ALBERT

Description: Differential exposure to multiple environmental burdens and benefits and their distribution across a population with varying vulnerability can contribute heavily to health inequalities. Particularly relevant are areas with high cumulative burdens and high social vulnerability termed as “hotspots”. This paper develops an index-based approach to assess these multiple burdens and benefits in combination with vulnerability factors at detailed intra-urban level. The method is applied to the city of Dortmund, Germany. Using non-spatial and spatial methods we assessed inequalities and identified “hotspot” areas in the city. We found modest inequalities burdening higher vulnerable groups in Dortmund (CI = −0.020 at p 〈 0.05). At the detailed intra-urban level, however, inequalities showed strong geographical patterns. Large numbers of “hotspots” exist in the northern part of the city compared to the southern part. A holistic assessment, particularly at a detailed local level, considering both environmental burdens and benefits and their distribution across the population with the different vulnerability, is essential to inform environmental justice debates and to mobilize local stakeholders. Locating “hotspot” areas at this detailed spatial level can serve as a basis to develop interventions that target vulnerable groups to ensure a health conducive equal environment.

Description: The goal of the study was to assess the quality of life (QOL) and depression and provide further insights into the relationship between QOL and depression among community-dwelling elderly Chinese people. Baseline data were collected from 1168 older adults (aged ≥ 60) in a large, prospective cohort study on measurement and evaluation of health-promoting and health-protecting behaviors intervention on chronic disease in different community-dwelling age groups. QOL was assessed using the 26-item, World Health Organization Quality of Life, brief version (WHOQOL-BREF) and depression was assessed using the 30-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). The mean WHOQOL-BREF score for all dimensions was approximately 60, with the highest mean value (61.92) observed for social relationships, followed by environment, physical health, and psychological health domains. In this cohort, 26.1% of elderly urban adults met GDS criteria for depression. There were negative correlations between physical health (Odds Ratio (OR) = 0.928, 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.910–0.946), psychological health (OR = 0.906, 95% CI: 0.879–0.934), environment (OR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.944–0.989) and depression among elderly people. Those with depression were older, less educated, had a lower monthly income, and were more likely to report insomnia. All WHOQOL-BREF domains, with the exception of the social domain were negatively correlated with depression.

Description: Background: Measuring mercury in newborn bloodspots to determine fetal exposures is a novel methodology with many advantages. Questions remain, however, about its reliability as an estimate of newborn exposure to mercury. Methods: We studied mercury concentrations in paired bloodspots and cord blood from a convenience sample of 48 Minnesota women and infants. Results: The limit of detection for bloodspots was higher than for cord blood (0.7 and 0.3 μg/L in bloodspots and cord blood, respectively) with the result that mercury was detected in only 38% of newborn bloodspots compared to 62% of cord blood samples. The geometric mean mercury concentration in cord blood was 0.6 μg/L. Mercury concentrations were almost uniformly lower in bloodspots than in cord blood (mean ratio (±SD) = 0.85 ± 0.4), their mean value was significantly less than that for the cord blood (p = 0.02), and the two methods were highly correlated (r = 0.82). Conclusion: These preliminary findings indicate that newborn bloodspot mercury measurements have utility; however, until bloodspot analyses are more sensitive, they are likely to underestimate in utero exposure.

Description: Materials based on biodegradable polyesters, such as poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT) or poly(butylene terephthalate-co-poly(alkylene glycol) terephthalate) (PBTAT), have potential application as pro-regenerative scaffolds for bone tissue engineering. Herein, the preparation of films composed of PBT or PBTAT and an engineered spider silk protein, (eADF4(C16)), that displays multiple carboxylic acid moieties capable of binding calcium ions and facilitating their biomineralization with calcium carbonate or calcium phosphate is reported. Human mesenchymal stem cells cultured on films mineralized with calcium phosphate show enhanced levels of alkaline phosphatase activity suggesting that such composites have potential use for bone tissue engineering.

Description: Bioleaching is the mobilization of metal cations from insoluble ores by microorganisms. Biofilms can enhance this process. Since Sulfobacillus often appears in leaching heaps or reactors, this genus has aroused attention. In this study, biofilm formation and subsequent pyrite dissolution by the Gram-positive, moderately thermophilic acidophile Sulfobacillus thermosulfidooxidans were investigated. Five strategies, including adjusting initial pH, supplementing an extra energy source or ferric ions, as well as exchanging exhausted medium with fresh medium, were tested for enhancement of its biofilm formation. The results show that regularly exchanging exhausted medium leads to a continuous biofilm development on pyrite. By this way, multiply layered biofilms were observed on pyrite slices, while only monolayer biofilms were visible on pyrite grains. In addition, biofilms were proven to be responsible for pyrite leaching in the early stages.

Description: The objective of this study was to assess the performance of the simulated start of the photosynthetically active season by a large-scale biosphere model in boreal forests in Finland with remote sensing observations. The start of season for two forest types, evergreen needle- and deciduous broad-leaf, was obtained for the period 2003–2011 from regional JSBACH (Jena Scheme for Biosphere–Atmosphere Hamburg) runs, driven with climate variables from a regional climate model. The satellite-derived start of season was determined from daily Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) time series of Fractional Snow Cover and the Normalized Difference Water Index by applying methods that were targeted to the two forest types. The accuracy of the satellite-derived start of season in deciduous forest was assessed with bud break observations of birch and a root mean square error of seven days was obtained. The evaluation of JSBACH modelled start of season dates with satellite observations revealed high spatial correspondence. The bias was less than five days for both forest types but showed regional differences that need further consideration. The agreement with satellite observations was slightly better for the evergreen than for the deciduous forest. Nonetheless, comparison with gross primary production (GPP) determined from CO2 flux measurements at two eddy covariance sites in evergreen forest revealed that the JSBACH-simulated GPP was higher in early spring and led to too-early simulated start of season dates. Photosynthetic activity recovers differently in evergreen and deciduous forests. While for the deciduous forest calibration of phenology alone could improve the performance of JSBACH, for the evergreen forest, changes such as seasonality of temperature response, would need to be introduced to the photosynthetic capacity to improve the temporal development of gross primary production.

Description: An innovative remote sensing approach that combines land-use change and water quality information is proposed in order to investigate if Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) area extension is associated with water siltation in the Tapajós River Basin (Brazil), containing the largest small-scale gold mining district in the world. Taking advantage of a 40-year period of the multi-satellite imagery archive, the objective of this paper is to build a normalized time-series in order to evaluate the influence of temporal mining expansion on the water siltation data (TSS, Total Suspended Solids concentration) derived from previous research. The methodological approach was set to deliver a full characterization of the ASGM expansion from its initial stages in the early 1970s to the present. First, based on IRS/LISSIII images acquired in 2012, the historical Landsat image database (1973–2001) was corrected for radiometric and atmospheric effects using dark vegetation as reference to create a normalized time-series. Next, a complete update of the mining areas distribution in 2012 derived from the TerraClass Project (an official land-use classification for the Brazilian Amazon) was conducted having IRS/LISSIII as the base map with the support of auxiliary data and vector editing. Once the ASGM in 2012 was quantified (261.7 km2) and validated with photos, a reverse classification of ASGM in 2001 (171.7 km2), 1993 (166.3 km2), 1984 (47.5 km2), and 1973 (15.4 km2) with the use of Landsat archives was applied. This procedure relies on the assumption that ASGM changes in the land cover are severe and remain detectable from satellite sensors for decades. The mining expansion area over time was then combined with the (TSS) data retrieved from the same atmospherically corrected satellite imagery based on the literature. In terms of gold mining expansion and water siltation effects, four main periods of ASGM activities were identified in the study area: (i) 1958–1977, first occurrence of mining activities and low water impacts; (ii) 1978–1993, introduction of low-budget mechanization associated with very high gold prices resulting in large mining area expansion and high water siltation levels; (iii) 1994–2003, general recession of ASGM activities and exhaustion of easy-access gold deposits, resulting in decreased TSS; (iv) 2004 to present, intensification of ASGM encouraged by high gold prices, resulting in an increase of TSS.

Description: Current earth observation models do not take into account the influence of water salinity on the evaporation rate, even though the salinity influences the evaporation rate by affecting the density and latent heat of vaporization. In this paper, we adapt the SEBS (Surface Energy Balance System) model for large water bodies and add the effect of water salinity to the evaporation rate. Firstly, SEBS is modified for fresh-water whereby new parameterizations of the water heat flux and sensible heat flux are suggested. This is achieved by adapting the roughness heights for momentum and heat transfer. Secondly, a salinity correction factor is integrated into the adapted model. Eddy covariance measurements over Lake IJsselmeer (The Netherlands) are carried out and used to estimate the roughness heights for momentum (~0.0002 m) and heat transfer (~0.0001 m). Application of these values over the Victoria and Tana lakes (freshwater) in Africa showed that the calculated latent heat fluxes agree well with the measurements. The root mean-square of relative-errors (rRMSE) is about 4.1% for Lake Victoria and 4.7%, for Lake Tana. Verification with ECMWF data showed that the salinity reduced the evaporation at varying levels by up to 27% in the Great Salt Lake and by 1% for open ocean. Our results show the importance of salinity to the evaporation rate and the suitability of the adapted-SEBS model (AquaSEBS) for fresh and saline waters.

Description: Area-based analyses of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data are an established approach to obtain wall-to-wall predictions of forest characteristics for vast areas. The analyses of sparse data in particular are based on the height value distributions, which do not produce optimal information on the horizontal forest structure. We evaluated the complementary potential of features quantifying the textural variation of ALS-based canopy height models (CHMs) for both supervised (linear regression) and unsupervised (k-Means clustering) analyses. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we identified a total of four texture analysis methods that produced rotation-invariant features of different order and scale. The CHMs and the textural features were derived from practical sparse-density, leaf-off ALS data originally acquired for ground elevation modeling. The features were extracted from a circular window of 254 m2 and related with boreal forest characteristics observed from altogether 155 field sample plots. Features based on gray-level histograms, distribution of forest patches, and gray-level co-occurrence matrices were related with plot volume, basal area, and mean diameter with coefficients of determination (R2) of up to 0.63–0.70, whereas features that measured the uniformity of local binary patterns of the CHMs performed poorer. Overall, the textural features compared favorably with benchmark features based on the point data, indicating that the textural features contain additional information useful for the prediction of forest characteristics. Due to the developed processing routines for raster data, the CHM features may potentially be extracted with a lower computational burden, which promotes their use for applications such as pre-stratification or guiding the field plot sampling based solely on ALS data.

Description: Presence of speech and motion artifacts has been shown to impact the performance of wearable sensor systems used for automatic detection of food intake. This work presents a novel wearable device which can detect food intake even when the user is physically active and/or talking. The device consists of a piezoelectric strain sensor placed on the temporalis muscle, an accelerometer, and a data acquisition module connected to the temple of eyeglasses. Data from 10 participants was collected while they performed activities including quiet sitting, talking, eating while sitting, eating while walking, and walking. Piezoelectric strain sensor and accelerometer signals were divided into non-overlapping epochs of 3 s; four features were computed for each signal. To differentiate between eating and not eating, as well as between sedentary postures and physical activity, two multiclass classification approaches are presented. The first approach used a single classifier with sensor fusion and the second approach used two-stage classification. The best results were achieved when two separate linear support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were trained for food intake and activity detection, and their results were combined using a decision tree (two-stage classification) to determine the final class. This approach resulted in an average F1-score of 99.85% and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.99 for multiclass classification. With its ability to differentiate between food intake and activity level, this device may potentially be used for tracking both energy intake and energy expenditure.

Description: The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for devices around the world to acquire information and store it, in order to be able to use it at a later stage. However, this potential opportunity is often not exploited because of the excessively big interval between the data collection and the capability to process and analyse it. In this paper, we review the current IoT technologies, approaches and models in order to discover what challenges need to be met to make more sense of data. The main goal of this paper is to review the surveys related to IoT in order to provide well integrated and context aware intelligent services for IoT. Moreover, we present a state-of-the-art of IoT from the context aware perspective that allows the integration of IoT and social networks in the emerging Social Internet of Things (SIoT) term.

Description: Surrounded by the ocean, Taiwan has been increasingly developing coastal tourism projects. Concerns that negative impacts might be brought about by prosperous tourism have resulted in a recent focus on sustainable tourism. Sustainable tourism involves policies that acknowledge the interdependences among the environment, the community, and the economy. The goal of sustainable tourism is to enhance and protect the environment while satisfying basic human requirements, as well as those of the contemporary and future tourism industries to improve quality of life. On the other hand, unsustainable coastal tourism might undermine the natural environment and society, resulting in air, water, and soil pollution, wildlife habitat disruption, and changes of local community cultural characteristics. Therefore, performance evaluation of coastal tourism, using an indicator framework to facilitate sustainable development and enhance the effectiveness of coastal resources exploitation, is critical. Through a literature review and expert surveys using the methods of the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) and the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), this study builds a performance indicator framework and identifies the key factors affecting the sustainable development of coastal tourism in Taiwan. The results can serve as a reference for the public sector to be used for the sustainable planning and development of coastal tourism.

