Evaluating Effectiveness of Interactivity in Contour-Based Geospatial Visualizations.

Contour maps are an essential tool for exploring spatial features of the terrain, such as distance, directions, and surface gradient among the contour areas. User interactions in contour-based visualizations create approaches to visual analysis that are noticeably different from the perspective of human cognition. As such, various interactive approaches have been introduced to improve system usability and enhance human cognition for complex and large-scale spatial data exploration.

Redox-neutral, metal-free tryptophan labeling of polypeptides in hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP).

Despite the unmet needs for chemical tools to study biological roles of tryptophan in living systems, there has been a lack of chemical modification methods for tryptophan residues that can be used in cellular environments. Driven by a preliminary computational study of our previous research, this work experimentally examined our hypotheses to translate the metal-catalyzed tryptophan modification method in hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP) into a metal-free process. While one of the hypotheses merely confirmed the superiority of the thiophene-ethanol reagent developed in the previous report, the second hypothesis resulted in the identification of a trifluoroborate salt and an acidic ionic liquid as alternatives for the catalysis.

An Upgraded, Highly Saturated Linkage Map of Japanese Plum ( Lindl.), and Identification of a New Major Locus Controlling the Flavan-3-ol Composition in Fruits.

Japanese plum fruits are rich in phenolic compounds, such as anthocyanins and flavan-3-ols, whose contents vary significantly among cultivars. Catechin (C) and epicatechin (EC) are flavan-3-ol monomers described in the fruits of this species and are associated with bitterness, astringency, antioxidant capacity, and susceptibility to enzymatic mesocarp browning. In this study, we aimed to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with the content of flavan-3-ol in Japanese plum fruits.

HisVA: A Visual Analytics System for Studying History.

Studying history involves many difficult tasks. Examples include searching for proper data in a large event space, understanding stories of historical events by time and space, and finding relationships among events that may not be apparent. Instructors who extensively use well-organized and well-argued materials (e.

Multi-Scale 7DOF View Adjustment.

Multi-scale virtual environments contain geometric details ranging over several orders of magnitude and typically employ out-of-core rendering techniques. When displayed in virtual reality systems this entails using a 7 degree-of-freedom (DOF) view model where view scale is a separate 7th DOF in addition to 6DOF view pose. Dynamic adjustment of this and other view parameters become very important to usability.

VAiRoma: A Visual Analytics System for Making Sense of Places, Times, and Events in Roman History.

Learning and gaining knowledge of Roman history is an area of interest for students and citizens at large. This is an example of a subject with great sweep (with many interrelated sub-topics over, in this case, a 3,000 year history) that is hard to grasp by any individual and, in its full detail, is not available as a coherent story. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics approach to construct a data driven view of Roman history based on a large collection of Wikipedia articles.

Early adoption of robotic pulmonary lobectomy: feasibility and initial outcomes.

Despite the published benefits of minimally invasive video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) for lobectomy, the majority of lobectomies in the United States continue to be performed through a thoracotomy. The low adoption rate of VATS has been attributed to its technical challenges and ergonomic inefficiencies. Robotic surgery has been proposed as an alternative minimally invasive technique that allows the replication of open lobectomy with wristed instruments and three-dimensional vision.