An off-line large vocabulary hand-written Chinese character recognizer

An off-line hand-written Chinese character recognizer based on contextual vector quantization (CVQ) supporting a vocabulary of 4616 Chinese characters, alphanumerics and punctuation symbols has been reported. Trained with a sample for each character from each of 100 writers and tested on texts of 160000 characters written by another 200 writers, the average recognition rate is 77.2%. Two statistical language models have been investigated in this study. Their performance in terms of their capabilities in upgrading the recognition rate by 8.8% and 12.0% respectively when used as post-processors of the recognizer are reported.published_or_final_versio

A continuous Putonghua recognizer

A multi-speaker continuous Putonghua recognizer has been developed composing of 20 speaker-dependent recognizer as sub-systems. Each sub-system is a network of hidden Markov models modeling triphones as the fundamental speech units. Over 3 GB of speech data have been collected for training from twenty native Putonghua speakers reading carefully designed tests trying to include all phone-to-phone transitions in Putonghua. A Viterbi path search yields the best speech unit sequence over the HMMnet for each unknown input utterance which is then passed down to a language model for post-processing. The most suitable word sequence is determined by means of the bigram statistics of 470 word classes covering a vocabulary of over 80,000 words. An enrollment process is required for each new user to select the most suitable speaker-dependent system among the 20 sub-systems according to their recognition performance on a small quantity of speech data collected from the user.published_or_final_versio

CHINA'S AND INDIA'S PERSPECTIVES ON ARMED INTERVENTIONS IN AFRICA AND SYRIA

When both China and India sat on the United Nations Security Council in 2011–12, it deliberated whether to invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter to endorse military intervention in Africa and the Middle East. China and India demonstrated almost identical voting patterns and acquiesced to the intervention in Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and Mali but balked at an attempt in Syria. Despite their divergent political systems, what was the glue that held them together? Why were they opposed to external intervention in Syria only? Was Libya a game changer for their perception of military intervention

Why do Hong Kong patients need total hip arthroplasty? An analysis of 512 hips from 1998 to 2010

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Paediatric hepatoblastoma and hepatocellular carcinoma: retrospective study.

OBJECTIVES: To compare and contrast clinical characteristics and outcomes of hepatoblastoma or hepatocellular carcinoma in paediatric patients. DESIGN: Retrospective study. SETTING: University teaching hospital, Hong Kong. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Medical records of 22 paediatric patients with hepatoblastoma (n=11) or hepatocellular carcinoma (n=11) admitted to Queen Mary Hospital between 1989 and 2000 were reviewed. Data gathered included demographic data, results of liver function tests, hepatitis A, B, and C titres, and alpha-foetoprotein levels, and imaging studies including chest X-ray, ultrasound study, computed tomography scan, and magnetic resonance imaging/hepatic angiogram for tumour staging and resectability. RESULTS: The mean age of patients with hepatoblastoma was 18 months (range, 5 months to 3 years), while that of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma was 10.2 years (range, 2 to 16 years). Females predominated in the hepatoblastoma group (female:male, 8:3) and males in the hepatocellular carcinoma group (male:female, 10:1). None of the patients with hepatoblastoma were hepatitis B surface antigen positive, in contrast to 64% of the hepatocellular carcinoma group. Only 45% of the hepatocellular carcinomas were resectable at presentation and this figure remained unchanged following chemotherapy. A total of 91% of hepatoblastomas were resectable, four at presentation, and a further six after chemotherapy. Tumour rupture was more common in patients with hepatoblastoma than in those with hepatocellular carcinoma (36% versus 9% of cases, respectively). Mortality rates were considerably higher among the hepatocellular carcinoma group than the hepatoblastoma group in this series. CONCLUSION: Childhood hepatoblastoma and hepatocellular carcinoma differ with respect to age and tumour stage at presentation, hepatatis B surface antigen status, tendency to rupture, chemosensitivity, and prognosis.published_or_final_versio

Synthesis and photophysical properties of some conjugated polymers functionalized with ruthenium polypyridine complexes

Symposium J: Electrical, Optical and Magnetic Properties of Organic Solid-State Materials IVA series of conjugated polymers functionalized with different ruthenium polypyridine metal complexes were synthesized by the palladium catalyzed reaction. Two conjugated polymer systems have been studied: 1. poly(phenylenevinylene) with bis(2,2':6',2''-terpyridine) ruthenium (II) on the mainchain and 2. quinoxaline based polymers with tris(2,2'-bipyridine) ruthenium (II). The ruthenium polypyridine complexes exhibit a long-lived metal to ligand charge transfer excited state which can enhance the photosensitivity of the resulting polymers. Different physical properties such as the photoconductivity and charge mobility in these polymers are also studied.published_or_final_versio

Light-emitting multifunctional rhenium (I) and ruthenium (II) 2,2′-bipyridyl complexes with bipolar character

A series of multifunctional molecules consisting of hole transport, electron transport, and light-emitting moieties were synthesized and fabricated into single-layer organic light-emitting devices. The light-emitting units were based on 2,2′-bipyridine complexes of rhenium and ruthenium. It was found that, due to the bipolar character of the molecules, the charge carrier mobilities, charge injection barrier, and the device performance were improved. The electron carrier mobilities are on the order of 10-4 cm2V-1 s-1 and a maximum luminescence of 730 cd/m2 was observed. © 1999 American Institute of Physics.published_or_final_versio

Properties of a hand-printed Chinese character recognizer based on contexted vector quantization

A hand-printed Chinese character recognizer based on Contextual Vector Quantization (CVQ) has been built previously. In this paper, several properties of the recognizer will be discussed and the recognizer of 4516 Chinese characters has a successful rate of 91.0%. Then the output of the recognizer is passed to a language model which when applied to recognize a passage of about 1200 characters raises the rate from 91.5% to 97.5%.published_or_final_versio

Review article: Venous thromboembolism after total joint replacement

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