Updating geomorphic features of watersheds and their boundaries in hazardous areas using satellite synthetic aperture radar

Volcanic disasters can cause severe loss of human life and damage to property. The main damage is caused during an eruption and from subsequent erosion of deposited materials. Heavy rainfall in volcanic areas erodes volcanic deposits, mainly pyroclastic flows and ash fall deposits, which flow as lahar to the foothill of the mountain and cause drastic damage to economically important areas. This post-eruption disaster becomes complex due to the occurrence of stream captures and watershed breakouts that lead to devastating lahars. Continuous monitoring of such geomorphic and hydrologic changes is necessary to cope with changing hazard conditions. Therefore it is important to update the watershed boundaries in order to study current hazard conditions and develop mitigation plans for future disasters. Changes of geomorphic and watershed boundary have occurred in the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines mainly as a result of a major volcanic eruption of 1993, due to which mitigation structures were constructed and modified in the low lying areas. In this study interferometry was used to develop DEM from SAR data to delineate watershed boundaries. New lava flows, pyroclastic flows and lahar deposits in the watersheds were mapped using elevation changes, coherence and intensity derived from the SAR images. Updating geomorphic features of the watersheds and their boundaries using SAR provides a new weather independent alternative technique for monitoring the effect of volcanic activity.     

Esquentian of the mean by three stage procedure

Let X₁, X₂... be i.i.d. observations with mean μ and variance σ², and suppose that given a sample of size n one wishes to estimate μ by X_n, subject to the loss function L_n= A²(X_n-μ)²+n. When σ² is unknown, the optimal sample size n₀ for minimizing the risk R_n = E{L_n} cannotbe found. To resolve this problem, Robbins (1959) proposed a sequential procedure whenX_i is normally distributed, and then the asymptotic properties have been extensively studied. In this paper, we apply Hall's three stage procedure to the problem without specifying the distribution of X_i and derive the second order asymptotic expansions of the expected sample size and the risk.     

sequential estimation of the hgarginal density function for a strongly mixing process

Suppose that {X_n} is a strongly mixing process with unknow marginal density f(x) and that we estimate f(x) by a kernel estimator [fcirc]_n(x|h_n)and want to achive the MISE no larger than some preassigned postive number w. However,the appropriate sample size n^*depends on a functional of the unknow density function. Therefore some sequential procedure is required and we adopt a fully sequential procedure. In this paper we investigate the asymptotic properties of the procedure and show that the producure is asymptotically efficient in a certain sense as w→0. The results are almost the same in the i.i.d. setting. our result extend a class of models to which the methodology can be applied. For example economic variable,experiments on a single subject in which obervation are not indepent, and so on.     

Destruction of volatile organic compounds used in a semiconductorindustry by a capillary tube discharge reactor

Nonthermal plasma technologies offer an innovative approach to the problem of decomposing various volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The authors focused on DC capillary tube discharge plasma reactors to study the decomposition/destruction efficiency for toluene, EGM, trichloroethane and trichloroethylene at 50-2300 ppm levels in dry air. The effects of gas flow rate, VOC concentration and reactor operating conditions on decomposition and analysis of reactant conversion for each VOC were investigated. The results show that VOC destruction efficiency as high as 90% can be achieved, even under a short residence time (3.8 ms) with a destruction energy efficiency of up to 95 g (VOC)/kWh. Laboratory-scale plasma technology was successfully demonstrated for its potential application for VOC control in the semiconductor clean-room environment     

Novel Structures for Porous Silicon Light-Emitting Diodes

In this paper, two novel structures of porous silicon (PS) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are proposed aiming at the reduction of series resistance, R_s. The basic idea of the novel structures is to suppress the excessive growth of nanoporous silicon (nano-PS) layer that is electroluminescence- (EL-) active but highly resistive. The initial wafer of the first structure consists of a lightly-doped layer stacked on a highly-doped substrate. As a consequence of anodization, nano-PS layer is formed only in the lightly-doped layer, while meso-PS layer with moderate resistivity is formed in the highly-doped substrate. The second structure consists of alternately stacked nano- and meso-PS layers, since it is expected that multiple thin nano-PS layers connected in series are less resistive than a single thick nano-PS layer. Preliminary experimental results proved the effectiveness of these novel structures on the reduction of R_s.     

