Due to the lack of research between the inner layers in the structure of colonic mucous and the metabolism of fatty acid in the constipation model, we aim to determine the changes in the mucous phenotype of the colonic glycocalyx and the microbial community structure following treatment with Rhubarb extract in our research. The constipation and treatment models are generated using adult male C57BL/6N mice. We perform light microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to detect a Muc2-rich inner mucus layer attached to mice colon under different conditions. In addition, 16S rDNA sequencing is performed to examine the intestinal flora. According to TEM images, we demonstrate that Rhubarb can promote mucin secretion and find direct evidence of dendritic structure-linked mucus structures with its assembly into a lamellar network in a pore size distribution in the isolated colon section. Moreover, the diversity of intestinal flora has noticeable changes in constipated mice. The present study characterizes a dendritic structure and persistent cross-links have significant changes accompanied by the alteration of intestinal flora in feces in models of constipation and pretreatment with Rhubarb extract.

Dynamic trajectory prediction is an important topic in the field of navigation and positioning. Due to the drawbacks of a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, the trajectory of the position always lags behind the dynamic platform's actual position, especially in highly dynamic situations. In order to solve the prediction of a dynamic trajectory, a generalised extension extrapolated model is proposed in this paper. The model utilises the current motion state and a priori position data of the platform, combines the interpolation and fitting method, adds the angle information as a constraint condition and solves the platform position prediction. In this paper, the feasibility of the generalised extended extrapolation algorithm is analysed theoretically and practically. Simulation results show that the prediction error is within 0.2 metres and experimental results show that the algorithm still has high prediction accuracy when a land vehicle platform is turned through a large angle.

In this paper, we develop a formal framework for what a good community should look like and how strong a community is (community strength). One of the key innovations is to incorporate the concept of relative centrality into structural analysis of networks. In our framework, relative centrality is a measure that measures how important a set of nodes in a network is with respect to another set of nodes, and it is a generalization of centrality. Building on top of relative centrality, the community strength for a set of nodes is measured by the difference between its relative centrality with respect to itself and its centrality. A community is then a set of nodes with a nonnegative community strength. We show that our community strength is related to conductance that is commonly used for measuring the strength of a small community. We define the modularity for a partition of a network as the average community strength for a randomly selected node. Such a definition generalizes the original Newman's modularity and recovers the stability in as special cases. For the local community detection problem, we also develop efficient agglomerative algorithms that guarantee the community strength of the detected local community.

Morphological evolution and phase transformation of metastable intermediate precipitates are critical to their mechanical properties for the non-isothermal processing. During the non-isothermal precipitation, the formation of the new phases usually couples with structural evolution. Traditional structural characterization has limitation to resolve comprehensive changes simultaneously. In this study, we report direct observation, precipitation sequence, and the details of concurrent morphological and structural changes of various intermediate precipitates during non-isothermal heating in the Al–Cu systems with different pretreatments. The structural heterogeneity during the non-isothermal precipitation processes is resolved into coexistence of two different precipitate phases and quantitatively studied in terms of the phase transition and the morphological evolution. This paper presents the in situ small- and wide-angle synchrotron x-ray scattering (SAXS and WAXS) to refine and to identify the mixed structural information during multiple precipitation stages. The WAXS results show that the precipitation sequence is θ″ → (θ″ + θ′) → θ′ → (θ′ + θ) → θ upon heating. Due to the fact of the specifically oriented SAXS intensity, the evolution of the aforementioned phase transformation is resolved by the refinement of the SAXS intensity integrated over the selected area. These methods reveal multiscale information that is not trivial comparing to the traditional characterization methods.

Wiggling structures in a bipolar outflow may be attributed to orbital motion of a binary system or precession of an accretion disk perturbed by a companion. The shocked knots along the outflow axis display a morphology with either mirror symmetry due to the orbital motion or point symmetry resulted from disk precession. Using the Submillimeter Array (SMA), our CO (2-1) and SiO (5-4) observations show wiggling structures in the collimated bipolar outflow driven by the NGC 1333 IRAS 2A Class 0 protostar (d ~ 200 pc). By fitting the peak positions of emission knots, we can examine the lateral displacement of the molecular jet to constrain parameters of the unresolved binary system, such as the binary separation and total binary mass. With an angular resolution of ~3″, we have determined the knot positions in SiO (5–4)(Fig. 1) and CO (2–1). As a first attempt, we consider the scenario of orbital motion in a binary system and estimate a total binary mass of ~ 1M⊙ and a binary separation of roughly ~ 20 AU, corresponding to ~ 0.1″. Such a small separation makes it challenging to resolve this hypothesized proto-binary system, which is thought to be responsible for the large-scale quadrupolar outflow nearly perpendicular with each other in CO (1–0).

