Extraction of wax from sorghum bran

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1955 H78Master of Scienc

Examining Stakeholder Perspectives: Process, Performance and Progress of the Age-Friendly Taiwan Program.

Since Taiwans age-friendly city (AFC) program was launched in 2012, the central government has provided various resources to the countrys 22 local authorities, including budgetary support, policy advocacy, and consultation from a team of experts. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on the process, performance, and outcome of the AFC program. A 53-item questionnaire was developed based on the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, including mechanisms and processes (20 items), outcome evaluations (23 items), and resource integration (10 items). There was a great difference found among scores between facilitators and experts for inter-exchange experience with local and international cities (40%) and monitor and revise indicators (37%) in mechanisms and processes, evaluate performance of indicators and action plans (37%) in outcome evaluations, and interaction between government and community (46%) and interaction between civil organization and senior society (39%) in resource integration. Clearly, facilitators showed overly optimistic assessments in AFC mechanisms and processes, outcome evaluation, and resource integration. The results showed disconnect between experts expectations versus actual practice conducted by facilitators. Implications of these findings are to integrate top down expectations with the realities of bottom up practice to design more realistic evaluations; continue to educate stakeholders about design, implementation and evaluation; and further integrate resources from government, civil organizations, and community

A New Seamless Bitstream Switching Scheme for H.264 Video Adaptation with Enhanced Coding Performance

[[abstract]]In this paper, we propose a new seamless bitstream switching scheme to improve the coding performance of H.264 SP-frames for rate adaptation. Our method removes one of the two re-quantization blocks in the SP-frame encoders so as to significantly improve coding performance. The seamless switching property of SP-frames is retained by properly restructuring the primary and secondary switching frame codecs. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme achieves close coding performance to that of regular H.264 P-frames and significantly better performance than that of SP-frames. The proposed method also provides the advantage of using a single secondary switching bitstream for both switching-up and switching-down processes[[fileno]]2030144030014[[department]]電機工程學

Multi-Operator Fairness in Transparent RAN Sharing by Soft-Partition With Blocking and Dropping Mechanism

Radio access network (RAN) sharing has attracted significant attention from telecom operators as a means of accommodating data surges. However, current mechanisms for RAN sharing ignore the fairness issue among operators, and hence the RAN may be under- or over-utilized. Furthermore, the fairness among different operators cannot be guaranteed, since the RAN resources are distributed on a first come, first served basis. Accordingly, the present study proposes a “soft-partition with blocking and dropping” (SBD) mechanism that offers inter-operator fairness using a “soft-partition” approach. In particular, the operator subscribers are permitted to overuse the resources specified in the predefined service-level-agreement when the shared RAN is under-utilized, but are blocked (or even dropped) when the RAN is over-utilized. The simulation results show that SBD achieves an inter-operator fairness of 0.997, which is higher than that of both a hard-partition approach (0.98) and a no-partition approach (0.6) while maintaining a shared RAN utilization rate of 98%. Furthermore, SBD reduces the blocking rate from 35% (hard partition approach) to almost 0%, whereas controlling the dropping rate at 5%. Notably, the dropping rate can be reduced to almost 0% using a newly proposed bandwidth scale down procedure.This work was supported in part by H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL under Grant 761586, and in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under Contract MOST 106-2218- E-009-018

Ganoderma lucidum polysaccharides enhance CD14 endocytosis of LPS and promote TLR4 signal transduction of cytokine expression

We have previously reported that a well-characterized glycoprotein fraction containing fucose residues in an extract of Ganoderma lucidum polysaccharides (EORP) exerts certain immuno-modulation activity by stimulating the expression of inflammatory cytokines via TLR4. Continuing our studies, we have demonstrated that EORP increases the surface expression of CD14 and TLR4 within murine macrophages J774A.1 cells in vitro, and further promotes LPS binding and uptake by J774A.1 cells in a CD14-dependent fashion. Moreover, we observed the co-localization of internalized LPS with lysosome- and Golgi-apparatus markers within 5 min after J774A.1 cells stimulated with LPS. In addition, EORP pretreatment of J774A.1 cells and human blood-derived primary macrophages, followed by LPS stimulation, results in the super-induction of interleukin-1beta (IL-1) expression. Endocytosis inhibitors: such as cytochalasin D and colchicine effectively block EORP-enhanced LPS internalization by J774A.1 cells; yet they fail to decrease the LPS-induced phosphorylation of certain mitogen-activated protein kinases, and IL-1 mRNA and proIL-1 protein expression, indicating that LPS internalization by J774A.1 cells is not associated with LPS-dependent activation. Our current results could provide a potential EORP-associated protection mechanism for bacteria infection by enhancing IL-1 expression and the clearance of contaminated LPS by macrophages. J. Cell. Physiol. 212: 537–550, 2007. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56052/1/21050_ftp.pd

Green communication approach for the smart city using renewable energy systems

A smart city is an evolving Internet of Things (IoT) technique that links different digital gadgets via a network, offering several new services to the manufacturing and medical field to commerce. A smart city is an omnipresent and fundamental change that has altered the whole environment using Information Communication Technology (ICT) and sensor-enabled IoT gadgets. Renewable energy storage, the solar, wind, and distributed resources can be better integrated into the grid. The leading theory in the digital domain for improved and broad use of all the situations with high digital media accessibility (i.e., video, sound, words, and pictures), nevertheless it is challenging to talk freely about such small appliances because of resource constraints (starving power and battery capacity), and large quantities of the information. The green communication approach for the smart city (GCA-SC) is proposed in this article. Thus, using saved video streams to solve these difficulties is recommended by Hybrid Adaptation and Power Algorithms and Delay-tolerant Streamed Algorithms. A new architecture is similarly proposed for the smart city network. Empirical findings such as power drainage, battery capacity, latency, and bandwidth are acquired and evaluated. It was reached that, with less effort than Baseline, GCA-SC optimises energy drainage, the battery capacity, variance, power delivery ratio of the IoT compatible gadgets in the smart city environment. The simulation analysis of the proposed GCA-SC method enhances the packet delivery ratio of 39% and throughput of 99 kbps. It reduces the delay by 2.5 s and the standard deviation by −0.9 s.publishedVersio

Structural and cognitive deficits in chronic carbon monoxide intoxication: a voxel-based morphometry study

BACKGROUND: Patients with carbon monoxide (CO) intoxication may develop ongoing neurological and psychiatric symptoms that ebb and flow, a condition often called delayed encephalopathy (DE). The association between morphologic changes in the brain and neuropsychological deficits in DE is poorly understood. METHODS: Magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological tests were conducted on 11 CO patients with DE, 11 patients without DE, and 15 age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy subjects. Differences in gray matter volume (GMV) between the subgroups were assessed and further correlated with diminished cognitive functioning. RESULTS: As a group, the patients had lower regional GMV compared to controls in the following regions: basal ganglia, left claustrum, right amygdala, left hippocampus, parietal lobes, and left frontal lobe. The reduced GMV in the bilateral basal ganglia, left post-central gyrus, and left hippocampus correlated with decreased perceptual organization and processing speed function. Those CO patients characterized by DE patients had a lower GMV in the left anterior cingulate and right amygdala, as well as lower levels of cognitive function, than the non-DE patients. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with CO intoxication in the chronic stage showed a worse cognitive and morphologic outcome, especially those with DE. This study provides additional evidence of gray matter structural abnormalities in the pathophysiology of DE in chronic CO intoxicated patients