Data mining for government construction procurement

A new data-mining model for government construction procurement was developed to consider data preparation, domain knowledge and a conceptual model to reflect the needs of the knowledge economy. Prototype experiments and analysis were performed to test the data mining using information from a typical Taiwanese local construction procurement unit. The application of the data-mining algorithm to this construction procurement management model improves government procurement effectiveness and efficiency. By complying with this governmental procurement information system and revealing the information required by the World Trade Organization and the Government Procurement Agreement, the model has the potential to improve government procurement and industry effectiveness and efficiency. It also provides a platform for government access to the international community.     

Structural transformation and crystallization of amorphous copper phthalocyanine nanostructures

Vapor condensation was performed to prepare nanostructures of copper phthalocyanine. With a lower pressure and longer evaporation duration, a fine and dense network of thin and uniform nanowires was obtained. Nanorods with tube-like branches were formed at higher working pressures. The absorption coefficients and optical band gaps of the nanostructures were derived from the UV-vis absorption spectra. After heat treatment, the amorphous nanowires were transformed into crystalline straight β-phase nanostructures with a smooth surface. Reduced intensity of the absorption spectrum and a red shift of the optical band gap were also observed.     

Comparison of thermal degradation characteristics of poly(arylene sulfone)s using thermogravimetric analysis/mass spectrometry

Thermal degradation of poly(arylene sulfone)s had been studied by the combination of thermogravimetric analysis/mass spectrometry (TG/MS) with pyrolysis/gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Py‐GC/MS) techniques. Through these two methods, the pyrolysates from poly(ether sulfone) (PES) and polysulfone (PSF) were identified in 11 and 21 sets of evolution curves, respectively, from room temperature to 900 °C. Among these pyrolysates, 12 products from PES and 25 products from PSF were obtained. The major mechanism for both PES and PSF was one‐stage pyrolysis involving main chain random scission and carbonization with evolution of SO₂ and phenol as major products. Although the initial thermal stability of PES was lower than that of PSF, the formation of sulfide groups in the condensed phase from PES, through reduction of sulfone group by hydrogen radicals, increased the fire retardation behavior of PES. In PES, the ether and sulfone groups showed similar thermal stability. The thermal stability of functional groups in PSF were in the order of sulfone < ether < isopropylidene group. The scission of the ether group in PSF, with evolution of phenol as the major product, reached maximum evolution amount at the temperature of the maximum thermogravimetry loss of TG (T_max). The scission of isopropylidene groups at high temperature (>580 °C) evolved higher mass derivatives that lower the fire retardancy of PSF. By using a simplified kinetic model, PES showed maximum activation energy with a conversion ratio of 0.2–0.3, which implies a high fire retardant effect of sulfide formation in PES. A comparative study with the proposed model and experimental data showed the theoretical pyrolysis curves to be in agreement with the experimental curves for PES and PSF pyrolysis, respectively. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 81: 2387–2398, 2001     

Sialyl stage-specific embryonic antigen-1: a useful marker for differentiating the etiology of pleural effusion

OBJECTIVES: To assess the usefulness of sialyl stage-specific embryonic antigen-1 (SSEA-1) levels in differentiating the etiology of pleural effusion (PE). DESIGN: A solid-phase immunoradiometric sandwich assay with an FH6 monoclonal antibody was used to measure sialyl SSEA-1 levels in PEs of 132 patients with various diseases. Paired serum sialyl SSEA-1 levels were measured simultaneously in 47 patients with various subtypes of lung cancer RESULTS: The pleural sialyl SSEA-1 levels were significantly higher in patients who had adenocarcinoma of the lung with positive cytology than in all the other patients, including those having malignancies other than adenocarcinoma of the lung, adenocarcinoma of the lung with cytology-negative PE, and benign diseases. There were no significant differences among sialyl SSEA-1 levels in the pleural fluid containing no adenocarcinoma cells. Using the cutoff value of 265 U/mL, the sensitivity was 64% (25/39) and the specificity was 95% (88/93) for the pleural sialyl SSEA-1 level to differentiate adenocarcinoma from other effusions. CONCLUSIONS: With high specificity and modest sensitivity, the pleural sialyl SSEA-1 level is a useful biochemical marker for differentiating the etiology of PEs caused by adenocarcinoma from other diseases.     

