The Democratic “Globalization” and “Localization” Under the Culture Diversification

Political culture is a set of political attitudes, convictions, and emotions that prevail in a special period for a nationality, which influences the actions of the various political actors and the democratic process of a country. In the global era, the different nationalities and areas still maintain their own culture, exploring the suitable developing routes and having formed different democratic developing models. The political practices of such countries indicate that a stable and effective democratic government not only depends on the reasonable political systems and governmental structures, but also on the political values of the people. The world order should be more tolerant and plural, thereby supplying broader space for non-Western countries to choose suitable ways for themselves and combine the democratic globalization and localization together

Serum levels of NLRP3 and HMGB-1 are associated with the prognosis of patients with severe blunt abdominal trauma

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the relationship between the serum levels of NLRP3 and HMGB-1 and the prognosis of patients with severe blunt abdominal trauma. METHODS: In total, 299 patients were included in the current study from July 2014 to December 2015. All patients were divided into the mild/moderate blunt abdominal trauma group and the severe blunt abdominal trauma group according to their injury severity scores. Serum levels of NLRP3 and HMGB-1 were measured upon admission (0 h) and at 12 h, 24 h, 48 h, 72 h and 7 days after admission. RESULTS: Compared with the healthy controls, both the mild/moderate and severe blunt abdominal trauma groups had higher serum levels of NLRP3 and HMGB-1 at admission. At all points, the serum levels of NLRP3 and HMGB-1 were significantly higher in the severe group than in the mild/moderate group. The serum levels of both NLRP3 and HMGB-1 were significantly higher in the deceased patients than in the living patients. The Kaplan-Meier curve showed that compared with patients with higher levels of NLRP3 or HMGB-1, those with lower levels had longer survival times. The serum levels of both NLRP3 and HMGB-1 were independent risk factors for 6-month mortality in severe blunt abdominal trauma patients. CONCLUSION: The serum levels of NLRP3 and HMGB-1 were significantly elevated in severe blunt abdominal trauma patients, and the serum levels of both NLRP3 and HMGB-1 were correlated with 6-month mortality in severe blunt abdominal trauma patients

Novel complete ensemble EMD with adaptive noise-based hybrid filtering for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

A feature extraction of fault bearing has attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, weak fault feature is difficult to extract under heavy background noise. To solve this problem, a novel multi-layer filtering method is proposed to filter out noise and extract weak fault feature. The first layer introduces a metric based on de-trended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to identify intrinsic mode function (IMF) that reflect period impulsive information for vibration signal adaptively. The second layer uses non-local mean (NLM) method as a pre-filter of the third layer to realize extraction of singular value decomposition (SVD) which reflect the most information of IMFs. The last layer introduces a relative energy difference criterion of a singular value to extract important feature of Hankel matrix of IMFs. The filtered signal is obtained by re-constructed signal from identified singular value of SVD. Experiment results on simulation and real vibration signals indicate that the hybrid filtering method removes heavy noise successfully and extract weak fault feature of rolling bearing effectively

Effects of Stirrups on Bond Behavior Between Concrete and Corroded Steel Bars

Steel corrosion leads to the deterioration of bond between concrete and steel bars. The serviceability and ultimate strength of concrete elements within RC structures are hence affected. Many researchers have studied the bond behavior of corroded steel bars. However, very few studies have investigated the effects of confinements on the degradation of bond strength. The present paper proposed a new kind of beam specimen based on which the effects of stirrups on degradation of bond were investigated. The test results proved that stirrups can effectively increase the bond strength between concrete and corroded steel bars