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Clinicians have long recognized that thyroid hormones have some effects on the gastrointestinal tract. This study aimed to investigate the gut microbiota in hyperthyroid and assess whether there are alterations in the diversity and similarity of gut microbiota in the hyperthyroid when compared with healthy individuals. PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) with universal primers targeting V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene was employed to characterize the overall intestinal microbiota composition, and some excised gel bands were cloned for sequencing. Enterobacteriaceae, Enterococcus, Bifidobacterium, Clostridium, and Lactobacillus genus were also enumerated by quantitative real-time PCR. A significant difference between hyperthyroid and healthy groups ((*) P < 0.05) was shown in DGGE profiles. And real-time PCR showed obvious decrease of Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus ((*) P < 0.05), and increase of Enterococcus ((*) P < 0.05) in the hyperthyroid group. This study shows the characterization of gut microbiota in hyperthyroid.

When a multitude of RFID tags are in the interrogating field, an anti-collision technology must be used. In literatures, the reading performance was mainly investigated on the error-free communication links between reader and tags. In the practical situations, particularly where a number of readers and other wireless devices share the same frequency band, the performance on the erroneous links would be significant interest. In this paper, we evaluated Gen2 Air Protocol paying attention to the anti-collision performance in random error communication link. As a result of simulation, two findings were obtained. Firstly, there is an appropriate number of slots depending on the number of tags. This number hardly changes even if a random error is incurred on the link. Secondly, the singulation speed might be significantly degraded particularly in erroneous links, if the optimal number of slots is not chosen. The findings can be interpreted such that the necessary link quality can be derived if the number of tags and permissible time are known a priori to the implementation. For instance, if 64 tags are required to be read in one second, it is necessary to ensure the link quality to be better than BER=10 −4 in random error environment.

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Recently, system designers, especially in the field of product life-cycle management system start considering use of user memory bank of UHF RFID tags. By storing most useful life-cycle data onto a tag, user can access to the data even without access to back-end databases. One of the major issues to make use of the user memory bank is detection of memory tampering. Although technology vendors start introducing new functionalities such as fine grained locking along with high capacity user memory, these tags with new functionalities require new non-standardized air protocol to operate -require modified version of reader/writers. Also, these tags are usually more expensive. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to this problem: tag side write journaling mechanism and "Tag Memory Cloaking," which protect the journal by using. Tag Private Memory region, which is only readable and not writable from external devices such as a reader/writer, but writable by tag itself. Also, any write to the user memory automatically add journal entry -offset and length of the write -into the Tag Private Memory region. Later, a user can check existence of overlapped writes to user memory by checking the journal records. Since we have not modified any of air protocol, standard compliant read/writer can fully capable of all of our proposed operations: write to the tag, read, then detect unusual modification to user memory area. We have implemented the functionality to Programmable Battery Assisted Passive tag (BAP), then validated the method with several standard compliant reader/writers.

World Heritage Sites (WHSs) play an important role in sustaining community identity and enhancing local economic development through tourism. Although the Li River was designated as a WHS in 2014, severe damage to its ecosystem and environmental problems have been reported in recent years. Thus, the purpose of this study is to estimate residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the preservation of the Li River using a contingent valuation method. Moreover, a two-stage approach using hypothetical and real setting scenarios was utilized to reduce a hypothetical bias and overvaluation. Logit models were used to estimate the preservation value and compare factors influencing WTP between the hypothetical and real scenarios. The results of this study support the usefulness of a two-stage approach to avoid hypothetical bias and estimate a realistic preservation value. In the real setting scenario, WTP was 144.66–163.90 Yuan (USD 20.83–23.60) per capita per year, and the aggregate value was 721–818 million Yuan (USD 104–118 million) depending on mean WTP and truncated WTP. The study findings provide useful implication to support government’s fund and sustainable efforts to preserve the Li River.

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