Seniors and Information Technology in China

Technology, particularly information technology (IT), is changing rapidly and offers many advantages for users. IT has the potential to improve one’s quality of life, but only if used. Research has shown that, in most developed and developing nations, senior use of IT lags behind that of other segments of society. This “gray divide” is a concern for government, business, and others. Concern about senior adoption and use of IT has been the motivation for numerous studies and is the motivation for this study of Chinese seniors. This exploratory study examines urban Chinese seniors’ IT use, computers and mobile phones in particular, but also their attitudes and behaviors as they relate to the use of those devices. More specifically it examines several potential factors that motivate or hinder senior’s use of information technology, including self-efficacy, satisfaction, comfort with technology, and both positive and negative attitudes. This study provides some insight into the quantity and diversity of Chinese senior technology use in urban China. Particularly noteworthy, the study found that technology ownership was quite high, and in general the Chinese seniors studied had positive attitudes and beliefs concerning information technology. This is generally good news for the Chinese government, which must efficiently provide services for the growing population of Chinese seniors, as well as for businesses that wish to capitalize on one of the largest senior populations in the world.     

On the criteria for designing complex orthogonal space-time block codes

A complex orthogonal design (COD) used in space-time block codes is a kind of combinatorial design. It has been well studied because it has a fast maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm and achieves full diversity. When designing CODs, there are seven characteristics that should be considered, which include code rate, decoding delay, transceiver signal linearization, peak-to-average power ratio, etc. In this paper, we study the relationships among these design criteria. We prove that the maximum rate of generalized CODs (GCODs) that meet the last five criteria is 1/2. Moreover, we present a new method to construct GCODs based on CODs. Using this method on balanced complex orthogonal designs (BCODs), we obtain a novel class of GCODs that performs almost perfectly with respect to all the seven properties.     

ABC-RBF神经网络在平板坝裂缝开合度监测中的应用

为提高混凝土平板坝裂缝开合度预测精度,针对混凝土平板坝裂缝开合度监测序列呈非线性以及周期性变化的特点,将基于EMD分解优化的ABC-RBF神经网络模型应用于混凝土平板坝裂缝开合度安全监测中,对比分析普通RBF和ABC-RBF神经网络模型。结果表明,ABC-RBF神经网络模型预测误差相对较小,可用于分析混凝土平板坝裂缝开合度的安全监测。     

采煤塌陷区地形渲染研究

随着煤炭的大量开采,塌陷区逐渐增多,严重地破坏了矿区生态结构,影响了矿区及周边地区人们的生活。因此良好的塌陷区漫游系统成为了治理这些危害的关键。三维地形是可视化系统及虚拟仿真的基本组成部分,也是此次项目至关重要的一部分。针对当前三维地形及其渲染技术的研究现状,该文结合常用图形接口OPENGL,在VC＋＋6.0平台下,运用GIS技术和采煤塌陷区地形数据,对LOD技术和ROAM算法进行研究,更好地实现塌陷区漫游效果。     

基于智能手机的实时体重健康管理系统软件设计

随着生活节奏的加快,办公室人群普遍缺乏运动是诱发健康问题的主要原因。目前国内对于办公室人群的健康问题尚未引起足够重视,市场上也鲜有相关产品问世。该文基于安卓平台在智能手机上开发出一款实时体重健康管理软件,结合位于鞋垫的传感器进行数据传输,根据足底压力判断人的当前运动状态从而实时指导用户锻炼,养生等行为。结果表明,将智能手机应用于健康管理的范畴具有很强的现实意义。     

