Urban area characterization based on crowd behavioral lifelogs over Twitter

Recent location-based social networking sites are attractively providing us with a novel capability of monitoring massive crowd lifelogs in the real-world space. In particular, they make it easier to collect publicly shared crowd lifelogs in a large scale of geographic area reflecting the crowd’s daily lives and even more characterizing urban space through what they have in minds and how they behave in the space. In this paper, we challenge to analyze urban characteristics in terms of crowd behavior by utilizing crowd lifelogs in urban area over the social networking sites. In order to collect crowd behavioral data, we exploit the most famous microblogging site, Twitter, where a great deal of geo-tagged micro lifelogs emitted by massive crowds can be easily acquired. We first present a model to deal with crowds’ behavioral logs on the social network sites as a representing feature of urban space’s characteristics, which will be used to conduct crowd-based urban characterization. Based on this crowd behavioral feature, we will extract significant crowd behavioral patterns in a period of time. In the experiment, we conducted the urban characterization by extracting the crowd behavioral patterns and examined the relation between the regions of common crowd activity patterns and the major categories of local facilities.     

Effects of Shrunken and Other Mutations on the Properties of Rice Endosperm Starch

Starch granules were isolated from rice endosperms of twenty mutants, included two kinds of shrunken (shr) mutant, and two cultivars of their normal counterparts. The shr mutants, EM-20 and Kenkei 2088, showed opposite effects on the amylose content, that is, EM-20 had 5% higher than its normal counterpart and Kenkei 2088 had 3% lower than its one. The amylopectin of EM-20 was composed of slightly shorter chains on the average than its normal one. The gelatinization temperature and heat of gelatinization were affected by the mutation of shr, EM-20. The amylose extender (ae) mutant, Kenkei 2064, had a comparable amylose content with its normal counterpart but its amylopectin had higher content of long chain than the normal one. Twelve kinds of dull (du) mutant reduced the amylose content which varied from 2% to 16%.     

The Effect of Environmental Temperature on Distribution of Unit Chains of Rice Amylopectin

The effects of environmental temperature during the early development of seeds on the structural characteristics of the endosperm starch were investigated using near‐isogenic lines of rice plants (Taichung 65, waxy), grown under temperature controlled conditions. High performance gel permeation chromatography (HPLC) demonstrated that Pseudomonas isoamylase‐debranched amylopectins of rice plants grown at lower temperature (25°C) contain increased amounts of short chains and decreased amounts of long chains as compared with amylopectins obtained from rice plants grown at higher temperature (30°C). By high performance anion exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection (HPAEC‐PAD) of isoamylase‐debranched amylopectins it was detected that the amount of unit chains with degree of polymerization (DP) 6 and 11‐13, in the amylopectin of rice plants grown at lower temperature (25°C) had significantly increased and the amount of unit chains with DP 8, 22‐24 and 29 had significantly decreased, as compared with the amylopectin of rice plants grown at higher temperature (30°C). It was confirmed that the environmental temperature between 5 and 10 d after pollination strongly influenced the structure characteristics of the endosperm starch of rice plants.