Homo-urbanicus and Human-centered Planning

Homo-urbanicus is a planning concept which treats a human being as a rational animal with distinct material,social and intellectual characteristics,and a human settlement as a space in which human beings seek and offer opportunities for connection.Human-centered planning is the application of classical Natural Law(balance between self-preservation and mutual preservation)to the matching of human needs and human settlements.

Cascaded projection of Gaussian mixture model for emotion recognition in speech and ECG signals

A cascaded projection of the Gaussian mixture model algorithm is proposed.First,the marginal distribution of the Gaussian mixture model is computed for different feature dimensions, and a number of sub-classifiers are generated using the marginal distribution model.Each sub-classifier is based on different feature sets.The cascaded structure is adopted to fuse the sub-classifiers dynamically to achieve sample adaptation ability.Secondly,the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified on electrocardiogram emotional signal and speech emotional signal.Emotional data including fidgetiness,happiness and sadness is collected by induction experiments.Finally,the emotion feature extraction method is discussed,including heart rate variability, the chaotic electrocardiogram feature and utterance level static feature.The emotional feature reduction methods are studied, including principle component analysis,sequential forward selection, the Fisher discriminant ratio and maximal information coefficient.The experimental results show that the proposed classification algorithm can effectively improve recognition accuracy in two different scenarios.

On English teaching from psychology and cognition

In English teaching, it is necessary to pay attention to students＇ psychology and cognition in order to make them harmonious and effective. Therefore, English teacher would change their teaching opinions, realizing teaching object, guiding student＇s minds and ideas to study by some measures, such as accordant teaching and study, making students as a base in study, and students＇ self-study. In other words, making student study actively rather than passively is much better for their English abilities.

Issues in automated negotiation:protocol and ontology

In the environment of e-commerce, agents in automated negotiation should share common concept of what they are bargaining and a rule of how to bargain. State of the art overviews of automated negotiation is given. The main barriers to automated negotiation such as protocol and ontology are discussed. Then, a model of automated negotiation is presented with the ontologies of roles and goods described by web ontology language （OWL）, the proposal strategies based on the information sets, and a set of rules for agent interaction. In this model, agents coming from different organizations can negotiate automatically based on common ontologies defined by OWL and formal protocol. This makes it possible for the automated negotiation to be performed in an open environment such as Internet, not merely in a closed system.

AUTOMATIC TEXT SUMMARIZATION BASED ON TEXTUAL COHESION

This paper presents two different algorithms that derive the cohesion structure in the form of lexical chains from two kinds of language resources HowNet and TongYiCiCiLin. The re-search that connects the cohesion structure of a text to the derivation of its summary is displayed. A novel model of automatic text summarization is devised,based on the data provided by lexical chains from original texts. Moreover,the construction rules of lexical chains are modified accord-ing to characteristics of the knowledge database in order to be more suitable for Chinese summa-rization. Evaluation results show that high quality indicative summaries are produced from Chi-nese texts.

Using LSA and text segmentation to improve automatic Chinese dialogue text summarization

Automatic Chinese text summarization for dialogue style is a relatively new research area. In this paper, Latent Semantic Analysis （LSA） is first used to extract semantic knowledge from a given document, all question paragraphs are identified, an automatic text segmentation approach analogous to Text＇filing is exploited to improve the precision of correlating question paragraphs and answer paragraphs, and finally some ＂important＂ sentences are extracted from the generic content and the question-answer pairs to generate a complete summary. Experimental results showed that our approach is highly efficient and improves significantly the coherence of the summary while not compromising informativeness.

Multi-objective optimization scheduling for new energy power system considering energy storage participation

For the low utilization rate of photovoltaic power generation,taking a new energy power system constisting of concentrating solar power(CSP),photovoltaic power(PP)and battery energy storage system as an example,a multi-objective optimization scheduling strategy considering energy storage participation is proposed.Firstly,the new energy power system model is established,and the PP scenario generation and reduction frame based on the autoregressive moving average model and Kantorovich-distance is proposed.Then,based on the optimization goal of the system operation cost minimization and the PP output power consumption maximization,the multi-objective optimization scheduling model is established.Finally,the simulation results show that introducing energy storage into the system can effectively reduce the system operation cost and improve the utilization efficiency of PP.

The Effects of Natural Capital Protection on Pastoralist's Livelihood and Management Implication in the Source Region of the Yellow River, China

The interaction among different livelihood capitals is a key to generate a deeper understanding of the livelihood sustainability.In this paper,we use net income per capita(economic capital),meat and milk production per capita(physical capital),and areas of fenced pasture,livestock shelter,grassland rodent control and planted grassland(physical capital) as proxy indicators of livelihood promotion,livelihood provision,and livelihood protection respectively.By developing a correlation model between pastoralists' livelihood protection and improvement,we found that(1) there is a statistically significant correlation between the pastoralists' livelihood protection and promotion;(2) based on the maximum effect of pastoralists' livelihood promotion and provision,there is a benchmark in the effect of the intervention intensity of livelihood capital(grassland resource protection) on livelihood improvement;(3) on basis of two indicators,i.e.net income per capita and meat production per capita,the reasonable scales of fenced pasture,livestock shelter and planted grassland are less than 843,860 and 46 thousand hectares(hm2) per year respectively.With the marginal effect of livelihood protection,moderately decreased areas of fenced pasture and planted grassland,and increased area of livestock shelter is a critical to ensure pastoralist's livelihood sustainability.