Description: Many countries and scholars have used various strategies to improve and optimize the allocation ratios for carbon emission allowances. This issue is more urgent for China due to the uneven development across the country. This paper proposes a new method that divides low-carbon economy development processes into two separate periods: from 2020 to 2029 and from 2030 to 2050. These two periods have unique requirements and emissions reduction potential; therefore, they must involve different allocation methods, so that reduction behaviors do not stall the development of regional low-carbon economies. During the first period, a more deterministic economic development approach for the carbon emission allowance allocation ratio should be used. During the second period, more adaptive and optimized policy guidance should be employed. We developed a low-carbon economy index evaluation system using the entropy weight method to measure information filtering levels. We conducted vector autoregressive correlation tests, consulted 60 experts for the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, and we conducted max-min standardized data processing tests. This article presents first- and second-period carbon emission allowance models in combination with a low-carbon economy index evaluation system. Finally, we forecast reasonable carbon emission allowance allocation ratios for China for the periods starting in 2020 and 2030. A good allocation ratio for the carbon emission allowance can help boost China’s economic development and help the country reach its energy conservation and emissions reduction goals.

Description: In the Internet of Things era, panel displays play a major role in human life, because humans frequently use liquid crystal displays to monitor their electrical devices. The display industry creates remarkable economic output, but every manufacturing process inevitably has some undesirable effects on the environment. With the increasing awareness of environmental protection, balanced development is necessary to address the emerging market trends. However, short-sighted manufacturing corporations that focus solely on financial performance can achieve only short-term profits. The purpose of this study was to develop the most effective sustainable improvement strategies that can enhance competitive advantages in real-world situations. The proposed method combines the balanced scorecard and a new hybrid modified multiple attribute decision-making model which together adopt the DEMATEL technique to construct the influential network relation map and develop the DEMATEL-based ANP with the VIKOR method to deliver strategies that integrate environmental sustainability and competitive advantage. Finally, a real-world case study applying the proposed method to the cases of liquid crystal display manufacturers was conducted. Then, this paper discusses the effective use of natural resources, development of enterprises, and sustainable competitive advantage in this context. Various manufacturers, communities, and stakeholders can benefit from the coopetition solutions explained by the proposed method.

Description: Soil is the most basic resource for sustainable agricultural production; it promotes water quality, is a key component of the biogeochemical cycles and hosts a huge diversity of organisms. However, we are not paying enough attention to soil degradation produced by land use. Modern agriculture has been successful in increasing yields but has also caused extensive environmental damage, particularly soil degradation. In the Argentine Pampas, agriculturization reached a peak with the generalized use of the no-till technological package: genetically modified soybeans tolerant to glyphosate, no-till, glyphosate, and inorganic fertilizers. This phenomenon has been widely spread in the country; the no-till package has been applied in large areas and has been used by tenants in a 60%–70% of cultivated lands. Thus, those who were involved in developing management practices may not be the same as those who will face degradation issues related to those practices. Indeed, most evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that the most widely distributed practices in the Pampas region are actually producing severe soil degradation. Biological degradation is particularly important because soil biota is involved in numerous soil processes on which soil functioning relies, affecting soil fertility and productivity. For example, soil meso- and macrofauna are especially important in nutrient cycling and in soil structure formation and maintenance, and they are key components of the network that links microbial process to the scale of fields and landscapes where ecosystem services are produced. However, the knowledge of the impact of different agricultural managements on soil meso- and macrofauna in Pampas agroecosystems is far from conclusive at this stage. The reason for this lack of definite conclusions is that this area has been given less attention than in other parts of the world; the response of soil fauna to agricultural practices is complex and taxa-dependent; and there is a wide variety of practices in the main types of agricultural systems, making generalizations difficult. A review of the existing studies on soil meso- and macrofauna in agroecosystems, revealed that (a) agricultural soils, regardless of farming system, are strongly modified in biological aspects compared to the same soils without human interventions; (b) there are no conclusive results about no-till benefits compared to reduced tillage or conventional tillage; (c) agricultural managements that are alternative to the traditional conventional systems are very poorly represented in research.

Description: Rain gauge and satellite-retrieved data have been widely used in basin-scale hydrological applications. While rain gauges provide accurate measurements that are generally unevenly distributed in space, satellites offer spatially regular observations and common error prone retrieval. Comparative evaluation of gauge-based and satellite-based data is necessary in hydrological studies, as precipitation is the most important input in basin-scale water balance. This study uses quality-controlled rain gauge data and prevailing satellite products (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43, 3B42 and 3B42RT) to examine the consistency and discrepancies between them at different scales. Rain gauges and TRMM products were available in the Poyang Lake Basin, China, from 1998 to 2007 (3B42RT: 2000–2007). Our results show that the performance of TRMM products generally increases with increasing spatial scale. At both the monthly and annual scales, the accuracy is highest for TRMM 3B43, with 3B42 second and 3B42RT third. TRMM products generally overestimate precipitation because of a high frequency and degree of overestimation in light and moderate rain cases. At the daily scale, the accuracy is relatively low between TRMM 3B42 and 3B42RT. Meanwhile, the performances of TRMM 3B42 and 3B42RT are highly variable in different seasons. At both the basin and pixel scales, TRMM 3B43 and 3B42 exhibit significant discrepancies from July to September, performing worst in September. For TRMM 3B42RT, all statistical indices fluctuate and are low throughout the year, performing worst in July at the pixel scale and January at the basin scale. Furthermore, the spatial distributions of the statistical indices of TRMM 3B43 and 3B42 performed well, while TRMM 3B42RT displayed a poor performance.

Description: Flood is a frequent natural hazard that has significant financial consequences for Australia. In Australia, physical losses caused by floods are commonly estimated by stage-damage functions. These methods usually consider only the depth of the water and the type of buildings at risk. However, flood damage is a complicated process, and it is dependent on a variety of factors which are rarely taken into account. This study explores the interaction, importance, and influence of water depth, flow velocity, water contamination, precautionary measures, emergency measures, flood experience, floor area, building value, building quality, and socioeconomic status. The study uses tree-based models (regression trees and bagging decision trees) and a dataset collected from 2012 to 2013 flood events in Queensland, which includes information on structural damages, impact parameters, and resistance variables. The tree-based approaches show water depth, floor area, precautionary measures, building value, and building quality to be important damage-influencing parameters. Furthermore, the performance of the tree-based models is validated and contrasted with the outcomes of a multi-parameter loss function (FLFArs) from Australia. The tree-based models are shown to be more accurate than the stage-damage function. Consequently, considering more parameters and taking advantage of tree-based models is recommended. The outcome is important for improving established Australian flood loss models and assisting decision-makers and insurance companies dealing with flood risk assessment.

Description: This paper recounts the environmental history of a main waterway in Northern Israel—the Kishon, and deploys this history to examine the evolution of Israel water policy as it struggled to bridge the growing gap between its ambitions of development and the realities of its limited water supply. The first part of the paper describes the decay of the Kishon since the early 1950s, and the multiple scientific, political and legal attempts to alleviate its misfortunes, and discusses the reasons for their failings. Some of these reasons were administrative by nature, but the paper suggests a deeper reason, rooted in the ideological core of the infant state that was overwhelmingly concerned with the development of its infrastructure, and invited the pioneering Israeli society to consider the demise of the Kishon as a necessary sacrifice for progress. The second part of the paper describes the late-20th century developments that allowed for the recovery of the ailing river. Changing social mores, the growing importance of environmental politics, the advance of Israel’s water technologies, and an environmental scandal that endowed the rehabilitation of the Kishon with a new political and moral meaning, have all contributed to the rehabilitation of the river. Once a testament for the sacrifices involved in a struggle to create a viable state, the Kishon has become a theater for a confident society that has triumphed in its struggle against nature.

Description: Height models based on high-altitude aerial images provide a low-cost means of generating detailed 3D models of the forest canopy. In this study, the performance of these height models in the detection of individual trees was evaluated in a commercially managed boreal forest. Airborne digital stereo imagery (DSI) was captured from a flight altitude of 5 km with a ground sample distance of 50 cm and corresponds to regular national topographic airborne data capture programs operated in many countries. Tree tops were detected from smoothed canopy height models (CHM) using watershed segmentation. The relative amount of detected trees varied between 26% and 140%, and the RMSE of plot-level arithmetic mean height between 2.2 m and 3.1 m. Both the dominant tree species and the filter used for smoothing affected the results. Even though the spatial resolution of DSI-based CHM was sufficient, detecting individual trees from the data proved to be demanding because of the shading effect of the dominant trees and the limited amount of data from lower canopy levels and near the ground.

Description: Thinning is one of the intensive forest management techniques commonly applied to increase the merchantable timber volume. However, how thinning affects soil–atmospheric fluxes of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is poorly understood. A field experiment with four treatments (CK: unthinned; MB: medium intensity thinning from below; HB: high intensity thinning from below; and HI: high intensity thinning by removing every alternative row of trees) was conducted to assess the impact of thinning regimes on soil–atmospheric fluxes of GHGs (CO2, CH4, and N2O) and soil nitrogen mineralization in a poplar plantation established on a lowland. Thinning significantly increased soil water content and water table in the high thinning treatments (HB and HI) and tended to increase soil temperature (p 〈 0.10). The result of the one-year study showed that estimated annual emissions of CO2 and CH4 were higher in HB and HI than in other treatments, while the highest emission of N2O was in the CK. The thinning treatments increased the annual emission of CO2 by 23%–64% and that of CH4 by 190%–1200%, but decreased that of N2O by 41%–62%. Thinning increased annual N mineralization by 50.3% in HI and 30.1%in HB. Changes in soil temperature and water table drove CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions, while soil water content was the most important factor driving CH4 emission. We conclude that the moderate thinning (MB) regime is the best thinning option to minimize the impact on GHG emissions for lowland poplar plantations with similar conditions to those tested in this study.

Description: Severe crown fires are determining disturbances for the composition and structure of boreal forests in North America. Fire cycle (FC) associations with continental climate gradients are well known, but smaller scale controls remain poorly documented. Using a time since fire map (time scale of 300 years), the study aims to assess the relative contributions of local and regional controls on FC and to describe the relationship between FC heterogeneity and vegetation patterns. The study area, located in boreal eastern North America, was partitioned into watersheds according to five scales going from local (3 km2) to landscape (2800 km2) scales. Using survival analysis, we observed that dry surficial deposits and hydrography density better predict FC when measured at the local scale, while terrain complexity and slope position perform better when measured at the middle and landscape scales. The most parsimonious model was selected according to the Akaike information criterion to predict FC throughout the study area. We detected two FC zones, one short (159 years) and one long (303 years), with specific age structures and tree compositions. We argue that the local heterogeneity of the fire regime contributes to ecosystem diversity and must be considered in ecosystem management.

Description: Converting secondary natural forests (SFs) to Chinese fir plantations (CFPs) represents one of the most important (8.9 million ha) land use changes in subtropical China. This study estimated both biomass and soil C stocks in a SF and a CFP that was converted from a SF, to quantify the effects of land use change on ecosystem C stock. After the forest conversion, biomass C in the CFP (73 Mg·ha−1) was significantly lower than that of the SF (114 Mg·ha−1). Soil organic C content and stock decreased with increasing soil depth, and the soil C stock in the 0–10 cm layer accounted for more than one third of the total soil C stock over 0–50 cm, emphasizing the importance of management of the top soil to reduce the soil C loss. Total ecosystem C stock of the SF and the CFP was 318 and 200 Mg·ha−1, respectively, 64% of which was soil C for both stands (205 Mg·ha−1 for the SF and 127 Mg·ha−1 for the CFP). This indicates that land use change from the SF to the CFP significantly decreased ecosystem C stock and highlights the importance of managing soil C.

Description: Due to a mistake during the production process, there was one error in paragraph 3 of the introduction in the original published version [1].[...]

Description: Regulated school days entail less free-living physical activity (PA) and outdoor stay, which may jeopardize the opportunities for cohesive moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and, by extension, children’s health. The role of outdoor stay during school time for pupils’ free-living PA vs. physical education (PE) and indoor stay was studied during one academic year in 196 pupils aged 7–14 years at four schools in mid-southern Sweden during five consecutive days each in September, March, and May. Actigraph GT3X+ Activity monitors were used. Predictors for PA during school stay were expressed as mean daily accelerometer counts and were measured per season, day, grade, gender, weather, and time outdoors. Overall, free-living PA outdoors generated the highest mean accelerometer counts for moderate and vigorous PA. Outdoor PA and PE, representing 23.7% of the total school time contributed to 50.4% of total mean accelerometer counts, and were the greatest contributors to moderate and vigorous PA. Age and weather impacted PA, with less PA in inclement weather and among older pupils. More time outdoors, at all seasons, would favorably increase school children’s chances of reaching recommended levels of PA.

