Reasoning about Cardinal Directions between Extended Objects

Direction relations between extended spatial objects are important commonsense knowledge. Recently, Goyal and Egenhofer proposed a formal model, known as Cardinal Direction Calculus (CDC), for representing direction relations between connected plane regions. CDC is perhaps the most expressive qualitative calculus for directional information, and has attracted increasing interest from areas such as artificial intelligence, geographical information science, and image retrieval. Given a network of CDC constraints, the consistency problem is deciding if the network is realizable by connected regions in the real plane. This paper provides a cubic algorithm for checking consistency of basic CDC constraint networks, and proves that reasoning with CDC is in general an NP-Complete problem. For a consistent network of basic CDC constraints, our algorithm also returns a 'canonical' solution in cubic time. This cubic algorithm is also adapted to cope with cardinal directions between possibly disconnected regions, in which case currently the best algorithm is of time complexity O(n^5)

Linkage Power Europe

This book looks at the history of the EU’s trade negotiations with China from 1975 to 2019 from a distinctive perspective – the EU as a linkage power. The author explains how the EU through linkage strategies speaks with one voice, overcomes its weakness in military capabilities and translates its non-military capabilities into advantages and influences in some specific policy areas. 　 The book systematically traces the European negotiators’ tactics in managing the EU’s trade relations with China. It’s the first time that the history of EU–China trade negotiations is presented to the public by a seasoned trade negotiator. The author, combining the identities of a negotiator and a scholar, gives a panoramic view of EU–China trade relations from 1975, when the European Economic Community established diplomatic relations with China, to 2019 when the Juncker Commission leaves office. This book will appeal to policymakers, think-tankers, professors and students, as well as anyone who is interested in trade policies and negotiations in the EU and China

A Comparative Analysis of the Causes of the Heroine's Tragedy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and A Rose for Emily

From the perspective of feminist theory, this paper absorbs and inherits the existing research results, makes a deep interpretation of the two works, and makes a richer comparison and exploration of the tragic causes of Tess and Emily, which is conducive to a better understanding of the value of the works, revealing the significance of the works, and hoping to provide a new perspective to think for the study of their works and calling on the society to recognize the female subject status and self-identity, then to get rid of the shackles of traditional thoughts and to master the fate of themselves

Which Positive Feedback Matters? The Role of Language Concreteness and Temporal Effect in Continuous Contribution in Open Innovation Community

The feedback mechanism is the basis for motivating users to make continuous contributions in the Open Innovation Community (OIC). Although previous studies have revealed the overall role of positive feedback in promoting continuous user contribution, it is not clear which type of positive feedback is more effective and how it changes over time. To solve these problems, we constructed a research model based on reinforcement theory and took Lego Ideas, a typical OIC, as the research object to crawl users’ ideas and feedback data for empirical analysis. The results confirmed the effect of positive feedback and further demonstrated that, the effectiveness of positive feedback varies based on feedback concreteness and the tenure of the focal user. Our study contributes to the literature on how feedback affects user contributions in online communities by refining the classifications of feedback, and provide practical guidance for companies to motivate users to contributing ideas continuously

The influence of fear and authority on psychological reactance: a study of the effectiveness of public service announcement campaigns on drunk driving prevention among college students

This study investigates the influence of psychological reactance on the campaign message of preventing drunk driving to college students; it is based on different levels of source authority and fear appeal. 146 undergraduate students were divided into five groups to take an online survey examining their cognition with respect to different types of posters. Their perceived degrees of threat to freedom, psychological reactance, attitudes, and behavioral intention were tested among five hypotheses and one research question. This study found that: (1) Participants\u27 psychological reactance was significantly related with their threat to freedom, but strongly negatively related with both attitude and behavioral intention to follow the advice in the posters; (2) The level of source authority of spokespersons in the campaign was positively-related with psychological reactance; (3) A high level of fear appeal of message content significantly generated a significantly higher psychological reactance; (4) There was no significant interaction between level of source authority and level of fear appeal on psychological reactance

Controlled release of an antifouling agent from microcapsules with enhanced mechanical and thermal properties

