Predicting Long‐Term Changes in Riparian Bird Communities in Floodplain Landscapes

As anthropogenic impacts on riverine ecosystems expand, both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are influenced over large spatiotemporal scales. We predicted how riparian bird communities changed in response to long‐term changes in floodplain landscapes such as woodland expansion (i.e. rapid increases in vegetation cover on gravel bars and the progress of vegetation succession due to a decrease in the frequency and magnitude of flood disturbance). To test the hypothesis that woodland expansion after dam construction reduces the abundance of gravel bar‐nesting birds and increases the abundance of forest‐nesting birds, we estimated historical changes between past and present bird abundances using species distribution models across multiple rivers that were either unregulated or regulated by dams. We created past and present vegetation maps from remote sensing images and used habitat quantities as explanatory variables in the species distribution models. As we hypothesized, the estimated abundance of gravel bar‐nesting birds decreased and that of forest‐nesting birds increased because of woodland expansion in some regulated rivers. This suggests that anthropogenic alterations of riverine conditions (e.g. dam construction) can affect terrestrial ecosystems (e.g. riparian bird communities) through changes in floodplains (e.g. woodland expansion). In addition, our findings highlight the efficacy of combining spatial and temporal analyses when examining long‐term ecological dynamics. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quantitative structural analysis of twin boundary in alpha-Zn7Sb2O12 using HAADF STEM method

The structure and composition of the 1/4{110} twin boundary in alpha-Zn7Sb2O12 have been determined by using quantitative high-angle annular dark field scanning transmission electron microscopy (HAADF STEM) analysis. The noise in the experimental HAADF STEM images is reduced by using the maximum entropy method and average processing, and the parameters used in dynamical simulations are experimentally determined. From the analysis, it has been found that octahedral sites in the twin boundary slightly shift parallel to the [110] direction, and a reduction of the Sb concentration at the octahedral sites on the plane adjacent to the twin boundary was detected. The reduction was measured from three regions in the same twin boundary, and the Sb concentrations were 4 +/- 3, 8 +/- 3 and 19 +/-2 at% from 33 at%.     

A new scaling algorithm for the maximum mean cut problem

We present a new scaling algorithm for the maximum mean cut problem. The mean of a cut is defined by the cut capacity divided by the number of arcs crossing the cut. The algorithm uses an approximate binary search and solves the circulation feasibility problem with relaxed capacity bounds. The maximum mean cut problem has recently been studied as a dual analogue of the minimum mean cycle problem in the framework of the minimum cost flow problem by Ervolina and McCormick. A networkN=(G, lower, upper) with lower and upper arc capacities is said to be -feasible ifN has a feasible circulation when we relax the capacity bounds by ; that is, we use (lower(a)- , upper(a)+) bounds instead of (lower(a), upper(a)) bounds for each arca A. During an approximate binary search we maintain two bounds,LB andUB, such thatN is LB-infeasible andUB-feasible, and we reduce the interval size (LB, UB) by at least one-third at each iteration. For a graph withn vertices, m arcs, and integer capacities bounded byU, the running time of this algorithm is O(mn log(nU). This time bound is better than the time achieved by McCormick and Ervolina under thesimilarity condition (that is,U=O(n^o(1))). Our algorithm can be naturally used for the circulation feasibility problem, and thus provides a new scaling algorithm for the minimum cut problem.Research supported by a grant-in-aid of the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan.     

Disposition of diadenosine 5',5"'-P1,P4-tetraphosphate (Ap4A) in rats

The disposition of diadenosine 5'5"'-P1,P4-tetraphosphate (Ap4A), an endogenous dinucleotide, was investigated in rats. The degradation of Ap4A in rat plasma was very rapid and could be explained by a Michaelis-Menten equation: Km and Vmax values were 1.69 micrograms/ml and 4.32 micrograms/min/ml, respectively. Ap4A was degraded in rat plasma to ATP and AMP, but not to 2 ADP molecules, and these nucleotides were further degraded through adenosine. The degradations kinetics were examined. After intravenous bolus injection, Ap4A in plasma declined rapidly and the rate of elimination was dose-dependent: the biological half-life was about 3s at the dose of 1 mg/kg and was longer at 3 mg/kg. When Ap4A was administered by intravenous infusion (0.5 or 1.0 mg/kg/min), the plasma level rapidly reached a steady-state, which then rapidly declined after stopping the infusion.     

A new approach to the design of high-Tc superconductors: Metallised interlayers

We show from muon spin relaxation (SR) studies on mercury HTS superconductors that a 50-fold increase in irreversibility field obtained by partial substitution of Re for Hg is due to metallisation of the Hg/Re layer. Induced superconductivity on this metallic layer doubles the overall superfluid density. This suggests a new approach to the design of high performance HTS materials: metallising one of the non-CuO₂ interlayers and thereby greatly enhancing the superconducting properties.     

