I conduct a case study of Atlanta's metropolitan core in order to provide a rich, detailed analysis of urban neighborhoods, and to document the persistence of racial inequalities. Using Census 2000 block group data, I examine racial residential segregation in the five core counties of Atlanta between whites and minority groups, as well as among minority groups. I find high levels of residential segregation between whites and blacks, as well as between blacks and Asians, and blacks and Hispanics; segregation is lower between whites and Asians, and whites and Hispanics. I also investigate neighborhood characteristics like percentage poverty and educational attainment in neighborhoods with different racial compositions. These results highlight the advantages found in predominately white neighborhoods compared to racially concentrated minority neighborhoods, particularly African American and Latino neighborhoods. Overall, this thesis shows that residential stratification remains a hallmark indicator of racial inequality through the opening of the twenty-first century in Atlanta.

IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) is the authority that publishes different standards in the  fields  of  electrical  and  electronics  engineering,  to  be  used  internationally.  In  the  area  of manufacturing, it has demanded a new standard to fulfil better solutions of dynamic requirements. The  IEC  61499  redacted  by  IEC  offers  interoperability,  portability,  configurability  and  distributed control applications for manufacturing processes. However, this standard is not a replacement of IEC 61131-3,  one  of  the  most  used  standards  in  industry;  instead,  it  is  a  complement  of  it.  The  basic software units of IEC 61499 are named Function Blocks (FBs), which can be described as blocks that encapsulate functionality. By combining FBs together, it is possible to solve complex problems.   The  objective  of  this  project  (in  close  cooperation  with  another  project)  is  to  develop  a  software environment in Java language. It follows the requirements of IEC 61499, and implement a Function Block  designer  and  a  runtime  execution  environment,  as  a  part  of  an  existing  Wise-ShopFloor framework. The scope of this project covers:     FB  algorithm  editor:  Each  FB  has  one  or  more  algorithms,  which  can  be  defined  in  the algorithm editor using IEC 61131-3 or Java.     FB serialization: Opening and saving the configuration of FBs in Java Class file is one of the tasks  of  this  project.  As  soon  as  the  configuration  is  saved,  the  Java  code  of  FB  can  be generated. Java code is generated because compiled Java allows execution of FB. Saving in Java  Class  file  permits  portability,  i.e.  the  saved  configuration  can  be  opened  in  any  JVM system, and vice versa.      Case study: A simulation of an assembly station using an ABB IRB 140 robot is studied and implemented using the runtime simulator of the Java platform, in which some basic FBs have been also created in a library. This project also includes: (1) implementation of user interface and (2) FB serialization in XML. It  is  anticipated  that  the  developed  environment  will  be  able  to  save  and  open  FBs  configurations either in XML or in Java Class, following the specification of IEC 61499. It will allow portability and reusability.  Because  of  the  portability,  the  so-designed  FBs  can  be  validated  using  another  FB environment such as FBDK (Function Block Development Kit).

This study was designed to determine if Alberta's sulfur blocks were inhabited by microorganisms which contribute to oxidation of elemental sulfur. The first objective was to elucidate a functional method of differentiating between viable and non-viable organisms in environmental samples. The second objective was to use this and other more established microbiological analyses to characterize the microbial population inhabiting the block and determine if they influence elemental sulfur oxidation.<p>In order to differentiate between viable and non-viable microorganisms, I relied on a DNA binding agent called ethidium monoazide bromide (EMA). Based on previous literature, I was able to test its activity in different environmental samples. Treatment with EMA inhibits the amplification of free DNA, whereas DNA protected by the membranes of viable cells is not affected. After finding that killed pure culture cells had a substantial reduction in their DNA amplification I proceeded to inoculate the same species of killed and viable cells into either soil, biofilm, or elemental sulfur samples obtained from Syncrude's Phase I sulfur block. I have found the EMA treatment to be sufficient at inhibiting amplification of DNA from non-viable cells inoculated into both the soil and sulfur samples, but not in the biofilms. <p>In achieving the second objective I designed experiments which tested in vitro and in situ samples of the sulfur block. Bioreactors containing microbiological inoculants from water running off the sulfur block were compared to sterile bioreactors for levels of acidity, sulfate accumulation and microbial population. Comparison between the surface block samples and the matrix samples showed a higher number of bacteria in the surface samples; however, the differences between the two bioreactor treatments were not significant. Bioreactors which received sterile water did not increase in acidity or sulfate accumulation. The two treatments which were inoculated with 10% sulfur block run off increased by 3 and 4.3 mM sulfate, and 8.6 x 10-3 and 1.8 x 10-2 hydronium ion concentration, in the surface and matrix treatments respectively. In situ samples obtained by coring the sulfur blocks showed that microbial inhabitants are present throughout the block depth profile with a discontinuous pattern, which could be attributed to the fractures associated with the solidification of the block and subsequent colonization. The level of microbiological inhabitants ranged from 2.5 to 5.5 log heterotroph colony forming units g-1 sulfur, and 3.19 x 101 to 1.62 x 102 A. thiooxidans amplified copy numbers, and 1.23 x 103 to 1.11 x 104 Eubacteria amplified DNA copy numbers ìg-1 of extracted DNA from EMA treated sulfur block samples. Most probable number counts for autotrophs only detected organisms along the 0-10 cm depth of the block. <p>The results of this study suggest that the use of ethidium monoazide bromide is a suitable method of detecting the large and varied microbial population inhabiting Alberta's sulfur blocks which can influence the level of block oxidation. The level of microorganisms present in the block is varied, which may parallel the varied pockets of air and water collected in the geomorphic fractures. Microbial communities residing in the sulfur block are partially responsible for sulfur oxidation. Methods aimed at reducing the level of sulfur oxidation must aim to reduce both the chemical and biological pathways leading to sulfur oxidation.

