20,736 research outputs found

    An Integrated Road Construction and Resource Planning Approach to the Evacuation of Victims From Single Source to Multiple Destinations

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    This paper presents our study on the emergency resource-planning problem, particularly on the development of a new approach to resource planning through contraflow techniques with consideration of the repair of damaged infrastructures. The contraflow technique is aimed at reversing traffic flows in one or more inbound lanes of a divided highway for the outbound direction. As opposed to the current literature, our approach has the following salient points: (1) simultaneous consideration of contraflow and repair of repair of roads; (2) classification of victims in terms of their problems and urgency in sending them to a safe place or place to be treated; and (3) consideration of multiple destinations for victims. A simulated experiment is also described by comparing our approach with some variations of our approach. The experimental results show that our approach can lead to a reduction in evacuation time by more than 50%, as opposed to the original resource operation on the damaged transportation network, and by about 20%, as opposed to the approach with resource replanning (only) on the damaged network. In addition, the multiobjective optimization algorithm to solve our model can be generalized to other network resource-planning problems under infrastructure damage

    Determination of the minimum number of microarray experiments for discovery of gene expression patterns

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    BACKGROUND: One type of DNA microarray experiment is discovery of gene expression patterns for a cell line undergoing a biological process over a series of time points. Two important issues with such an experiment are the number of time points, and the interval between them. In the absence of biological knowledge regarding appropriate values, it is natural to question whether the behaviour of progressively generated data may by itself determine a threshold beyond which further microarray experiments do not contribute to pattern discovery. Additionally, such a threshold implies a minimum number of microarray experiments, which is important given the cost of these experiments. RESULTS: We have developed a method for determining the minimum number of microarray experiments (i.e. time points) for temporal gene expression, assuming that the span between time points is given and the hierarchical clustering technique is used for gene expression pattern discovery. The key idea is a similarity measure for two clusterings which is expressed as a function of the data for progressive time points. While the experiments are underway, this function is evaluated. When the function reaches its maximum, it indicates the set of experiments reach a saturated state. Therefore, further experiments do not contribute to the discrimination of patterns. CONCLUSION: The method has been verified with two previously published gene expression datasets. For both experiments, the number of time points determined with our method is less than in the published experiments. It is noted that the overall approach is applicable to other clustering techniques

    Promotion of ganoderic acid production in Ganoderma sinense by the addtion of an ether extract from Eupolyphaga sinensis, a medicinal insect

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    To screen stimulators from Chinese medicinal insects for mycelial growth and ganoderic acid (GA) production by Ganoderma sinense, the fungus was inoculated into the media with and without supplementation of a medicinal insect extract. The results show that all the water and ether extracts from the medicinal insects had no significant stimulatory effect on the biomass production (P > 0.05), and the extracts of Hydrotrechus remigator and Mylabris phalerata significantly inhibited the mycelial growth. However, the ether extract of Eupolyphaga sinensis at a concentration of 60 mgL-1 led to a significant increase in GA concentration from 187.6 ± 8.32 to 251.3 ± 11.27 mgL-1 (P < 0.01). Analysis of fermentation kinetics of G. sinense suggests that glucose concentration in the E. sinensis extract treatment group decreased more quickly as compared to the control group in the last 4 days of fermentation process, while the GA biosynthesis was promoted at the same period. However, the culture pH profile was not affected by the addition of the ether extract of E. sinensis.Key words: Medicinal fungus, Ganoderma sinense, submerged fermentation, Eupolyphaga sinensis, ganoderic acid

    Evacuation Planning Based on the Contraflow Technique With Consideration of Evacuation Priorities and Traffic Setup Time

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    Evacuation planning with the contraflow technique is a complex planning problem. The problem is further complicated when more realistic situations such as evacuation priorities and the setup time for the contraflow operation are considered. Such a complex problem has yet to be discussed in the present literature. In this paper, we present a multipleobjective optimization model for this problem and a two-layer algorithm to solve this model. Experiments on three transportation networks with different network scales are presented to show the excellent performance of the proposed model and algorithm.published_or_final_versio

