Threshold Chloride Concentration of Stainless Steels in Simulated Concrete Pore Solution

To evaluate whether stainless steel can replace carbon steel as rebar in reinforced concrete structures exposed to aggressive environment, the threshold chloride concentration of carbon steel, austenitic and duplex stainless steels were experimentally studied in this paper. The solutions with pH ranging from 9.5 to 13.6 were used herein to simulate the pore liquids in both alkaline and carbonated concretes. Potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) tests were carried out in the solutions with chloride concentration ranging from 0 to 5.0M and at a temperature around 25°C. The activation of pitting corrosion was determined when corrosion current increased and polarization resistance decreased significantly. The test results show that the pH value has a great effect on the evolution of the film resistance, and stainless steels have much higher corrosion resistance than carbon steel subjected to chloride environments

Research on Regional Development and its Operating Mechanism under the Background of Information: Take China as an Example

The information society, as a main circumstantial background of modern regional development, is the era cradle of region's deepening core connotation and evolving layout form. This article analyses the chief influenced factors of information society, and considers that the regional development under the background of information breaks through the limitation of time and space. Meanwhile, according to the industrial organization promotion, spatial structural optimization, basical information infrastructure and other fields of region, authors elaborate the present situation and characteristics of the regional development. Therefore, this article puts forward the innovative operating mechanism of regional development

BILINGUALISM POLICY IN SINGAPORE ELITE SCHOOLS

The Singapore government has been promoting the mastery of the English language as well as the mother tongue since 1987 in the hope that Singaporeans can be fluent in both the working language and one related to their native roots. From then on, all Chinese schools are required to teach in the English language, and English is officially known as the first language of all students. This paper aims to study the policy’s background, specifically in the area of Mandarin, and find out whether this policy has managed to achieve its goals, how it has affected Singapore students’ language development in elite schools, how to improve the policy to benefit students in the future as well as provide some implications for enhancing Chinese teaching pedagogy.Keywords: Mother tongue,  the  English  Language,  elite school, Chinese teaching pedagogy

Bilingualism policy in Singapore elite schools

The Singapore government has been promoting the mastery of the English language as well as the mother tongue since 1987 in the hope that Singaporeans can be fluent in both the working language and one related to their native roots. From then on, all Chinese schools are required to teach in the English language, and English is officially known as the first language of all students. This paper aims to study the policy’s background, specifically in the area of Mandarin, and find out whether this policy has managed to achieve its goals, how it has affected Singapore students’ language development in elite schools, how to improve the policy to benefit students in the future as well as provide some implications for enhancing Chinese teaching pedagogy

Genomic Features and Clinical Characteristics of Adolescents and Young Adults With Cholangiocarcinoma

Background: Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) diagnosed with cancer between ages 15 and 45 years may exhibit unique biologic and genomic characteristics as well as clinical features, resulting in differences in clinical characters and drug resistance. However, compared to other solid cancers, relatively few studies have been conducted in this age group in cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). This study is performed to investigate the clinical and molecular features of AYAs with CCA. Methods: Three cohorts, including the external dataset (TCGA and MSKCC) and the perihilar CCA databank of Chinese tertiary hospitals, were contained in this study. Pathway and process enrichment analysis had been carried out with the following ontology sources: KEGG Pathway, GO Biological Processes, Reactome Gene Sets, Canonical Pathways, and CORUM. Metascape and GEPIA datasets were used for bioinformatic analysis. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. All statistical analyses were performed with GraphPad Prism (version 7.0; GraphPad Software, La Jolla, California) and R studio (version 3.6.1; R studio, Boston, Massachusetts). Results: Compared to older adults, AYAs with CCA presented with worse overall survival, although the difference was not significant. Specific to patients with stage IV CCAs who underwent chemotherapy, AYAs were associated with significantly poorer overall survival (OS) (p = 0.03, hazards ratio (HR) 3.01, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.14-4.91). From the anatomical perspective, more extrahepatic CCA was detected in the AYA group. Microsatellite instability (MSI) occurred in 3% of older patients in the present study. Nevertheless, none of the AYAs had MSI status. In this study, AYAs gained an enhanced frequency of additional sex combs like 1 (ASXL1) (p = 0.02) and KMT2C (p = 0.02) mutation than their older counterparts. Besides ASXL1 and KMT2C, the genes enriched in AYAs with CCA were analyzed by pathway and process enrichment analysis. And those genes were found to be associated with poorer differentiation, deubiquitination, and WNT signal pathway. Moreover, AYAs were relevant to poor differentiation and advanced tumor stage. Conclusion: This study offered a preliminary landscape of the clinical and molecular features of early-onset biliary cancers. Further studies including more samples are essential to investigate whether ASXL1 and KMT2C could be considered as potentially targetable genomic signatures for young patients

Analysis of instability causes in the bi-dc converter and enhancing its performance by improving the damping in the IDA-PBC control

The poor damping of bidirectional dc (bi-dc) converter caused by constant power load makes power system prone to oscillation, and non-minimum phase characteristic also jeopardises voltage stability. To solve these challenges, the interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA-PBC) is utilised to improve transient response. The influences of the right-half-plane (RHP) zero on the stability margin and controller design are illustrated by zero dynamics analysis. Then the port-controlled Hamiltonian modelling is used to obtain the IDA-PBC control law, which is suitable to the bi-dc converter and independent of the operation mode. The system dissipation property is modified, and thus the desired damping is injected to smooth the transient voltage. To remove the voltage error caused by RHP zero and adjust the damping ratio, an energy controller with an adjustment factor is introduced. Besides, a virtual circuit is established to explain the physical meaning of the control parameter, and the parameter design method is given. Passivity analysis assesses the controller performance. Simulation results are analysed and compared with other control strategies to test the proposed IDA-PBC strategy

Regional Differential Information Entropy for Super-Resolution Image Quality Assessment

PSNR and SSIM are the most widely used metrics in super-resolution problems, because they are easy to use and can evaluate the similarities between generated images and reference images. However, single image super-resolution is an ill-posed problem, there are multiple corresponding high-resolution images for the same low-resolution image. The similarities can't totally reflect the restoration effect. The perceptual quality of generated images is also important, but PSNR and SSIM do not reflect perceptual quality well. To solve the problem, we proposed a method called regional differential information entropy to measure both of the similarities and perceptual quality. To overcome the problem that traditional image information entropy can't reflect the structure information, we proposed to measure every region's information entropy with sliding window. Considering that the human visual system is more sensitive to the brightness difference at low brightness, we take $\gamma$ quantization rather than linear quantization. To accelerate the method, we reorganized the calculation procedure of information entropy with a neural network. Through experiments on our IQA dataset and PIPAL, this paper proves that RDIE can better quantify perceptual quality of images especially GAN-based images.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 4 table