An Analysis on Syntactic and Semantic Factors Found in Newspaper Headlines

As a type of media text, newspaper has an important role in human\u27s life because it presents various local, national and International information and events. In order to attract readers\u27 attention, journalists make the headlines as ambiguous and confusing as possible so that readers are curious to know the content of the whole story and they would read it. Moreover, in presenting the information or events, different reporters will have different linguistic choices which include the choice of words and expressions and different linguistic structures. Thus, this paper analyzes how the different linguistic choices and structures used in the headlines of The Jakarta Post and Indonesian Daily News would construct different linguistic representations of events in the world

Lot-sizing and scheduling optimization in food supply chain

A common assumption in supply chain management is that products have unlimited lifespans, i.e., they can be stored indefinitely. However, in a real-world environment, especially in the food industry, products undergo a process of decay, damage or spoilage during storage and cannot be served for their original purpose. Due to the perishability of food products, production planning in the food industry is more complex than in other environments. The challenge lies not only in the trade-off between minimizing total costs and meeting market demand, but also in considering uncertainties such as limited shelf life limits and deterioration of food products during production and inventory. Moreover, food industry has to provide quality food products while satisfying quality requirements and safety regulations. In this thesis, we first introduce the distinctive characteristic of food products, perisha- bility that stress the food industry to search for efficient production planning. We also present an overview of fundamental characteristics of production planning in terms of lot sizing and scheduling and the generic single-level capacitated lot sizing and scheduling models. After that, the primary attention is centered on the modeling of perishability in production planning, and the solution approaches used to solve production planning problems available in the research literature. We consider the perishability of the food product in terms of fixed shelf life and disposal. Fixed shelf life refers to periods that food production can stay in inventory, while disposal refers to food losses that occur after exceeding fixed shelf life. Two variants of mixed- integer programming formulations are proposed to integrate fixed shelf life constraints with or without disposal into the Capacitated Lot Sizing Problem with Linked Lot Sizes (CLSPL) model. Computational experiments are performed on problem instances of different sizes, showing the added value of explicitly incorporating perishability considerations into production planning problems. Next, we turn our attention to investigating more efficient solution approaches to solve the proposed production planning problem with fixed shelf life constraints. We introduce a heuristic approach that starts with obtaining an initial solution by relaxing the capacity restriction. Three alternative methods, Wagner and Whitin (WW), Lot for Lot (LL) and Dixon–Silver (DS) are introduced to create different starting points. Then, a backward andforward shift method is employed in an attempt to find a feasible solution based on the initial solution. We are using a Tabu Search (TS) structure that prevents cycling moves in the backward and forward shifts. Finally, we try to improve the solution while preserving feasibility. Computational experiments are performed on the same problem instances, showing the advantage of heuristic approaches on finding feasible solutions quickly in less than 1 second. We then incorporate heuristic approaches in a Memetic Algorithm (MA) processes to improve the quality of solutions for the proposed production planning problem with fixed shelf life constraints. Heuristic approaches are embedded in the evolution loop of MA to generate solutions which are represented as individuals in the population. Population re-construction is applied to avoid population diversity converging too quickly if the best solution is not changed in a specific number of generations. Computational experiments are performed on the same problem instances groups, showing the superiority of MA in finding reasonably good quality solutions in a short time. Finally, we comprehensively compare the performance of heuristic approaches, MA and the Gurobi optimization solver on an extensive set of instances based on five parameters of capacity utilization, the ratio of setup time and capacity, the proportion of setup and holding cost, problem size, and shelf life. We also compare the computational efficiency of these methods when implemented using C and Python programming languages. In short, this study makes an important contribution to the integration of perishability into production planning. It also opens up important research pathways to provide an efficient MA for solving production planning problems in the food industry, while taking into account more real-world characteristics

Numerical Study on Droplet Sliding across Micropillars

Numerical Study on Droplet Sliding across Micropillar

Numerical Study on Droplet Sliding across Micropillars

Droplet sliding on surfaces is an important phenomenon since it widely happens in microfluidic industry. In this article, we simulate droplets sliding across micropillars on smooth substrates to test how the pillars with different intrinsic wettability influence the movement of droplets. The simulation is performed using a particle-based numerical method, many-body dissipative particle dynamics (MDPD). The simulated results show that the heterogeneous area (built by arranged micropillars) can influence the dynamical contact angles significantly. Both the advancing and receding contact angles increase when the droplet front slides on the heterogeneous area, and their difference is also enlarged, thus the contact line may be pinned. The droplet shows a creeping motion style when its front climbs over each pillar. We also find when the droplet enwraps all pillars, the composite liquid/solid surfaces have no effect on the advancing and receding contact angles. The outcomes support the viewpoint that the wettability is a contact-line-based problem instead of a contact-area-based one

