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Given the fatal health conditions caused by emerging infectious pathogens, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, their rapid diagnosis is required for preventing secondary infections and guiding correct treatments. Although various molecular diagnostic methods based on nucleic acid amplification have been suggested as gold standards for identifying different species, these methods are not suitable for the rapid diagnosis of pathogens owing to their long result acquisition times and complexity. In this study, we developed a rapid bio-optical sensor that uses a ball-lensed optical fiber (BLOF) probe and an automatic analysis platform to precisely diagnose infectious pathogens. The BLOF probe is easy to align and has a high optical sensing sensitivity (1.5-fold) and a large detection range (1.2-fold) for an automatic optical sensing system. Automatic signal processing of up to 250 copies/reaction of DNA of Q-fever-causing Coxiella burnetii was achieved within 8 min. The clinical utility of this system was demonstrated with 18 clinical specimens (9 Q-fever and 9 other febrile disease samples) by measuring the resonant wavelength shift of positive or negative samples for Coxiella burnetii DNA. The results from the system revealed the stable and automatic optical signal measurement of DNA with 100% accuracy. We envision that this BLOF probe-based sensor would be a practical tool for the rapid, simple, and sensitive diagnosis of emerging infectious pathogens.

We have developed a compact optical endoscopic probe for in vivo fluorescence optical imaging device. We obtained fluorescence image for the colon tissue of a mouse using a compacted optical endoscopic probe with a designed endoscopic optical lens. In order to demonstrate endoscopic fluorescence imaging for the colon cancer, we have manufactured a compacted optical endoscopic probe to pass through the biopsy channel of electric flexible endoscope. The compacted optical endoscopic probe with maximum outside diameter of 2.8mm consists of fiber-optic illumination part and imaging part. The imaging part consists of a fiber-optic imaging bundle linked to an endoscopic optical lens and focus assembly. We considered a compact structure, sensitivity, and FOV for the design of the endoscopic optical lens. We have suggested an endoscopic optical lens with an FOV of 90 ° and DOF of 3 – 80mm. The optical system consists of glass-based aspheric lenses. The total track is less than 2.5 mm, and the diameter is limited to less than 1.5 mm to obtain a compact system. We have presented the compacted optical endoscopic probe for cancer imaging of a mouse. The proposed endoscopic optical lens showed sufficient sensitivity and a wide field of view for obtaining fluorescence imaging. We demonstrated endoscopic ex vivo fluorescence imaging for the colon cancer of a mouse using the compacted optical endoscopic probe.

We have designed a fiber probe based optical diagnose system for detection of interspecies transmissibility. We have showed the optical performance to measure the optical signal of the target sample by using the manufactured fiber probe. We have confirmed the capability of our system to be utilized to biomedical diagnose applications.

Learning a heritage language can be celebrated to enhance marginalized groups’ self-esteem, but a heritage can also encompass ideologies prevalent in the groups’ original homeland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2007–2011) at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States, this article investigates how ideologies on race politics within a heritage language community’s homeland are reproduced or subverted through heritage language education. We analyze treatment of Korea–Japan power relations at school by focusing on the practice of guiding students (not) to shift their perspectives in three cases involving (a) discrimination against Resident Koreans in Japan, (b) gender-specific abortion in South Korea, and (c) South Korea and Japan’s dispute over possession of Tokdo/Takeshima. While social analyses of heritage language education tend to focus on a minority group’s place in mainstream society, this article suggests investigating the reproduction of ideologies from its homeland via herit...

The use of honorifics in Korean and Japanese is generally dictated by social factors such as age, status, and gender (Sohn 1999, Kuno 1987). Honorifics are marked by a well-defined repertoire of linguistic elements, including address-terms, specialized vocabulary, and verbal suffixes. Depending on the relationship between the interlocutors, an honorific form is chosen over the other available forms. Recently, researchers have been questioning whether the choice is wholly dependent on the relative status, or if other factors play a role in the selection process (Strauss and Eun 2005, Dunn 2005, Yoon 2015). This study focuses on the honorifics productively encoded by verbal suffixes. Unexpectedly, continual shifts between verbal suffixes are observed in a single speech situation. Based on the analyses of media data, we identify a set of social meanings encoded by these shifts. Furthermore, we show that Silverstein’s notion of “indexical order” (Silverstein 2003) is crucial for accounting for suffix alternation.

