ALBERT

Description: Atmospheric benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX) can lead to multiple health injuries. However, what remains uncertain is the effect of long-term exposure to low levels of BTEX. Thus, we determined the BTEX levels in the air from the refueling and office areas in gas stations. Then we collected workers’ (200 refueling vs. 52 office workers) peripheral blood samples to analyze the serum total-superoxide dismutase (T-SOD), glutathione (GSH), malondialdehyde (MDA), and 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) levels. DNA damage was analyzed by the comet assay and micronucleus test in buccal epithelial cells. We found that the levels of BTEX in refueling areas were significantly higher than those in office areas (p 〈 0.001). The serum T-SOD and GSH of refueling workers were significantly lower than those in office workers (p 〈 0.001). By contrast, the serum MDA and 8-OHdG of refueling workers were significantly higher than those of office workers (p 〈 0.001, MDA; p = 0.025, 8-OHdG). Furthermore, tail and Olive tail moments in refueling workers were longer (p = 0.004, tail moment; p = 0.001, Olive tail moment), and the micronucleus rate was higher (p 〈 0.001) than those in office workers. Taken together, long-term exposure to low levels of BTEX may reduce the antioxidant ability and increase the risk of DNA damage in refueling workers of gas stations.

Description: The increasing prevalence of dyslipidemia has become a worldwide public health problem, and the prevalence varies widely according to socioeconomic, cultural and ethnic characteristics. Chongqing has experienced rapid economic development and is now the economic center of Southwestern China. There are scant data on serum lipid profile of residents in Chongqing, the largest municipality directly under the Central Government in China. We conducted a cross-sectional study in a representative sample of 5375 residents of Chongqing, aged ≥18 years, and estimated the prevalence of dyslipidemia and its associated risk factors. According to the National Cholesterol Education Program-Adult Treatment Panel III criteria, the age-standardized prevalence of dyslipidemia was 35.5% (34.4% among men and 37.6% among women). Among the 2009 patients with dyslipidemia, 44.2% had isolated hypertriglyceridemia, 14.7% had isolated hypercholesterolemia, 13.2% had mixed hyperlipidemia, and 28.0% had isolated low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. The peak prevalence of dyslipidemia in men was between 30 and 39 years (48.2%), and then declined gradually; in women, the prevalence of dyslipidemia increased with age, with the peak prevalence occurring after age 60 (46.3%). Multivariable logistic regression analysis revealed that dyslipidemia was associated with age, education level, physical activity, obesity and central obesity for both men and women. In conclusion, the results indicated dyslipidemia, particularly hypertriglyceridemia and low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, are very common in Chongqing. To prevent dyslipidemia, it is essential to conduct appropriate intervention programs aimed at risk factor reduction and implement routine screening programs for blood lipid levels in Chongqing, China.

Description: Accurate and updated finer resolution maps of rubber plantations and stand ages are needed to understand and assess the impacts of rubber plantations on regional ecosystem processes. This study presented a simple method for mapping rubber plantation areas and their stand ages by integration of PALSAR 50-m mosaic images and multi-temporal Landsat TM/ETM+ images. The L-band PALSAR 50-m mosaic images were used to map forests (including both natural forests and rubber trees) and non-forests. For those PALSAR-based forest pixels, we analyzed the multi-temporal Landsat TM/ETM+ images from 2000 to 2009. We first studied phenological signatures of deciduous rubber plantations (defoliation and foliation) and natural forests through analysis of surface reflectance, Normal Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI) and generated a map of rubber plantations in 2009. We then analyzed phenological signatures of rubber plantations with different stand ages and generated a map, in 2009, of rubber plantation stand ages (≤5, 6–10, >10 years-old) based on multi-temporal Landsat images. The resultant maps clearly illustrated how rubber plantations have expanded into the mountains in the study area over the years. The results in this study demonstrate the potential of integrating microwave (e.g., PALSAR) and optical remote sensing in the characterization of rubber plantations and their expansion over time.

