THE ACCIDENT RISK MEASURING MODEL FOR URBAN ARTERIALS

ABSTRACT In Taiwan, the fatal accident rate was 146 per million populations in 2008, roughly 1.8 times the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development average rate. Many studies have focused on traffic safety and attempted to identify methods for preventing traffic accidents. However, the analytical models used most frequently, including Statement Statistic, Regression Analysis, Factor Analysis (FA), Cluster Analysis (CA), and Data Mining, assess the correlations or relationships between one dependent variable and independent variables. Those methods cannot indentify overall causal relationships and cannot combine different accident indexes to define accident risk. This study uses Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to construct a theoretical framework for traffic accident risk analysis for urban arterials. Different accident indexes, such as accident number, fatality rate, injury rate, and casualty rate, are combined to construct an accident risk evaluation model, to explore factor significance, and to identify relationships between factors. These factors include driver characteristics, vehicle characteristics and road characteristics. This study segmented urban arterials according their geometry, and determined accident risk for each section. Analytical results show that accident risk on urban arterials can be calculated by combining accident number, injury rate, and casualty rate. Driver characteristics and road geometry, particularly the road division pattern affect accident risk significantly; however, vehicle characteristics did not, indicating that one can focus on driver behavior and road design when attempting to decrease road accident risk

Dickens and science: Summaries of contibutions related to science in "Household Words" and "All the Year Round" with an introduction

The study is an attempt to find a reasonable basis on which to form an estimate of Dickens's knowledge of science as far as it can be seen in his two weekly journals, Household Words and All the Year Round. Some recent and influential criticism on Dickens by commentators such as George Levine, Gillian Beer and their followers, has pioneered the study of Dickens and Science, and their ideas have also been popularised by Peter Ackroyd, Dickens's major biographer currently in print. They argue or imply that Dickens's knowledge of science was considerable, and that science is part of the very form of his novels, including Bleak Home, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations. However their assertion that Dickens's understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, "entropy," and Darwin's evolutionary theories in his Origin of Species (1859) have influenced his writing is highly questionable, and there is the need to examine what evidence there is for Dickens's knowledge of science in his life, letters, speeches, his library and the journals he edited. A preliminary survey of the scientific works in Dickens's library was undertaken for my M. Litt. The present study continues this work by investigating science in Dickens's journals, and by offering brief summaries of their articles on scientific subjects. An introduction discusses questions about the extent of Dickens's supervision. It looks at reasons for doubting whether it was as close as has sometimes been thought, the problems of inferring Dickens's own views on scientific subjects, and how we can decide whether the articles reflect his personal ideas about creation, man and the universe. The introduction also looks at some of the writers who contributed scientific articles; it shows that, with few exceptions, they were journalists or laymen, and examines how they conveyed to general readers accounts of the new discoveries in astronomy, geology, chemistry and physics. The relationship between Dickens's journals and his fiction is of critical significance. This cross-boundary exploration of Dickens and his journals in relation to science aims to find a reliable methodology for studying Victorian periodicals based on actual reading of them

Synthesis and Spectroscopic Calf Thymus Deoxyribonucleic Acid Binding Investigations of Luteolin – Zinc (II) Complex

A luteolin–zinc (II) (lut–Zn) complex was synthesized by the reaction of luteolin with copper acetate in alcohol. The binding mode of lut–Zn with calf thymus deoxyribonucleic acid (ctDNA) was studied by different spectroscopic methods in pH 7.4 tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane–HCl (Tris–HCl) buffer solution. Ultraviolet (UV)–visible absorption spectrophotometry and fluorescence spectroscopy as well as viscosity measurements proved the formation of lut–Zn–ctDNA complex. Binding constant (Ka) of lut–Zn–ctDNA complex was 4.29 × 104 L mol-1 (310K). Fluorophotometry measurements proved that the quenching mechanism of fluorescence of acridine orange (AO)–ctDNA by lut–Zn was static quenching. The thermodynamic parameters entropy change (∆S), enthalpy change (∆H) and Gibbs free energy (∆G) of binding reaction were calculated to be -20.87 J K-1 mol -1, -3.39 × 104 J mol-1 and -2.74 × 104 J mol-1 at 310 K, respectively. Negative values of ΔH and ΔS indicated that there were hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces in the binding reaction of lut–Zn with ctDNA. The fluorescence results and UV–visible absorption together revealed that the interaction mode of lut–Zn to ctDNA was an intercalation mode. This conclution was further confirmed by viscosity measurements