A scalable interest-oriented peer-to-peer pub/sub network

There has been a big challenge in structured peer-to-peer overlay network research area. Generally, a structured overlay network involves nodes evenly or based on their resource availabilities, and gathers nodes?? resources to achieve some bigger tasks. The challenge here is to gather resources based on nodes?? interests, and only interested nodes are involved in a certain task. Toward this challenge, we propose a new scheme to a peer-to-peer publish/subscribe network. Publish/subscribe represents a new paradigm for distributed content delivery. It provides an alternative to address-based communication due to its ability to decouple communication between the source and the destination. We propose a Bloom filter based mapping scheme to map IDs to nodes?? interests in addition to new interest proximity metric to forward events and to build nodes?? routing tables. We also propose a new approach called ??shared interest approach?? for network discovery. To evaluate the algorithms proposed in this work, we conducted simulations in both static and dynamic settings, and found a low false positive rate. We also discuss about a well-known application called Twitter, and show how our scheme would work in a real environment.     

Unsupervised WSD by Finding the Predominant Sense Using Context as a Dynamic Thesaurus

We present and analyze an unsupervised method for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Our work is based on the method presented by McCarthy et al. in 2004 for finding the predominant sense of each word in the entire corpus. Their maximization algorithm allows weighted terms (similar words) from a distributional thesaurus to accumulate a score for each ambiguous word sense, i.e., the sense with the highest score is chosen based on votes from a weighted list of terms related to the ambiguous word. This list is obtained using the distributional similarity method proposed by Lin Dekang to obtain a thesaurus. In the method of McCarthy et al., every occurrence of the ambiguous word uses the same thesaurus, regardless of the context where the ambiguous word occurs. Our method accounts for the context of a word when determining the sense of an ambiguous word by building the list of distributed similar words based on the syntactic context of the ambiguous word. We obtain a top precision of 77.54% of accuracy versus 67.10% of the original method tested on SemCor. We also analyze the effect of the number of weighted terms in the tasks of finding the Most Frecuent Sense (MFS) and WSD, and experiment with several corpora for building the Word Space Model.     

Automatic 3D model reconstruction of cutting tools from a single camera

Collision detection by machining simulation requires the 3D models of rotating cutters. However, the 3D models of a cutter and holder are not always available. In this paper, a new method is proposed to design an automatic vision-based 3D modeling system, which is able to quickly reconstruct the 3D model of a cutter and holder when they are installed onto the spindle. Only a single camera is mounted on the machine tool to capture the image of the rotating cutter and holder. By viewing the rotating cutter and holder as an object of surface of revolution, the contour of the imaged cutter and holder can be used to reconstruct the 3D model as a stack of circular cross-sections. Then the complete generating function of the cutter and holder can be recovered from the cross-sections. Finally, the 3D model of the cutter is built by rotating the generating function around the spindle axis. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method are verified by experiments on-machine using 12 kinds of cutters and holders, which can satisfy the requirement of collision detection.     

An accurate adaptive NURBS curve interpolator with real-time flexible acceleration/deceleration control

Parametric interpolation has been widely used in CNC machining because of its advantages over the traditional linear or circular interpolation. Many researchers focused on this field and have made great progress in the specific one, NURBS curve interpolation. These works greatly improved the CNC machining with constant feedrate, confined chord error and limited acceleration/deceleration. However, during CNC machining process, mechanical shocks to machine tool caused by the undesired acceleration/deceleration profile will dramatically deteriorate the surface accuracy and quality of the machined parts. This is, in most occasions, very harmful to machine tools. In this paper, an accurate adaptive NURBS curve interpolator is proposed with consideration of acceleration–deceleration control. The proposed design effectively reduces the machining shocks by constraining the machine tool jerk dynamically. Meanwhile, the constant feedrate is maintained during most time of machining process, and thus high accuracy is achieved while the feedrate profile is greatly smoothed. In order to deal with the sudden change of the acceleration/deceleration around the corner with large curvature, a real-time flexible acceleration/deceleration control scheme is introduced to adjust the feedrate correspondingly. Case study has been taken to verify the feasibility and advantages of the proposed design.     

Challenge: Concept of system life and its application to robotics

Artifact systems created by humans interact with the surrounding natural world and have a large-scale influence on our human lives. The most creditable concept to this critical issue of scientific and technological development seems to be “System Life” that is an innovative competence to be embodied into any artifact system for creating harmony in the world of natural entities and artifact systems interacting with each other. System life is defined as a seamless system of sensing, processing, activating and expressing mechanisms governed by system life information. This paper introduces a design approach of robots possessing system life. First, this paper presents the concept of system life comparing it with the conventional design methodology of intelligent systems. Second, the paper introduces an intelligent control methodology using the cubic neural network that the author developed in order to cope with unpredicted failures. Finally, the paper presents various intelligent robots, a skiing robot, autonomous soccer robots, a game playing robot, as new concrete artifact systems designed using the system life concept.