浑然—体——云南西双版纳都市车友改雅阁

“其实改装音响不是单纯地考虑如何将器材装到车上就完事,如果不能让你安装上车的器材与车自身浑然一体,那么这台音响改装车会逊色不少。”这一句话是笔者是从东明音响掌门人黄东明先生口中听到的,听完后感触很深。确实,每一台音响改装车本来就应该是一件极富美感的艺术品,当然其本质也就是声音必须得过关,而观感并不是陪衬,     

技·艺的完美结晶——Baf（百富龙）宝马专用扬声器隆重出台

宝马汽车无论是其优雅大气的外观,还是卓越的操控性能都让人为之沉醉。不过本文要为大家介绍的不是宝马的动力或者外观,而是与其原车音响有所关系。据了解,佰芙音响电子有限公司与英国汽车音响专业工程师专门针对宝马汽车音响联合开发了Baf（百富龙）-Prince（小皇子）和Noble（贵族）两款宝马汽车专配扬声器系统。     

Localized relaxation theory of circuits and its applications in electro-thermal analyses

In the high-performance IC design with increasing design complexity,it is a very important design content to efficiently analyze IC parameters.Thus,the electro-thermal (ET) analyses including power/ground (P/G) analysis and thermal analysis are hot topics in today’s IC research.Since ET analysis equation has a sparse,positive definite and strictly diagonally dominant coefficient-matrix,we prove that the ET analysis has the advantage of locality.Owing to this advantage,localized relaxation method is formally proposed,which has the same accuracy as the global relaxation done with the constraint of the same truncation error limitation.Based on the localized relaxation theory,an efficient and practical localized successive over-relaxation algorithm (LSOR2) is introduced and applied to solve the following three ET analysis problems.(1) Single-node statistical voltage analysis for over-IR-drop nodes in P/G networks;(2) single-node statistical temperature analysis for hot spots in 3D thermal analysis;(3) fast single open-defect analysis for P/G networks.A large amount of experimental data demonstrates that compared with the global successive over-relaxation (SOR) algorithm,LSOR2 can speed up 1-2 orders of magnitudes with the same accuracy in ET analyses.     

Perspective:Societally connected multimedia across cultures

The advance of the Internet in the past decade has radically changed the way people communicate and col- laborate with each other. Physical distance is no more a barrier in online social networks, but cultural differences (at the individual, community, as well as societal levels) still govern human-human interactions and must be con- sidered and leveraged in the online world. The rapid de-ployment of high-speed Internet allows humans to interact using a rich set of multimedia data such as texts, pictures, and videos. This position paper proposes to define a new research area called ’connected multimedia’, which is the study of a collection of research issues of the super-area social media that receive little attention in the literature. By connected multimedia, we mean the study of the social and technical interactions among users, multimedia data, and devices across cultures and explicitly exploiting the cultural differences. We justify why it is necessary to bring attention to this new research area and what benefits of this new research area may bring to the broader scientific research community and the humanity.     

A note on circle packing

The problem of packing circles into a domain of prescribed topology is considered. The circles need not have equal radii. The Collins-Stephenson algorithm computes such a circle packing. This algorithm is parallelized in two different ways and its performance is reported for a triangular, planar domain test case. The implementation uses the highly parallel graphics processing unit (GPU) on commodity hardware. The speedups so achieved are discussed based on a number of experiments.     

An automated, parallel processing approach to biomolecular sample preparation

Sample preparation for DNA and RNA assays is a prime candidate for laboratory automation. A novel, parallel processing device that performs the three separate liquid-handling functions necessary for such sample preparation-dispensing, pipetting, and pressurizing-is presented. The device comprises an array of fine nozzles connected by fluidic channels to automatically and precisely distribute flow between one source and an array of points. The design principles, as well as the experimental and computational methods used to develop the device, are described. Test results, including accuracy, uniformity, volume range, and timing, are presented. The functionality of the device is demonstrated by performing a solid-phase extraction of DNA with two types of microcolumns.     

Automated zebrafish chorion removal and single embryo placement: optimizing throughput of zebrafish developmental toxicity screens

The potential of the developing zebrafish model for toxicology and drug discovery is limited by inefficient approaches to manipulating and chemically exposing zebrafish embryos-namely, manual placement of embryos into 96- or 384-well plates and exposure of embryos while still in the chorion, a barrier of poorly characterized permeability enclosing the developing embryo. We report the automated dechorionation of 1600 embryos at once at 4 h postfertilization (hpf) and placement of the dechorionated embryos into 96-well plates for exposure by 6 hpf. The process removed ≥95% of the embryos from their chorions with 2% embryo mortality by 24 hpf, and 2% of the embryos malformed at 120 hpf. The robotic embryo placement allocated 6-hpf embryos to 94.7% ± 4.2% of the wells in multiple 96-well trials. The rate of embryo mortality was 2.8% (43 of 1536) from robotic handling, the rate of missed wells was 1.2% (18 of 1536), and the frequency of multipicks was <0.1%. Embryo malformations observed at 24 hpf occurred nearly twice as frequently from robotic handling (16 of 864; 1.9%) as from manual pipetting (9 of 864; 1%). There was no statistical difference between the success of performing the embryo placement robotically or manually.     

Dynex: multiplex ELISA technology

Conventional enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is a gold standard for screening antibodies and testing for protein or antigen presence. A significant limitation of this assay resides in the fact that only one analyte can be assessed per microplate well. Here, we describe and investigate a new technology consisting of an automated ELISA system in which up to 10 analytes can be measured within one single well, thus improving productivity, accuracy, and repeatability by reducing the amount of human labor required. Another strength of the platform is that a user can load any necessary sets/subsets of beads to perform required assays, with improved flexibility compared to manufactured-loaded arrays for multiplex analysis. We also demonstrate that this system can be used to determine the pathogenicity (i.e., presence of Shiga toxins) and serotype (i.e., Escherichia coli O157) of E. coli isolates.