His first journey to Italy was a pleasant one. Genoa, Pisa of the famed Leaning Tower, Naples, Capri, Pompeii and Rome were highspots of his Italian visit. During his three day's stay in Rome, he viewed an outdoor performance of "Aida", in the ruins of the Caracalla Baths, which was attended by 20,000 people. The Conte de Bavoia, Italian liner, was leaving Naples during his visit; three days la...

Control Chart Patterns (CCPs) recognition is one the most important concepts in control chart application. Relating the patterns exhibited on the control chart to assignable causes is an ambiguous and vague task especially when multiple patterns co-exist. In this study, a fuzzy rule-based system is developed for X ̅ control charts to prioritize the control chart causes based on the accumulated e...

—In this article, a video base early fire alarm system is developed by monitoring the smoke in the scene. There are two major contributions in this work. First, to find the best texture feature for smoke detection, a general framework, named Histograms of Equivalent Patterns (HEP), is adopted to achieve an extensive evaluation of various kinds of texture features. Second, the Block based Inter-...

T cells ectopically expressing costimulators are pathogenic and contribute to autoimmunity against self-antigens. Given that tumor antigens are often self-antigen or mutated self-antigens, we hypothesize that neoexpressing a costimulator on tumor-reactive T cells may likewise enhance their reactivity to tumor. To test this hypothesis, we have expressed B7-1 on OT-1 CD8+ T-cell receptor transgen...

In this study, a culture-independent Illumina MiSeq sequencing strategy was applied to investigate the microbial communities colonizing the ancient painted sculptures of the Maijishan Grottoes, a famous World Cultural Heritage site listed by UNESCO in China. Four mixed samples were collected from Cave 4-4 of the Maijishan Grottoes, the so-called Upper Seven Buddha Pavilion, which was built duri...

This paper is a sequel to [LoMa] where moduli spaces of painted stable curves were introduced and studied. We define the extended modular operad of genus zero, algebras over this operad, and study the formal differential geometric structures related to these algebras: pencils of flat connections and Frobenius man-ifolds without metric. We focus here on the combinatorial aspects of the picture. ...

This paper is a sequel to [LoMa] where moduli spaces of painted stable curves were introduced and studied. We define the extended modular operad of genus zero, algebras over this operad, and study the formal differential geometric structures related to these algebras: pencils of flat connections and Frobenius man-ifolds without metric. We focus here on the combinatorial aspects of the picture. ...

Painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) are representatives of a vertebrate clade whose biology and phylogenetic position hold a key to our understanding of fundamental aspects of vertebrate evolution. These features make them an ideal emerging model system. Extensive ecological and physiological research provide the context in which to place new research advances in evolutionary genetics, genomics, ...