A temperature structure appropriate for maritime areas is employed to find exact solutions to the non-linear quasi-geostrophic omega and vorticity equations, using a procedure similar to that used in a quasigeostrophic model by Sanders (1971). Results are qualitatively similar to those found in the latter model, and thus, are consistent with the traditional baroclinic stability theory. The prin...

This paper proposes a Template-based Spectral Estimation (TSE) method for noise reduction of microphone array processing aiming at speech recognition enhancement. In the proposed method, a noise template in a complex plane is calculated for each frequency bin using non-speech audio signals observed at microphones. Then for every noise-overlapped speech signals, a speech signal can be reformed b...

Small nontranslated RNAs (sRNAs) regulate a variety of biological processes. DsrA and OxyS are two E. coli sRNAs that regulate the translation of rpoS, which encodes a protein sigma factor. Due to their structural complexity, the functional dissection of sRNAs solely by designing and assaying mutants can be challenging. Here, we present a complementary approach to the study of functional RNAs, ...

Hearing protectors attenuate both the background noise and the useful sounds embedded in noise such as the sounds of speech and warning signals. An effective hearing protector is one that attenuates background noise while leaving sufficient energy of speech and warning signals to reach the ear of the worker. At present, however, there are no established criteria for assessing effective change i...

This paper describes a fixed-point independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm in combination with the null beamforming technique to sieve out speech signals from their convoluted mixture observed using a linear microphone array. The fixed-point algorithm shows fast convergence to the solution, however it is highly sensitive to the initial value from which iteration starts. A good initial va...

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm which mainly exploits the source statistics at the decoder based on the availability of side information at the decoder. This paper considers feedback channel based Transform Domain Wyner-Ziv (TDWZ) DVC. The coding efficiency of TDWZ video coding does not match that of conventional video coding yet, mainly due to the quality of side info...

The overall theme of this thesis has been the study of the effects of well known and potentially novel stressors on fish health and how some of these may be modulated by dietary supplements of micronutrients, using both in vitro and in vivo analysis. In vitro experiments with cultured fish cells (EPC-A 1, GFSk-S 1) evaluated the potential of niacin and selenium to reduce cytotoxicity and genomi...

With a hepatitis B prevalence of 0.3%, Switzerland is a country with low endemicity. Unlike most other countries, Switzerland's recommendation for vaccination against hepatitis B has since 1998 focused on adolescents aged 11 to 15 years rather than on infants, in addition to risk groups since 1982. This paper describes the evolution of the incidence of acute hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection an...

The discovery of metals as catalytic centers for nitrogen reduction reactions has stimulated great enthusiasm single-atom catalysts. However, the poor activity and low selectivity available SACs are far away from industrial requirement. Through high throughout first principles calculations, doping engineering can effectively regulate NRR performance b-Sb monolayer. Especially, origin activated ...