In-Band Asymmetry Compensation for Accurate Time/Phase Transport over Optical Transport Network

The demands of precise time/phase synchronization have been increasing recently due to the next generation of telecommunication synchronization. This paper studies the issues that are relevant to distributing accurate time/phase over optical transport network (OTN). Each node and link can introduce asymmetry, which affects the adequate time/phase accuracy over the networks. In order to achieve better accuracy, protocol level full timing support is used (e.g., Telecom-Boundary clock). Due to chromatic dispersion, the use of different wavelengths consequently causes fiber link delay asymmetry. The analytical result indicates that it introduces significant time error (i.e., phase offset) within 0.3397 ns/km in C-band or 0.3943 ns/km in L-band depending on the wavelength spacing. With the proposed scheme in this paper, the fiber link delay asymmetry can be compensated relying on the estimated mean fiber link delay by the Telecom-Boundary clock, while the OTN control plane is responsible for processing the fiber link delay asymmetry to determine the asymmetry compensation in the timing chain

Protection Effect of Zhen-Wu-Tang on Adriamycin-Induced Nephrotic Syndrome via Inhibiting Oxidative Lesions and Inflammation Damage

Zhen-wu-tang (ZWT), a well-known formula in China, is widely used to treat chronic kidney diseases. However, very little information on ZWT’s mechanism of action is currently available. In this study, we investigated the possible protective role and underlying mechanism of ZWT on nephrotic syndrome (NS) induced by Adriamycin (intravenous injection, 6.0 mg/kg) in rats using biochemical and histopathological approaches. ZWT decreased urine protein excretion and the serum levels of total cholesterol, triglycerides, blood urea nitrogen, and creatinine significantly in diseased rats. A decrease in plasma levels of total protein and albumin was also recorded in nephropathic rats. Pathological results show an improved pathological state and recovering glomerular structure in ZWT treatment groups. ZWT decreased renal IL-8 level but increased renal IL-4 level. In addition, rats subjected to ZWT exhibited less IgG deposition in glomerulus compared with model group. RT-PCR results showed that ZWT decreased the mRNA expression of NF-κB p65 and increased the mRNA expression of IκB. Furthermore, ZWT reduced the level of MDA and increased SOD activity. These results demonstrated that ZWT ameliorated Adriamycin-induced NS in rats possibly by inhibiting Adriamycin-induced inflammation damage, enhancing body’s antioxidant capacity, thereby protecting glomerulus from injury

Deep line art video colorization with a few references

Coloring line art images based on the colors of reference images is an important stage in animation production, which is time-consuming and tedious. In this paper, we propose a deep architecture to automatically color line art videos with the same color style as the given reference images. Our framework consists of a color transform network and a temporal refinement network based on 3U-net. The color transform network takes the target line art images as well as the line art and color images of the reference images as input, and generates corresponding target color images. To cope with the large differences between each target line art image and the reference color images, we propose a distance attention layer that utilizes non-local similarity matching to determine the region correspondences between the target image and the reference images and transforms the local color information from the references to the target. To ensure global color style consistency, we further incorporate Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) with the transformation parameters obtained from a multiple-layer AdaIN that describes the global color style of the references, extracted by an embedder network. The temporal refinement network learns spatiotemporal features through 3D convolutions to ensure the temporal color consistency of the results. Our model can achieve even better coloring results by fine-tuning the parameters with only a small number of samples when dealing with an animation of a new style. To evaluate our method, we build a line art coloring dataset

The Effectiveness of Cupping Therapy on Relieving Chronic Neck and Shoulder Pain: A Randomized Controlled Trial

The research aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cupping therapy (CT) in changes on skin surface temperature (SST) for relieving chronic neck and shoulder pain (NSP) among community residents. A single-blind experimental design constituted of sixty subjects with self-perceived NSP. The subjects were randomly allocated to two groups. The cupping group received CT at SI 15, GB 21, and LI 15 acupuncture points, and the control group received no intervention. Pain was assessed using the SST, visual analog scale (VAS), and blood pressure (BP). The main results were SST of GB 21 acupuncture point raised from 30.6°C to 32.7°C and from 30.7°C to 30.6°C in the control group. Neck pain intensity (NPI) severity scores were reduced from 9.7 to 3.6 in the cupping group and from 9.7 to 9.5 in the control group. The SST and NPI differences between the groups were statistically significant (P < 0.001). One treatment of CT is shown to increase SST. In conjunction with the physiological effect the subjective experience of NSP is reduced in intensity. Further studies are required to improve the understanding and potential long-term effects of CT