Consultation system with contact person through on‐demand calling of a proper expert for a problem

Local branches of financial institutions offer to their customers a wide spectrum of advisory services which must be upgraded from time to time to keep up with changes in the mix of financial products offered and with the growing sophistication of the customers' inquiries. However, keeping the full staff of experts trained in various aspects of banking business is not practical from the standpoint of cost‐effectiveness, while without them it is difficult to provide high‐quality services. In this paper we propose a window consultation system for customers at the branch office using the on‐demand calling of an expert specializing in the subject related to the inquiry. The proposed system is based on the multimedia network technology and it has two main functions: selection of an on‐line expert and tele‐consultation providing the replies or expert advises to the inquiries. A customer visiting his branch office is interviewed by a clerk who determines the contents of the request and, if he is unable to give the customer satisfactory advice, contacts through the proposed system an appropriate expert. This system makes it possible to provide high‐quality services and to avoid mistakes, which can be made by customers if they operate the consultation systems on their own. The proposed system has a three‐layered structure: application component layer, middleware component layer, and fundamental component layer. This structure allows for an easy installation and modifications depending on the scale of specific branch offices of financial institutions and the mix of financial products offered by them. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 163(2): 57–66, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.20518     

Characterization of cellulose microbeads prepared by a viscose‐phase‐separation method and their chemical modification with acid anhydride

Chemically modified cellulose microbeads are useful as cosmetic materials. Cellulose microbeads as supports, prepared by a viscose‐phase‐separation method, are monodisperse and spherical. However, cellulose shows only slight hydrophilicity, even though it has three hydroxyl groups per pyranose ring, because cellulose possesses high crystallinity on account of the cellulose II structure derived from hydrogen bonds among the hydroxyl groups. To increase the hygroscopicity of cellulose microbeads, we have carboxylated them with succinic and glutaric anhydrides. Their hygroscopicity increases with the addition of succinoyl and glutaroyl groups. Moreover, we have confirmed the increased hygroscopicity of microbeads with sodium salinization. We have investigated the decomposition of these hydrophilic cellulose microbeads in aqueous buffer solutions and have confirmed that succinoylated cellulose is more readily decomposed than glutaroylated cellulose microbeads in aqueous solutions. On the other hand, to increase the lipophilicity of cellulose microbeads, we have acylated them with acetic and hexanoic anhydrides. Hydrophobizing microbeads with hexanoyl groups provides an affinity to benzene but not to H₂O. In contrast, hydrophobizing with acetyl groups provides affinity not only to benzene but also to H₂O. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 97: 149–157, 2005     

Survival of Vibrio parahaemolyticus serovar O3:K6 strains under acidic conditions

The survival of Vibrio parahaemolyticus serovar O3:K6 strains and other serovars in the presence of acetic, citric and hydrochloric acids were studied. There were no differences in resistance to these acids between serovar O3:K6 and the other serovars. At pH 5.6, citric acid was more effective in reducing the number of viable cells of V. parahaemolyticus than acetic acid. However, at pH 4.5, acetic acid was more effective than citric acid. The number of viable cells decreased quickly in the presence of rice vinegar or wine vinegar at pH 4.0.     

Development of snake-like robot ACM-R8 with large and mono-tread wheel

One of the important advantages of an active wheeled snake-like robots is that it can access narrow spaces which are inaccessible to other types of robot (such as crawlers, walking robots), since snake-like robots have an elongated, narrow body. Additionally, in areas with rubble, snake-like robots can traverse rough terrain and large obstacles since its body can conform to the terrain’s contours. ‘ACM-R8’ is a new snake-like robot which can climb stairs and reach doorknobs in addition to the features explained above. To fulfill these functions, the design of this robot incorporates several key features: joints with parallel link mechanism, mono-tread wheels with internal structure, force sensors and ‘swing-grousers’ which were developed to improve step climbability. In this paper, the design and control methods are described. Experiments confirmed high mobility on stairs and steps, with the robot succeeding in overcoming a step height of 600 mm, despite the height of the robot being just 300 mm.     

A Linear Time Algorithm for L(2,1)-Labeling of Trees

An L(2,1)-labeling of a graph G is an assignment f from the vertex set V(G) to the set of nonnegative integers such that |f(x)?f(y)|≥2 if x and y are adjacent and |f(x)?f(y)|≥1 if x and y are at distance 2, for all x and y in V(G). A k-L(2,1)-labeling is an L(2,1)-labeling f:V(G)→{0,…,k}, and the L(2,1)-labeling problem asks the minimum k, which we denote by λ(G), among all possible assignments. It is known that this problem is NP-hard even for graphs of treewidth 2, and tree is one of very few classes for which the problem is polynomially solvable. The running time of the best known algorithm for trees had been O(Δ ^4.5 n) for more than a decade, and an O(min{n ^1.75,Δ ^1.5 n})-time algorithm has appeared recently, where Δ and n are the maximum degree and the number of vertices of an input tree, however, it has been open if it is solvable in linear time. In this paper, we finally settle this problem by establishing a linear time algorithm for L(2,1)-labeling of trees. Furthermore, we show that it can be extended to a linear time algorithm for L(p,1)-labeling with a constant p.     

Drawing Borders Efficiently

A spreadsheet, especially MS Excel, is probably one of the most popular software applications for personal-computer users and gives us convenient and user-friendly tools for drawing tables. Using spreadsheets, we often wish to draw several vertical and horizontal black lines on selective gridlines to enhance the readability of our spreadsheet. Such situations we frequently encounter are formulated as the Border Drawing Problem (BDP). Given a layout of black line segments, we study how to draw it efficiently from an algorithmic view point, by using a set of border styles and investigate its complexity. (i) We first define a formal model based on MS Excel, under which the drawability and the efficiency of border styles are discussed, and then (ii) show that unfortunately the problem is -hard for the set of the Excel border styles and for any reasonable subset of the styles. Moreover, in order to provide potentially more efficient drawing, (iii) we propose a new compact set of border styles and show a necessary and sufficient condition of its drawability.     

Natural-convection heat transfer to air from a horizontal array of cylinders with different surface temperatures

Heat transfer measurements were made on natural convection around horizontal in-line arrays of cylinders whose surface temperatures were different from each other. Through the experiments for a three-cylinder array, a correlation was obtained for the heat transfer coefficient of the array-center cylinder. By using the correlation with some assumptions, the heat-flux distributions could be estimated for an array of five cylinders which were heated to their respective temperatures. Consequently, it was found that both the correlation and the method proposed here were useful in the estimation of heat-flux distributions for a horizontal array of cylinders. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Inc. Heat Trans Jpn Res, 26(2): 116–121, 1997