Emotional Stimuli, Divided Attention, and Memory.

The emotion-memory literature has shown that negative emotional arousal enhances memory. S. A. Christianson (1992) proposed that preattentive processing could account for this emotion-memory relationship. Two experiments were conducted to test Christianson's theory. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to neutral and negative arousing slides. In Experiment 2, participants were exposed to neutral, negative arousing, and positive arousing slides. In both experiments, the aforementioned variable was factorially combined with a divided-attention or non-divided-attention condition. The authors predicted that, in contrast to the nondivided condition, dividing attention would adversely impact neutral and positive stimuli more than negative stimuli. The hypothesis was supported; participants recalled more high negative-arousal slides than positive or neutral slides when their attention was divided rather than nondivided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fault diagnosis of non-linear systems: Graphical approach to detectability,distinguishability and diagnosis algorithm

This paper discusses the problem of fault diagnosis for non-linear systems described by a set of non-linear algebraic equations. Necessary and sufficient conditions for fault detectability and fault distinguishability are given as analytic conditions, as well as graphical conditions. These conditions are then used to derive an algorithm for fault diagnosis. The technique is illustrated by an example.     

Development of Bismuth Ferrite as a Piezoelectric and Multiferroic Material by Cobalt Substitution

Bismuth ferrite (BiFeO₃) is the most widely studied multiferroic material with robust ferroelectricity and antiferromagnetic ordering at room temperature. One of the possible device applications of this material is one that utilizes the ferroelectric/piezoelectric property itself such as ferroelectric memory components, actuators, and so on. Other applications are more challenging and make full use of its multiferroic property to realize novel spintronics and magnetic memory devices, which can be addressed electrically as well as magnetically. This progress report summarizes the recent attempt to control the piezoelectric and magnetic properties of BiFeO₃ by cobalt substitution.     

On the isomorphism problem of concept algebras

Weakly dicomplemented lattices are bounded lattices equipped with two unary operations to encode a negation on concepts. They have been introduced to capture the equational theory of concept algebras (Wille 2000; Kwuida 2004). They generalize Boolean algebras. Concept algebras are concept lattices, thus complete lattices, with a weak negation and a weak opposition. A special case of the representation problem for weakly dicomplemented lattices, posed in Kwuida (2004), is whether complete weakly dicomplemented lattices are isomorphic to concept algebras. In this contribution we give a negative answer to this question (Theorem 4). We also provide a new proof of a well known result due to M.H. Stone (Trans Am Math Soc 40:37–111, 1936), saying that each Boolean algebra is a field of sets (Corollary 4). Before these, we prove that the boundedness condition on the initial definition of weakly dicomplemented lattices (Definition 1) is superfluous (Theorem 1, see also Kwuida (2009)).     

A Fine-Grained Runtime Power/Performance Optimization Method for Processors with Adaptive Pipeline Depth

Recently,a method known as pipeline stage unification (PSU) has been proposed to alleviate the increasing energy consumption problem in modern microprocessors.PSU achieves a high energy efficiency by employing a changeable pipeline depth and its working scheme is eligible for a fine control method.In this paper,we propose a dynamic method to study fine-grained program interval behaviors based on some easy-to-get runtime processor metrics.Using this method to determine the proper PSU configurations during the program execution,we are able to achieve an averaged 13.5% energy-delay-product (EDP) reduction for SPEC CPU2000 integer benchmarks,compared to the baseline processor.This value is only 0.14% larger than the theoretically idealized controlling.Our hardware synthesis result indicates that the proposed method can largely decrease the hardware overhead in both area and delay costs,as compared to a previous program study method which is based on working set signatures.     

Learning multi-task local metrics for image annotation

The goal of image annotation is to automatically assign a set of textual labels to an image to describe the visual contents thereof. Recently, with the rapid increase in the number of web images, nearest neighbor (NN) based methods have become more attractive and have shown exciting results for image annotation. One of the key challenges of these methods is to define an appropriate similarity measure between images for neighbor selection. Several distance metric learning (DML) algorithms derived from traditional image classification problems have been applied to annotation tasks. However, a fundamental limitation of applying DML to image annotation is that it learns a single global distance metric over the entire image collection and measures the distance between image pairs in the image-level. For multi-label annotation problems, it may be more reasonable to measure similarity of image pairs in the label-level. In this paper, we develop a novel label prediction scheme utilizing multiple label-specific local metrics for label-level similarity measure, and propose two different local metric learning methods in a multi-task learning (MTL) framework. Extensive experimental results on two challenging annotation datasets demonstrate that 1) utilizing multiple local distance metrics to learn label-level distances is superior to using a single global metric in label prediction, and 2) the proposed methods using the MTL framework to learn multiple local metrics simultaneously can model the commonalities of labels, thereby facilitating label prediction results to achieve state-of-the-art annotation performance.     

Development of an embedded sensor system for pneumatic artificial muscle proprioceptors

Spinal reflexes greatly contribute to the control of fast physical interactions (e.g., catching a moving ball) without the influence of higher level control systems involved in human motor control. Therefore, to realize the interactions in robots, it is a useful approach to mimic the nervous system controlling spinal reflexes. To this end, as the starting point for creating spinal reflexes, sensors that measure and encode body movements similar to human proprioceptors are needed to generate signals for the spinal reflexes. In this study, we developed artificial muscle proprioceptors to reproduce spinal reflexes in robots. In particular, we focused on pneumatic artificial muscles and designed an artificial muscle spindle and an artificial Golgi tendon organ, which were integrated with a pneumatic artificial muscle. A compact local measuring system consisting of a microcomputer and amplifiers was developed to easily install and organize the sensors.     

Flavonoid glycosides in the shoot system of Okinawa Taumu (Colocasia esculenta S.)

Six C-glycosylflavonoids and one O-glycosylflavonoid have been isolated from the shoot system of Taumu (Colocasia esculenta S.). They were identified as schaftoside, isoschaftoside, orientin, isovitexin, isoorientin, vitexin and luteolin 7-O-sophoroside. The presence of catechol moiety in the B-ring of isoorientin, orientin and luteolin 7-O-sophoroside showed strong antioxidant activity with different mechanisms of action in DPPH radical scavenging, β-carotene bleaching and superoxide radical inhibition assays. The amount of dry weight matter extract of water was higher than methanol for both the leaf and the stem parts. Isovitexin was the main compound in water and methanol extracts of the leaf while schaftoside was the main compound of the water extract of the stem. Methanol extract of the leaf showed higher DPPH radical scavenging activity than water extract while the opposite was observed for the stem. The results of this experiment suggest the potential of the leaf of Taumu as a source of dietary antioxidant.