Description: Nuclear hazards, linked to both U.S. weapons programs and civilian nuclear power, pose substantial environment justice issues. Nuclear power plant (NPP) reactors produce low-level ionizing radiation, high level nuclear waste, and are subject to catastrophic contamination events. Justice concerns include plant locations and the large potentially exposed populations, as well as issues in siting, nuclear safety, and barriers to public participation. Other justice issues relate to extensive contamination in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, and the mining and processing industries that have supported it. To approach the topic, first we discuss distributional justice issues of NPP sites in the U.S. and related procedural injustices in siting, operation, and emergency preparedness. Then we discuss justice concerns involving the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and the ways that uranium mining, processing, and weapons development have affected those living downwind, including a substantial American Indian population. Next we examine the problem of high-level nuclear waste and the risk implications of the lack of secure long-term storage. The handling and deposition of toxic nuclear wastes pose new transgenerational justice issues of unprecedented duration, in comparison to any other industry. Finally, we discuss the persistent risks of nuclear technologies and renewable energy alternatives.

Description: Mothers’ instigation of complementary feeding before their infant reaches 6 months old risks shortening their breastfeeding duration, and high morbidity and mortality for their child. Complementary feeding practices require further investigation in Saudi Arabia. The present study aims to evaluate complementary feeding practices, and to establish which factors are associated with the early introduction of complementary feeding in the Saudi Arabian context. Cross-sectional research was conducted with 632 mothers of infants aged between 4 and 24 months attending five primary health care centers (PHCCs) between July and December 2015 in Saudi Arabia. Data on participants’ socio-demographic characteristics and complementary feeding practices were collected via structured questionnaires. A regression analysis identified the factors associated with the early introduction of solid foods, defined as before 17 weeks. 62.5% of the study’s infants received solid foods before reaching 17 weeks old. The maternal factors at higher risk of early introduction of solids were: younger age; Saudi nationality; shorter education; employment within 6 months post-birth; caesareans; not breastfeeding fully for six weeks post-birth, and living in low-income households. Complementary feeding prior to 6 months postpartum was common in Saudi Arabia. Public health interventions are needed to reduce early complementary feeding, focusing on mothers at highest risk of giving solids too early.

Description: Introduction: Asthma is a multifactorial disease and a serious public health problem. Environmental factors and poverty are the main determinants of this disease. Objective: To describe the spatial and temporal distribution of asthma-related hospitalizations and identify the areas with the highest prevalence of and vulnerability to severe asthma in a major Brazilian city. Methods: An ecological study of hospitalizations for asthma from 2002 to 2012, in children and adolescents under 15 years of age, living in Belo Horizonte, Southeast Brazil. All events were geocoded by residence address using Hospital Information System data. The socioeconomic vulnerability of residence address was ranked using the Health Vulnerability Index. Raster surfaces were generated and time-series plots were constructed to determine spatial and time trends in the frequency of asthma-related hospitalizations, respectively. Results: Asthma-related hospitalization rates were highest in children aged 0–4 years and in boys. There was a decreasing trend in the number of asthma-related hospitalizations across the study period. Approximately 48% of all hospitalizations were children living in health vulnerable areas. Seasonal trends showed a hospitalization peak in March, April, and May, coinciding with the post-rainy period. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that social and environmental factors may be determinants of disparities in severe asthma.

Description: Biologically plausible associations exist between climatic conditions and stroke risk, but study results are inconsistent. We aimed to summarize current evidence on ambient temperature and overall stroke occurrence, and by age, sex, and variation of temperature. We performed a systematic literature search across MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Web of Science, and GEOBASE, from inception to 16 October 2015 to identify all population-based observational studies. Where possible, data were pooled for meta-analysis with Odds ratios (OR) and corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI) by means of the random effects meta-analysis. We included 21 studies with a total of 476,511 patients. The data were varied as indicated by significant heterogeneity across studies for both ischemic stroke (IS) and intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). Pooled OR (95% CI) in every 1 degree Celsius increase in ambient temperature was significant for ICH 0.97 (0.94–1.00), but not for IS 1.00 (0.99–1.01) and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) 1.00 (0.98–1.01). Meta-analysis was not possible for the pre-specified subgroup analyses by age, sex, and variation of temperature. Change in temperature over the previous 24 h appeared to be more important than absolute temperature in relation to the risk of stroke, especially in relation to the risk of ICH. Older age appeared to increase vulnerability to low temperature for both IS and ICH. To conclude, this review shows that lower mean ambient temperature is significantly associated with the risk of ICH, but not with IS and SAH. Larger temperature changes were associated with higher stroke rates in the elderly.

Description: Bisphenol A (BPA) is a ubiquitous compound used in polymer manufacturing for a wide array of applications; however, increasing evidence has shown that BPA causes significant endocrine disruption and this has raised public concerns over safety and exposure limits. The use of renewable materials as polymer feedstocks provides an opportunity to develop replacement compounds for BPA that are sustainable and exhibit unique properties due to their diverse structures. As new bio-based materials are developed and tested, it is important to consider the impacts of both monomers and polymers on human health. Molecular docking simulations using the Estrogenic Activity Database in conjunction with the decision forest were performed as part of a two-tier in silico model to predict the activity of 29 bio-based platform chemicals in the estrogen receptor-α (ERα). Fifteen of the candidates were predicted as ER binders and fifteen as non-binders. Gaining insight into the estrogenic activity of the bio-based BPA replacements aids in the sustainable development of new polymeric materials.

Description: 2,4,6-Tribromophenol (TBP) is a brominated flame retardant (BFR). Based on its affinity for transthyretin, TBP could compete with endogenous thyroid hormone. In this study, the effects of TBP on the thyroid hormone system were assessed in mice. Briefly, animals were exposed to 40 and 250 mg/kg TBP. Thyroid hormones were also administered with or without TBP. When mice were treated with TBP, deiodinase 1 (Dio1) and thyroid hormone receptor β isoform 2 (Thrβ2) decreased in the pituitary gland. The levels of deiodinase 2 (Dio2) and growth hormone (Gh) mRNA increased in response to 250 mg/kg of TBP, and the relative mRNA level of thyroid stimulating hormone β (Tshβ) increased in the pituitary gland. Dio1 and Thrβ1 expression in the liver were not altered, while Dio1 decreased in response to co-treatment with thyroid hormones. The thyroid gland activity decreased in response to TBP, as did the levels of free triiodothyronine and free thyroxine in serum. Taken together, these findings indicate that TBP can disrupt thyroid hormone homeostasis and the presence of TBP influenced thyroid actions as regulators of gene expression. These data suggest that TBP interferes with thyroid hormone systems

Description: Various themed streets have recently been developed by local governments in order to stimulate local economies and to establish the identity of the corresponding places. However, the motivations behind the development of some of these themed street projects has been based on profit, without full considerations of people’s perceptions of their local areas, resulting in marginal effects on the local economies concerned. In response to this issue, this study proposed a themed street clustering method to detect the themed streets of a specific region, focusing on the commercial themed street, which is more prevalent than other types of themed streets using location based service data. This study especially uses “the street segment” as a basic unit for analysis. The Sillim and Gangnam areas of Seoul, South Korea were chosen for the evaluation of the adequacy of the proposed method. By comparing trade areas that were sourced from a market analysis report by a reliable agent with the themed streets detected in this study, the experiment results showed high proficiency of the proposed method.

Description: Delimitating trade areas is a major business concern. Today, mobile communication technologies make it possible to use social media data for this purpose. Few studies however, have focused on methods to extract suitable samples from social media data for trade area delimitation. In our case study, we divided Beijing into regular grid cells and extracted activity centers for each social media user. Ten sample sets were obtained by selecting users based on the retail agglomerations they visited and aggregating user activity centers to each grid cell. We calculated distance and visitation frequency attributes for each user and each grid cell. The distance value of a grid cell is the average distance of user activity centers in this grid cell to a retail agglomeration. The visitation frequency of a grid cell refers to the average count of visits to retail agglomerations by user activity centers for a cell. The calculated attribute values of 10 sets were input into a Huff model and the delimitated trade areas were evaluated. Results show that sets obtained by aggregating user activity centers have a better delimitating effect than sets obtained without aggregation. Differences in the distribution and intensity of trade areas also became apparent.

Description: There are a great variety of joint types used in nature which can inspire engineering joints. In order to design such biomimetic joints, it is at first important to understand how biological joints work. A comprehensive literature review, considering natural joints from a mechanical point of view, was undertaken. This was used to develop a taxonomy based on the different methods/functions that nature successfully uses to attach dissimilar tissues. One of the key methods that nature uses to join dissimilar materials is a transitional zone of stiffness at the insertion site. This method was used to propose bio-inspired solutions with a transitional zone of stiffness at the joint site for several glass fibre reinforced plastic (GFRP) to steel adhesively bonded joint configurations. The transition zone was used to reduce the material stiffness mismatch of the joint parts. A numerical finite element model was used to identify the optimum variation in material stiffness that minimises potential failure of the joint. The best bio-inspired joints showed a 118% increase of joint strength compared to the standard joints.

Description: The production of activated carbons (ACs) from rapeseed cake and raspberry seed cake using slow pyrolysis followed by physical activation of the obtained solid residues is the topic of this study. The effect of activation temperature (850, 900 and 950 °C), activation time (30, 60, 90 and 120 min) and agent (steam and CO2) on the textural characteristics of the ACs is investigated by N2 adsorption. In general, higher activation temperatures and longer activation times increase the BET specific surface area and the porosity of the ACs, regardless of the activation agent or raw material. Steam is more reactive than CO2 in terms of pore development, especially in the case of raspberry seed cake. The performance of the ACs in liquid adsorption is evaluated by batch phenol adsorption tests. Experimental data are best fitted by the Freundlich isotherm model. Based on total yield, textural characteristics and phenol adsorption, steam activation at 900 °C for 90 min and CO2 activation at 900 °C for 120 min are found as the best activation conditions. Raspberry seed cake turns out to be a better raw material than rapeseed cake. Moreover, AC from raspberry seed cake produced by steam activation at 900 °C for 90 min performs as well as commercial AC (Norit GAC 1240) in phenol adsorption. The adsorption kinetics of the selected ACs are best fitted by the pseudo-second-order model.

Description: State-of-the-art pansharpening methods generally inject the spatial structures of a high spatial resolution (HR) panchromatic (PAN) image into the corresponding low spatial resolution (LR) multispectral (MS) image by an injection model. In this paper, a novel pansharpening method with an edge-preserving guided filter based on three-layer decomposition is proposed. In the proposed method, the PAN image is decomposed into three layers: A strong edge layer, a detail layer, and a low-frequency layer. The edge layer and detail layer are then injected into the MS image by a proportional injection model. In addition, two new quantitative evaluation indices, including the modified correlation coefficient (MCC) and the modified universal image quality index (MUIQI) are developed. The proposed method was tested and verified by IKONOS, QuickBird, and Gaofen (GF)-1 satellite images, and it was compared with several of state-of-the-art pansharpening methods from both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed method.

Description: This paper embeds a bi-fold contribution for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs); performance analysis of incremental relaying in terms of outage and error probability, and based on the analysis proposition of two new cooperative routing protocols. Subject to the first contribution, a three step procedure is carried out; a system model is presented, the number of available relays are determined, and based on cooperative incremental retransmission methodology, closed-form expressions for outage and error probability are derived. Subject to the second contribution, Adaptive Cooperation in Energy (ACE) efficient depth based routing and Enhanced-ACE (E-ACE) are presented. In the proposed model, feedback mechanism indicates success or failure of data transmission. If direct transmission is successful, there is no need for relaying by cooperative relay nodes. In case of failure, all the available relays retransmit the data one by one till the desired signal quality is achieved at destination. Simulation results show that the ACE and E-ACE significantly improves network performance, i.e., throughput, when compared with other incremental relaying protocols like Cooperative Automatic Repeat reQuest (CARQ). E-ACE and ACE achieve 69% and 63% more throughput respectively as compared to CARQ in hard underwater environment.

