Structural Antecedents to Knowledge and Participation: Extending the Knowledge Gap Concept to Participation

This paper investigates relationships between community characteristics and levels of knowledge and participation examined at both the individual and the community levels. This research extends the knowledge gap concept to a parallel phenomenon, the participation gap. Results from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey 2000 showed that community density, education, and cohesion were significant positive predictors of knowledge but less consistent predictors of participation at the individual level. At the community level, relationships were even stronger, though cohesion was associated with higher mean levels of participation and reduced participation gaps, whereas population density was associated with lower levels of participation and increased gaps.     

Strain improvement of Aspergillus sojae for increased l-leucine aminopeptidase and protease production

Food Science and Biotechnology - Conventional random mutagenesis was implemented to improve l-leucine aminopeptidase (LAP) and protease production in Aspergillus sojae. Through successive...     

Evidence for anthropogenic 210Po in the urban atmosphere of Seoul, Korea

We have measured the concentrations of 210Po, 210Pb, SO4(2-), Na+, and 34S in precipitation samples from two metropolitan cities, Seoul and Busan, Korea. The delta34S values ranged from 0 to 10% in most Seoul and Busan precipitation samples, indicating major contributions from industrial sources to S levels. A high level of excess 210Po, which is not produced by 210Pb decay in the troposphere, was observed in both regions. The excess 210Po activities in some samples from Busan, a harbor city, were influenced strongly by sea salt (i.e., sea-surface microlayer) which could be traced using [Na+] and delta34S values. In Seoul precipitations, we observed a good correlation between non-sea-salt SO4(2-) and excess 210Po, suggesting that both species are controlled mainly by the same factor. This correlation and the delta34S values indicate that the major source for both species in this region is likely to be anthropogenic, rather than from traditionally suggested sources such as soil resuspension, stratospheric air intrusion, sea sprays, volcanic emissions, and biogenic emissions.     

Three‐dimensional numerical analysis on discharge properties of microwave excited ring dielectric line surface wave processing plasma device

A three‐dimensional simulation code with the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method combined with the electron fluid model has been developed for the microwave excited surface wave plasma in the RDL‐SWP device. This code permits the three‐dimensional numerical analysis of the spatial distributions of electric field, power absorption, electron density, and electron temperature. At a low gas pressure (about 10 mTorr), the numerical results were compared with the experimental measurements that show the validity of this 3D simulation code. A simplified analysis assuming that the electron density is spatially uniform has also been studied and its applicability is evaluated by the comparison of the 3D simulation and the analytical solutions. The surface wave eigenmodes are determined by the electron density, and it is found that the structure of the device strongly influences the spatial distribution of the electric fields of surface waves in a low‐density area (n_e < 3.0 × 10¹¹ cm^?3). A method to irradiate by microwave the whole surface area of the plasma is proposed. The method is found to be effective in obtaining a high uniformity distribution of electron density. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 150(4): 1–12, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.10333     

Energy Efficient and Reliable ARQ Scheme (E^2R-ACK) for Mission Critical M2M/IoT Services

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the main infrastructure for machine to machine (M2M) and Internet of thing (IoT). Since various sophisticated M2M/IoT services have their own quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, reliable data transmission in WSNs is becoming more important. However, WSNs have strict constraints on resources due to the crowded wireless frequency, which results in high collision probability. Therefore a more efficient data delivering scheme that minimizes both the transmission delay and energy consumption is required. This paper proposes energy efficient and reliable data transmission ARQ scheme, called energy efficient and reliable ACK (E \(^2\) R-ACK), to minimize transmission delay and energy consumption at the same time. The proposed scheme has three aspects of advantages compared to the legacy ARQ schemes such as ACK, NACK and implicit-ACK (I-ACK). It consumes smaller energy than ACK, has smaller transmission delay than NACK, and prevents the duplicated retransmission problem of I-ACK. In addition, resource considered reliability (RCR) is suggested to quantify the improvement of the proposed scheme, and mathematical analysis of the transmission delay and energy consumption are also presented. The simulation results show that the E \(^2\) R-ACK scheme achieves high RCR by significantly reducing transmission delay and energy consumption.     

A High Quality Depth Map Upsampling Method Robust to Misalignment of Depth and Color Boundaries

In recent years, fusion camera systems that consist of color cameras and Time-of-Flight (TOF) depth sensors have been popularly used due to its depth sensing capability at real-time frame rates. However, captured depth maps are limited in low resolution compared to the corresponding color images due to physical limitation of the TOF depth sensor. Most approaches to enhancing the resolution of captured depth maps depend on the implicit assumption that when neighboring pixels in the color image have similar values, they are also similar in depth. Although many algorithms have been proposed, they still yield erroneous results, especially when region boundaries in the depth map and the color image are not aligned. We therefore propose a novel kernel regression framework to generate the high quality depth map. Our proposed filter is based on the vector pointing similar pixels that represents the unit vector toward similar neighbors in the local region. The vectors are used to detect misaligned regions between color edges and depth edges. Unlike conventional kernel regression methods, our method properly handles misaligned regions by introducing the numerical analysis of the local structure into the kernel regression framework. Experimental comparisons with other data fusion techniques prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm.     

Natural frequencies of Euler-Bernoulli beam with open cracks on elastic foundations

A study of the natural vibrations of beam resting on elastic foundation with finite number of transverse open cracks is presented. Frequency equations are derived for beams with different end restraints. Euler-Bernoulli beam on Winkler foundation and Euler-Bernoulli beam on Pasternak foundation are investigated. The cracks are modeled by massless substitute spring. The effects of the crack location, size and its number and the foundation constants, on the natural frequencies of the beam, are investigated.