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.     

Modified hippocampal long-term potentiation in PKC gamma-mutant mice

Calcium-phospholipid-dependent protein kinase (PKC) has long been suggested to play an important role in modulating synaptic efficacy. We have created a strain of mice that lacks the gamma subtype of PKC to evaluate the significance of this brain-specific PKC isozyme in synaptic plasticity. Mutant mice are viable, develop normally, and have synaptic transmission that is indistinguishable from wild-type mice. Long-term potentiation (LTP), however, is greatly diminished in mutant animals, while two other forms of synaptic plasticity, long-term depression and paired-pulse facilitation, are normal. Surprisingly, when tetanus to evoke LTP was preceded by a low frequency stimulation, mutant animals displayed apparently normal LTP. We propose that PKC gamma is not part of the molecular machinery that produces LTP but is a key regulatory component.     

Continuous measurement of cardiac output by the Fick principle in infants and children: comparison with the thermodilution method

OBJECTIVE: To compare a system that continuously monitors cardiac output by the Fick principle with measurements by the thermodilution technique in pediatric patients. DESIGN: Prospective direct comparison of the above two techniques. SETTING: Pediatric intensive care unit of a university hospital. PATIENTS: 25 infants and children, aged 1 week to 17 years (median 10 months), who had undergone open heart surgery were studied. Only patients without an endotracheal tube leak and without a residual shunt were included. METHODS: The system based on the Fick principle uses measurements of oxygen consumption taken by a metabolic monitor and of arterial and mixed venous oxygen saturation taken by pulse- and fiberoptic oximetry to calculate cardiac output every 20s. INTERVENTIONS: In every patient one pair of measurements was taken. Continuous Fick and thermodilution cardiac output measurements were performed simultaneously, with the examiners remaining ignorant of the results of the other method. RESULTS: Cardiac output measurements ranged from 0.21 to 4.55 l/min. A good correlation coefficient was found: r2 = 0.98; P < 0.001; SEE = 0.41 l/min. The bias is absolute values and in percent of average cardiac output was - 0.05 l/min or - 4.4% with a precision of 0.32 l/min or 21.3% at 2 SD, respectively. The difference was most marked in a neonate with low cardiac output. CONCLUSION: Continuous measurement of cardiac output by the Fick principle offers a convenient method for the hemodynamic monitoring of unstable infants and children.     

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     

The Transmogrifier-2: a 1 million gate rapid-prototyping system

This paper describes the Transmogrifier-2 (TM-2), a second-generation multifield programmable gate array (FPGA) rapid-prototyping system. The largest version of the system will comprise 16 boards that each contain two Altera 10K50 FPGA's, four I-Cube interconnect chips, and up to 8 Mbytes of memory. The inter-FPGA routing architecture of the TM-2 uses a novel interconnect structure, a nonuniform partial crossbar, that provides a constant delay between any two FPGA's in the system. The TM-2 architecture is modular and scalable, meaning that systems of various sizes can be constructed from copies of the same board, while maintaining routability and the constant delay feature. Other features include a system-level programmable clock that allows single-cycle access to off-chip memory, and programmable clock waveforms with edge resolution of 10 ns. The first Transmogrifier-2 boards have been manufactured and are functional. They have recently been used successfully in some simple graphics acceleration applications