Description: In order to reduce the influence of fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) random drift error on inertial navigation systems, an improved auto regressive (AR) model is put forward in this paper. First, based on real-time observations at each restart of the gyroscope, the model of FOG random drift can be established online. In the improved AR model, the FOG measured signal is employed instead of the zero mean signals. Then, the modified Sage-Husa adaptive Kalman filter (SHAKF) is introduced, which can directly carry out real-time filtering on the FOG signals. Finally, static and dynamic experiments are done to verify the effectiveness. The filtering results are analyzed with Allan variance. The analysis results show that the improved AR model has high fitting accuracy and strong adaptability, and the minimum fitting accuracy of single noise is 93.2%. Based on the improved AR(3) model, the denoising method of SHAKF is more effective than traditional methods, and its effect is better than 30%. The random drift error of FOG is reduced effectively, and the precision of the FOG is improved.

Description: In this paper, a label-free aptamer based detection system (apta-DS) was investigated for detecting colon cancer cells. For this purpose, we employed an aptamer specific to colon cancer cells like HCT116 expressing carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) on their surfaces. Capture aptamers were covalently immobilized on the surface of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) through self-assembly monolayer of 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid (11-MUA) activated with EDC (1-Ethyl-3-[3-dimethylaminopropyl]carbodiimide)/N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS). The cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronopotentiometry (CP) methods were used for electrodeposition of GNPs on the surface of indium tin oxide (ITO). In this work, the CV method was also used to demonstrate the conjugation of GNPs and aptamers and identify the cancer cell capturing events. Additionally, Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM) confirmed the deposition of GNPs on ITO and the immobilization of aptamer on the apta-DS. The electrodeposited GNPs played the role of nanoprobes for cancer cell targeting without losing the optical transparency of the ITO substrate. A conventional optical microscope also verified the detection of captured cancer cells. Based on this study’s results relying on electrochemical and optical microscopic methods, the proposed apta-DS is reliable and high sensitive with a LOD equal to 6 cell/mL for colon cancer detection.

Description: Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) improve the mobility of visually-impaired persons, but it is not easy to develop an ETA satisfying all the factors needed for reliable object detection, effective notification, and actual usability. In this study, the authors developed an easy-to-use ETA having the function of reliable object detection and its successful feedback to the user by tactile stimulation. Seven ultrasonic sensors facing in different directions detect obstacles in the walking path, while vibrators in the tactile display stimulate the hand according to the distribution of obstacles. The detection of ground drop-offs activates the electromagnetic brakes linked to the rear wheels. To verify the feasibility of the developed ETA in the outdoor environment, walking tests by blind participants were performed, and the evaluation of safety to ground drop-offs was carried out. From the experiment, the feasibility of the developed ETA was shown to be sufficient if the sensor ranges for hanging obstacle detection is improved and learning time is provided for the ETA. Finally, the light-weight and low cost ETA designed and assembled based on the evaluation of the developed ETA is introduced to show the improvement of portability and usability, and is compared with the previously developed ETAs.

Description: Structural parameter calibration for the binocular stereo vision sensor (BSVS) is an important guarantee for high-precision measurements. We propose a method to calibrate the structural parameters of BSVS based on a double-sphere target. The target, consisting of two identical spheres with a known fixed distance, is freely placed in different positions and orientations. Any three non-collinear sphere centres determine a spatial plane whose normal vector under the two camera-coordinate-frames is obtained by means of an intermediate parallel plane calculated by the image points of sphere centres and the depth-scale factors. Hence, the rotation matrix R is solved. The translation vector T is determined using a linear method derived from the epipolar geometry. Furthermore, R and T are refined by nonlinear optimization. We also provide theoretical analysis on the error propagation related to the positional deviation of the sphere image and an approach to mitigate its effect. Computer simulations are conducted to test the performance of the proposed method with respect to the image noise level, target placement times and the depth-scale factor. Experimental results on real data show that the accuracy of measurement is higher than 0.9‰, with a distance of 800 mm and a view field of 250 × 200 mm2.

Description: The goal of achieving sustainable tourism is now a priority for many tourism planners. It has been suggested that stakeholder analysis is an essential step in determining sustainable tourism in regions, given its highly contextual nature. However, previous research has tended to focus heavily on stakeholders with the assumption that attitudes within groups are homogeneous. This research questions this assumption and in doing so, takes a critical approach by examining attitudes towards sustainable tourism and then assesses whether attitudes align with stakeholder groups. The study was conducted in the island state of Tasmania, Australia, and utilised the Q-methodology to examine attitudes towards sustainable tourism in the Bay of Fires region. The results concur with recent research, which shows that attitudes do not always align with those of stakeholder groups. The critical and reflexive approach suggests that assumptions regarding stakeholder attitudes need to be reviewed and more attention given to people’s contextualised attitudes, rather than the stakeholder group in which they sit.

Description: Urban metabolism analysis has become a useful and effective tool to explore urban socio-economic processes. In this research, in order to explore the similarities and differences of metabolic characteristics and variation rules of different types of resource-dependent cities, we selected two cities—Taiyuan and Jincheng, the capital and a traditional resource-dependent city of Shanxi province, respectively, as research subjects, we also established an urban metabolic evaluation framework by employing a set of eight emergy-based indicators from socio-economic data from 2007 to 2014, and compared the similarities and discrepancies from the perspectives of metabolic structure, intensity, pressure, and efficiency, and put forward some suggestions for pursuing sustainable development for both cities and pointed out that more types of resource-dependent cities should be incorporated in future research work.

Description: In light of the growing importance of data network quality in the wireless industry, this study analyzes and compares efficiencies in management, service quality, network quality, and market in the 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless industry. For this purpose, a bootstrap data envelopment analysis (DEA) model using representative U.S. wireless carriers as decision making units (DMUs) was designed and conducted, with further verification through the Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon W test, to examine the differences in efficiency distribution. The results indicate that, in terms of efficiency distribution, network quality efficiency and market efficiency belongs to the same group as that which has high management efficiency. Based on these results, this paper suggests implications and strategic guidelines for wireless carriers for improvement in management efficiency.

Description: The role of tourism in rural areas is pivotal for the integration and valorization of territorial resources and it is strengthened by the capacity to promote local community participation in processes of development. The paper addresses the issue by presenting and discussing a case study of a rural area of southern Italy where a territorial network for the development of local tourism has been set up. The innovative initiative aimed, firstly, to facilitate a closer connection between production and consumption by reducing transaction costs and, secondly, to connect local production with quality conscious consumers looking for traditional products. The network project also aimed to create conditions conducive to increasing the competitiveness of the local production chain and tourism sector. The case study shows how the challenge for many rural territories lies in increasing levels of trust and rebuilding social capital as a precondition of developing the tourism sector and fostering socio-economic development as a whole. Traditional institutions, as well as hybrid institutions, with the support of research organizations, can play a key role.

Description: For resilience building, cities need to foster learning and innovation processes among all actors in order to develop transformative capacities of urban governance regimes to manage extraordinary situations as well as continuous change. A close collaboration of urban governmental actors and citizens is, therefore, of high importance. This paper explores two different discourses on urban governance: participation and self-organized collective action for the management of the commons. Both address the involvement of citizens into governance, albeit from different perspectives: on the one hand from the viewpoint of the government, selectively handing some of its power over to citizens, on the other hand from the perspective of citizens who self-organize for a collective management of urban commons. Based on experiences in the Austrian city of Korneuburg, it is argued that the collective action literature may help overcome some of the self-criticisms and shortcomings of the participation discourse. More specifically, Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for the management of the commons provide valuable input to overcome restrictions in thinking about citizen participation and to effectively design institutions for long-term urban co-management.

Description: Region duplication forgery where a part of the image itself is copied and pasted onto a different part of the same image grid is becoming more popular in image manipulation. The forgers often apply geometric transformations such as rotation and scaling operations to make the forgery imperceptible. In this study, an image region duplication forgery detection algorithm is proposed based on the angular radial partitioning and Harris key-points. Two standard databases have been used: image data manipulation and MICC-F220 (Media Integration and Communication Center– of the University of Florence) for experimentation. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed technique can detect rotated regions in multiples of 30 degrees and can detect region duplication with different scaling factors from 0.8, to 1.2. More experimental results are presented to confirm the effectiveness of detecting region duplication that has undergone other changes, such as Gaussian noise, and JPEG compression.

Description: Sustainable mining has received much attention in recent years as a consequence of the negative impacts of mining and public awareness. The aim of this paper is to provide mining companies guidance on improving the sustainability of their sites through effective community engagement based on recent advances in the literature. It begins with a review of the literature on sustainable development and its relationship to stakeholder engagement. It then uses the literature to determine the dominant factors that affect community perceptions of mining projects. These factors are classified into five categories: environmental, economic, social, governance and demographic factors. Then, we propose a new two-stage method based on discrete choice theory and the classification that can improve stakeholder engagement and be cost-effective. Further work is required to validate the proposed method, although it shows potential to overcome some of the challenges plaguing current approaches.

Description: Nowadays, several wireless location systems have been developed in the research world. The goal of these systems has always been to find the greatest accuracy as possible. However, if every node takes data from the environment, we can gather a lot of information, which may help us understand what is happening around our network in a cooperative way. In order to develop this cooperative location and tracking system, we have implemented a sensor network to capture data from user devices. From this captured data we have observed a symmetry behavior in people’s movements at a specific site. By using these data and the symmetry feature, we have developed a statistical cooperative approach to predict the new user’s location. The system has been tested in a real environment, evaluating the next location predicted by the system and comparing it with the next location in the real track, thus getting satisfactory results. Better results have been obtained when the stochastic cooperative approach uses the transition matrix with symmetry.

Description: To comply with recent international trends and initiatives, and in order to help achieve sustainable development, Korea has established a greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction target of 37% (851 million tons) of the business as usual (BAU) rate by 2030. Regarding environmentally-oriented standards such as the IGCC (International Green Construction Code), there are also rising demands for the assessment on CO2 emissions during the life cycle in accordance with ISO (International Standardization Organization’s Standard) 14040. At present, precast concrete (PC) engineering-related studies primarily cover structural and construction aspects, including improvement of structural performance in the joint, introduction of pre-stressed concrete and development of half PC. In the manufacture of PC, steam curing is mostly used for the early-strength development of concrete. In steam curing, a large amount of CO2 is produced, causing an environmental problem. Therefore, this study proposes a method to assess CO2 emissions (including absorption) throughout the PC life cycle by using a life cycle assessment (LCA) method. Using the proposed assessment method, CO2 emissions during the life cycle of a precast concrete girder (PCG) were assessed. In addition, CO2 absorption was assessed against a PCG using conventional carbonation and CO2 absorption-related models. As a result, the CO2 emissions throughout the life cycle of the PCG were 1365.6 (kg-CO2/1 PCG). The CO2 emissions during the production of raw materials among the CO2 emissions throughout the life cycle of the PCG were 1390 (kg-CO2/1 PCG), accounting for a high portion to total CO2 emissions (nearly 90%). In contrast, the transportation and manufacture stages were 1% and 10%, respectively, having little effect on total CO2 emissions. Among the use of the PCG, CO2 absorption was mostly decided by the CO2 diffusion coefficient and the amount of CO2 absorption by cement paste. The CO2 absorption by carbonation throughout the service life of the PC was about 11% of the total CO2 emissions, which is about 16% of CO2 emissions from ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete.

Description: Spatial differences in urban environmental conditions contribute to health inequalities within cities. The purpose of the paper is to map environmental inequalities relevant for health in the City of Dortmund, Germany, in order to identify needs for planning interventions. We develop suitable indicators for mapping socioeconomically-driven environmental inequalities at the neighborhood level based on published scientific evidence and inputs from local stakeholders. Relationships between socioeconomic and environmental indicators at the level of 170 neighborhoods were analyzed continuously with Spearman rank correlation coefficients and categorically applying chi-squared tests. Reclassified socioeconomic and environmental indicators were then mapped at the neighborhood level in order to determine multiple environmental burdens and hotspots of environmental inequalities related to health. Results show that the majority of environmental indicators correlate significantly, leading to multiple environmental burdens in specific neighborhoods. Some of these neighborhoods also have significantly larger proportions of inhabitants of a lower socioeconomic position indicating hotspots of environmental inequalities. Suitable planning interventions mainly comprise transport planning and green space management. In the conclusions, we discuss how the analysis can be used to improve state of the art planning instruments, such as clean air action planning or noise reduction planning towards the consideration of the vulnerability of the population.

Description: Stop-skipping is a key method for alleviating congestion in rail transit, where schedules are sometimes difficult to implement. Several mechanisms have been proposed and analyzed in the literature, but very few performance comparisons are available. This study formulated train choice behavior estimation into the model considering passengers’ perception. If a passenger’s train path can be identified, this information would be useful for improving the stop-skipping schedule service. Multi-performance is a key characteristic of our proposed five stop-skipping schedules, but quantified analysis can be used to illustrate the different effects of well-known deterministic and stochastic forms. Problems in the novel category of forms were justified in the context of a single line rather than transit network. We analyzed four deterministic forms based on the well-known A/B stop-skipping operating strategy. A stochastic form was innovatively modeled as a binary integer programming problem. We present a performance analysis of our proposed model to demonstrate that stop-skipping can feasibly be used to improve the service of passengers and enhance the elasticity of train operations under demand variations along with an explicit parametric discussion.