Pyrrolizidine Alkaloids Mediate Host-Plant Recognition by Ovipositing Females of an Old World Danaid Butterfly, Idea leuconoe

A giant danaid butterfly, Idea leuconoe, specializes on apocynaceous plants such as Parsonsia laevigata, which has been reported to contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids. Females of I. leuconoe deposited eggs in response to methanolic extract of P. laevigata, and subsequent bioassay-guided fractionation of the extract revealed that phytochemicals crucial for host recognition by ovipositing females are Parsonsia-specific macrocyclic pyrrolizidine alkaloids including parsonsianine, parsonsianidine, and 17-methylparsonsianidine. Parsonine, another P. laevigata pyrrolizidine component with a keto-dihydropyrrolizine moiety that is closely related in structure to male pheromones of the butterfly, and several nonhost pyrrolizidine alkaloids were entirely inactive. We interpret these data as strong evidence for an ancestral association through herbivory between danaid butterflies and pyrrolizidine alkaloids.     

Magnetic specific heat and magnetoresistance of URhSi

Specific heat of a single crystalline URhSi was measured by a relaxation method in a temperature range 0.3–25 K in magnetic fields up to 8 T applied along the two of the principal axes. The low-temperature specific heat exponentially decays with magnetic field. The decay is much faster in fields applied along the easy magnetization direction (the c-axis) than for the hard axis (the a-axis) case. A strong upturn in c_p/T versus T below 0.6 K that disappears with application of magnetic field is observed suggesting possible magnetic or superconducting phase transition at lower temperatures. The electrical resistivity in the vicinity of the ferromagnetic phase temperature is found to be reduced by more than 50% upon application of magnetic field of 8 T applied along the c-axis. URhSi represent an itinerant ferromagnetic system with influence of spin fluctuations.     

A novel method for suppressing silicidation of tungsten catalyzer during silane decomposition in Cat-CVD

Growth of tungsten silicide (WSi_x) on tungsten (W) catalyzer surface is investigated by monitoring resistance change of heated W wire in silane (SiH₄) atmosphere. To know a method suppressing the silicide formation, the effect of carbonization of W surface is also studied. Resistance change of heated W, observed in initial stage just after SiH₄ introduction, is brought about increase in power consumption due to decomposition of SiH₄. This power consumption can be drastically reduced when W surface is carbonized. Therefore, carbonization of tungsten surface is effective to stabilize the catalyzer temperature and to suppress W silicidation.     

A robot language for parts handling based on hierarchical structure of verbs

An operation-level robot language for parts handling has been developed, in which stress is laid on the systematization of the hierarchical structure of verbs (and verb phases) and the realization of and interpreter of the language for controlling a robot arm. In this research, the circumstances are defined as a robot arm, shelves (work benches), boxes and objects on a floor. In the user's programming, eighteen verbs can be utilized: [Level 3] place on, stack on, lift down, carry, direct to, put in, put out, push and draw; [Level 2] have, lift and put; [Level 1] go, raise, lower, seize (grip), detach and turn. In the system, a verb module is reduced to a sequence of the verb modules immediately one level below it, and a series of control commands to a robot controller is automatically generated.     

Position control for a linear slider with twin linear drives

In this paper, position control of a linear slider with twin linear drives is considered. Recently, for high‐speed response, several linear motors have been used for linear slider systems. In such a linear slider, if the linear drives are controlled individually, their position responses may undergo vibrational disturbance by interaction with the output of the motors. To control this vibration, this paper presents a dynamic model of a linear slider system which consists of two motion systems decoupled by coordinate transformation, and proposes a feedback controller which is designed for these two decoupled systems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by experiments. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 147(4): 68–76, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.10291