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 3313: Tourism Review Sentiment Classification Using a Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network with an Attention Mechanism and Topic-Enriched Word Vectors Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10093313 Authors: Qin Li Shaobo Li Jie Hu Sen Zhang Jianjun Hu Sentiment analysis of online tourist reviews is playing an increasingly important role in tourism. Accurately capturing the attitudes of tourists regarding different aspects of the scenic sites or the overall polarity of their online reviews is key to tourism analysis and application. However, the performances of current document sentiment analysis methods are not satisfactory as they either neglect the topics of the document or do not consider that not all words contribute equally to the meaning of the text. In this work, we propose a bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network model (BiGRULA) for sentiment analysis by combining a topic model (lda2vec) and an attention mechanism. Lda2vec is used to discover all the main topics of review corpus, which are then used to enrich the word vector representation of words with context. The attention mechanism is used to learn to attribute different weights of the words to the overall meaning of the text. Experiments over 20 NewsGroup and IMDB datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Furthermore, we applied our model to hotel review data analysis, which allows us to get more coherent topics from these reviews and achieve good performance in sentiment classification.

Description: As public expectations for health rise, health measurements broaden from a focus on death, disease, and disability to wellbeing. However, wellbeing hasn’t been incorporated into the framework of climate change policy decision-making in Chinese cities. Based on survey data (n = 763) from Suzhou, this study used Generalized Estimation Equation approach to model external conditions associated with wellbeing. Then, semi-quantitative analyses were conducted to provide a first indication to whether local climate change policies promote or conflict with wellbeing through altering these conditions. Our findings suggested: (i) Socio-demographic (age, job satisfaction, health), psychosocial (satisfaction with social life, ontological security/resilience) and environmental conditions (distance to busy road, noise annoyance and range hoods in the kitchen) were significantly associated with wellbeing; (ii) None of existing climate change strategies in Suzhou conflict with wellbeing. Three mitigation policies (promotion of tertiary and high–tech industry, increased renewable energy in buildings, and restrictions on car use) and one adaption policy (increasing resilience) brought positive co–benefits for wellbeing, through the availability of high-satisfied jobs, reduced dependence on range hoods, noise reduction, and valuing citizens, respectively. This study also provided implications for other similar Chinese cities that potential consequences of climate change interventions for wellbeing should be considered.

Description: Materials, Vol. 10, Pages 961: A Novel Approach to Eliminate the Effect of External Stress on Interdiffusivity Measurement Materials doi: 10.3390/ma10080961 Authors: Weimin Chen Qin Li Lijun Zhang In this paper, the interdiffusivities in fcc Co–Ni alloys at 1373 K due to different types of diffusion couple experiments were firstly re-calculated via the unified Wagner method based on the measured composition profiles. Their maximum difference due to different approaches for diffusion couple preparation was found to be larger than one order of magnitude. Then, a comprehensive analysis on the effect of different preparation methods was performed. After that, a two-step diffusion couple technique in combination with the pragmatic numerical inverse method was proposed to determine the accurate interdiffusivities by eliminating the effect of external stress. Such a novel approach was successfully applied in the binary fcc Co–Ni alloys for demonstration purposes. Moreover, it is anticipated that such novel approach can be utilized as the standard method for accurate interdiffusivity measurement, and the resultant accurate interdiffusivities in different alloys may serve as a benchmark for the later experimental and theoretical studies.

Description: IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 900: Will Happiness Improve the Psychological Integration of Migrant Workers? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph15050900 Authors: Tian-Cheng Li Chien-Chi Chu Fan-Cun Meng Qin Li Di Mo Bin Li Sang-Bing Tsai Happiness is a major factor that influences people’s perceptions and behavior. Two-stage least squares regression was applied to investigate the effect of happiness on the psychological integration of migrant workers in China. The data for a total of 1625 individuals were obtained from the 2014 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). This study describes happiness from three main aspects: happiness, life satisfaction, and economic satisfaction. The psychological integration includes two dimensions of settlementwillingness, and trust level; these have gone through dimension-reduced processing by using the weighted average method. The empirical evidence shows, first, that happiness has a significantly positive effect on the psychological integration of migrant workers and second, that the sense of life satisfaction in particular plays a more significant role. The acceleration of the social and political integration in migrant workers will enhance their psychological integration. Additionally, social, cultural and economic integration is found to influence migrant workers’ psychological integration by promoting happiness. Happiness between different generations of migrant workers was found to have a noticeably positive impact on their psychological integration; however, the happiness of the younger migrant workers was more perceivable than that of the other generations. Preferential policies should therefore be provided to improve the happiness of migrant workers.