Automatic character detection and segmentation in natural scene images

We present a robust connected-component (CC) based method for automatic detection and segmentation of text in real-scene images. This technique can be applied in robot vision, sign recognition, meeting processing and video indexing. First, a Non-Linear Niblack method (NLNiblack) is proposed to decompose the image into candidate CCs. Then, all these CCs are fed into a cascade of classifiers trained by Adaboost algorithm. Each classifier in the cascade responds to one feature of the CC. Proposed here are 12 novel features which are insensitive to noise, scale, text orientation and text language. The classifier cascade allows non-text CCs of the image to be rapidly discarded while more computation is spent on promising text-like CCs. The CCs passing through the cascade are considered as text components and are used to form the segmentation result. A prototype system was built, with experimental results proving the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

GIS as an Information Infrastructure for Recovery and Reconstruction after the Great East Japan Earthquake

This study considers the regional characteristics of the Tohoku region and the extent of the damage caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and makes proposals for recovery and reconstruction of the areas affected by this disaster as well as for a reduction of the impact of natural disasters that may occur in the future with GIS （geographic information systems） as a social infrastructure positioned at the heart of the information infrastructure. Due to the fact that social media that used ICT （information and communication technology） was useful in the days directly after the disaster, it can be said that it is necessary to investigate the provision of an information infrastructure that uses ICT to reduce the impact of disasters. Therefore, this study proposes the construction of a geographical information database using GIS and the provision and sharing of information using social media GIS after discussion of the relationship between the development of the computerization of Japan and GIS as a valid example of using information systems for recovery and reconstruction after the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Biological Autonomy

We argue that genuine biological autonomy, or described at human level as free will, requires taking into account quantum vacuum processes in the context of biological teleology. One faces at least three basic problems of genuine biological autonomy： （1） if biological autonomy is not physical, where does it come from？ （2） Is there a room for biological causes？ And （3） how to obtain a workable model of biological teleology？ It is shown here that the solution of all these three problems is related to the quantum vacuum. We present a short review of how this basic aspect of the fundamentals of quantum theory, although it had not been addressed for nearly 100 years, actually it was suggested by Bohr, Heisenberg, and others. Realizing that the quantum mechanical measurement problem associated with the ＂collapse＂ of the wave function is related, in the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, to a process between self-consciousness and the external physical environment, we are extending the issue for an explanation of the different processes occurring between living organisms and their internal environment. Definitions of genuine biological autonomy, biological aim, and biological spontaneity are presented. We propose to improve the popular two-stage model of decisions with a biological model suitable to obtain a deeper look at the nature of the mind-body problem. In the newly emerging picture biological autonomy emerges as a new, fundamental and inevitable element of the scientific worldview.

An improved TF-IDF approach for text classification

This paper presents a new improved term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) approach which uses confidence, support and characteristic words to enhance the recall and precision of text classification. Synonyms defined by a lexicon are processed in the improved TF-IDF approach. We detailedly discuss and analyze the relationship among confidence, recall and precision. The experiments based on science and technology gave promising results that the new TF-IDF approach improves the precision and recall of text classification compared with the conventional TF-IDF approach.

Chemical constituents and antioxidant activities of waste liquid extract from Apostichopus japonicus Selenka processing

Apostichopus japonicus Selenka is an ideal tonic food that is used traditionally in many Asian countries, and it contains many bioactive substances, such as antioxidant, antimicrobial, and anticancer materials. To convert waste liquid generated during production into a useful resource, extract from waste liquid was isolated by column chromatography and studied by the pyrogallol autoxidation and 1,10-phenanthroline-Fe^2＋ oxidation methods. Results show that the extract scavenged about 91% of the superoxide anion radical at a concentration of 1.4 mg/mL and 24% of the hydroxyl radical at 3.3 mg/mL. Four compounds were isolated and identified from the extract： 2,4-dihydroxy-5-methyl-1,3-azine; 2,4-dihydroxy- 1,3-diazine; 3-O-β-D-quinovopranosyl-（1→2）-4-O-sodium sulfate-β-D-xylopranosyl]-holosta-9（11）-ene313,12β,17α-triol; and 24-ethyl-5α-cholesta-7-ene-3β-O-β-D-xylopyranoside. All of these compounds are known in A. japonicus, and were found in the waste liquid for the first time.

