Efforts have been devoted to the identification of the impacts of occupant behavior on building energy consumption. Various factors influence building energy consumption at the same time, leading to the lack of precision when identifying the individual effects of occupant behavior. This paper reports the development of a new methodology for examining the influences of occupant behavior on build...

This paper studies the existence of eecient (small size) ampliiers for proving explicit inaproximability results for bounded degree and bounded occurrence combinatorial optimization problems, and gives an explicit construction for such ampliiers. We use this construction to improve the currently best known approximation lower bounds for bounded occurrence instances of linear equations mod 2, an...

The role of alkaloids in cigarette smoke was investigated in the cumulus expansion of oocyte-cumulus complexes (OCC) isolated from large antral porcine follicles. Suppression of the cumulus expansion stimulated by FSH was observed in the presence of different concentration of cadmium, anabasine and nicotine but not its metabolite cotinine. There were comparable inhibitory effects of cadmium and...

Development and usage of Case Based Reasoning (CBR) driven medical diagnostic system requires a large volume of clinical cases that depict the problem-solving methodology of medical experts. Successful usage of CBR based systems in healthcare is constrained by the need for a continuous supply of current and correct clinical cases (in an electronic medium) from medical experts. To address this c...

An extension of the one-cycle control (OCC) method for switched-capacitor (SC) converters is proposed in this paper, featuring a fast dynamic response, wide line and load operation ranges, and simplicity in implementation. To illustrate the operation principle of this nonlinear control method and to demonstrate its simplicity in design, a dual-phase unity gain SC converter is examined. A new co...

MicroPET imaging studies using (18)F-nifene, a new positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracer for nicotinic acetylcholinergic receptors (nAChR) α4β2 receptors in rats, have been carried out. Rats were imaged for 90 min after intravenous injection of (18)F-nifene (0.8 to 1 mCi), and binding potential (BP(ND)) was measured. (18)F-Nifene binding to thalamic and extrathalamic brain regions was ...

Oral cavity cancer (OCC) is associated with high incidence of loco-regional recurrences, which account for the majority of treatment failures post-surgery and radiotherapy. The time-course of relapse manifestation and metastasis are unpredictable. Relapsed OCC represents a major clinical challenge in part due to their aggressive and invasive behaviors. Chemotherapy remains the only option for a...

Occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in office buildings has been positively correlated to self-estimated job performance and, potentially, to overall company productivity. LEED is a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program that provides third-party certification of green buildings, contributing to promote sustainability into the mainstream of building design a...

Recently, substantial development is observed in the area of Internet Vehicles owing to application wireless communication technologies. Majority these technologies are based on radio frequency (RF); however, RF spectra overly congested and regulated, hence, insufficient support massive data traffic future. In recent times, optical camera (OCC) that uses a light-emitting diode (LED) as transmit...

Emotion is considered to be an important factor in human decision making and consciousness. Due to its perceived importance, recently a number of works try to explore emotion in IR tasks. However, the complexity of emotion extractors and lack of understanding on their effectiveness hinder the progress of such works. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study on the effectiveness of three emo...