Prognostics and health management (PHM) provides an opportunity for lowering sustainment costs, improving maintenance decision‐making, and providing product usage feedback for the product design and validation process. This chapter discusses the determination of the implementation costs, potential cost avoidance, and the resulting return on investment offered by electronics PHM. An important attribute of most business cases is the development of an economic justification. Return on investment (ROI) is a useful means of gauging the economic merits of adopting PHM. Financial costs are part of the engineering economics of technology acquisitions. Implementation costs are the costs associated with the realization of PHM in a system, that is, the achievement of the technologies and support necessary to integrate and incorporate PHM into new or existing systems. The costs of implementing PHM can be categorized as recurring, nonrecurring, or infrastructural depending on the frequency and role of the corresponding activities.

This study examines the plural suffixes of Korean –tul and Japanese –tachi. In the two languages, countable nouns do not have to be obligatorily marked for plurality despite the existence of plural markers. It is well documented that when nouns occur with these plural markers, they not only mark plurality but also denote an added meaning. After careful examination of occurrences/non-occurrences of these suffixes, we challenge previous claims that “Definiteness” is at work in the marked reading, and instead, propose that the marked reading of such nouns are [+specific] for both Korean and Japanese, following the definitions of “Specificity” and “Definiteness” given by Ioni, Ko and Wexler. Furthermore, we claim that the “associative” reading that is only available to Japanese –tachi is responsible for the strong tendency of the Japanese plural suffix to be construed as a marked reading rather than a mere plural reading.

Molecular endoscopic fluorescence imaging can improve noninvasive detection of lesions in the colon. We developed fluorescence endoscopic imaging system. We obtained fluorescence image of ex vivo mouse colon tissue from designed image acquisition system.

This study examines the nominal address terms in Korean and Japanese and argues that the notion of ‘Intimacy’ plays a crucial role in choosing an appropriate nominal address term in both languages. In the past several decades, a long list of researchers working in diverse languages have evaluated the validity of the Power and Solidarity semantics proposed by Brown and Gilman (1960), which provided a ground-breaking framework to account for the selection of pronominal address terms in the T-V languages. Building on the Power and Solidarity semantics, we propose to fine-tune it by adding Intimacy as the third dimension crisscrossing the first two well-established dimensions. We take Power and Solidarity as socially prescribed notions while Intimacy is personally defined. We demonstrate how this highly subjective notion dictates and often manipulates the ways the Korean/Japanese speaker selects an appropriate nominal address term. In particular, we argue that the Korean selection of pseudo-kinship terms over the neutral title ssi, or the Japanese use of chan/kun by adult speakers in lieu of the default ‘Last Name+san’, cannot be accounted for without applying Intimacy as a crucial indexing device. Furthermore, we suggest that Intimacy is not an ad hoc dimension specific to Korean and Japanese, but that it is relevant to all languages whether or not a given language has an overt way of encoding it.

We previously reported the potential of using vascular reactivity during respiratory challenges as a marker to predict the response of breast tumor to chemotherapy in a rat model by using a continuous wave near-infrared spectroscopy. However, it cannot visualize how the vascular reactivity from tumor vessel can predict the tumor response to its treatment. In this study, we utilized a spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) system to visualize vascular reactivity of both tumor and normal vasculature during respiratory challenges in a mouse model. We adapted intensity based Doppler variance algorithm to draw angiogram from the ear of mouse (8-week-old Balb/c nu/nu). Animals were anesthetized using 1.5% isoflurane, and the body temperature was maintained by a heating pad. Inhalational gas was switched from air (10min) to 100% oxygen (10min), and a pulse oximeter was used to monitor arterial oxygen saturation and heart rate. OCT angiograms were acquired 5 min after the onset of each gas. The vasoconstriction effect of hyperoxic gas on vasculature was shown by subtracting an en-face image acquired during 100% oxygen from the image acquired during air inhalation. The quantitative change in the vessel diameter was measured from the en-face OCT images of the individual blood vessels. The percentage of blood vessel diameter reduction varied from 1% to 12% depending on arterial, capillary, or venous blood vessel. The vascular reactivity change during breast tumor progression and post chemotherapy will be monitored by OCT angiography.