基于马尔科夫链残差修正的EMD-MELM混凝土坝位移预测模型

基于经验模态分解(EMD)、改进的极限学习机(MELM)以及马尔科夫链,提出了一种新的混合模型。由于混凝土坝的变形可看成静水压力、环境温度和时间效应而产生的变形,前两者体现总变形中的周期性分量,后者体现为总变形中的趋势性分量,所以在数据预处理阶段,利用经验模态分解技术将坝体总位移序列分解为趋势分量位移和周期分量位移,选择多项式函数预测趋势分量位移,提出了一种改进的极限学习机,即均值学习机集成(MELM),采用MELM模型对周期分量进行预测。再使用马尔科夫链修正模型对两个模型的拟合残差进行修正预测,叠加各预测值得到最终预测值。在某混凝土坝的应用表明,该组合模型的拟合及预测精度明显优于传统模型,具有操作简便、预测精度高、训练速度快等优点。     

An innovative method for dynamic update of initial water table in XXT model based on neural network technique

The initial subsurface flow of whole basin plays a quite important role in daily rainfall–runoff simulation. However, general physically based rainfall–runoff model, such as the XXT model (a hybrid model of TOPographic MODEL and the Xinanjiang model), is difficult to catch the non-linear factors and take full advantages of previous information of rainfall and runoff that is essential to the initial watershed average saturation deficit of each time step. In order to address the issue, this study selected the initial subsurface flow for the whole time series of the XXT model as the breakthrough point, and used the observed runoff and rainfall data of two days before the present day as the inputs of artificial neural network (ANN) and initial subsurface flow of the present day as the output, then integrated ANN into runoff generation module of XXT model and finally tested the integrated model for daily runoff simulation in large-scale and semi-arid Linyi watershed, eastern China. In addition, this work employ particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to seek the best combination of 6 physical parameters in XXT and a great number of weights in ANN to avoid the local optimization. The results show that the integrated model performs much better than XXT in terms of Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NE) and root mean square error (RMSE). Hence, the new integrating approach proposed here is promising for daily rainfall–runoff modeling and can be easily extended to other process-based models.     

Creating a live, public short message service corpus: the NUS SMS corpus

Short Message Service (SMS) messages are short messages sent from one person to another from their mobile phones. They represent a means of personal communication that is an important communicative artifact in our current digital era. As most existing studies have used private access to SMS corpora, comparative studies using the same raw SMS data have not been possible up to now. We describe our efforts to collect a public SMS corpus to address this problem. We use a battery of methodologies to collect the corpus, paying particular attention to privacy issues to address contributors’ concerns. Our live project collects new SMS message submissions, checks their quality, and adds valid messages. We release the resultant corpus as XML and as SQL dumps, along with monthly corpus statistics. We opportunistically collect as much metadata about the messages and their senders as possible, so as to enable different types of analyses. To date, we have collected more than 71,000 messages, focusing on English and Mandarin Chinese.     

Impacts of employee participation and trust on e-business readiness, benefits, and satisfaction

An increasing number of firms have invested large sums in implementing electronic business (e-business). Nowadays, while the e-businesses are fostering rapid industrial growth, employees are the one who factually engage with information exchange, communication and support e-business processes. However, prior literature has paid scant attention in determining e-business value and its drivers from employee perspective. Thus, the present study attempts to investigate how user participation and trust drives e-business value in terms of e-business readiness, e-business benefits, and e-business satisfaction. For this sake, data collected from 143 employees at Taiwanese IT related firms and analyzed with partial least square (PLS) structural equation approach reveal that trust and user participation were significant precursors of employee e-business satisfaction. The results strongly support the contention that trust directly affects e-business satisfaction, and indirectly affects it through e-business readiness and e-business benefits. The research model and findings will help managers implement e-business successfully and offer valuable references for researchers interested in developing related theories.     

块效应图像质量模糊评估标准

研究和讨论了图像质量评估方法,提出一种基于模糊推理的块效应评估标准。假设图像由平滑区域、边缘区域以及纹理区域等组成,而且不同的区域应采用不同的方法进行质量评估。在此基础上,给出了三个分别适用于不同区域的图像质量评估因子,并提出了一个灵活的模糊图像质量评估方法。此方法把块效应和图像本身具有的边缘分开,防止了边缘会被误认为是块效应。仿真结果表明,提出的标准对于不同的图像具有鲁棒性,有一般图像质量评价标准的性能。