Description: Since 1989, blue-collar foreign workers have been permitted to work in Taiwanese industries. Most blue-collar foreign workers apply for jobs in Taiwan through blue-collar foreign workers’ agencies. Because blue-collar foreign workers are not familiar with the language and culture in Taiwan, in occupational accident education and hazard prevention, the agencies play an important role in the coordination and translation between employees and blue-collar foreign workers. The purpose of this study is to establish the agencies’ role in the occupational accidents education and hazard prevention for blue-collar foreign workers in Taiwan. This study uses a qualitative method—grounded theory—to collect, code, and analyze the data in order to understand the agencies’ role in occupational accident education and hazard prevention for blue-collar foreign workers in Taiwan. The results show that the duty of agencies in occupational accident education and hazard prevention includes selecting appropriate blue-collar foreign workers, communicating between employees and blue-collar foreign workers, collecting occupational safety and health information, assisting in the training of occupational safety and health, and helping blue-collar foreign workers adapt to their lives in Taiwan. Finally, this study suggests seven important points and discusses the implementation process necessary to improve governmental policies. The government and employees should pay attention to the education/training of occupational safety and health for blue-collar foreign workers to eliminate unsafe behavior in order to protect the lives of blue-collar foreign workers.

Description: Road information is fundamental not only in the military field but also common daily living. Automatic road extraction from a remote sensing images can provide references for city planning as well as transportation database and map updating. However, owing to the spectral similarity between roads and impervious structures, the current methods solely using spectral characteristics are often ineffective. By contrast, the detailed information discernible from the high-resolution aerial images enables road extraction with spatial texture features. In this study, a knowledge-based method is established and proposed; this method incorporates the spatial texture feature into urban road extraction. The spatial texture feature is initially extracted by the local Moran’s I, and the derived texture is added to the spectral bands of image for image segmentation. Subsequently, features like brightness, standard deviation, rectangularity, aspect ratio, and area are selected to form the hypothesis and verification model based on road knowledge. Finally, roads are extracted by applying the hypothesis and verification model and are post-processed based on the mathematical morphology. The newly proposed method is evaluated by conducting two experiments. Results show that the completeness, correctness, and quality of the results could reach approximately 94%, 90% and 86% respectively, indicating that the proposed method is effective for urban road extraction.

Description: Effectively identifying an airport from satellite and aerial imagery is a challenging task. Traditional methods mainly focus on the use of multiple features for the detection of runways and some also adapt knowledge of airports, but the results are unsatisfactory and the usage limited. A new method is proposed to recognize airports from high-resolution optical images. This method involves the analysis of the saliency distribution and the use of fuzzy rule-based classification. First, a number of images with and without airports are segmented into multiple scales to obtain a saliency distribution map that best highlights the saliency distinction between airports and other objects. Then, on the basis of the segmentation result and the structural information of airports, we analyze the segmentation result to extract and represent the semantic information of each image via the bag-of-visual-words (BOVW) model. The image correlation degree is combined with the BOVW model and fractal dimension calculation to make a more complete description of the airports and to carry out preliminary classification. Finally, the support vector machine (SVM) is adopted for detailed classification to classify the remaining imagery. The experiment shows that the proposed method achieves a precision of 89.47% and a recall of 90.67% and performs better than other state of the art methods on precision and recall.

Description: This study examined the associations between perceived neighborhood and home environmental factors and excessive television (TV) viewing time among Taiwanese older adults. The sample data was collected by administering computer-assisted telephone interviewers to 980 Taiwanese older adults (aged ≥ 65 years) living in two regions. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to examine the associations between self-reported perceived neighborhood and home environmental attributions and TV viewing time by using logistic regression analyses. The results showed that perceived neighborhood and home environmental factors were associated with excessive TV viewing time (≥2 h/day) after adjusting for potential confounders. Compared with a reference group, older adults who perceived their neighborhoods to have unsafe traffic were more likely to report excessive TV viewing time (OR = 1.36, 95%CI = 1.02–1.82). Older adults who reported having two or more TV sets in the home (OR = 1.77, CI = 1.28–2.44) and having a TV in the bedroom (OR = 1.55, CI = 1.18–2.03) were also more likely to report excessive TV viewing time. Further longitudinal research can confirm these findings, and tailored interventions focusing on the perceptions of neighborhood traffic safety and TV access at home for older adults might be effective means of preventing excessive TV viewing time.

Description: Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful methodology for the study of health impacts and public policies. We performed this study to quantitatively explain the potential health impacts on disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) of corn produced in Mexico and imported from the United States of America (U.S.) from 1984 until 2014. The processes are hybrid and organic corn production. The functional unit was defined as 1 ton of corn production. Results indicate a total value of 178,431, 244,175, and 283,426 DALYs of three decades: 1984–1993, 1994–2003, and 2004–2013, of Mexican production; the U.S. production and transport were also calculated, showing values of 29,815, 65,837, and 107,729 for the same three decades. Additionally, DALYs were obtained for the category of human health and climate change by functional unit: 802.31 (1984–1993), 802.67 (1994–2003), and 803.92 (2004–2013), and for imported corn transported to Mexico from the U.S., 859.12 (1984–2013). DALYs on human toxicity were obtained: 99.05 (1984–1993), 99.05 (1994–2003), and 99.04 (2004–2013), and for the corn imported and transported to Mexico from the U.S., 116.25 (1984–2013). Conclusions: Environmental and health impacts in terms of DALYs are higher when corn is imported versus the corn produced in Mexico. Environmental health and nominal corn cultivation and transport impacts have increased as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico needs to redefine its public policies to suffer less of an environmental burden from corn to ensure global environmental health and food security.

Description: Inland saline wetlands are complex systems undergoing continuous changes in moisture and salinity and are especially vulnerable to human pressures. Remote sensing is helpful to identify vegetation change in semi-arid wetlands and to assess wetland degradation. Remote sensing-based monitoring requires identification of the spectral characteristics of soils and vegetation and their correspondence with the vegetation cover and soil conditions. We studied the spectral characteristics of soils and vegetation of saline wetlands in Monegros, NE Spain, through field and satellite images. Radiometric and complementary field measurements in two field surveys in 2007 and 2008 were collected in selected sites deemed as representative of different soil moisture, soil color, type of vegetation, and density. Despite the high local variability, we identified good relationships between field spectral data and Quickbird images. A methodology was established for mapping the fraction of vegetation cover in Monegros and other semi-arid areas. Estimating vegetation cover in arid wetlands is conditioned by the soil background and by the occurrence of dry and senescent vegetation accompanying the green component of perennial salt-tolerant plants. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was appropriate to map the distribution of the vegetation cover if the green and yellow-green parts of the plants are considered.

Description: Extreme heat weather events have received increasing attention and has become of special importance as they can remarkably affect sectors as diverse as public health, energy consumption, water resources, natural biodiversity and agricultural production. In this regard, summer temperatures have become a parameter of essential interest under a framework of a hypothetical increase in the number of intense-heat conditions. Thus, their forecast is a crucial aspect bearing in mind a mitigation of the effects and impacts that these intense-heat situations could produce. The current work tries to reach a better understanding of these sorts of situations that are really common over the Western Mediterranean coast. An extreme heat episode that took place in the Valencia Region in July 2009 is analysed, based on the simulations performed with the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). This event recorded maximum temperatures exceeding 40 °C amply extended over the region besides reaching minimum temperatures up to 25.92 °C. We examine the role of improved skin and soil temperature (ST) initial conditions in the forecast results by means of different modelling and satellite-derived products. The influence of incorporating the Land Surface Temperature (LST) into RAMS is not found to produce a meaningful impact on the simulation results, independently of the resolution of the dataset used in the initial conditions of the model. In contrast, the introduction of the ST in lower levels, not only the skin temperature, has a more marked decisive effect in the simulation. Additionally, we have evaluated the influence of increasing the number of soil levels to spread deeper underground. This sensitivity experiment has revealed that more soil levels do not produce any meaningful impact on the simulation compared to the original one. In any case, RAMS is able to properly capture the observed patterns in those cases where a Western advection is widely extended over the area of study. This region’s variability in orography and in distances to the sea promotes the development of sea-breeze circulations, thus producing a convergence of two opposite wind flows, a Western synoptic advection and a sea-breeze circulation. As a result, the RAMS skill in those cases where a sea breeze is well developed depends on the proper location of the boundary and convergence lines of these two flows.

Description: Spatially explicit knowledge of aboveground biomass (AGB) in large areas is important for accurate carbon accounting and quantifying the effect of forest disturbance on the terrestrial carbon cycle. We estimated AGB from 1990 to 2011 in northern Guangdong, China, based on a spatially explicit dataset derived from six years of national forest inventory (NFI) plots, Landsat time series imagery (1986–2011) and Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radars (PALSAR) 25 m mosaic data (2007–2010). Four types of variables were derived for modeling and assessment. The random forest approach was used to seek the optimal variables for mapping and validation. The root mean square error (RMSE) of plot-level validation was between 6.44 and 39.49 (t/ha), the normalized root-mean-square error (NRMSE) was between 7.49% and 19.01% and mean absolute error (MAE) was between 5.06 and 23.84 t/ha. The highest coefficient of determination R2 of 0.8 and the lowest NRMSE of 7.49% were reported in 2006. A clear increasing trend of mean AGB from the lowest value of 13.58 t/ha to the highest value of 66.25 t/ha was witnessed between 1988 and 2000, while after 2000 there was a fluctuating ascending change, with a peak mean AGB of 67.13 t/ha in 2004. By integrating AGB change with forest disturbance, the trend in disturbance area closely corresponded with the trend in AGB decrease. To determine the driving forces of these changes, the correlation analysis was adopted and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) method was used to find a factor rotation that maximizes this variance and represents the dominant factors of nine climate elements and nine human activities elements affecting the AGB dynamics. Overall, human activities contributed more to short-term AGB dynamics than climate data. Harvesting and human-induced fire in combination with rock desertification and global warming made a strong contribution to AGB changes. This study provides valuable information for the relationships between forest AGB and climate as well as forest disturbance in subtropical zones.

Description: Although China has promoted the construction of Chinese Sustainable Ground Transportation (CSGT) to guide sustainable development, it may create substantial challenges, such as rapid urban growth and land limitations. This research assessed the effects of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge on impervious surface growth in Cixi County, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. Changes in impervious surfaces were mapped based on Landsat images from 1995, 2002, and 2009 using a combination of multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) and landscape metrics. The results indicated that the area and density of impervious surfaces increased significantly during construction of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge (2002–2009). Additionally, the bridge and connected road networks promoted urban development along major roads, resulting in compact growth patterns of impervious surfaces in urbanized regions. Moreover, the Hangzhou Bay Bridge promoted the expansion and densification of impervious surfaces in Hangzhou Bay District, which surrounds the bridge. The bridge also accelerated socioeconomic growth in the area, promoting rapid urban growth in Cixi County between 2002 and 2009. Overall, the Hangzhou Bay Bridge is an important driver of urban growth in Cixi County, and policy suggestions for sustainable urban growth should be adopted in the future.

Description: Rapid urbanization and rapid urban growth present great challenges to the sustainable utilization of land resources. This paper discusses the on-going process of construction-to-ecological land conversion (CELC) in terms of three aspects: land use, environmental effects, and system responses. CELC is compared to other current land conversion strategies in China. Taking Shenzhen City as an example, this paper introduces five areas in which CELC has been implemented since 2009, including basic farmland protection zones, mining areas, ecological corridors, inefficient industrial zones, and urban villages. This paper argues that Shenzhen’s CELC model can improve the ecological environment, control urban sprawl, and promote sustainable land use and, thus, serve as an example for other cities in China.

Description: Northeast China (NEC) is one of China’s major rice production areas and has experienced obvious climate warming over the past three decades, similar to other mid- to high-latitude regions in the Northern Hemisphere. The present study investigates the temporal and spatial impacts of climate warming on rice yield in mid–high latitude regions. In this study, two time series datasets of rice yield and climate records in the NEC, including 178 county sites and 105 climate stations and covering the period from 1980 to 2008, were compiled. From these data, the responses of rice yield to the rice-growing season temperature (GST), growing degree days (GDD), and precipitation (GSP) were estimated using a regression model. The results indicate that rice yield benefits from climate warming in the NEC. GST positively impacted rice yield in 64.6% of the counties, with an increase of approximately 3.65%; GDD positively impacted yield in 64% of the counties, an increase of approximately 3.2%; and GSP negatively impacted rice yield in 68% of the counties, with a decrease of approximately −2.3%. Spatial variation was observed in the climate-rice yield relationships. The statistical relationships of GST and GDD with rice yield were significantly and positively correlated with latitude, longitude, and altitude, while that of GSP and rice yield was significantly and negatively correlated with latitude and longitude and showed a nonsignificant positive correlation with altitude. In summary, climate warming has significantly increased rice yield over the last three decades in the region north of 42°N, east of 122.4°E, and at an elevation of 134–473 m, which covers the majority of the rice-growing areas in the NEC.