Based on fieldwork at a weekend Japanese language school in the USA in 2007–2009, this article illustrates the ways in which different regimes of government arise from an activity depending on meanings individuals invest in it. We examine how two students in the same classroom experienced two different regimes of government: one of a low-track class for ‘native speakers’ and the other of a heritage language class for bilingual speakers. Building on Mitchell Dean's reworking of Foucault, we suggest a new approach to ethnographically studying governmentality which focuses on invested meanings.

The late twentieth century saw a rise of global discourse about heritage. Research on heritage politics, however, has shed little light on heritage practices in schools, especially regarding language, that is, how heritage language is constructed and how it is “inherited” by students of various backgrounds. Heritage language education is often viewed as a means to empower heritage language speakers or to address the diverse needs of students in language classes. In existing works, the individual’s link to “heritage” is assumed as given and stable. More recent works show that the processes and effects of heritage language education are complex and nuanced due to diverse personal backgrounds and changing political economy and cultural politics. The role of schooling in the process of “inheriting” language, however, has not attracted much attention: how students are grouped or tracked into a particular class, for example. After ethnographically investigating various views and practices at a weekend Japanese ...

Researchers have shown that the maintenance of a minority language has positive effects on the minority students' view of self, educational attainment, and career opportunities (Cho 2000; Wright and Taylor 1995). In the research for this article, however, we found that such a focus on the effects of heritage-language education on the students is of limited usefulness in analyzing the complex processes of heritage-language education. Based on our ethnographic study at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States, we illustrate contestations among administrators, students, and parents regarding the legitimacy of two types of Japanese heritage-language program and diverse subjectivities of heritage-language students that are causes and effects of such contestations. We suggest approaching heritage-language education not merely as an effort to enhance awareness of one's heritage or an instruction in language but also as a schooling process in which legitimacy of the knowledge and ways to achieve it...

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) has been studied to improve its imaging resolution and functional imaging modality without labeling on biology sample. However the use of high numerical aperture (NA) objective lens confines the field of view or the axial imaging range of OR-PAM. In order to obtain images at different layers, one needs to change either the sample position or th e focusing position by mechanical scanning. This mechanical movement of the sample or the objective lens limits the scanning speed and the positioning precision. In this study, we propose a multi-depth PAM with a focus tunable lens. We electri cally adjusted the focal length in the depth direction of the sample, and twice extended the axial imaging range up to 660 m with the objective lens (20X, NA 0.4). The proposed approach can increase scanning speed and avoid step motor induced distortions during PA signal acquisitions without mechanical scanning in the depth direction. To in vestigate the performance of the multi-depth PAM system, we scanned a black human hair and the ear of a living nude mouse (BALB/c Nude). The obtained PAM images presented the volumetric rendering of black hair and the vasculature of the nude mouse. Keywords: photoacoustic imaging, focus tunable le ns, optical imaging, biomedical imaging

As of July 2014, there were eighty weekend Japanese language schools in the United States. They are called supplementary instruction schools (hoshū jugyō kō), and their main purpose is to serve Japanese children overseas by providing them with instruction in the Japanese language arts.

The range of imaging depth in optical resolution photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) is limited by the short depth of focus of high-numerical aperture objective lenses. In this paper, focus tunable lens modulation has been employed at the resonant frequency of focus tunable lenses in order to enhance both the range of imaging depth and the scanning speed. By electrically controlling the focal length in the axial direction of the sample, the range of imaging depth was extended approximately 1.22 times and the scanning speed was enhanced by approximately 7.40 times, in comparison to corresponding values of conventional PAM systems.