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A Chinese medicinal formulation, ‘Liu Wei Di Huang’, and its individual components have been tested for the genoprotective effect on human DNA by the comet assay. Results showed no DNA protection contributed by this prescription. However, the aqueous extracts of individual herbs, namely Cortex Moutan and Rhizoma Dioscoreae, were able to decrease by 10–15% the DNA stand break from hydrogen peroxide-mediated oxidative stress. This provides insight to further evaluate the interaction among herbs and the search for the active ingredient responsible for the DNA protective effect.

In wireless multimedia communication systems, call admission control (CAC) is critical for simultaneously achieving a high resource utilization efficiency and maintaining quality-of-service (QoS) to mobile users. User mobility, heterogeneous nature of multimedia traffic, and limited radio spectrum pose significant challenges to CAC. QoS provisioning to both new calls and handoff calls comes with a cost of low resource utilization. This paper proposes a CAC policy for a wireless communication system supporting integrated voice and data services. In particular, soft QoS (or relaxed target QoS) is incorporated in the CAC policy to make compromises among different objectives. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate that (a) in dealing with the dilemma between QoS satisfaction and high resource utilization, how the resource utilization efficiency can be increased by introducing soft QoS; and (b) in accommodating different types of traffic, how the QoS of low priority traffic can be improved by specifying soft QoS to high priority traffic.

This paper proposes a series of pet system design principles which can guarantee the game balance while successfully maintaining attractiveness to game players.

In this paper we will describe how we establish an experimental framework of tele-immersive system based on the polyhedral visual hull algorithm. The system is divided into two sites: the local and the remote sites. At the local site, images of a participant are taken from a set of synchronized cameras. A polyhedral visual hull algorithm is then used to reconstruct the 3D mesh. The texture information together with the mesh model is then sent to the remote site for rendering on immersive walls. We will describe each of the system components, including segmentation, post-process filtering, visual hull reconstruction at the local site; view dependent texture mapping at the remote site. We will present some preliminary results and observations we make during initial investigations, and propose possible future work that will add further functionalities to the system.

By the use of optimization approach and the specification of soft quality-of-service (QoS) levels, a systematic way to search for the most suitable call admission control (CAC) policy is proposed for a wireless network supporting both constant-bit-rate (CBR) and available-bit-rate (ABR) traffic. Numerical results show that the CAC policy obtained by the proposed method can guarantee the QoS of all the users under most traffic conditions considered.