A diastereoselective synthesis of highly substituted aminobicyclo[4.3.0]nonanes has been attained using a one-pot multi-bond forming process. A four-step synthetic route was developed for the efficient synthesis of a series of C-7 substituted hept-2-en-6-yn-1-ols. These compounds were then investigated as substrates for a one-pot, three-step tandem process involving a palladium(ii)-catalysed Ov...

Membership encryption is a newly developed cryptographic primitive that combines membership proof and encryption into an unified setting. This paper presents a new flexible membership encryption scheme which is provably secure and significantly more efficient than the previous scheme. Further we apply our proposed membership encryption to construct a round optimal 1-outof-n priced oblivious tra...

The biodegradability of three types of bioplastic pots was evaluated by measuring carbon dioxide produced from lab-scale compost reactors containing mixtures of pot fragments and compost inoculum held at 58 °C for 60 days. Biodegradability of pot type A (composed of 100% polylactic acid (PLA)) was very low (13 ± 3%) compared to literature values for other PLA materials. Near infrared spectrosco...

We introduce a novel approach for robust belief tracking of user intention within a spoken dialog system. The space of user intentions is modeled by a probabilistic extension of the underlying domain ontology called a probabilistic ontology tree (POT). POTs embody a principled approach to leverage the dependencies among domain concepts and incorporate corroborating or conflicting dialog observa...

Carbohydrates are diverse bio-macromolecules with highly complex structures that are involved in numerous biological processes. Well-defined carbohydrates obtained by chemical synthesis are essential to the understanding of their functions. However, synthesis of carbohydrates is greatly hampered by its insufficient efficiency. So far, assembly of long carbohydrate chains remains one of the most...

Bottom-up fabrication of nanoscale structures relies on chemical processes to direct self-assembly. The complexity, precision, and yield achievable by a one-pot reaction are limited by our ability to encode assembly instructions into the molecules themselves. Nucleic acids provide a platform for investigating these issues, as molecular structure and intramolecular interactions can encode growth...

‘Big Beef’ tomatoes produced 2.68 kg/plant from a 72 day harvest period when they were grown in 0.35 liter aluminum beverage cans by a sub-irrigation hydroponic method. Tomatoes growing in net pots (70 ml) suspended by expanded polystyrene bead boards with a sub-irrigation method gave similar yields in one trial but lower yields in another trial than tomatoes growing in beverage cans. Tomatoes ...

We describe the iterative design and evaluation of a geometric interaction technique for bare-hand mid-air virtual pottery. We model the shaping of a pot as a gradual and progressive convergence of the pot-profile to the shape of the user’s hand represented as a pointcloud (PCL). Our pottery-inspired application served as a platform for systematically revealing how users use their hands to expr...

We investigated the cause of thrombocytosis in 14 patients with tumors producing colony-stimulating factor (CSF). Of the 14 patients, 10 had tumors producing granulocyte-CSF (G-CSF) and 4 had tumors producing granulocyte-macrophage--CSF (GM-CSF). Thrombocytosis of greater than 400 x 10(9)/L was noted in 8 of 10 patients with G-CSF-producing tumors and all 4 patients with GM-CSF-producing tumors...

'Floratam' and 'FX-313' St. Augusfinegrasses (Stenotaphrum secundatum) were compared in a time-course experiment for host suitability and susceptibility to the lance nematode, Hoplolaimus galeatus. Nematode densities were determined in the soil and acid-fuchsin stained roots 42, 84, 126, 168, and 210 days after pots containing 230 cm(3) of autoclaved native Margate fine sand/pot were infested w...