An eco- and inno-product design system applying integrated and intelligent qfde and triz methodology

The green environmental laws and regulations are legislated, implemented, and enforced in many countries and economic regions. The provision of green products and services are the fast growing trend in global consumer markets. Therefore, introducing new products with environmental considerations becomes critical for global brand manufacturers. This research depicts an integrated and intelligent eco- and inno-product design methodology to support environmental friendly green product development. The methodology adopts approaches, such as life cycle assessment (LCA), quality function deploymnet for environement (QFDE), theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) and back-propagation network (BPN) to achieve eco- and inno-design objectives. LCA evaluates and compares the environmental impacts of production. QFDE transforms high-level concerns of environment into design requirements. When there are many historical QFDE data, the BPN prediction model is trained and deployed to automate the specifications of green design improvement. TRIZ is to support the creation of innovative product design ideas effectively and efficiently during the concept design stage. Finally, this paper presents two eco-design cases of power adaptor to demonstrate the proposed methodology.     

Silicon-chip-based ultrafast optical oscilloscope

With the realization of faster telecommunication data rates and an expanding interest in ultrafast chemical and physical phenomena, it has become important to develop techniques that enable simple measurements of optical waveforms with subpicosecond resolution. State-of-the-art oscilloscopes with high-speed photodetectors provide single-shot waveform measurement with 30-ps resolution. Although multiple-shot sampling techniques can achieve few-picosecond resolution, single-shot measurements are necessary to analyse events that are rapidly varying in time, asynchronous, or may occur only once. Further improvements in single-shot resolution are challenging, owing to microelectronic bandwidth limitations. To overcome these limitations, researchers have looked towards all-optical techniques because of the large processing bandwidths that photonics allow. This has generated an explosion of interest in the integration of photonics on standard electronics platforms, which has spawned the field of silicon photonics and promises to enable the next generation of computer processing units and advances in high-bandwidth communications. For the success of silicon photonics in these areas, on-chip optical signal-processing for optical performance monitoring will prove critical. Beyond next-generation communications, silicon-compatible ultrafast metrology would be of great utility to many fundamental research fields, as evident from the scientific impact that ultrafast measurement techniques continue to make. Here, using time-to-frequency conversion via the nonlinear process of four-wave mixing on a silicon chip, we demonstrate a waveform measurement technology within a silicon-photonic platform. We measure optical waveforms with 220-fs resolution over lengths greater than 100 ps, which represent the largest record-length-to-resolution ratio (>450) of any single-shot-capable picosecond waveform measurement technique. Our implementation allows for single-shot measurements and uses only highly developed electronic and optical materials of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon-on-insulator technology and single-mode optical fibre. The mature silicon-on-insulator platform and the ability to integrate electronics with these CMOS-compatible photonics offer great promise to extend this technology into commonplace bench-top and chip-scale instruments.     

Genomic screening and replication using the same data set in family-based association testing

The Human Genome Project and its spin-offs are making it increasingly feasible to determine the genetic basis of complex traits using genome-wide association studies. The statistical challenge of analyzing such studies stems from the severe multiple-comparison problem resulting from the analysis of thousands of SNPs. Our methodology for genome-wide family-based association studies, using single SNPs or haplotypes, can identify associations that achieve genome-wide significance. In relation to developing guidelines for our screening tools, we determined lower bounds for the estimated power to detect the gene underlying the disease-susceptibility locus, which hold regardless of the linkage disequilibrium structure present in the data. We also assessed the power of our approach in the presence of multiple disease-susceptibility loci. Our screening tools accommodate genomic control and use the concept of haplotype-tagging SNPs. Our methods use the entire sample and do not require separate screening and validation samples to establish genome-wide significance, as population-based designs do.     

Stability of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula during the Holocene epoch

The stability of the Antarctic ice shelves in a warming climate has long been discussed, and the recent collapse of a significant part, over 12,500 km2 in area, of the Larsen ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula has led to a refocus toward the implications of ice shelf decay for the stability of Antarctica's grounded ice. Some smaller Antarctic ice shelves have undergone periodic growth and decay over the past 11,000 yr (refs 7-11), but these ice shelves are at the climatic limit of ice shelf viability and are therefore expected to respond rapidly to natural climate variability at century to millennial scales. Here we use records of diatoms, detrital material and geochemical parameters from six marine sediment cores in the vicinity of the Larsen ice shelf to demonstrate that the recent collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf is unprecedented during the Holocene. We infer from our oxygen isotope measurements in planktonic foraminifera that the Larsen B ice shelf has been thinning throughout the Holocene, and we suggest that the recent prolonged period of warming in the Antarctic Peninsula region, in combination with the long-term thinning, has led to collapse of the ice shelf.     

Cytokine signaling convergence regulates the microglial state transition in Alzheimer’s disease

Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences - Genetic analyses have revealed the pivotal contribution of microglial dysfunctions to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Along AD...     

A one-stop logistic services framework supporting global supply chain collaboration

A global enterprise must continuously improve the efficiency of logistic operations between supply chain collaborators. Integrating logistic services, resources, and necessary information flows in the supply chain to ensure efficiency and efficacy is critically important to these companies. Global logistic service companies face challenges from their clients to provide logistic services that are cost effective, accurate, and seamlessly integrate material, information and cash flows. In this research, an improved framework for one-stop logistic services is systematically designed, analyzed, and evaluated. The one-stop logistic service framework, defined in four models, is developed to provide enterprises with integrated and comprehensive services within the global supply chain context. The levels of service importance are assessed using a four categories questionnaire. This research provides a case study of the implementation of one-stop logistic services in the distribution industry and demonstrates the framework operating under different demand conditions. Finally, system dynamics causal evaluation is used to evaluate the advantages of the logistic service framework.     

Re-engineering transformer maintenance processes to improve customized service delivery

The outage of a transformer in a power generation system will generally result in a shutdown of the entire system.Consequentially,large amounts of revenue are lost to the plant owner with a substantial negative impact on the civil community and industrial customers.This paper analyzes the current maintenance practices(i.e.,an as-is process model) of a transformer manufacturing company,which provides maintenance services to power generation plants and reports the major weaknesses in current business pract...