A biomimetic underwater vehicle, which is propelled by two undulating long-fins, is introduced in this paper. The undulating or oscillating movements of symmetrical long-fins cause the complex locomotion of biomimetic underwater vehicle. For convenience, three motion modes are proposed and considered firstly. Then an inertial unit is installed for collection of accelerations and angular velocity. The underwater vehicle's MIMO model is reduced into a SISO model by some simplifications. A sine wave function deduced from the long-fin's time-varying membrane is proposed and used as the input of the biomimetic underwater vehicle ARMA model, and velocity or angular velocity is considered as the model output. The algorithms based on recursive weighted least squares are applied for model parameter identification. Experiments carried out with a long-fin propelled underwater vehicle. The experimental results show that the proposed methods can build valid locomotion models for three motion modes efficiently.

In this paper, we consider a discrete-time queueing model for a Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) system with integration of voice and data (a model introduced by Li and Mark [16]). The voice traffic is a superposition of N Markov chains, which alternate between two states: the talkspurt state and the silence state. The data traffic is Poisson and independent of the voice sources. We show that the average queue size is increasing in certain correlation coefficients of the voice sources, increasing convex in the proportion of time the voice sources are in talkspurts, increasing convex in the number of voice sources, and increasing convex in the data traffic intensity. However, it is decreasing convex in the number of channels. These structural results yield various bounds. To take video traffic into account as well, we adapt a model of Maglaris et al. [18]. In their model, video traffic is generated by a continuous-state autoregressive Markov process that matches the average rate and the autocovariance of the output of a video coder. We show that if we replace their autoregressive model by a two-state Markov chain model with the same rate and correlation coefficient, we obtain an upper bound for the queue size. This replacement enables us to treat the video traffic as a voice source and use the techniques developed for dealing with voice/data integration to obtain bounds and estimates.

We consider preemptive scheduling on parallel machines where processing times of jobs are i.i.d. but jobs may already have received distinct amounts of service. We show that when processing times are increasing in likelihood ratio, SEPT (shortest expected [remaining] processing time first) stochastically minimizes any increasing and Schur-concave function of the job completion times. The same result holds when processing times are exponential with possibly different means.

Relational program derivation is the technique of stepwise refining a relational specification to a program by algebraic rules. The program thus obtained is correct by construction. Meanwhile, dependent type theory is rich enough to express various correctness properties to be verified by the type checker. We have developed a library, AoPA (Algebra of Programming in Agda), to encode relational derivations in the dependently typed programming language Agda. A program is coupled with an algebraic derivation whose correctness is guaranteed by the type system. Two non-trivial examples are presented: an optimisation problem and a derivation of quicksort in which well-founded recursion is used to model terminating hylomorphisms in a language with inductive types.

This study reviews the results of the surgical management of 154 cases of ruptured aneurysm of the sinus of Valsalva. Of the patients0 73% were male, with an average age of 28 years. An associated ventricular septal defect was found in 40% and 23% had aortic valvar regurgitation. The aneurysms originated from the right coronary sinus in 79% and from the non-coronary sinus in the remainders. The aneurysms ruptured into the right ventricle in 73%, into the right atrium in 27% and into the left ventricle in less than 1%. Operative mortality was 4.5%. Long-term follow-up was achieved in 80% of patients, with a mean duration of 5.7 years and a range from two months to 29 years. Preoperative aortic regurgitation and preoperative functional class (NYHA III or IV) were both predictive of a worse long-term outcome. The optimal surgical approach was closure of the distal end of the fistula by direct suture together with reinforcement of the aortic sinus with a Dacron patch.

We present a new process based on the electrolysis of glass, which allows the transfer of a single-crystal silicon film while creating an in situ barrier layer free of mobile ions in the glass. This barrier layer consists only of network-forming elements (i.e., aluminum, silicon, and boron) and is free of modifiers. The barrier layer glass is unusual and cannot be synthesized via any of the known glass-forming processes. The barrier layer is thermally stable and thus allows the fabrication of displays with ultimate performance. The process consists of the hydrogen ion implantation of silicon to create a defect structure followed by bringing the glass and the silicon wafer in contact, and finally applying electrical potential to cause the electrolysis of glass.

