Initial cholesterol uptake by everted sacs of rat small intestine: Kinetic and thermodynamic aspects

The kinetics of initial cholesterol uptake by everted rat proximal and distal small intestinal sacs were evaluated in vitro. The mucosal incubation solution consisted of 0.05 mM cholesterol solubilized in 4.8 mM sodium taurocholate micellar solution at pH 7.4. Experiments were performed at temperatures from 26 to 38 C. The rate of cholesterol uptake followed a linear relationship when plotted against time indicating an apparent zero-order kinetics mechanism for initial uptake. An Arrhenius plot of the results of uptake versus temperature remained linear over the entire range of temperatures studied. The large free energy of activation (20 kcal/mole) suggests that an energy barrier for cholesterol uptake exists at the enterocyte luminal cell membrane and may be an important limiting step in cholesterol uptake. It is proposed that a transient association between cholesterol and a component of the enterocyte luminal cell membrane is formed during initial uptake of cholesterol. The transient association may be an activated complex formed with proteins present at or within the luminal enterocyte cell membrane.     

Finishing effects of spiral polishing method on micro lapping surface

This study presents a spiral polishing method and a device for micro-finishing purposes. This novel finishing process has wider application than traditional processes. This offers both automation and flexibility in final machining operations for deburring, polishing, and removing recast layers, thereby producing compressive residual stresses even in difficult to reach areas. Applying of this method can obtain a fine polished surface by removing tiny fragments via a micro lapping generated by transmission of an abrasive medium through a screw rod. The effect of the removal of the tiny fragments can be achieved due to the function of micro lapping. The method is not dependent on the size of the work-piece's application area in order to carry out the ultra precise process. The application of this research can be extended to various products of precision ball-bearing lead screw. The proposed method produces products with greater precision and more efficiently than traditional processes, in terms of processing precisions and the surface quality of products. These parameters used in achieving maximum material removal rate (MRR) and the lowest surface roughness (SR) are abrasive particle size, abrasive concentration, gap, revolution speed and machining time.     

Annular ring slot antenna design with reconfigurable polarization

A microstrip‐fed conventional annular ring slot (ARS) antenna with linear polarization (LP) is initially studied. To generate two orthogonal degenerate modes for circular polarization (CP) radiations, two identical meandering perturbation slots (MPS) are symmetrically loaded into the ARS. By further incorporating a PIN diode switch across each MPS, the proposed antenna can switch between left‐hand CP (LHCP), right‐hand CP (RHCP), and LP. All three polarizations have shown good impedance bandwidth and broad CP bandwidth that can satisfy the wireless local area network (WLAN) 2.4‐GHz operating band (2400–2480 MHz). Furthermore, desirable gains of 1.8–2.0 dBi and 2.40–2.84 dBic are also exhibited at LP and LHCP/RHCP, respectively. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 26:110–120, 2016.     

Exploring cell tower data dumps for supervised learning-based point-of-interest prediction (industrial paper)

Exploring massive mobile data for location-based services becomes one of the key challenges in mobile data mining. In this paper, we investigate a problem of finding a correlation between the collective behavior of mobile users and the distribution of points of interest (POIs) in a city. Specifically, we use large-scale cell tower data dumps collected from cell towers and POIs extracted from a popular social network service, Weibo. Our objective is to make use of the data from these two different types of sources to build a model for predicting the POI densities of different regions in the covered area. An application domain that may benefit from our research is a business recommendation application, where a prediction result can be used as a recommendation for opening a new store/branch. The crux of our contribution is the method of representing the collective behavior of mobile users as a histogram of connection counts over a period of time in each region. This representation ultimately enables us to apply a supervised learning algorithm to our problem in order to train a POI prediction model using the POI data set as the ground truth. We studied 12 state-of-the-art classification and regression algorithms; experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.     

An Integrated Model of the Toyota Production System with Total Quality Management and People Factors

The Toyota production system (TPS), or lean production, has been associated with many benefits for manufacturing firms that implement the system. However, to implement the TPS successfully, it is necessary to integrate the so‐called “hard side” of the system (that is, the technical aspects of material handling) with the “soft side” of the program (that is, the aspects associated with human factors). The present study makes a contribution to such a holistic view of the TPS by proposing an integrated model that consists of the technical aspects of the TPS, together with elements associated with total quality management (TQM), human resources management (HRM), and certain identified “people factors.” The study then uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to test this holistic model using data obtained from a questionnaire survey of 153 Taiwanese manufacturing firms. The empirical study confirms the appropriateness of the causal model, which is evaluated by several goodness‐of‐fit methods. The study confirms the proposition that the inclusion of the “people factors” together with TQM and HRM significantly improves the realization of benefits associated with the TPS practices of “just‐in‐time” (JIT) and “autonomation.” The conclusion is that such an integrated model provides a much more effective “lean system” and has the potential to produce significantly enhanced benefits for firms that implement it. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Social network,social trust and shared goals in organizational knowledge sharing

The aim of our study was to further develop an understanding of social capital in organizational-knowledge-sharing. We first developed a measurement tool and then a theoretical framework in which three social capital factors (social network, social trust, and shared goals) were combined with the theory of reasoned action; their relationships were then examined using confirmatory factoring analysis. We then surveyed of 190 managers from Hong Kong firms, we confirm that a social network and shared goals significantly contributed to a person's volition to share knowledge, and directly contributed to the perceived social pressure of the organization. The social trust has however showed no direct effect on the attitude and subjective norm of sharing knowledge.