Description: Fresh water is a key natural resource for food production, sanitation and industrial uses and has a high environmental value. The largest water use worldwide (~70%) corresponds to irrigation in agriculture, where use of water is becoming essential to maintain productivity. Efficient irrigation control largely depends on having access to reliable information about the actual plant water needs. Therefore, fast, portable and non-invasive sensing techniques able to measure water requirements directly on the plant are essential to face the huge challenge posed by the extensive water use in agriculture, the increasing water shortage and the impact of climate change. Non-contact resonant ultrasonic spectroscopy (NC-RUS) in the frequency range 0.1–1.2 MHz has revealed as an efficient and powerful non-destructive, non-invasive and in vivo sensing technique for leaves of different plant species. In particular, NC-RUS allows determining surface mass, thickness and elastic modulus of the leaves. Hence, valuable information can be obtained about water content and turgor pressure. This work analyzes and reviews the main requirements for sensors, electronics, signal processing and data analysis in order to develop a fast, portable, robust and non-invasive NC-RUS system to monitor variations in leaves water content or turgor pressure. A sensing prototype is proposed, described and, as application example, used to study two different species: Vitis vinifera and Coffea arabica, whose leaves present thickness resonances in two different frequency bands (400–900 kHz and 200–400 kHz, respectively), These species are representative of two different climates and are related to two high-added value agricultural products where efficient irrigation management can be critical. Moreover, the technique can also be applied to other species and similar results can be obtained.

Description: SMEs need to protect their innovation outcomes and increase profits from their innovations in order to make their growth sustainable. The appropriability regime enables SMEs to secure financial returns on their R&D investment so that SMEs can continuously invest in innovation and obtain financial gains. However, the appropriability regime can change the effects of protecting innovation outcomes depending on the capacity of knowledge exploration, especially for SMEs, and previous studies have not discussed these issues. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to explore how the knowledge exploration capacity affects the relationship between different types of appropriability regimes and innovation performance. Multivariate regression is used to analyze the manufacturing SMEs sampled from the Korea Innovation Survey 2007 (KIS 2007). Our results demonstrate that both formal and informal appropriability regimes can improve firm’s innovation performance. Furthermore, although both inventive and absorptive capacity have positive moderating effects on the relationship between the informal appropriability regime and innovation performance, the inventive capacity moderates negatively the relationship between the formal appropriability regime and innovation performance. As a whole, the significance of this paper lies in providing further understanding of the different types of appropriability regimes and knowledge exploration capacity in SMEs.

Description: A detention reservoir is one of the most effective engineered solutions for flood damage mitigation in urban areas. Detention facilities are constructed to temporarily store storm water and then slowly drain when the peak period has passed. This delayed drainage may coincide with upstream floods and aggravate the flood risk downstream. Optimal operation and design are needed to improve the performance of detention reservoirs for flood reduction. This study couples hydrologic simulation software (EPA-SWMM) with an evolutional optimizer (extraordinary particle swarm optimization, EPSO) to minimize flood damage downstream while considering the inundation risk at the detention reservoir. The optimum design and operation are applied to an urban case study in Seoul, Korea, for historical severe flooding events and designed rainfall scenarios. The optimal facilities outperform the present facilities in terms of flood damage reduction both downstream and in the detention reservoir area. Specifically, the peak water level at the detention pond under optimal conditions is significantly smaller than that of the current conditions. The comparison of the total flooded volume in the whole watershed shows a dramatic reduction of 79% in a severe flooding event in 2010 and around 20% in 2011 and in 180 min designed rainfall scenarios.

Description: This study investigated the residual tensile properties of plain woven jute fiber reinforced poly(lactic acid) (PLA) during thermal cycling. Temperature ranges of thermal cycling tests were 35–45 °C and 35–55 °C. The maximum number of cycles was 103 cycles. The quasi-static tensile tests of jute fiber, PLA, and composite were conducted after thermal cycling tests. Thermal mechanical analyses of jute fiber and PLA were conducted after thermal cycling tests. Results led to the following conclusions. For temperatures of 35–45 °C, tensile strength of composite at 103 cycles decreased 10% compared to that of composite at 0 cycles. For temperatures of 35–55 °C, tensile strength and Young’s modulus of composite at 103 cycles decreased 15% and 10%, respectively, compared to that of composite at 0 cycles. Tensile properties and the coefficient of linear expansion of PLA and jute fiber remained almost unchanged after thermal cycling tests. From observation of a fracture surface, the length of fiber pull out in the fracture surface of composite at 103 cycles was longer than that of composite at 0 cycles. Therefore, tensile properties of the composite during thermal cycling were decreased, probably because of the decrease of interfacial adhesion between the fiber and resin.

Description: This paper presents a demand response (DR) framework that intertwines thermodynamic building models with a genetic algorithm (GA)-based optimization method. The framework optimizes heating/cooling schedules of end-users inside a business park microgrid with local distributed generation from renewable energy sources (DG-RES) based on two separate objectives: net load minimization and electricity cost minimization. DG-RES is treated as a curtailable resource in anticipation of future scenarios where the infeed of DG-RES to the regional distribution network could be limited. We test the DR framework with a case study of a refrigerated warehouse and an office building located in a business park with local PV generation. Results show the technical potential of the DR framework in harnessing the flexibility of the thermal masses from end-user sites in order to: (1) reduce the energy exchange at the point of connection; (2) reduce the cost of electricity for the microgrid end-users; and (3) increase the local utilization of DG-RES in cases where DG-RES exports to the grid are restricted. The results of this work can aid end-users and distribution network operators to reduce energy costs and energy consumption.

Description: High-entropy alloys (HEAs) have recently become a vibrant field of study in the metallic materials area. In the early years, the design of HEAs was more of an exploratory nature. The selection of compositions was somewhat arbitrary, and there was typically no specific goal to be achieved in the design. Very recently, however, the development of HEAs has gradually entered a different stage. Unlike the early alloys, HEAs developed nowadays are usually designed to meet clear goals, and have carefully chosen components, deliberately introduced multiple phases, and tailored microstructures. These alloys are referred to as advanced HEAs. In this paper, the progress in advanced HEAs is briefly reviewed. The design strategies for these materials are examined and are classified into three categories. Representative works in each category are presented. Finally, important issues and future directions in the development of advanced HEAs are pointed out and discussed.

Description: In this paper, a full-color photovoltaic (PV) module, called the artist PV module, is developed by laser processes. A full-color image source is printed on the back of a protective glass using an inkjet printer, and a brightened grayscale mask is used to precisely define regions on the module where colors need to be revealed. Artist PV modules with 1.1 × 1.4 m2 area have high a retaining power output of 139 W and an aesthetic appearance making them more competitive than other building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) products. Furthermore, the installation of artist PV modules as curtain walls without metal frames is also demonstrated. This type of installation offers an aesthetic advantage by introducing supporting fittings, originating from the field of glass technology. Hence, this paper is expected to elevate BIPV modules to an art form and generate research interests in developing more functional PV modules.

Description: We studied branching in Sequoia sempervirens (Lamb. ex D. Don) Endl. (coast redwood) and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco var. menziesii (coast Douglas-fir) because of their commercial value to coastal northern California. We focused on branching in the second log, which constitutes an important part of a tree’s wood volume and potential value. We quantified branch size and branch growth of overstory trees in multiaged stands in Mendocino County, California, in response to topographic, silvicultural, and stand- and tree-related variables. Higher stand density—a measure of competition averaged across the sample plot—did not correlate with size of the largest second-log branch measured but was associated with a smaller average diameter of the largest branches measured on all sides of the study tree. The largest branch measured was smaller when in closer proximity to branches of its immediate neighbor tree. Redwood had larger branches than Douglas-fir but their size was more sensitive to an ecological gradient of soil-moisture deficit. Branches responded differently to individual tree selection harvest of conifers versus herbicide control of hardwoods. Residual conifer branches in harvested plots responded almost immediately with increased growth, but this release was short-lived. Branches in herbicide-treated plots exhibited a delayed release, giving more consistent branch growth throughout two five-year measurement periods after treatment.

Description: Merging satellite and rain gauge data by combining accurate quantitative rainfall from stations with spatial continuous information from remote sensing observations provides a practical method of estimating rainfall. However, generating high spatiotemporal rainfall fields for catchment-distributed hydrological modeling is a problem when only a sparse rain gauge network and coarse spatial resolution of satellite data are available. The objective of the study is to present a satellite and rain gauge data-merging framework adapting for coarse resolution and data-sparse designs. In the framework, a statistical spatial downscaling method based on the relationships among precipitation, topographical features, and weather conditions was used to downscale the 0.25° daily rainfall field derived from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) precipitation product version 7. The nonparametric merging technique of double kernel smoothing, adapting for data-sparse design, was combined with the global optimization method of shuffled complex evolution, to merge the downscaled TRMM and gauged rainfall with minimum cross-validation error. An indicator field representing the presence and absence of rainfall was generated using the indicator kriging technique and applied to the previously merged result to consider the spatial intermittency of daily rainfall. The framework was applied to estimate daily precipitation at a 1 km resolution in the Qinghai Lake Basin, a data-scarce area in the northeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The final estimates not only captured the spatial pattern of daily and annual precipitation with a relatively small estimation error, but also performed very well in stream flow simulation when applied to force the geomorphology-based hydrological model (GBHM). The proposed framework thus appears feasible for rainfall estimation at high spatiotemporal resolution in data-scarce areas.

Description: Kernel-based methods and ensemble learning are two important paradigms for the classification of hyperspectral remote sensing images. However, they were developed in parallel with different principles. In this paper, we aim to combine the advantages of kernel and ensemble methods by proposing a kernel supervised ensemble classification method. In particular, the proposed method, namely RoF-KOPLS, combines the merits of ensemble feature learning (i.e., Rotation Forest (RoF)) and kernel supervised learning (i.e., Kernel Orthonormalized Partial Least Square (KOPLS)). In particular, the feature space is randomly split into K disjoint subspace and KOPLS is applied to each subspace to produce the new features set for the training of decision tree classifier. The final classification result is assigned to the corresponding class by the majority voting rule. Experimental results on two hyperspectral airborne images demonstrated that RoF-KOPLS with radial basis function (RBF) kernel yields the best classification accuracies due to the ability of improving the accuracies of base classifiers and the diversity within the ensemble, especially for the very limited training set. Furthermore, our proposed method is insensitive to the number of subsets.

Description: Leaf Area Index (LAI) is a key variable that bridges remote sensing observations to the quantification of agroecosystem processes. In this study, we assessed the universality of the relationships between crop LAI and remotely sensed Vegetation Indices (VIs). We first compiled a global dataset of 1459 in situ quality-controlled crop LAI measurements and collected Landsat satellite images to derive five different VIs including Simple Ratio (SR), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), two versions of the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI and EVI2), and Green Chlorophyll Index (CIGreen). Based on this dataset, we developed global LAI-VI relationships for each crop type and VI using symbolic regression and Theil-Sen (TS) robust estimator. Results suggest that the global LAI-VI relationships are statistically significant, crop-specific, and mostly non-linear. These relationships explain more than half of the total variance in ground LAI observations (R2 > 0.5), and provide LAI estimates with RMSE below 1.2 m2/m2. Among the five VIs, EVI/EVI2 are the most effective, and the crop-specific LAI-EVI and LAI-EVI2 relationships constructed by TS, are robust when tested by three independent validation datasets of varied spatial scales. While the heterogeneity of agricultural landscapes leads to a diverse set of local LAI-VI relationships, the relationships provided here represent global universality on an average basis, allowing the generation of large-scale spatial-explicit LAI maps. This study contributes to the operationalization of large-area crop modeling and, by extension, has relevance to both fundamental and applied agroecosystem research.