For fabricating Yb3+ doped La2O3-Al2O3-SiO2 glasses for high-powered fiber lasers, it is critical to choose the right core glass composition to obtain a high numerical aperture and to avoid phase separation. TEM techniques were used to study the relationship between the core composition and phase separation. In the study, inter-diffusion between the core and cladding glasses was found. The inter-diffusion caused large density fluctuation in the region of the core/cladding interface in fibers containing relatively high concentrations of La2O3. The TEM results were used to optimize the chemical composition of the core glass for high-power fiber lasers.

A novel method for synthesizing anisotropically shaped particles of materials having cubic symmetry is reported. Anisotropically shaped single-crystal particles of cubic SrTiO3 were obtained by epitaxial growth on tabular tetragonal Sr3Ti2O7. Transmission electron microscopy revealed that both the shape and the size of the single-crystal particles was regulated by selecting a precursor material that can act as a reaction site in molten KCl and has an epitaxial relation with SrTiO3. The [001] and [110] directions of tabular SrTiO3 are parallel to the [001] and [110] directions of the Sr3Ti2O7 host particle, respectively. Tabular SrTiO3 particles with rectangular faces having an edge length of 10–20 μm and a thickness of ˜2 μm were obtained by reacting TiO2 and tabular Sr3Ti2O7 particles of the same edge length in molten KCl.

Long-range dependence has been recently asserted to be an important characteristic in modeling telecommunications traffic. Inspired by the integral relationship between the fractional Brownian motion and the standard Brownian motion, we model a process with long-range dependence, Y, as a fractional integral of Riemann-Liouville type applied to a more standard process X—one that does not have long-range dependence. When X takes the form of a sample path process with bounded stationary increments, we provide a criterion for X to satisfy a moderate deviations principle (MDP). Based on the MDP of X, we then establish the MDP for Y. Furthermore, we characterize, in terms of the MDP, the transient behavior of queues when fed with the long-range dependent input process Y. In particular, we identify the most likely path that leads to a large queue, and demonstrate that unlike the case where the input has short-range dependence, the path here is nonlinear.

The topological theory of interfacial defects and the associated flux analysis are reviewed. It is shown that the shears and diffusive fluxes associated with the motion of disconnections can be determined directly from their crystallographic characteristics, and that the effects of changes in chemical composition, interfacial misfit and ordering can be incorporated into the analysis. The special conditions are identified for which there is conservation of atomic sites during the motion of disconnections. It is shown that, under these circumstances, disconnection motion may result in mixed-mode displacive-diffusive transformations whereby diffusion is required for the transformation to proceed but the interfaces exhibit crystallographic characteristics which one would normally associate with a martensitic transformation. It is shown that the growth of γ lamellae in TiAl-based alloys is an example of such a mixed-mode transformation.

The defect character of steps on lamellar γ/α2 interfaces in a quinternary TiAl-based alloy has been studied using high resolution transmission electron microscopy. The interfaces consisted of atomically flat coherent terraces separated by interfacial steps across equal even numbers of {111}γ and (0002)α2 planes. Circuit mapping was used to identify the Burgers vectors of these steps from lattice images obtained at [101]γ and [110]γ zone axes. It was found that the Burgers vectors exhibited by the two-layer steps are different from those reported previously and are consistent with those expected for perfect disconnections as described by Pond's topological theory of interfacial defects, and not with the usual partial dislocation model.

In this note, we consider G/G/1 queues with stationary and ergodic inputs. We show that if the service times are independent and identically distributed with unbounded supports, then for a given mean of interarrival times, the number of sequences (distributions) of interarrival times that induce identical distributions on interdeparture times is at most 1. As a direct consequence, among all the G/M/1 queues with stationary and ergodic inputs, the M/M/1 queue is the only queue whose departure process is identically distributed as the input process.

We consider preemptive scheduling on parallel machines where the number of available machines may be an arbitrary, possibly random, function of time. Processing times of jobs are from a family of DLR (decreasing likelihood ratio) distributions, and jobs may arrive at random agreeable times. We give a constructive coupling proof to show that LEPT stochastically minimizes the makespan, and that it minimizes the expected cost when the cost function satisfies certain agreeability conditions.