Applying the Resilience to the Community Development in Taiwan

In 1999, the Shishui community in Nantou County, Taiwan was severely damaged by the 921 earthquakes, with many houses collapsing and community facilities suffering unprecedented damage. In late 2001, a community development association was established, and with the efforts of residents, the community was awarded the title of Classic Rural Area by the government in 2007, becoming a nationally recognized leisure agriculture demonstration base. However, with the subsequent reduction of external resources, continuous loss of internal talents, and operational dysfunction of community organizations, the Shishui community eventually stagnated. How can we evaluate the community\u27s resilience in this situation? This study takes the Shishui community as its research field, integrates expert and scholar research on community resilience, constructs the elements of Shishui community development resilience through in-depth interviews with community residents, and analyzes Shishui community resilience indicators using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM), with five main dimensions: sustainable development capacity, organizational leadership capacity, financial management capacity, community cohesion, and network resource capacity. Then, using the Similarity-based Importance-Performance Analysis (SBIPA) method, the study analyzes the evaluations of Shishui community residents on the satisfaction and importance of each resilience indicator. Finally, a total of 18 issues that residents consider important but have not yet reached the expected level of performance are identified, such as community resources and mechanisms to support young people returning to their hometowns and fair distribution of community resources by community organizations, which will become important directions for future community governance improvement

2D-3D Interlaced Transformer for Point Cloud Segmentation with Scene-Level Supervision

We present a Multimodal Interlaced Transformer (MIT) that jointly considers 2D and 3D data for weakly supervised point cloud segmentation. Research studies have shown that 2D and 3D features are complementary for point cloud segmentation. However, existing methods require extra 2D annotations to achieve 2D-3D information fusion. Considering the high annotation cost of point clouds, effective 2D and 3D feature fusion based on weakly supervised learning is in great demand. To this end, we propose a transformer model with two encoders and one decoder for weakly supervised point cloud segmentation using only scene-level class tags. Specifically, the two encoders compute the self-attended features for 3D point clouds and 2D multi-view images, respectively. The decoder implements interlaced 2D-3D cross-attention and carries out implicit 2D and 3D feature fusion. We alternately switch the roles of queries and key-value pairs in the decoder layers. It turns out that the 2D and 3D features are iteratively enriched by each other. Experiments show that it performs favorably against existing weakly supervised point cloud segmentation methods by a large margin on the S3DIS and ScanNet benchmarks. The project page will be available at https://jimmy15923.github.io/mit_web/.Comment: ICCV 2023 (main + supp). Website: https://jimmy15923.github.io/mit_web

Supporting Service Management with Service Encounters Analysis: A Case on Call Centre Outsourcing Operations

Background. A service encounter is the moment that a client directly interacts with a service firm. It is a social-oriented activity that an in-depth analysis of how the client behaved can contribute to the service quality. Objective. The primary objective of this study was to cluster the CLT into groups. The secondary objective was to discover the sequence of question types that asked in each group. Method. A real world call centre outsourcing practice and data mining techniques are used to discover client behaviour. Results. A total of 100,703 inbound calls from the call centre operational database are analyzed. 90.4% of the total calls were made by 85% of clients who used up to three business applications. 72.03% of the total calls were made by a group of clients who involved two to five question types. The clients were clustered into four groups by three behaviour variables. The sequences discovered in this study were mainly on two question types. Conclusion. The service encounter is a complex business process that an integrated perspective should be taken to analyze the dynamics among the entities involved. The client behaviour can be discovered and used as the feedback information for turning the operations in different organizational levels

Modeling Medical Summary Sharing Service with Web Services

Enterprises are entering a new Internet era. The Web, initially designed for human use, will now evolve to better support automated use. In this new era, enterprises will have the capability to assemble large-scale systems out of network-bound software components within the reach of mass-market consumers. This study aims to depict the conversations between business processes and Web service technologies, explain what and how can Web services support message sharing between business partners. A Medical Summary Sharing process from IHE is implemented with Web services technologies in a Long-Term Care Management Center setting. In this scenario, one manager in Care Management Center uses a care plan creation application to evaluate care requirements for one patient. The conversations between the application and Web services are explained using Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) in business process side and Web Services Description Language (WSDL) in technical side. We discovered that basic Web service technologies have matured enough to support enterprises in composition of Web services and further research should be made to identify novelty in using the technologies and to ensure operational quality while the services are consumed

Finite Element Simulations of Bone Temperature Rise During Bone Drilling Based on a Bone Analog

Abstract Many researchers have attempted to measure bone temperature using thermocouples; however, the limitations of thermocouples make it difficult to determine the bone temperature in the immediate vicinity of a drilled hole. This study develops a method of analysis that can be used to obtain the bone temperature rise in the immediate vicinity of a drilled hole. A three-dimensional finite element model, based on a bone analog, was used to simulate bone temperature rise during a drilling process. The effect of drilling speed on bone temperature distribution is discussed. The results indicate that, for a constant drill feed rate, the drill bit with a higher rotation speed can cause a noticeable increase in bone temperature as well as the size of the thermally affected zone. Based on the numerical results, an empirical equation is proposed to estimate the peak bone temperature using the value of the rotation drilling speed. The maximum difference between the peak bone temperatures predicted by the proposed equation and those obtained from the numerical model is less than 3.5%