Droplets impact on textured surfaces: Mesoscopic simulation of spreading dynamics

Droplets impact on textured surfaces: Mesoscopic simulation of spreading dynamic

Genetic Incorporation of a 2‑Naphthol Group into Proteins for Site-Specific Azo Coupling

The 2-naphthol analogue of tyrosine, 2-amino-3-(6-hydroxy-2-naphthyl)­propanoic acid (NpOH), has been genetically introduced into proteins in Escherichia coli. This is achieved through the directed evolution of orthogonal aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pairs that selectively charge the target amino acid in response to the amber stop codon, UAG. Moreover, chemoselective azo coupling reactions have been revealed between the 2-naphthol group and diazotized aniline derivatives that are substituted with an electron donating moiety. The coupling reactions required a very mild condition (pH 7) with great reaction rate (less than 2 h at 0 °C), high efficiency, and excellent selectivity

Covariance Matrix Estimation for High-Throughput Biomedical Data with Interconnected Communities

Estimating a covariance matrix is central to high-dimensional data analysis. Empirical analyses of high-dimensional biomedical data, including genomics, proteomics, microbiome, and neuroimaging, among others, consistently reveal strong modularity in the dependence patterns. In these analyses, intercorrelated high-dimensional biomedical features often form communities or modules that can be interconnected with others. While the interconnected community structure has been extensively studied in biomedical research (e.g., gene co-expression networks), its potential to assist in the estimation of covariance matrices remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose a procedure that leverages the commonly observed interconnected community structure in high-dimensional biomedical data to estimate large covariance and precision matrices. We derive the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimators for covariance and precision matrices in closed forms and provide theoretical results on their asymptotic properties. Our proposed method enhances the accuracy of covariance- and precision-matrix estimation and demonstrates superior performance compared to the competing methods in both simulations and real data analyses.</p

sj-docx-1-arp-10.1177_02750740231185849 - Supplemental material for In the Shadow of Administrative Decentralization: The Impact of Devolution on Subnational Service Provision

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-arp-10.1177_02750740231185849 for In the Shadow of Administrative Decentralization: The Impact of Devolution on Subnational Service Provision by Yiran Li, Shuo Chen and Yaohui Peng in The American Review of Public Administration</p

Spontaneous uptake of droplets into non-wetting capillaries

Spontaneous uptake of droplets into non-wetting capillarie

Hybrid Cross-Linking to Construct Functional Elastomers

ConspectusElastomers have been extensively used in diverse industrial sectors such as footwear, seals, tires, and cable jacketing and have attracted more and more attention in emerging fields such as regenerative medicine, soft robotics, and stretchable electronics. Global consumption of natural and synthetic elastomers amounted to nearly 27 million metric tons in 2020. In addition, to further enhance the common properties of elastomers, it is highly desired to endow elastomers with functionalities such as reprocessability, biomimetic mechanical properties, self-healing ability, bioactivity, and electrical conductivity, which will significantly broaden their applications. The covalent or noncovalent cross-linked structure is the essential factor for the elasticity of elastomers. Traditional elastomers usually comprise a single type of cross-linked molecular network, for which it is difficult to modulate the properties and introduce functionalities. Inspired by the simultaneous existence of multiple cross-linked structures in proteins, researchers have employed a hybrid cross-linking strategy to construct elastomers. Various noncovalent interactions (e.g., hydrogen bonds, metal–ligand coordination, ionic interactions, and chain folding) and dynamic covalent bonds (e.g., disulfide bonds, oxime–urethane bonds, and urea bonds) have been integrated in elastomers. Accordingly, the properties and functionalities of elastomers can be tuned by regulating the types, ratios, and distributions of cross-links. The hybrid cross-linking strategy provides a versatile and effective way to construct diverse functional elastomers for broad applications in various important fields.In this Account, we present our recent progress on functional elastomers constructed by a hybrid cross-linking strategy, including their design, preparation, properties, and diverse applications. First, we provide a brief introduction of the basic concept of functional elastomers and outline general strategies and mechanics for functional elastomers constructed by hybrid cross-linking. Then, we classify hybrid cross-linked elastomers by their design strategies, including multiple cross-linking, topological design, chemical coupling, and multiple networks. The relationships between the functionalities and hybrid cross-linked structures are summarized. At the same time, we also introduce diverse applications of these hybrid cross-linked elastomers in biomedicine, flexible electronics, soft robotics, 3D printing, and so on. Finally, we discuss our perspective on open challenges and future development trends of this rapidly evolving field. This Account highlighting the diverse hybrid cross-linked elastomers not only provides insights into strategies for elastomer functionalization but also provides new ideas for material design and inspires a variety of new applications