Assessing the benthic ecological status in the stressed coastal waters of Yantai, Yellow Sea, using AMBI and M-AMBI.

The coastal waters around Yantai have been subjected to a variety of anthropogenic pressures over the last two decades. To assess the current benthic ecological health and the recovery process of the benthic ecosystem, four surveys were conducted in 2010 and 2011. The AMBI and M-AMBI were applied to assess the benthic ecological status. The ecological status of the Sishili Bay and Taozi Bay was &quot;moderate&quot; to &quot;good&quot; at most sampling stations during four surveys, but some stations were degraded due to pollution and eutrophication induced by human activities. The ecological status improved after removal of the marine raft culture and minimizing the amount of waste water discharged into the coastal waters of Yantai. The AMBI and M-AMBI could be used as suitable bio-indicator indices to assess the benthic ecological status of coastal waters in Yantai, Shandong Province.&nbsp;</p

Predictions of energy profile of four states in USA

In this paper, we calculate the value of the residual energy in 2001-2009 in four states by establishing Grey Prediction Model.  We use MATLAB software programming to predict the energy profile of each state for 2025 and 2050 in the absence of any policy changes

Compositemap: A Novel Framework for Music Similarity Measure

10.1145/1571941.1572011Proceedings - 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2009403-41

Query-document-dependent fusion: A case study of multimodal music retrieval

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centre @ Singapore Funding Initiativ

Preparation and Characterization of Stimuli-Responsive Magnetic Nanoparticles

In this work, the main attention was focused on the synthesis of stimuli-responsive magnetic nanoparticles (SR-MNPs) and the influence of glutathione concentration on its cleavage efficiency. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) were first modified with activated pyridyldithio. Then, MNPs modified with activated pyridyldithio (MNPs-PDT) were conjugated with 2, 4-diamino-6-mercaptopyrimidine (DMP) to form SR-MNPs via stimuli-responsive disulfide linkage. Fourier transform infrared spectra (FTIR), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used to characterize MNPs-PDT. The disulfide linkage can be cleaved by reduced glutathione (GHS). The concentration of glutathione plays an important role in controlling the cleaved efficiency. The optimum concentration of GHS to release DMP is in the millimolar range. These results had provided an important insight into the design of new MNPs for biomedicine applications, such as drug delivery and bio-separation

Experimental and numerical investigations on the seismic behavior of bridge piers with vertical unbonded prestressing strands

In the performance-based seismic bridge design, piers are expected to undergo large inelastic deformations during severe earthquakes, which in turn can result in large residual drift and concrete crack in the bridge piers. In this paper, longitudinal unbonded prestressing strands are used to minimize residual drift and residual concrete crack width in reinforced concrete (RC) bridge piers. Seven pier specimens were designed and tested quasi-statically and the numerical simulations were carried out. The effectiveness of using vertical unbonded prestressing strands to mitigate the residual drift and concrete crack width of RC bridge piers are examined and discussed in detail. It is found that the residual drift and residual concrete crack width of the piers can be reduced significantly by using the prestressing strands. Moreover, the strands can increase the lateral strength of the piers while have little influence on the ductility capacity of the piers. The hysteretic curves, residual drifts and strand stress of the piers predicted by the numerical model agree well with the testing data and can be used to assess the cyclic behavior of the piers