Disordered Fe vacancies and superconductivity in potassium-intercalated iron selenide (K2-xFe4+ySe5)

The parent compound of an unconventional superconductor must contain unusual correlated electronic and magnetic properties of its own. In the high-Tc potassium intercalated FeSe, there has been significant debate regarding what the exact parent compound is. Our studies unambiguously show that the Fe-vacancy ordered K2Fe4Se5 is the magnetic, Mott insulating parent compound of the superconducting state. Non-superconducting K2Fe4Se5 becomes a superconductor after high temperature annealing, and the overall picture indicates that superconductivity in K2-xFe4+ySe5 originates from the Fe-vacancy order to disorder transition. Thus, the long pending question whether magnetic and superconducting state are competing or cooperating for cuprate superconductors may also apply to the Fe-chalcogenide superconductors. It is believed that the iron selenides and related compounds will provide essential information to understand the origin of superconductivity in the iron-based superconductors, and possibly to the superconducting cuprates

Leukocyte nucleus segmentation and nucleus lobe counting

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Leukocytes play an important role in the human immune system. The family of leukocytes is comprised of lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, basophils, and neutrophils. Any infection or acute stress may increase or decrease the number of leukocytes. An increased percentage of neutrophils may be caused by an acute infection, while an increased percentage of lymphocytes can be caused by a chronic bacterial infection. It is important to realize an abnormal variation in the leukocytes. The five types of leukocytes can be distinguished by their cytoplasmic granules, staining properties of the granules, size of cell, the proportion of the nuclear to the cytoplasmic material, and the type of nucleolar lobes. The number of lobes increased when leukemia, chronic nephritis, liver disease, cancer, sepsis, and vitamin B12 or folate deficiency occurred. Clinical neutrophil hypersegmentation has been widely used as an indicator of B12 or folate deficiency.Biomedical technologists can currently recognize abnormal leukocytes using human eyes. However, the quality and efficiency of diagnosis may be compromised due to the limitations of the biomedical technologists' eyesight, strength, and medical knowledge. Therefore, the development of an automatic leukocyte recognition system is feasible and necessary. It is essential to extract the leukocyte region from a blood smear image in order to develop an automatic leukocyte recognition system. The number of lobes increased when leukemia, chronic nephritis, liver disease, cancer, sepsis, and vitamin B12 or folate deficiency occurred. Clinical neutrophil hypersegmentation has been widely used as an indicator of B12 or folate deficiency.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The purpose of this paper is to contribute an automatic leukocyte nuclei image segmentation method for such recognition technology. The other goal of this paper is to develop the method of counting the number of lobes in a cell nucleus. The experimental results demonstrated impressive segmentation accuracy.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Insensitive to the variance of images, the LNS (Leukocyte Nuclei Segmentation) method functioned well to isolate the leukocyte nuclei from a blood smear image with much better UR (Under Segmentation Rate), ER (Overall Error Rate), and RDE (Relative Distance Error). The presented LC (Lobe Counting) method is capable of splitting leukocyte nuclei into lobes. The experimental results illuminated that both methods can give expressive performances. In addition, three advanced image processing techniques were proposed as weighted Sobel operator, GDW (Gradient Direction Weight), and GBPD (Genetic-based Parameter Detector).</p

Managing cardiac arrest with refractory ventricular fibrillation in the emergency department: Conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation versus extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation

AbstractAimRefractory ventricular fibrillation, resistant to conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), is a life threatening rhythm encountered in the emergency department. Although previous reports suggest the use of extracorporeal CPR can improve the clinical outcomes in patients with prolonged cardiac arrest, the effectiveness of this novel strategy for refractory ventricular fibrillation is not known. We aimed to compare the clinical outcomes of patients with refractory ventricular fibrillation managed with conventional CPR or extracorporeal CPR in our institution.MethodThis is a retrospective chart review study from an emergency department in a tertiary referral medical center. We identified 209 patients presenting with cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation between September 2011 and September 2013. Of these, 60 patients were enrolled with ventricular fibrillation refractory to resuscitation for more than 10min. The clinical outcome of patients with ventricular fibrillation received either conventional CPR, including defibrillation, chest compression, and resuscitative medication (C-CPR, n=40) or CPR plus extracorporeal CPR (E-CPR, n=20) were compared.ResultsThe overall survival rate was 35%, and 18.3% of patients were discharged with good neurological function. The mean duration of CPR was longer in the E-CPR group than in the C-CPR group (69.90±49.6min vs 34.3±17.7min, p=0.0001). Patients receiving E-CPR had significantly higher rates of sustained return of spontaneous circulation (95.0% vs 47.5%, p=0.0009), and good neurological function at discharge (40.0% vs 7.5%, p=0.0067). The survival rate in the E-CPR group was higher (50% vs 27.5%, p=0.1512) at discharge and (50% vs 20%, p=0. 0998) at 1 year after discharge.ConclusionsThe management of refractory ventricular fibrillation in the emergency department remains challenging, as evidenced by an overall survival rate of 35% in this study. Patients with refractory ventricular fibrillation receiving E-CPR had a trend toward higher survival rates and significantly improved neurological outcomes than those receiving C-CPR