Description: Algorithms, Vol. 10, Pages 56: Clustering Using an Improved Krill Herd Algorithm Algorithms doi: 10.3390/a10020056 Authors: Qin Li Bo Liu In recent years, metaheuristic algorithms have been widely used in solving clustering problems because of their good performance and application effects. Krill herd algorithm (KHA) is a new effective algorithm to solve optimization problems based on the imitation of krill individual behavior, and it is proven to perform better than other swarm intelligence algorithms. However, there are some weaknesses yet. In this paper, an improved krill herd algorithm (IKHA) is studied. Modified mutation operators and updated mechanisms are applied to improve global optimization, and the proposed IKHA can overcome the weakness of KHA and performs better than KHA in optimization problems. Then, KHA and IKHA are introduced into the clustering problem. In our proposed clustering algorithm, KHA and IKHA are used to find appropriate cluster centers. Experiments were conducted on University of California Irvine (UCI) standard datasets, and the results showed that the IKHA clustering algorithm is the most effective.

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 9, Pages 2208: An Intelligent Luminance Control Method for Tunnel Lighting Based on Traffic Volume Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su9122208 Authors: Li Qin Li-Li Dong Wen-Hai Xu Li-Dong Zhang Arturo Leon This paper presents an intelligent control method for tunnel lighting based on traffic volume. The monitoring data for a period of 12 days of the Chibai tunnel (located in the Jilin province of China) under different weather conditions was selected as the case study. The data used in the analysis included traffic volume, vehicle speed, the time of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) operating at their lowest luminance level, and the average time interval between two consecutive vehicles. The traffic flow analysis indicated that the tunnel has a relatively heavy traffic volume in the daytime (7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.) and a relatively low traffic volume in the nighttime (12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.). Thus, we propose a tunnel lighting control method that distinguishes day and night operational strategies. In the daytime, the luminance of tunnel zones depends on tunnel exterior luminance, traffic volume and vehicle speed regardless of vehicle presence. In the night, the “vehicle in, light brightens; vehicle out, light darkens” control method is adopted for the tunnel luminance, which depends on vehicle presence.

Description: IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 656: Influence of Vehicle Speed on the Characteristics of Driver’s Eye Movement at a Highway Tunnel Entrance during Day and Night Conditions: A Pilot Study International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph15040656 Authors: Li Qin Li-Li Dong Wen-Hai Xu Li-Dong Zhang Arturo Leon The aim of this study was to investigate how vehicle speed influences the characteristics of driver’s eye movement at highway tunnel entrances during day and night. In this study, six drivers’ eye movement data (from 200 m before tunnel entrance to 200 m inside tunnel entrance) under five predetermined vehicle speeds (40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 km/h) in the daytime and three predetermined vehicle speeds (40, 60 and 80 km/h) in the nighttime were recorded using the non-intrusive Dikablis Professional eye-tracking system. Pupil size, the average fixation duration time and the average number of fixation were analyzed and then the influence of the vehicle speed on these parameters was evaluated by means of IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0. The results for pupil size in daytime increased when approaching the tunnel entrance, while as for nighttime, pupil size decreased when approaching the tunnel entrance and then increased after entering the tunnel. The pupil size in daytime has a significant negative correlation with vehicle speed, while the pupil size in nighttime did not show a significant association with vehicle speed. Furthermore, the average fixation duration in daytime increased when entering the tunnel, and had a significant negative correlation with vehicle speed. Also, the average number of fixations in daytime decreased when entering the tunnel and has a significant negative correlation with vehicle speed. However, the average fixation duration and the average number of fixations in nighttime did not show any significant association with vehicle speed. Moreover, limitations and future directions of the study are discussed for the further investigation.