Description: With its temporal resolution of 10 days (five days with two satellites, and significantly more at high latitudes), its swath width of 290 km, and its 10 m and 20 m spatial resolution bands from the visible to the shortwave infrared, the European Sentinel-2 satellites have significant potential for glacier remote sensing, in particular mapping of glacier outlines and facies, and velocity measurements. Testing Level 1C commissioning and ramp-up phase data for initial sensor quality experiences, we find a high radiometric performance, but with slight striping effects under certain conditions. Through co-registration of repeat Sentinal-2 data we also find lateral offset patterns and noise on the order of a few metres. Neither of these issues will complicate most typical glaciological applications. Absolute geo-location of the data investigated was on the order of one pixel at the time of writing. The most severe geometric problem stems from vertical errors of the DEM used for ortho-rectifying Sentinel-2 data. These errors propagate into locally varying lateral offsets in the images, up to several pixels with respect to other georeferenced data, or between Sentinel-2 data from different orbits. Finally, we characterize the potential and limitations of tracking glacier flow from repeat Sentinel-2 data using a set of typical glaciers in different environments: Aletsch Glacier, Swiss Alps; Fox Glacier, New Zealand; Jakobshavn Isbree, Greenland; Antarctic Peninsula at the Larsen C ice shelf.

Description: Currently there is a lack of quantitative information regarding the driving factors of vegetation dynamics in post-Soviet Central Asia. Insufficient knowledge also exists concerning vegetation variability across sub-humid to arid climatic gradients as well as vegetation response to different land uses, from natural rangelands to intensively irrigated croplands. In this study, we analyzed the environmental drivers of vegetation dynamics in five Central Asian countries by coupling key vegetation parameter “overall greenness” derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI time series data, with its possible factors across various management and climatic gradients. We developed nine generalized least-squares random effect (GLS-RE) models to analyze the relative impact of environmental factors on vegetation dynamics. The obtained results quantitatively indicated the extensive control of climatic factors on managed and unmanaged vegetation cover across Central Asia. The most diverse vegetation dynamics response to climatic variables was observed for “intensively managed irrigated croplands”. Almost no differences in response to these variables were detected for managed non-irrigated vegetation and unmanaged (natural) vegetation across all countries. Natural vegetation and rainfed non-irrigated crop dynamics were principally associated with temperature and precipitation parameters. Variables related to temperature had the greatest relative effect on irrigated croplands and on vegetation cover within the mountainous zone. Further research should focus on incorporating the socio-economic factors discussed here in a similar analysis.

Description: Yoga classes designed for women with premenstrual syndrome are available, but their efficacy is unclear. We investigated the effects of 12 weeks’ yoga exercise (yoga intervention) on premenstrual symptoms in menstruating females in Taiwan. Sixty-four subjects completed the yoga intervention, and before and after the intervention filled out a structured self-report questionnaire about their demographics, personal lifestyle, menstrual status, baseline menstrual pain scores, premenstrual symptoms, and health-related quality of life. Of 64 subjects, 90.6% reported experiencing menstrual pain during menstruation. After the yoga intervention, subjects reported decreased use of analgesics during menstruation (p = 0.0290) and decreased moderate or severe effects of menstrual pain on work (p = 0.0011). The yoga exercise intervention was associated with the improvement of the scale of physical function (p = 0.0340) and bodily pain (p = 0.0087) of the SF-36, and significantly decreased abdominal swelling (p = 0.0011), breast tenderness (p = 0.0348), abdominal cramps (p = 0.0016), and cold sweats (p = 0.0143). Menstrual pain mitigation after yoga exercise correlated with improvement in six scales of the SF-36 (physical function, bodily pain, general health perception, vitality/energy, social function, mental health). Employers can educate female employees about the benefits of regular exercise such as yoga, which may decrease premenstrual distress and improve female employee health.

Description: This paper examines how and to what degree government policies of garbage fees and voluntary source separation programs, with free indoor containers and garbage bags, can affect the effectiveness of municipal solid waste (MSW) management, in the sense of achieving a desirable reduction of per capita MSW generation. Based on city-level panel data for years 1998–2012 in China, our empirical analysis indicates that per capita MSW generated is increasing with per capita disposable income, average household size, education levels of households, and the lagged per capita MSW. While both garbage fees and source separation programs have separately led to reductions in per capita waste generation, the interaction of the two policies has resulted in an increase in per capita waste generation due to the following crowding-out effects: Firstly, the positive effect of income dominates the negative effect of the garbage fee. Secondly, there are crowding-out effects of mandatory charging system and the subsidized voluntary source separation on per capita MSW generation. Thirdly, small subsidies and tax punishments have reduced the intrinsic motivation for voluntary source separation of MSW. Thus, compatible fee charging system, higher levels of subsidies, and well-designed public information and education campaigns are required to promote household waste source separation and reduction.

Description: The study of the Rio Grande/Bravo (RGB) Basin water allocation demonstrates how the United States (U.S.) and Mexico have consolidated a transboundary framework based on water sharing. However, the water supply no longer meets the ever-increasing demand for water or the expectations of different stakeholders. This paper explores opportunities for an enhanced management regime that will address past problems and better examine how to balance demands for a precious resource and environmental needs. Based on an overview of the RGB Basin context and the water allocation framework, as well as a discussion on stakeholders’ ability to achieve solutions, this paper explores three key questions: (1) Does the current binational water allocation framework meet current and future human and environmental needs? (2) How can the U.S.-Mexico water allocation framework be adapted to balance social and environmental water demands so it can support and preserve the RGB Basin ecosystem? (3) What are the main opportunities to be explored for expanding the U.S.-Mexico water resources allocation framework? The U.S.-Mexico water resources framework is subject to broad interpretation and may be adapted to the circumstances taking the fullest advantage of its flexibility. Policy recommendations highlight the existing flexibility of the binational framework, the potential to move forward with an ad hoc institutional arrangement, and the creation of political will to achieve change through stakeholders recommendations.

Description: This paper proposes a multi-sensory Joint Adaptive Kalman Filter (JAKF) through extending innovation-based adaptive estimation (IAE) to estimate the motion state of the moving vehicles ahead. JAKF views Lidar and Radar data as the source of the local filters, which aims to adaptively adjust the measurement noise variance-covariance (V-C) matrix ‘R’ and the system noise V-C matrix ‘Q’. Then, the global filter uses R to calculate the information allocation factor ‘β’ for data fusion. Finally, the global filter completes optimal data fusion and feeds back to the local filters to improve the measurement accuracy of the local filters. Extensive simulation and experimental results show that the JAKF has better adaptive ability and fault tolerance. JAKF enables one to bridge the gap of the accuracy difference of various sensors to improve the integral filtering effectivity. If any sensor breaks down, the filtered results of JAKF still can maintain a stable convergence rate. Moreover, the JAKF outperforms the conventional Kalman filter (CKF) and the innovation-based adaptive Kalman filter (IAKF) with respect to the accuracy of displacement, velocity, and acceleration, respectively.

Description: Energy harvesting has become an increasingly important topic thanks to the advantages in renewability and environmental friendliness. In this paper, a comprehensive study on contemporary portable wind energy harvesters has been conducted. The electrical power generation methods of portable wind energy harvesters are surveyed in three major groups, piezoelectric-, electromagnetic-, and electrostatic-based generators. The paper also takes another view of this area by gauging the required mechanisms for trapping wind flow from ambient environment. In this regard, rotational and aeroelastic mechanisms are analyzed for the portable wind energy harvesting devices. The comparison between both mechanisms shows that the aeroelastic mechanism has promising potential in producing an energy harvester in smaller scale although how to maintain the resonator perpendicular to wind flow for collecting the maximum vibration is still a major challenge to overcome for this mechanism. Furthermore, this paper categorizes the previously published portable wind energy harvesters to macro and micro scales in terms of their physical dimensions. The power management systems are also surveyed to explore the possibility of improving energy conversion efficiency. Finally some insights and research trends are pointed out based on an overall analysis of the previously published works along the historical timeline.

Description: This paper presents an architecture model for the development of intelligent systems for public passenger transport by road. The main objective of our proposal is to provide a framework for the systematic development and deployment of telematics systems to improve various aspects of this type of transport, such as efficiency, accessibility and safety. The architecture model presented herein is based on international standards on intelligent transport system architectures, ubiquitous computing and service-oriented architecture for distributed systems. To illustrate the utility of the model, we also present a use case of a monitoring system for stops on a public passenger road transport network.

Description: An urban forest assessment is essential for developing a baseline from which to measure changes and trends. The most precise way to assess urban forests is to measure and record every tree on a site, but although this may work well for relatively small populations (e.g., street trees, small parks), it is prohibitively expensive for large tree populations. Thus, random sampling offers a cost-effective way to assess urban forest structure and the associated ecosystem services for large-scale assessments. The methodology applied to assess ecosystem services in this study can also be used to assess the ecosystem services provided by vacant land in other urban contexts and improve urban forest policies, planning, and the management of vacant land. The study’s findings support the inclusion of trees on vacant land and contribute to a new vision of vacant land as a valuable ecological resource by demonstrating how green infrastructure can be used to enhance ecosystem health and promote a better quality of life for city residents.

Description: Understanding human mobility patterns provides us with knowledge about human mobility in an urban context, which plays a critical role in urban planning, traffic management and the spread of disease. Recently, the availability of large-scale human-sensing datasets enables us to analyze human mobility patterns and the relationships between humans and their living environments on an unprecedented spatial and temporal scale to improve decision-making regarding the quality of life of citizens. This study aims to characterize the urban spatial-temporal dynamic from the perspective of human mobility hotspots by using mobile phone location data. We propose a workflow to identify human convergent and dispersive hotspots that represent the status of human mobility in local areas and group these hotspots into different classes according to clustering their temporal signatures. To illustrate our proposed approach, a case study of Shenzhen, China, has been conducted. Six typical spatial-temporal patterns in the city are identified and discussed by combining the spatial distribution of these identified patterns with urban functional areas. The findings enable us to understand the human dynamics in a different area of the city, which can serve as a reference for urban planning and traffic management.

Description: This study explores the technical and scale efficiency of two types of Greek fishing vessels, small-scale vessels and bottom trawlers, using a bias-corrected input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis model. Moreover, the associations between efficiency scores and vessel’s and skipper’s characteristics are also explored. The results indicate that small-scale vessels achieve a very low average technical efficiency score (0.42) but a much higher scale efficiency score (0.81). Conversely, bottom trawlers achieve lower scale but higher technical efficiency scores (0.68 and 0.73, respectively). One important finding of this study is that the technical efficiency of small-scale vessels, in contrast to trawlers, is positively associated with the experience of the skipper. In a looser context, it can be said that small-scale fisheries mainly rely on skill, whereas bottom trawlers rely more on technology. This study concludes that there is space for improvement in efficiency, mainly for small-scale vessels, which could allow the achievement of the same level of output by using reduced inputs.

Description: An open, standardized data management and related service infrastructure is a crucial requirement for a seamless storage and exchange of data and information within research projects, for the dissemination of project results and for their application in decision making processes. However, typical project databases often refer to only one research project and are limited to specific purposes. Once implemented, those systems are often not further maintained and updated, rendering the stored information useless once the system stops operating. The River Basin Information System (RBIS) presented here is designed to fit not only the requirements of one research project, but focuses on generic functions, extensibility and standards compliance typically found in interdisciplinary environmental research. Developed throughout more than 10 years of research cooperation worldwide, RBIS is designed to manage different types of environmental data with and without spatial context together with a rich set of metadata. Beside data management and storage, RBIS provides functions for the visualization, linking, analysis and processing of different types of data to support research, decision making, result dissemination and information discovery for all kinds of users. The focus of this paper is on the description of the technical implementation and the presentation of functions. This will be complemented by an overview of example applications and experiences during RBIS development and operation.

Description: Technology analysis (TA) is an important issue in the management of technology. Most R&D (Research & Development) policies have depended on diverse TA results. Traditional TA results have been obtained through qualitative approaches such as the Delphi expert survey, scenario analysis, or technology road mapping. Although they are representative methods for TA, they are not stable because their results are dependent on the experts’ knowledge and subjective experience. To solve this problem, recently many studies on TA have been focused on quantitative approaches, such as patent analysis. A patent document has diverse information of developed technologies, and thus, patent is one form of objective data for TA. In addition, sustainable technology has been a big issue in the TA fields, because most companies have their technological competitiveness through the sustainable technology. Sustainable technology is a technology keeping the technological superiority of a company. So a country as well as a company should consider sustainable technology for technological competition and continuous economic growth. Also it is important to manage sustainable technology in a given technology domain. In this paper, we propose a new patent analysis approach based on statistical analysis for the management of sustainable technology (MOST). Our proposed methodology for the MOST is to extract a technological structure and relationship for knowing the sustainable technology. To do this, we develop a hierarchical diagram of technology for finding the causal relationships among technological keywords of a given domain. The aim of the paper is to select the sustainable technology and to create the hierarchical technology paths to sustainable technology for the MOST. This contributes to planning R&D strategy for the sustainability of a company. To show how the methodology can be applied to real problem, we perform a case study using retrieved patent documents related to telematics technology.