It is a vitally important task to achieve control of the weight and center of gravity of lightship during building a new ship. If the lightship weight is slightly out of control, the deadweight inadequacy and a deviation from the initial design target will be caused. The basic performance and function of a ship at sea are also resulted. Furthermore, if the lightship weight is incompletely under control, it will bring about an unsafe vessel, ship-delivery difficulty and a severe loss for shipbuilder. Docking arrangement is optimized to allocate by using the state-of-the-art finite element method to analyze the lightweight distribution as the load and the ship girder as a beam; in addition, the dock is recognized as a spring-liked elastic foundation subjected to compression only. It is verified by comparison between measurement of the lightship weight by means of the weight control system on land and the traditional inclining experiment. Based on the results, it can be shown that the whole system is reliable, available and efficient. The load cell is utilized as a component of the weight control system to measure the compressive force (i.e., ship weight) at a specified dock. The main function of the system is to determine the lightweight and its C.G. on-land construction instead of the time-consuming and labor-wasting traditional way. The presented methodology will be beneficial for weight control of a new-ship building in the future.

This thesis addresses the design and implementation of a dual-mode channel decoder for two advanced wireless communication systems. One of the targetsystems is the digital video broadcasting for hand-held terminals (DVB-H) , and the other one is Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) system based on the recently approved IEEE 802.16e. Both standards promise to deliver high data bandwidth within very broad regions. The error control coding schemes of both standards are all built on the similar concatenated code, with the exception of the way of data interleaving. Therefore, the decoders for both standards can be highly integrated. To achieve the low-cost and low-power decoder, this thesis proposes several novel design ideas. First, a fast dynamic multiple path convergence mechanism is proposed for the design of Viterbi decoder module, which can determine the survivor path at earlier stage. Furthermore, a new modified forward path prediction method is also presented which can efficiently predict the possiblesurvivor path such that the number of memory operations during the trace-back canbe significantly reduced. The proposed methodology can reduce up to 50% to 80%of memory operations compared with the best prediction scheme in the literature at high signal-to-noise ration. Secondly, for the block deinterleaver adopted by IEEE 802.16. a new multi-bank architecture is proposed by properly splitting and allocating the input data to suitable bank. The proposed block deinterleaver can be highly integrated with the byte-level convolutional deinterleaver adopted by the DVB-H standard by realizing the multiply First-In-First-Out (FIFO) data branches as the circular buffer. The other salient feature of the proposed dual-mode decoder is that all the major data storage units can all be realized by single-port memory such that the overall cost can be highly reduced.

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名古屋大学博士学位論文 学位の種類 : 博士(医学)(論文) 学位授与年月日:平成4年7月20日 新田弘幸氏の博士論文として提出された

Fractal image compression is based on the representation of an image by contractive transforms whose xed points are close to the original image. In the encoding of fractal image compression, most of the time is spent on nding the close match between a range block and a large pool of domain blocks. In this thesis, we use the intra-block variances distributions of domain blocks to reduce the searching space. For nding a close match we need only search the domain blocks whose maximal intra-block variance quadrants are the same as that of the range block in nding a close match. The experiment results show that our algorithm can reduce much encoding time with only slight loss of quality.

Computing A^X mod n or A^XB^Y mod n for large X, Y, and n is very important in many ElGamal-like public key cryptosystems. In this paper, we proposed using block method in sparse form to improve the performance of modular exponentiation and analyzing the computational cost by state transition diagram. We also extended the concept of Block Method and make it more general. This method is suitable for some devices with limited storage space, such as smart card.

In this paper, we propose a high-yield self-aligned process to form a silicon-on-insulator MOSFET with block oxide for 1T DRAM use. The new process can overcome the problem of the previous one [1], which cannot be used for a thin BOX devices. Based on the TCAD 10.0 simulation, we compared the conventional 1T-DRAM (PDSOI) with the partially depleted SOI with block oxide ¡]bPDSOI¡^ which used the new process presented in this thesis, We find that the device with block oxide embedded on body is not only obtain good short-channel effects immunity but also reduce leakage of the P-N junction between source/drain and the body and increase the gate controlability on the channel region. Moreover, it can decrease power consumption and raise the operation speed of the 1T-DRAM. Compare to the PDSOI DRAM to carry out 10 £gA programming window, the power consumption of the new 1T-DRAM is diminished 39% of write ¡§1¡¨ and 25% of write ¡§0¡¨. Furthermore, the energy consumption during memory operation is only 23% compared to that of the conventional PDSOI DRAM and it can short the operation time but achieve a long retention time.