Typhoons on the southeastern coast of China and Formosa

Working draftCover title"September 1955.""165"--handwritten on coverIncludes bibliographical references (p. 56-58

A Study of Effectiveness and Satisfaction Level of Cloud CRM Users in Taiwan\u27s Enterprises

Cloud computing in recent years has become a popular IT application. In Taiwan, enterprises currently using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications seek to take advantages of cloud computing features to enhance CRM effectiveness. However, despite international IT service providers’ investments in Taiwan’s market for establishing a cloud computing environment for CRM users, no statistics are available to reflect experience with actual use. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to understand the satisfaction levels of the current cloud CRM users (i.e., Taiwan’s enterprises) and to determine the key factors, which significantly affect enterprises’ managerial effectiveness and users’ satisfaction with cloud CRM. The basis for the research model is the Information System Success model and the characteristics of SaaS and CRM. This study has obtained contacts with Taiwan’s enterprises currently using cloud CRM, and the complete analyses of valid survey responses will occur shortly

The Role of Task Conflict in the Non-Colour Word Stroop Task

The aim of the current thesis was to investigate the role of task conflict in the non-colour word Stroop task using the study-test procedure that was first introduced by MacLeod (1996) and then developed by Sharma (2018). Task conflict was suggested by two findings: (a) Studied words can slow down the colour-responding to unstudied words in a block with studied words compared to those in a block without studied words; (b) Within the studied block comprising of studied and unstudied words, the slowdown can also occur on a trial-by-trial basis when responses are made to two successively presented studied words - a reversed pattern of sequential modulation effect. The thesis reports on three sets of manipulations and their effects on task conflict: the effect of using different (10 or 30) numbers of studied items (Chapter 4), the effect of varying the number of non-word rectangle stimuli (Chapter 5), and the effect of using emotionally salient words: anxiety-related and addiction-related words (Chapter 6). Chapter 4 provided further evidence of colour naming interference from studied words and a reversed sequential modulation effect. There was a tendency that using 30 words produced less task conflict than using 10 words. Chapter 5 provided some evidence that task conflict increased with an increase in the proportion of rectangle stimuli. Chapter 6 again found evidence for task conflict indicated by interference from salient and/or studied words as well as a reversed sequential modulation effect. The thesis explores how these findings can be explained by connectionist models of the Stroop task with particular emphasis on the proactive-control/task-conflict model by Kalanthroff et al. (2015). I also explore the role of individual differences and its role in top-down and bottom-up processes

GAS: Generating Fast and Accurate Surrogate Models for Autonomous Vehicle Systems

Modern autonomous vehicle systems use complex perception and control components. These components can rapidly change during development of such systems, requiring constant re-testing. Unfortunately, high-fidelity simulations of these complex systems for evaluating vehicle safety are costly. The complexity also hinders the creation of less computationally intensive surrogate models. We present GAS, the first approach for creating surrogate models of complete (perception, control, and dynamics) autonomous vehicle systems containing complex perception and/or control components. GAS's two-stage approach first replaces complex perception components with a perception model. Then, GAS constructs a polynomial surrogate model of the complete vehicle system using Generalized Polynomial Chaos (GPC). We demonstrate the use of these surrogate models in two applications. First, we estimate the probability that the vehicle will enter an unsafe state over time. Second, we perform global sensitivity analysis of the vehicle system with respect to its state in a previous time step. GAS's approach also allows for reuse of the perception model when vehicle control and dynamics characteristics are altered during vehicle development, saving significant time. We consider five scenarios concerning crop management vehicles that must not crash into adjacent crops, self driving cars that must stay within their lane, and unmanned aircraft that must avoid collision. Each of the systems in these scenarios contain a complex perception or control component. Using GAS, we generate surrogate models for these systems, and evaluate the generated models in the applications described above. GAS's surrogate models provide an average speedup of $3.7\times$ for safe state probability estimation (minimum $2.1\times$) and $1.4\times$ for sensitivity analysis (minimum $1.3\times$), while still maintaining high accuracy