Undergraduate nursing education in the United States

Nursing education in the United States began in the 1870s with hospital training schools modeled after the Nightingale plan. Presently there are three educational paths that students may take to become a registered nurse （RN）. These are the baccalaureate degree （BS）, the associate degree （AD） and the diploma. Accelerated nursing programs are also available for people who have a baccalaureate degree in another field. Nursing education and nursing practice in the United States is regulated by each of the 50 states. The focus of nursing education is the preparation of nurses who use critical thinking skills to provide comprehensive patient-centered care to a variety of clients. It is expected that nurses will function using evidence-based practice in a culturally competent, safe manner. Nursing schools must be approved by the state in which they exist. In addition to this, most nursing schools are also accredited, a voluntary process that is done by a non-governmental association. All graduates take the same licensing exam, a computer adaptive test that is from 75 to 265 items long educated graduates were first time test takers; 85.5% passed the exam. Trends in nursing education In 2008 almost 120,000 US include a focus on evidence based practice, an emphasis on safety and quality, patient education and management of chronic conditions, genetics and genomics and the use of simulation in nursing education

Identifying Proper Names Based on Association Analysis

The issue of proper names recognition in Chinese text was discussed. An automatic approach based on association analysis to extract rules from corpus was presented. The method tries to discover rules relevant to external evidence by association analysis, without additional manual effort. These rules can be used to recognize the proper nouns in Chinese texts. The experimental result shows that our method is practical in some applications. Moreover, the method is language independent.

Automatic Partition of Chinese Sentence Group

Automatic partition of Chinese sentence group is very important to the statistical machine translation system based on discourse. This paper presents an approach to this issue： first, each sentence in a discourse is expressed as a feature vector; second, a special hierarchical clustering algorithm is applied to present a discourse as a sentence group tree. In this paper, local reoccurrence measure is proposed to the selection of key phras and the evaluation of the weight of key phrases. Experimental results show our approach promising.

A new adaptive state space construction method for the mobile robot navigation

In order to solve the combinative explosion problems in a continuous and high dimensional statespace,a function approximation approach is usually used to represent the state space.The normalized ra-dial basis function(NRBF)was adopted as the local function approximator and a kind of adaptive statespace construction strategy based on the NRBF(ASC-NRBF)was proposed,which enables the system toallocate appropriate number and size of the basis functions automatically.Combined with the reinforce-ment learning method,the proposed ASC-NRBF method was applied to the robot navigation problem.Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

Coeliac disease in Dutch patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and vice versa

AIM: To define the association between Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and coeliac disease in Dutch patients. METHODS: A total of 104 consecutive patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis underwent coeliac serological tests (antigliadins, transglutaminase and endomysium antibodies) and HLA-DQ typing. Small intestinal biopsy was performed when any of coeliac serological tests was positive. On the other hand, 184 patients with coeliac disease were subjected to thyroid biochemical (thyroid stimulating hormone and free thyroxine) and thyroid serological tests (thyroglobulin and thyroid peroxidase antibodies). RESULTS: Of 104 patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, sixteen (15%) were positive for coeliac serology and five patients with documented villous atrophy were diagnosed with coeliac disease (4.8%; 95% CI 0.7-8.9). HLA-DQ2 (and/or -DQ8) was present in all the five and 53 patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (50%; 95% CI 43-62). Of 184 patients with coeliac disease, 39 (21%) were positive for thyroid serology. Based on thyroid biochemistry, the 39 patients were subclassified into euthyroidism in ten (5%; 95% CI 2-9), subclinicalhypothyroidism in seven (3.8%; 95% CI 1.8-7.6), and overt hypothyroidism (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis) in 22 (12%; 95% CI 8-16). Moreover, four patients with coeliac disease had Graves’ disease (2%; 95% CI 0.8-5) and one patient had post-partum thyroiditis. CONCLUSION: The data from a Dutch population confirm the association between Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and coeliac disease. Screening patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis for coeliac disease and vice versa is recom- mended.

Second Reference State and Complete Eigenstates of Open XYZ Chain

The second reference state of the open XYZ spin chain with non-diagonal boundary terms is studied. The associated Bethe states exactly yield the second set of eigenvalues proposed recently by functional Bethe Ansatz.

Sustainability and Entrepreneurship in the Biofuels Supply Chain： A Proposal for a Survey

Investments in bio-energies require deep and accurate analysis to evaluate their economical feasibility both by the investors＇ and the policy makers＇ perspectives. The chance to attain locally organized supply chains is presumably higher where there is a higher concentration of human, natural and financial capitals. After a literature review about social capital and energy supply chain （prg. 1）, we investigate the instruments for public direct financial incentive （prg. 2） and the development of the public intervention plans in the agro-energy sector within the Local Development Plans （LDP） by Local Action Groups （LAG）. Then, we present the case study of the Apulia Region （prg. 3） based upon a unique dataset, specifically built that collects LDP data relative to social capital. We finally propose a new methodological approach that makes use of social network analysis investigating the net of relationships underneath the territorial organization of the LAGs and the local supply chains. Results seem to show that site specificities affect the sustainability of biofuels supply chains, and that effect seems to be reciprocally bounded, thus calling for the inclusion of such measures when planning new policies, and for analytical approaches encompassing historical perspectives. Finally, we draw the conclusions.