Development of a recurrent Sigma-Pi neural network rainfall forecasting system in Hong Kong

At the moment, weather forecasting is still an art — the experience and intuition of forecasters play a significant role in determining the quality of forecasting. This paper describes the development of a new approach to rainfall forecasting using neural networks. It deals with the extraction of information from radar images and an evaluation of past rain gauge records to provide shortterm rainfall forecasting. All of the meteorological data were provided by the Royal Observatory of Hong Kong (ROHK). Preprocessing procedures were essential for this neural network rainfall forecasting. The forecast of the rainfall was performed every half an hour so that a storm warning signal can be delivered to the public in advance. The network architecture is based on a recurrent Sigma-Pi network. The results are very promising, and this neural-based rainfall forecasting system is capable of providing a rain storm warning signal to the Hong Kong public one hour ahead.     

CMV colitis masquerading as colon cancer--an unusual presentation of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

To determine whether there is any correlation between sudden decrease in barometric pressure and onset of labor, a non-experimental, retrospective study at a 948-bed tertiary care hospital was done. Pregnant patients of 36 weeks gestation or more who presented with spontaneous onset of labor during the 48 hours surrounding the 12 occurrences of significant drop in barometric pressure in 1992 were included in the study. Significantly more occurrences of onset of labor were identified in the 24 hours after a drop in barometric pressure than were identified in the 24 hours prior to the drop in barometric pressure (P < 0.05). Therefore, the overall number of labor onsets increased in the 24 hours following a significant drop in barometric pressure.     

The ultrasound appearances of neonatal renal vein thrombosis

Renal vein thrombosis (RVT) is the most frequently occurring vascular condition in the new-born kidney. The predisposing factors include dehydration, sepsis, birth asphyxia, maternal diabetes, polycythaemia and the presence of an indwelling umbilical venous catheter. (RVT) may present clinically with a flank mass, haematuria, hypertension or renal failure. Many imaging modalities have been employed, but ultrasound is the technique most commonly used in the evaluation of neonates with suspected RVT. Thrombosis commences in the small renal veins and subsequently propagates via larger interlobar veins to the main renal vein and inferior vena cava (IVC). The ultrasound appearances depend upon the stage at which the examination is performed and extent of the thrombus. Initially, the interlobular and interlobar thrombus appears as highly echogenic streaks. These streaks commence in a peripheral, focal segment of the involved kidney and only persist for a few days. In the first week the affected kidney swells and becomes echogenic with prominent echopoor medullary pyramids. Later, the swelling increases and the kidney becomes heterogenous with loss of corticomedullary differentiation. Grey scale ultrasound readily demonstrates thrombus within the renal vein and IVC. Adrenal haemorrhage is a recognized association and may be identified ultrasonically. Colour Doppler scanning provides additional information. In the early stages of RVT, colour Doppler may demonstrate absent intrarenal and renal venous flow. Ultimately, the kidney may recover, show focal scarring or become atrophic. Thus, ultrasound provides an accessible and reliable tool in the assessment of suspected neonatal RVT.     

Study of impurity induced modifications in amorphous N-type (GeSe3·5)100−x Bi x using high pressure technique

The technique of high pressure is utilized to study the carrier transport behaviour in doped and undoped bulk amorphous (GeSe_3·5)_100−x Bi _x (x=0, 2, 4, 10) down to liquid nitrogen temperature to observe impurity induced modifications in amorphous semiconductors. It is observed that pressure induced effects in lightly doped (2 at % Bi) and heavily doped (x=4, 10) semiconductors are markedly different. Results are discussed in view of the incorporation behaviour of the bismuth impurity.     

Power Distribution Fault Cause Identification With Imbalanced Data Using the Data Mining-Based Fuzzy Classification E-Algorithm

Power distribution systems have been significantly affected by many outage-causing events. Good fault cause identification can help expedite the restoration procedure and improve the system reliability. However, the data imbalance issue in many real-world data sets often degrades the fault cause identification performance. In this paper, the E-algorithm, which is extended from the fuzzy classification algorithm by Ishibuchi to alleviate the effect of imbalanced data constitution, is applied to Duke Energy outage data for distribution fault cause identification. Three major outage causes (tree, animal, and lightning) are used as prototypes. The performance of E-algorithm on real-world imbalanced data is compared with artificial neural network. The results show that the E-algorithm can greatly improve the performance when the data are imbalanced     

A role for Edman degradation in proteome studies

Advances in protein database design and the software used to access the sequence data has led to progress in using protein attributes such as amino acid composition and peptide masses to identify proteins separated by two-dimensional electrophoresis. However, Edman degradation remains the principal technique for protein identification and it presents a significant bottleneck in the progress towards rapid protein identification. Simple modifications to the sequencing hardware, which automate the delivery of protein spots into the sequencer, and parallel sequencing of the protein spots represent a significant advance in the use of Edman degradation to rapidly generate the powerful protein attribute, an N-terminal sequence tag.     

Functional and defective components of avian endogenous virus long terminal repeat enhancer sequences

Oncogenic avian retroviruses, such as Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) and the avian leukosis viruses, contain a strong enhancer in the U3 portion of the proviral long terminal repeat (LTR). The LTRs of a second class of avian retroviruses, the endogenous viruses (ev) lack detectable enhancer activity. By creating ev-RSV hybrid LTRs, we previously demonstrated that, despite the lack of independent enhancer activity in the ev U3 region, ev LTRs contain sequences that are able to functionally replace essential enhancer domains from the RSV enhancer. A hypothesis proposed to explain these data was that ev LTRs contain a partial enhancer that includes sequences necessary but not sufficient for enhancer activity and that these sequences were complemented by RSV enhancer domains present in the original hybrid constructs to generate a functional enhancer. Studies described in this report were designed to define sequences from both the ev and RSV LTRs required to generate this composite enhancer. This was approached by generating additional ev-RSV hybrid LTRs that exchanged defined regions between ev and RSV and by directly testing the requirement for specific motifs by site-directed mutagenesis. Results obtained demonstrate that ev enhancer sequences are present in the same relative location as upstream enhancer sequences from RSV, with which they share limited sequence similarity. In addition, a 67-bp region from the internal portion of the RSV LTR that is required to complement ev enhancer sequences was identified. Finally, data showing that CArG motifs are essential for high-level activity, a finding that has not been previously demonstrated for retroviral LTRs, are presented.     

Benign seizures associated with mild diarrhea: clinical analysis of 20 cases

Even without electrolyte imbalance, dehydration and fever, seizures are found occasionally in the cases of mild diarrhea. Such patients have shown favorable outcome during long-term follow-up. Twenty cases (10 boys and 10 girls) of benign seizure with mild diarrhea have been diagnosed at the Pediatric Department of Cathay General Hospital from January 1987 to March 1991. Ages-of-onset ranged from 3 months to 43 months (mean 19 months). Most cases were found between December and March (16 cases, 80%). Most seizure episodes were from 2 to 5 times (10 cases, 50%); the durations of seizures were mostly within a 5-minute period (16 cases, 80%). All seizures were generalized and symmetric, including tonic-clonic (13 cases, 65%), tonic (5 cases, 25%), and clonic (2 cases, 10%). Six out of 11 cases (54.5%) showed Rotazyme (Latex agglutination) positive. After six month to four year follow up, no patient had suffered any type of epilepsy, and psychomotor development was normal in all. Further discussion of clinical features is provided.