Assuring Safety of Vision-Based Swarm Formation Control

Vision-based formation control systems are attractive because they can use inexpensive sensors and can work in GPS-denied environments. The safety assurance for such systems is challenging: the vision component's accuracy depends on the environment in complicated ways, these errors propagate through the system and lead to incorrect control actions, and there exists no formal specification for end-to-end reasoning. We address this problem and propose a technique for safety assurance of vision-based formation control: First, we propose a scheme for constructing quantizers that are consistent with vision-based perception. Next, we show how the convergence analysis of a standard quantized consensus algorithm can be adapted for the constructed quantizers. We use the recently defined notion of perception contracts to create error bounds on the actual vision-based perception pipeline using sampled data from different ground truth states, environments, and weather conditions. Specifically, we use a quantizer in logarithmic polar coordinates, and we show that this quantizer is suitable for the constructed perception contracts for the vision-based position estimation, where the error worsens with respect to the absolute distance between agents. We build our formation control algorithm with this nonuniform quantizer, and we prove its convergence employing an existing result for quantized consensus.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, submitted to the 2024 American Control Conference (ACC 2024

Effect of Auricular Acupressure on Peri- and Early Postmenopausal Women with Anxiety: A Double-Blinded, Randomized, and Controlled Pilot Study

We tested effects of auricular acupressure on peri- and early postmenopausal women with anxiety (PPWA). Fifty PPWA were randomly assigned to the auricular acupressure group (AG) or the sham group (SG). After 3 meals and before sleep every day for 4 weeks, the AG received auricular acupressure on the bilateral ear shenmen and subcortex points for 3 min per point on alternating ears. The SG received sham auricular acupressure. The Alprazolam was reduced from 0.5 mg/day at baseline to 0.3 mg/day 4 weeks after auricular acupressure (4 W) in the AG (P < .05) whereas maintained at 0.5 mg/day in the SG (P > .05). The Zolpidem was reduced from 3.0 mg/day at baseline to 1.5 mg/day at 4 W (P < .05) whereas was reduced from 2.4 mg/day to 1.9 mg/day at 4 W in the SG (P > .05), thus, significant tapering medication, suggesting auricular acupressure is helpful to PPWA

Epidemiology and outcomes of anal abscess in patients on chronic dialysis: a 14-year retrospective study

OBJECTIVES: We conducted this retrospective study to elucidate the clinical presentation and outcomes of anal abscess in chronic dialysis patients. METHODS: We performed a chart review of patients who were hospitalized for anal abscess from Jan. 2002 to Dec. 2015. A total of 3,074 episodes of anal abscess were identified. Of these, 43 chronic dialysis patients with first-time anal abscess were enrolled. Patients were divided into a surgical group and a nonsurgical group according to the treatment received during hospitalization. The baseline characteristics, clinical findings, treatments and outcomes were obtained and analyzed. The endpoints of this study were in-hospital mortality, one-year mortality and one-year recurrence. RESULTS: Of the 43 patients, 27 (62.7%) received surgical treatment, and 16 (37.2%) received antibiotic treatment alone. There was no significant difference in age, sex, body mass index, smoking habits, comorbidities, or dialysis characteristics between the two groups. Perianal abscess was the most common type of anal abscess, and 39.5% of patients experienced fistula formation. Most patients had mixed aerobic and anaerobic flora. Our data demonstrate that there was no significant difference in hospital stay, one-year survival or recurrence rate between the surgical group and nonsurgical group. However, there was a trend toward better in-hospital survival in patients who received surgical treatment (p=0.082). CONCLUSION: In chronic dialysis patients with anal abscess, there was no statistically significant difference in clinical presentation and outcomes between the surgical and nonsurgical groups, although the surgical group had a trend of better in-hospital survival