Description: Based on two substitute products, we study the inventory and contract coordination strategy of a three-echelon supply chain, which consists of two suppliers, a manufacturer and a retailer, under supply disruption and stochastic demand. We investigate the channel gross profit model of the centralized supply chain and obtain a unique optimal order quantity. Under a decentralized decision, we find that the commonly-used wholesale price contracts cannot coordinate the system. Then, we propose a buy-back contract and prove that this contract can more efficiently coordinate the system than the former. At last, we show that the integrated performance of the decentralized system can be maximized through choosing the buy-back parameter by the manufacturer and reveal that the effects of supply uncertainty and the substitution behavior of customers on the optimal decision by numerical examples.

Description: Both distributed healthcare systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) are currently hot topics. The latter is a new computing paradigm to enable advanced capabilities in engineering various applications, including those for healthcare. For such systems, the core social requirement is the privacy/security of the patient information along with the technical requirements (e.g., energy consumption) and capabilities for adaptability and personalization. Typically, the functionality of the systems is predefined by the patient’s data collected using sensor networks along with medical instrumentation; then, the data is transferred through the Internet for treatment and decision-making. Therefore, systems creation is indeed challenging. In this paper, we propose a model-driven framework to develop the IoT-based prototype and its reference architecture for personalized health monitoring (PHM) applications. The framework contains a multi-layered structure with feature-based modeling and feature model transformations at the top and the application software generation at the bottom. We have validated the framework using available tools and developed an experimental PHM to test some aspects of the functionality of the reference architecture in real time. The main contribution of the paper is the development of the model-driven computational framework with emphasis on the synergistic effect of security and energy issues.

Description: This paper pays attention to magnetic flux linkage optimization of a direct-driven surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous generator (D-SPMSG). A new compact representation of the D-SPMSG nonlinear dynamic differential equations to reduce system parameters is established. Furthermore, the nonlinear dynamic characteristics of new D-SPMSG equations in the process of varying magnetic flux linkage are considered, which are illustrated by Lyapunov exponent spectrums, phase orbits, Poincaré maps, time waveforms and bifurcation diagrams, and the magnetic flux linkage stable region of D-SPMSG is acquired concurrently. Based on the above modeling and analyses, a novel method of magnetic flux linkage optimization is presented. In addition, a 2 MW D-SPMSG 2D/3D model is designed by ANSYS software according to the practical design requirements. Finally, five cases of D-SPMSG models with different magnetic flux linkages are simulated by using the finite element analysis (FEA) method. The nephograms of magnetic flux density are agreement with theoretical analysis, which both confirm the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Description: The construction of two marine bulk terminals in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States are currently under review and would open up additional thermal coal exports to Asia on the order of almost 100 million additional tonnes per year. The major exporters of coal to Asian markets include Indonesia and Australia. This life cycle analysis (LCA) seeks to understand the role of transportation and mining in the cradle-to-busbar environmental impacts of coal exports from the Powder River Basin (PRB) to Asian countries, when compared to the competitor countries. This LCA shows that: (1) the most significant greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts in the cradle-to-busbar life cycle of coal for power generation come from the combustion of coal in a power plant, even when 90% carbon capture is applied; (2) for non-GHG air impacts, power plant combustion impacts are less dominant and variations in upstream impacts (mining and transportation) are more important; and (3) when comparing impacts between countries, upstream impacts vary for both GHG and non-GHG results, but conclusions that rank countries cannot be made. Future research should include expansion to include non-air impacts, potential consequential effects of coal exports, and a better understanding around the characterization of non-GHG ocean transport impacts.

Description: A maximum entropy copula is the copula associated with the joint distribution, with prescribed marginal distributions on [ 0 , 1 ] , which maximizes the Tsallis–Havrda–Chavát entropy with q = 2 . We find necessary and sufficient conditions for each maximum entropy copula to be a copula in the class introduced in Rodríguez-Lallena and Úbeda-Flores (2004), and we also show that each copula in that class is a maximum entropy copula.

Description: We described the occult bacteremia (OB) and bacteremia with diagnosed focus (BwF) picture among children managed as outpatients at the pediatric emergency room (PER) in southern Israel, before and after the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) introduction in a retrospective study enrolling all three- to 36-month-old patients with fever >38.0 °C during 2005–2014. Of 511 (0.82% of all febrile patients) true bacteremias, 230 (45%) were managed as outpatients; 96 of 230 (41.7%) had OB and 134 (3.59%) had BwF. OB and BwF rates were 0.22% and 3.02%, respectively. A significant decrease was noted in OB and BwF rates (p = 0.0008 and p = 0.02, respectively). S. pneumoniae (SP, 37.5%), K. kingae (11.4%) and Brucella spp. (8.7%) were the most common OB pathogens and SP (29.8%), S. viridans (13.4%), and Brucella spp. (12.7%) were the most common in BwF patients. PCV13 serotypes were not found among the serotypes isolated post-PCV13 introduction. During 2010–2014 there was an increase in non-PCV13 serotype isolation (p = 0.005). SP was the main pathogen isolated among patients with pneumonia, acute otitis media (AOM) and periorbital cellulitis (62.5%, 33.3% and 60%, respectively). OB and BwF decreased following the introduction of PCVs and SP was the main pathogen in both conditions. Vaccine-SP serotypes were not isolated in OB after PCV13 introduction and non-vaccine serotypes increased significantly.

Description: This review presents a survey of the literature on recent progress in lithium-ion batteries, with the active sub-micron-sized particles of the positive electrode chosen in the family of lamellar compounds LiMO2, where M stands for a mixture of Ni, Mn, Co elements, and in the family of yLi2MnO3•(1 − y)LiNi½Mn½O2 layered-layered integrated materials. The structural, physical, and chemical properties of these cathode elements are reported and discussed as a function of all the synthesis parameters, which include the choice of the precursors and of the chelating agent, and as a function of the relative concentrations of the M cations and composition y. Their electrochemical properties are also reported and discussed to determine the optimum compositions in order to obtain the best electrochemical performance while maintaining the structural integrity of the electrode lattice during cycling.

Description: Polymer nanocomposites have always attracted the interest of researchers and industry because of their potential combination of properties from both the nanofillers and the hosting matrix. Gathering nanomaterials and 3D printing could offer clear advantages and numerous new opportunities in several application fields. Embedding nanofillers in a polymeric matrix could improve the final material properties but usually the printing process gets more difficult. Considering this drawback, in this paper we propose a method to obtain polymer nanocomposites by in situ generation of nanoparticles after the printing process. 3D structures were fabricated through a Digital Light Processing (DLP) system by disolving metal salts in the starting liquid formulation. The 3D fabrication is followed by a thermal treatment in order to induce in situ generation of metal nanoparticles (NPs) in the polymer matrix. Comprehensive studies were systematically performed on the thermo-mechanical characteristics, morphology and electrical properties of the 3D printed nanocomposites.

Description: A series of substitutional solid solutions—Eu7Cu44−xTxAs23 (T = Fe, Co, Ni)—based on a recently discovered clathrate-like compound (Eu7Cu44As23) were synthesized from the elements at 800 °C. Almost up to 50% of Cu can be substituted by Ni, resulting in a linear decrease of the cubic unit cell parameter from a = 16.6707(1) Å for the ternary compound to a = 16.3719(1) Å for the sample with the nominal composition Eu7Cu24Ni20As23. In contrast, Co and Fe can only substitute less than 20% of Cu. Crystal structures of six samples of different composition were refined from powder diffraction data. Despite very small differences in scattering powers of Cu, Ni, Co, and Fe, we were able to propose a reasonable model of dopant distribution over copper sites based on the trends in interatomic distances as well as on Mössbauer spectra for the iron-substituted compound Eu7Cu36Fe8As23. Ni doping increases the Curie temperature to 25 K with respect to the parent compound, which is ferromagnetically ordered below 17.5 K, whereas Fe doping suppresses the ferromagnetic ordering in the Eu sublattice.

Description: The reactions of enantiomeric glycerol-based 3-armed lactide oligomers (H3DLAO and H3LLAO) and a diethylene glycol-based 2-armed ɛ-caprolactone oligomer (H2CLO) with hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI) produced polyesterurethane copolymer networks (PEU-3scLAO/2CLOs 100/0, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75 and 0/100) with different feed ratios of stereocomplex (sc) lactide oligomer (H3scLAO = H3DLAO + H3LLAO, H3DLAO/H3LLAO = 1/1) and H2CLO. Thermal and mechanical properties of the copolymer networks were compared with those of a simple homochiral (hc) network (PEU-3DLAO) produced by the reaction of H3DLAO and HDI. X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetric analyses revealed that sc crystallites are formed without any hc crystallization for PEU-3scLAO/2CLOs, and that PEU-3DLAO is amorphous. The melting temperatures of sc crystallites for PEU-3scLAO/2CLOs were much higher than that of hc crystallites of H3DLAO. The polarized optical microscopic analysis revealed that the nucleation efficiency is enhanced with increasing feed of H3scLAO fraction, whereas the spherulite growth rate is accelerated with increasing feed H2CLO fraction over 100/0-50/50 networks. PEU-3scLAO/2CLO 100/0 (i.e., PEU-3scLAO) exhibited a higher tensile strength and modulus than PEU-3DLAO. The elongation at break and tensile toughness for PEU-3scLAO/2CLOs increased with an increasing feed amount of H2CLO.

Description: A novel numerical method at the microscale for studying the mechanical behavior of an aluminum-particle-reinforced polytetrafluoroethylene (Al/PTFE) composite is proposed and validated experimentally in this paper. Two types of 2D representative volume elements (RVEs), real microstructure-based and simulated microstructures, are established by following a series of image processing procedures and on a statistical basis considering the geometry and the distribution of particles and microvoids, respectively. Moreover, 3D finite element modelling based on the same statistical information as the 2D simulated microstructure models is conducted to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the 2D models. The results of all simulations and experiments indicate that real microstructure-based models and simulated microstructure models are efficient methods to predict elastic and plastic constants of particle-reinforced composites.

Description: Plasma polymerized a-C:H thin films have been deposited on Si (100) and aluminum coated glass substrates by a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) operated at medium pressure using C2Hm/Ar (m = 2, 4, 6) gas mixtures. The deposited films were characterized by Fourier transform infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy (FT-IRRAS), Raman spectroscopy, and ellipsometry. FT-IRRAS revealed the presence of sp3 and sp2 C–H stretching and C–H bending vibrations of bonds in the films. The presence of D and G bands was confirmed by Raman spectroscopy. Thin films obtained from C2H4/Ar and C2H6/Ar gas mixtures have ID/IG ratios of 0.45 and 0.3, respectively. The refractive indices were 2.8 and 3.1 for C2H4/Ar and C2H6/Ar films, respectively, at a photon energy of 2 eV.

Description: Volcanic layers in coal seams in southwestern China coalfields have received much attention given their significance in coal geology studies and their potential economic value. In this study, the mineralogical and geochemical compositions of C19 and C25 coal seams were examined, and the following findings were obtained. (1) Clay minerals in sample C19-r are argillized, and sedimentary layering is not observed. The acicular idiomorphic crystals of apatite and the phenocrysts of Ti-augite coexisting with magnetite in roof sample C19-r are common minerals in basaltic rock. The rare earth elements (REE) distribution pattern of C19-r, which is characterized by positive Eu anomalies and M-REE enrichment, is the same as that of high-Ti basalt. The concentrations of Ti, V, Co, Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, Nb, Ta, Zr, and Hf in C19-r are closer to those of high-Ti basalt. In conclusion, roof sample C19-r consists of tuffaceous clay, probably with a high-Ti mafic magma source. (2) The geochemical characteristics of the C25 coals are same as those reported for coal affected by alkali volcanic ash, enrichment in Nb, Ta, Zr, Hf, and REE, causing the C25 minable coal seams to have higher potential value. Such a vertical study of coals and host rocks could provide more information for coal-forming depositional environment analysis, for identification of volcanic eruption time and magma intrusion, and for facilitating stratigraphic subdivision and correlation.

Description: This paper studies a continuous Bertrand duopoly game model with two-stage delay. Our aim is to investigate the influence of delay and weight on the complex dynamic characteristics of the system. We obtain the bifurcation point of the system respect to delay parameter by calculating. In addition, the dynamic properties of the system are simulated by power spectrum, attractor, bifurcation diagram, the largest Lyapunov exponent, 3D surface chart, 4D Cubic Chart, 2D parameter bifurcation diagram, and 3D parameter bifurcation diagram. The results show that the stability of the system depends on the delay and weight, in order to maintain stability of price and ensure the firm profit, the firms must control the parameters in the reasonable region. Otherwise, the system will lose stability, and even into chaos, which will cause fluctuations in prices, the firms cannot be profitable. Finally, the chaos control of the system is carried out by a control strategy of the state variables’ feedback and parameter variation, which effectively avoid the damage of chaos to the economic system. Therefore, the results of this study have an important practical significance to make decisions with multi-stage delay for oligopoly firms.