image content is demanding nowadays. Three aspects of this task, error burst correction, efficient rate allocation and random error protection are investigated in this dissertation. A novel technique, called successive packing, is proposed for combating multi-dimensional (M-D) bursts of errors. A new concept of basis interleaving array is introduced. By combining different basis arrays, effective M-D interleaving can be realized. It has been shown that this algorithm can be implemented only once and yet optimal for a set of error bursts having different sizes for a given two-dimensional (2-D) array. To adapt to variable channel conditions, a novel rate allocation technique is proposed for FineGranular Scalability (FGS) coded video, in which real data based rate-distortion modeling is developed, constant quality constraint is adopted and sliding window approach is proposed to adapt to the variable channel conditions. By using the proposed technique, constant quality is realized among frames by solving a set of linear functions. Thus, significant computational simplification is achieved compared with the state-of-the-art techniques. The reduction of the overall distortion is obtained at the same time. To combat the random error during the transmission, an unequal error protection (UEP) method and a robust error-concealment strategy are proposed for scalable coded video bitstreams

Difluoro­[2-(quinolin-2-yl)phenolato]borane

The title compound, C15H10BF2NO, was synthesized by the reaction of 2-(quinolin-2-yl)phenol and boron trifluoride etherate. The quinoline ring system and the benzene ring are twisted, making a dihedral angle of 8.3 (2)°. In the crystal, π–π inter­actions between the aromatic rings [centroid–centroid distance = 3.638 (9) Å] link the mol­ecules into chains propagating in [100]

Entanglement criterion via general symmetric informationally complete measurements

We study the quantum separability problem by using general symmetric informationally complete measurements and present a separability criterion for arbitrary dimensional bipartite systems. We show by detailed examples that our criterion is more powerful than the existing ones in entanglement detection.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Effect of bioactive whey protein-supplemented paclitaxel on nutritional status and tumor growth in a mouse model of subcutaneously transplanted triple-negative breast cancer

Purpose: To study the effect of bioactive whey protein-supplemented paclitaxel on nutritional status and tumor growth in a mouse model of subcutaneously transplanted triple negative breast cancer (TNBC).Methods: Eighty (80) mice were equally assigned to chemotherapy and control groups. The chemotherapy-treated mice received bioactive whey protein-supplemented paclitaxel chemotherapy, while the control group received paclitaxel chemotherapy only. Differences in body weight, glutathione (GSH) contents in tumor tissue and blood, tumor volume and extent of tumor suppression, serum levels of CA153 and TSGF, and survival time were determined and compared between the two groups.Results: After 4 weeks, tumor tissue GSH was markedly lower in chemotherapy-exposed mice than in control mice, while blood GSH content in the chemotherapy group was significantly higher than that of control group (p < 0.05). After drug administration, volume of transplanted tumor and tumor weight were significantly lower in chemotherapy mice than in control mice, while levels of CA153 and TSGF in serum were down-regulated in chemotherapy-exposed mice, relative to control mice. Moreover, the mean survival time of mice in chemotherapy group was significantly longer than that in control group (p < 0.05).Conclusion: Bioactive whey protein-supplemented paclitaxel improves the nutritional status of mice, slows down weight loss, lowers the levels of tumor growth factors, suppresses tumor growth, prolongs survival period, and improves prognosis of subcutaneously transplanted triple negative breast cancer in mice. This therapeutic strategy can potentially be used. for the management of breast cancer but this requires prior successful clinical trial

That’s Mine! Employee Side Projects, Intellectual Property Ownership, and Innovation

Working on side projects outside their work hours is a growing trend for IT professionals. While employees might believe that everything they create in their spare time belongs to themselves, it is not always the case. In the legal case of Alcatel v. Brown, the court ruled that the employer owned rights to employees’ intellectual property including ideas of their side projects. Relatively little is known about how innovation activities are affected when employees are not allowed to retain the ownership of their intellectual property. We leverage the Alcatel v. Brown case as an exogenous shock and apply a difference-in-difference model to examine how the legal case affects innovation activities in different counties. We find that following Alcatel v. Brown, both patent counts and entrepreneurial activities decrease in counties where employees’ ownership of their intellectual property is not legally protected. We also find that the dampening effect is more pronounced in IT-related industries. Our work contributes to the literature on innovation management while providing practical implications for policy makers on intellectual property law

A computational study of preferential diffusion and scalar transport in nonpremixed hydrogen-air flame

The nonpremixed hydrogen-air reacting flow is simulated using three-dimensional direct numerical simulation coupled with flamelet generated manifolds based on detailed chemical kinetics. From the comparisons between one computational case taking into account preferential diffusion and another case with unity Lewis number assumption, the instantaneous results show that the flow is more vortical in the absence of preferential diffusion. This indicates that preferential diffusion may smooth the flame under certain circumstances when coupled with the intrinsic hydrodynamic instability. The flame compositional structures are also influenced by preferential diffusion in a significant manner. Further, the statistical information suggests that turbulent scalar flux is affected by preferential diffusion. The phenomenon of counter-gradient diffusion of both the conserved and non-conserved scalars can be detected for the two cases. The gradient model for scalar closure is found to be incapable of accurately predicting the scalar transport in nonpremixed hydrogen flames

An incident detection method considering meteorological factor with fuzzy logic

To improve the performance of automatic incident detection algorithm under extreme weather conditions, this paper introduces an innovative method to quantify the relationship between multiple weather parameters and the occurrence of traffic incident as the meteorological influencing factor, and combines the factor with traffic parameters to improve the effect of detection. The new algorithm consists of two modules: meteorological influencing factor module and incident detection module. The meteorological influencing factor module based on fuzzy logic is designed to determine the factor. On the basis of learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network, the new incident detection module uses the factor and traffic parameters to detect incidents. The algorithm is tested with data collected from a typical freeway in Chongqing, China. Also, the performance of the algorithm is evaluated by the common criteria of detection rate (DR), false alarm rate (FAR) and mean time to detection (MTTD). The experiments conducted on the field data study the influence of different algorithm architectures exerted on the detection performance. In addition, comparative experiments are performed. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm has higher DR, lower FAR than the contrast algorithms, and the proposed algorithm has better potential for the application of freeway automatic incident detection