It is well known that wind energy is abundant at sea so many offshore wind power generators have been installed and used. However, there are a few factors affecting the efficiency and reliability of wind turbines. Biofouling caused by a complex marine environment is one of the problems influencing the state of power generation systems in seawater. Therefore antifouling coatings have to be developed and applied to their surfaces. Microcapsules, which can be incorporated into certain coating materials, are an ideal micro-carrier of antifouling agent to achieve its sustained release. This project aimed to prepare microcapsules with an antifouling agent, which can have a high payload, be mechanically strong, have good thermal conductivity, and can achieve sustained release of the active ingredient. The long-term objectives are to achieve the long-term sustained release of the active ingredient in marine environment and antifouling performance, after the microcapsules are incorporated into marine coating that will then be applied to metal surfaces. In this project, microcapsules consisting of N-Vanillylnonanamide (capsaicin synthetic) in the core, which is an antifouling agent, and cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB) as the shell material have been prepared by solvent evaporation method, based on oil in water (O/W) emulsification in a stirred tank. The effects of formulation and processing conditions on the morphology, size, mechanical properties, thermal properties of microcapsules, release rate of the active ingredient in model liquid have been investigated. The formulation and processing conditions included type of emulsifier, emulsifier concentration, agitation speed, core/shell ratio, metallic coating on the CAB microcapsules with capsaicin synthetic. A range of experimental techniques have been used to characterise the microcapsules, including optical microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), Malvern particle sizing, micromanipulation, UV-VIS spectrophotometry and laser flash analysis. It has been found that the prepared microcapsules had a matrix structure with multiple cores. Based on the experimental conditions and experimental results, using an emulsifier of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) with concentration of 0.5%, and agitation speed of 1000 rpm to generate the O/W emulsion produced the microcapsules smaller than 60µm for potentially being incorporated into the coatings, an encapsulation efficiency and the payload reached 80.7% and 16.5%, respectively, which is desirable. As for the mechanical properties, the microcapsules showed elastic and plastic deformations under compression, but not rupture for the experimental conditions investigated due to their matrix structure. The Young’s modulus value of microcapsules, calculated by the Hertz model, decreased significantly with increasing the ratio of core/shell material from 0 to 1/2, w/w, and were all in Mega Pascal scale, which are stiffer compared with many different microcapsules prepared by other researchers. Moreover, cyclohexane was used for accelerating the release of capsaicin synthetic from microcapsules and was found to enable to predict the release profile in water by considering the solubility of capsaicin synthetic in each liquid. Ritger-Peppas Model with n = 0.43 was demonstrated to describe the release kinetics of capsaicin synthetic from the microcapsules well, and it is concluded that the release from the matrix microcapsules was driven by Fickian diffusion. In addition, metallic coating of the microcapsules on their surface were achieved successfully by electroless plating copper after generating a layer of polydopamine based on its selfpolymerisation of dopamine. The microcapsules with copper were proved much stiffer than those without any metallic composition. The thermal conductivities were enhanced up to 7 times by incorporating copper and prolonging the time of both self-polymerising PDA and suspending microcapsules. Thus, the microcapsules with an antifouling agent have been successfully prepared, which showed its sustained release over a few months. And the microcapsules with metal on their surface were prepared by electroless plating copper after generating a layer of polydopamine based on its self-polymerisation of dopamine, achieving the aim of enhancing thermal conductivity of the antifouling microcapsules

Self-assembly of Zein-based microcarrier system for colon-targeted oral drug delivery

The advances in pharmaceutical technology allow for the development of various region-selective delivery systems for oral administration to optimize local and systemic therapy. In this paper, micronization associated with a polymorph modification approach was proposed for improving the solubility of hydrophobic drugs for developing a Zein-based colon-targeted delivery system. A microcarrier based on self-assembled structures of Zein was fabricated via a built-in ultrasonic dialysis process, which displayed high payload of a model drug, indomethacin (Indo), with its optimal crystal form. The possible self-assembly mechanism of Zein/Indo forming porous structure in the ultrasonic dialysis process was attributed to the results of intra- and/or intermolecular interactions between Zein and Indo. The designed microspheres, Zein-Indo@PDA, with a surface coating of polydopamine (PDA) not only rendered them enhanced stability and mechanical resistance but also hindered the premature drug release at undesired sites. This innovative formulation design may offer better chances of colon-targeted release