Rapid movement of agricultural chemicals through soil to groundwater via preferential flow pathways is one cause of water contamination. Previous studies have shown that time domain reflectometry (TDR) could be used to characterize solute transport in soil. However, previous studies have only scarcely addressed preferential flow. This study presents an extended application of TDR for determinin...

On the basis of an intraseasonal variability index of storm track evaluated for 40 winters (1963–64 through 2003–04) of NCEP–NCAR reanalysis data, it is found that well-defined midwinter minimum [MWMIN; (midwinter maximum MWMAX)] occurs in 21 (8) winters over the North Pacific. In contrast, MWMIN (MWMAX) occurs in 4 (25) of the 40 winters over the North Atlantic. The power spectrum of such an i...

OBJECTIVE Betacellulin (BTC), purified and cloned from mouse beta cell tumor (BTC-JC10), is regarded as a new member of the epidermal growth factor family. The present study was conducted to clarify the expression of BTC and its receptors, ErbB-1 and ErbB-4, in the trophoblasts in the human placenta over the course of pregnancy. DESIGN AND METHODS Human placental tissues were obtained from 4 ...

Betacellulin (BTC), a ligand of the epidermal growth factor receptor, has been shown to promote growth and differentiation of pancreatic β-cells and to improve glucose metabolism in experimental diabetic rodent models. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been already proved to be multipotent. Recent work has attributed to rat and human MSCs the potential to differentiate into insulin-secreting c...

Activation of EGF receptors is closely involved in vascular proliferative diseases. The signaling mechanisms of EGF ligands, including betacellulin (BTC) and amphiregulin (AR), are poorly understood. We examined how BTC and AR induced DNA synthesis activity in primary cultures of human thoracic aortic smooth muscle cells (HTASMCs). BTC induced phosphorylation of all four EGF receptors present o...

Block Truncation Coding (BTC), using a one-bit moment preserving quantizer to quantize a block, is a simple compression method; however, compression with BTC cannot be used to obtain a sufficiently high quality image, especially an image with many edges. In this paper, a new generalized multilevel BTC algorithm, which arbitrarily specifies the number of quantization levels, is developed. In the...

We introduce a simple image coding method, the block truncation coding (BTC) technique, as a novel approach to the construction of colour image databases. It is shown that BTC can not only be used to compress the images thus achieving storage eflciency. the BTC codes can also be used directly to construct image features for effective image retrieval. From the BTC code we have developed an image...

In this paper, Block Turbo Codes (BTC), that is product codes obtained from the concatenation of either two extended or two expurgated BCH codes are evaluated for the HIPERLAN/2 system. Simulations show that only expurgated BTC outperforms the performance of the Convolutional Code (CC) specified in the standard. This result is surprising since expurgated and extended BTC have same performance o...

The strength of the East Australian Current (EAC) is observed to vary in response to changes in basin-scale winds in the South Pacific, with a time lag of three years. First mode baroclinic Rossby waves would take 10–15 years to reach the western boundary from the center of the South Pacific, so a faster mechanism is needed to explain this link. We use an ocean general circulation model forced ...