Comparison of five PCR methods for detection of Helicobacter pylori DNA in gastric tissues

Five different PCR methods for the detection of Helicobacter pylori were evaluated. The results of this study indicate that of the five PCR methods examined, the ureC (glmM) gene PCR is the most sensitive and specific for the detection of H. pylori in gastric biopsy specimens.     

Limit-cycle analysis of dynamic fuzzy control systems

The main purpose of this study is to predict limit cycles of a dynamic fuzzy control system by combining a stability equation, describing function and parameter plane. The stability of a linearized dynamic fuzzy control system is then analyzed using stability equations and the parameter plane method, with the assistance of a describing function method. This procedure identifies the amplitude and frequency of limit cycles that are clearly formed by the dynamic fuzzy controller in the parameter plane. Moreover, the suppression of the limit cycle by adjusting control parameters is proposed. Continuous and sampled-data systems are addressed, and the proposed approach can easily be extended to a fuzzy control system with multiple nonlinearities. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Demand-driven frequent itemset mining using pattern structures

Frequent itemset mining aims at discovering patterns the supports of which are beyond a given threshold. In many applications, including network event management systems, which motivated this work, patterns are composed of items each described by a subset of attributes of a relational table. As it involves an exponential mining space, the efficient implementation of user preferences and mining constraints becomes the first priority for a mining algorithm. User preferences and mining constraints are often expressed using patterns attribute structures. Unlike traditional methods that mine all frequent patterns indiscriminately, we regard frequent itemset mining as a two-step process: the mining of the pattern structures and the mining of patterns within each pattern structure. In this paper, we present a novel architecture that uses pattern structures to organize the mining space. In comparison with the previous techniques, the advantage of our approach is two-fold: (i) by exploiting the interrelationships among pattern structures, execution times for mining can be reduced significantly; and (ii) more importantly, it enables us to incorporate high-level simple user preferences and mining constraints into the mining process efficiently. These advantages are demonstrated by our experiments using both synthetic and real-life datasets.     

OpenMP Implementation of SPICE3 Circuit Simulator

In this paper, we describe our experience of creating an OpenMP implementation of the SPICE3 circuit simulator program. Given the irregular patterns of access to dynamic data structures in the SPICE code, a parallelization using current standard OpenMP directives is impossible without major rewriting of the original program. The aim of this work is to present a case study showing the development of a shared memory parallel code with minimum effort. We present two implementations, one with minimal code modification and one without modification to the original SPICE3 program using Intel’s taskq construct. We also discuss the results of the case study in terms of what future compiler tools may be needed to help OpenMP application developers with similar porting goals. Our experiments using SPICE3, based on SRAM model simulation, were compiled by the SUN compiler running on a SunFire V880 UltraSPARC-III 750 MHz and by the Intel icc compiler running on both an IBM Itanium with four CPUs and Intel Xeon of two processors machines. The results are promising.     

Enhancement of heat transfer of mixed convection for heated blocks using vortex shedding generated by an oblique plate in a horizontal channel

Summary The problem of heat transfer enhancement of mixed convective flow past heated blocks in a horizontal channel is investigated. The heat transfer enhancement in this paper has been accomplished by the installation of an oblique plate to generate vortex shedding, which is used in flow modulation. Results for the details of the streamlines in the channel and the Nusselt number along the blocks with and without an oblique plate have been presented.Notation C _p pressure coefficient (2f Pds/f ds) - d length of an oblique plate - ds surface area increment along an oblique plate - f_s frequency of the vortex shedding - Gr Grashof number - H channel wall-to-wall spacing - h height of the block - k thermal conductivity - L channel length - Nu Nusselt number - time-mean Nusselt number (f Nudt/f dt) - average time-mean Nusselt number - n normal vector - P dimensionless pressure (p ^*/(u ² ) - p ^* pressure - Pr Prandtl number (/) - q heat flux at the block boundary - Re Reynolds number (u w/v) - St Strouhal number (df_ssin /u ) - T^* temperature - T uniform inlet temperature - t dimensionless time (t ^* / (w/u )) - t dimensionless time increment - t ^* time - u uniform inlet velocity - u, v dimensionless velocity components (u=u ^*/u ,v=v ^*/v ) - u ^*,v ^* velocity components - w width of the block - x,y dimensionlessx ^*,y ^* coordinates (x=x ^*/w,y=y ^*/w) - x ^*,y ^* physical coordinates - thermal diffusivity - angle of inclination for a plate - dimensionless temperature ((T^*–T ^* )/(qw/k)) - v kinematic viscosity of fluid