Nanomembrane‐Based,Thermal‐Transport Biosensor for Living Cells

Knowledge of materials' thermal‐transport properties, conductivity and diffusivity, is crucial for several applications within areas of biology, material science and engineering. Specifically, a microsized, flexible, biologically integrated thermal transport sensor is beneficial to a plethora of applications, ranging across plants physiological ecology and thermal imaging and treatment of cancerous cells, to thermal dissipation in flexible semiconductors and thermoelectrics. Living cells pose extra challenges, due to their small volumes and irregular curvilinear shapes. Here a novel approach of simultaneously measuring thermal conductivity and diffusivity of different materials and its applicability to single cells is demonstrated. This technique is based on increasing phonon‐boundary‐scattering rate in nanomembranes, having extremely low flexural rigidities, to induce a considerable spectral dependence of the bandgap‐emission over excitation‐laser intensity. It is demonstrated that once in contact with organic or inorganic materials, the nanomembranes' emission spectrally shift based on the material's thermal diffusivity and conductivity. This NM‐based technique is further applied to differentiate between different types and subtypes of cancer cells, based on their thermal‐transport properties. It is anticipated that this novel technique to enable an efficient single‐cell thermal targeting, allow better modeling of cellular thermal distribution and enable novel diagnostic techniques based on variations of single‐cell thermal‐transport properties.     

Tailoring Materials for Mottronics: Excess Oxygen Doping of a Prototypical Mott Insulator

The Mott transistor is a paradigm for a new class of electronic devices—often referred to by the term Mottronics—which are based on charge correlations between the electrons. Since correlation‐induced insulating phases of most oxide compounds are usually very robust, new methods have to be developed to push such materials right to the boundary to the metallic phase in order to enable the metal–insulator transition to be switched by electric gating. Here, it is demonstrated that thin films of the prototypical Mott insulator LaTiO₃ grown by pulsed laser deposition under oxygen atmosphere are readily tuned by excess oxygen doping across the line of the band‐filling controlled Mott transition in the electronic phase diagram. The detected insulator to metal transition is characterized by a strong change in resistivity of several orders of magnitude. The use of suitable substrates and capping layers to inhibit oxygen diffusion facilitates full control of the oxygen content and renders the films stable against exposure to ambient conditions. These achievements represent a significant advancement in control and tuning of the electronic properties of LaTiO_3+x thin films making it a promising channel material in future Mottronic devices.     

PRNN/ERLS-based predictive QoS-promoted DBA scheme for upstream transmission in EPON

This article proposes a PRNN/ERLS-based predictive QoS-promoted dynamic bandwidth allocation (PQ-DBA) scheme for upstream transmission in Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) systems. The proposed PQ-DBA scheme originally divides incoming packets of voice, video, data service traffic into six priorities, where packets having less room before QoS requirements violation or being in starvation situation will be dynamically promoted to high priority cycle-by-cycle. It predicts packets arriving at prediction interval for ONUs using pipeline recurrent neural network (PRNN)/extended recursive least squares (ERLS) so that the bandwidth allocation can be more up-to-date and then accurate. Simulation results show that the proposed PQ-DBA scheme achieves higher system utilization and lower average voice, video, data packet delay time than the DBAM scheme [Luo and Ansari, OSA J Opt Netw 4(9):561–572] by 4, and 21, 90, 43%, respectively, and the PQ-DBA scheme but without prediction by 2, and 26, 29, 34%, respectively.     

大尺寸TFT-LCD电视的彩色和图像增强

最近几年,薄膜晶体管液晶显示器(TFT-LCD)技术取得了快速而显著的进步,其性能超过了PDP、CRT以及投影显示。毫无疑问,TFT-LCD已经成为高清电视应用的最佳实现方案。本文将介绍进一步增强大尺寸LCD电视的彩色和图像性能的技术。     

Perspectives on crowdsourcing annotations for natural language processing

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a new method for obtaining annotations for training models for machine learning. While many variants of this process exist, they largely differ in their methods of motivating subjects to contribute and the scale of their applications. To date, there has yet to be a study that helps the practitioner to decide what form an annotation application should take to best reach its objectives within the constraints of a project. To fill this gap, we provide a faceted analysis of crowdsourcing from a practitioner’s perspective, and show how our facets apply to existing published crowdsourced annotation applications. We then summarize how the major crowdsourcing genres fill different parts of this multi-dimensional space, which leads to our recommendations on the potential opportunities crowdsourcing offers to future annotation efforts.     

Throughput-based fair bandwidth allocation in OBS networks

Fair bandwidth allocation (FBA) has been studied in optical burst switching (OBS) networks, with the main idea being to map the max-min fairness in traditional IP networks to the fair-loss probability in OBS networks. This approach has proven to be fair in terms of the bandwidth allocation for differential connections, but the use of the ErlangB formula to calculate the theoretical loss probability has made this approach applicable only to Poisson flows. Furthermore, it is necessary to have a reasonable fairness measure to evaluate FBA models. This article proposes an approach involving throughput-based-FBA, called TFBA, and recommends a new fairness measure that is based on the ratio of the actual throughput to the allocated bandwidth. An analytical model for the performance of the output link with TFBA is also proposed.     

Secure Multi-hop Data Transmission in Cognitive Radio Networks Under Attack in the Physical Layer

Wireless Personal Communications - Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) have a shortcoming in that attackers can increase their ability to disturb secondary users (SUs). This paper focuses on jamming...     

A novel reversible data hiding scheme with two-dimensional histogram shifting mechanism

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, we propose a novel reversible data hiding technique based on two-dimensional histogram shifting for quantized discrete cosine transformation...     

Air pollution,economic spillovers,and urban growth in China

This paper empirically tests the interactive effects of air pollution and economic spillovers in Chinese cities from 2003 to 2010. The results show that Chinese cities benefit from the economic spillovers from surrounding cities, but bear the costs of negative air pollution externalities created by neighboring cities. We use wind direction and the administrative boundaries of provinces to disentangle possible multicollinearity between air pollution emissions and economic spillovers across cities. However, the results could not reject the growth-restricting effects of air pollution from neighboring cities. The results imply that the development of a city surrounded by polluters is likely to be constrained.     

Phase Stability and Physical Properties of Cubic and Tetragonal ZrO2 in the System ZrO2–Y2O3–Ta2O5

The cubic ( c -ZrO₂) and tetragonal zirconia ( t -ZrO₂) phase stability regions in the system ZrO₂–Y₂O₃–Ta₂O₅ were delineated. The c -ZrO₂ solid solutions are formed with the fluorite structure. The t -ZrO₂ solid solutions having a c/a axial ratio (tetragonality) smaller than 1.0203 display high fracture toughness (5 to 14 MPa · m^1/2), and their instability/transformability to monoclinic zirconia ( m -ZrO₂) increases with increasing tetragonality. On the other hand, the t -ZrO₂ solid solutions stabilized at room temperature with tetragonality greater than 1.0203 have low toughness values (2 to 5 MPa · m^1/2), and their transformability is not related to the tetragonality.