    华北克拉通北缘晚中生代火山岩Sr-Nd-Pb同位素填图及其构造意义

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    辽宁西部广泛分布着晚中生代火山岩,横跨华北克拉通和兴> 蒙造山带两大构造单元,一般认为它们是以在这一地区发育的两条主要断裂———西拉木伦河断裂和赤峰> 开源断裂为界。这些火山作用曾被认为是中生代伊泽奈崎板块西向或西北向消减作用的结果。在岩性上它们主要以中酸性岩石为主,玄武岩等中基性岩石较少。为查明下伏岩石圈对这些岩浆作用成因的影响,对其中的SiO2 含量 开源断裂两侧为界,两侧火山岩的同位素特征存在显著区别。南区有明显的EMI 特征并具EMI-PM 混合趋势,而北区则显示了原始或略亏损的特征。南北两区之间的过渡带(介于西拉木伦河断裂和赤峰> 开源断裂之间)则表现了同位素组成上相应的过渡特征。这一地球化学观测与已有的地质和地球物理资料颇为吻合。基于新生代幔源岩石化学反演的中国东部陆下地幔化学区划研究揭示了克拉通下(subcratonic)岩石圈地幔与EMI 存在着密切关系。本研究所提供的地球化学证据说明了采用中生代中基性岩类作为类似研究途径的可行性,并进一步提出对华北克拉通边缘中生代火山作用成因另一种可能的解释,即古消减带物质的活化有可能对华北北缘火山岩源区物质组成产生重要影响。Late Mesozoic volcanic rocks are extensively spread on both sides of northern margin of the North China Craton (NCC), where is the boundary between an Archean craton to the south and a Paleozoic orogenic belt, Xing an- Mongolia Orogenic Belt (XMOB), to the north. Two major east- west trending faults, Kaiyuan- Chifeng Fault (KCF) and Xar Moron He Fault (XHF) develop in this margin zone as a boundary between two tectonic domains. The volcanism has been thought to be the magmatic response to the west- , or no...published_or_final_versio

    Analytical technology aided optimization and scale-up of impinging jet mixer for reactive crystallization process

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    Reactive crystallization is widely used in the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Since APIs often have low solubility, traditional stirred tank reactors and the route of process operation and control using metastable zone width are not effective. The current work investigated the integration of an impinging jet mixer and a stirred tank crystallizer that can take advantage of both the reaction and crystallization characteristics, the focus being on design optimization and scale-up using process analytical techniques based on the Fourier transform Infrared spectroscopy and Focused Beam Reflectance Measurement, as well as X-ray diffraction and particle imaging Morphologi G3. The parameters for process operation and design of the impinging jet mixer were optimized. The research was carried out with reference to the manufacture of an antibiotic, sodium cefuroxime, firstly in a 1L reactor, then a 10L reactor. The crystals produced showed higher crystallinity, narrower size distribution, higher stability and purity

    Six SNPs and a TTG indel in sheep desmoglein 4 gene are in complete linkage disequilibrium

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    Desmoglein 4 (DSG4) plays an important role in the regulation of growth and differentiation of hair follicles in mammals. In this study, a 755 bp long segment of DSG4 was screened in 544 sheep sampled from nine Chinese indigenous breeds and two Western breeds using PCR-SSCP assay with three different pairs of primers. Two of the three fragments showed polymorphisms with genotypes defined as AA, AB, BB and BC, and DD, DE, and EE, respectively. Interestingly, polymorphisms in these two fragments were in strong linkage disequilibrium. Only three haplotypes were found, of which haplotype AD determined by alleles A and D was the major one in all breeds, while haplotype BE was only found in Chinese breeds that possess divergent frequencies ranging from 0.02 to 0.43; haplotype CD was very rare and present in only one Chinese sheep. Sequences of the three haplotypes showed seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and a TTG insertion/deletion (indel), leading to five amino acid substitutions and a glycine indel. Our study provides valuable genetic markers in evaluating the impact of the DSG4 gene on wool traits in sheep.Key words: Sheep, DSG4 gene, single-strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP), variation, linkage disequilibrium

    Influence of human body on massive MIMO indoor channels

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    © 2019 IEEE. Massive MIMO can dramatically improve capacity and spectral efficiency. However, it is not very clear whether it can significantly improve the signal blockage problem that exists in single antenna systems. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the human body on indoor massive MIMO channels, using practically measured channel data for a 32x8 massive MIMO system in a complex office environment. We introduce a parameter of Power Imbalance (PI) indices to estimate the wide-sense none-stationarity in multiple domains and another parameter of Channel Popularity Indices (CPI) to predict the popularity of MIMO channel. We find that in most cases, the presence of the human body still has a non- negligible negative impact. It decreases the ergodic capacity by about 8% and increases the path loss exponent by 1. In average, the ergodic capacity for NLOS channels are 15% higher than that for LOS
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