BACKGROUND Workers exposed to sewage may have an increased risk of infection by Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis E virus (HEV). OBJECTIVES To assess the incidence of clinical hepatitis E and peptic ulcers and the seroconversion rate of antibodies to H pylori and HEV in workers with and without sewage exposure. METHODS 332 workers exposed to sewage and a control group of 446 municipal manua...

Analyzed and summarized the research results on the ship target detection and identification in SAR imagery. The characteristics of the ship target recognition in SAR imagery are listed. Ship target recognition techniques are introduced. And the ship detection and recognition algorithms have been reviewed and analyzed. The main problems on ship detection and recognition process have been descri...

Cryptosporidium and Giardia are two important pathogenic parasites that have caused many waterborne outbreaks which affected hundreds of thousands of people. Contamination from effluent discharged by sewage treatment plants have been implicated in previous waterborne outbreaks of Cryptosporidium and Giardia. This study evaluated the reduction of Cryptosporidium and Giardia (oo)cysts in two sewa...

Ferry accidents often occur the result of ship handling difficulty which interfacing human, machine and environment. Therefore, a decision tool model as a comprehensive information system, based on the ship handling difficulty, needs to be developed through the combination of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Logic System. The Fuzzy Logic System part consists of ship condition, ship ha...

In this study, basic experiments regarding the wireless sensor network were conducted on a 3,000-ton-class training ship as the first step in applying the ubiquitous technology to a real ship. Various application fields of the technology in terms of the provision of safety and convenience on a ship would be extracted through these experiments. To efficiently adopt the ubiquitous technology for ...

We have previously demonstrated that the NKR repertoire is profoundly disrupted by SHIP deficiency. This repertoire disruption is characterized by receptor dominance where inhibitory signals from 2B4 repress killing of complex targets expressing MHC class I and activating ligands. In this study, we examine the molecular basis of receptor dominance in SHIP-/- NK cells. In this study, we show tha...

According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) guidelines, when calculating CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions from biomass should be excluded from the total amount of CO2 emissions and should be separately reported due to their “carbon neutrality”. Sewage sludge is one of the representative biomass fuels. It is mixed with fossil fuels to achieve greenhouse gas reduction or is used...

A study was conducted to determine the significance of starvation resistance to the ability of a species to survive in sewage and lake water. Tests were conducted for periods of up to 14 days. Rhizobium meliloti and one fluorescent and one nonfluorescent strain of Pseudomonas were resistant to starvation because their population sizes did not fall appreciably in buffer and sterile lake water, a...

The termination of activation signals is a critical step in the control of the immune response; perturbation of inhibitory feedback pathways results in profound immune defects culminating in autoimmunity and overwhelming inflammation. FcgammaRIIB receptor is a well described inhibitory receptor. The ligation of B-cell receptor (BCR) and FcgammaRIIB leads to the inhibition of B-cell activation. ...

We report about a hierarchical design for extracting ship features and recognizing ships from SAR images, and which will eventually feed a multisensor data fusion system for airborne surveillance. The target is segmented from the image background using directional thresholding and region merging processes. Ship end-points are then identified through a ship centerline detection performed with a ...