The formation of insurance contract in London market.

The processes involved in the formation of a marine insurance contract are different from the processes by which other types of contracts are formed. The formation of insurance contracts in London Market typically takes the following course: a prospective assured who is seeking the insurance cover approaches a Lloyd's accredited broker. The broker prepares the slip and takes it around the market seeking subscriptions. Then the underwriter, who wishes to participate in the insurance, will initial the slip, stating the percentage and the proportion of the risk he is prepared to underwrite. Once the broker has obtained the desired level of subscriptions, the slip is closed. A formal policy is frequently issued later. In general, the formation of a contract of marine insurance is governed by the ordinary principles of contract law. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the application of contract law principles to the legal issues that arise at the formation stage in marine insurance contracts and to investigate whether these principles are suitable to dealing with the practical difficulties that arise in the London insurance market. The main body of the thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is about the legal issues arising before the marine insurance contract is concluded. The second part concentrates on the insurance broker who is playing a significant role during the process of contract formation. Legal issues on the duties, rights and liabilities of the insurance broker will be discussed. The third part focuses on legal issues arising after the marine insurance contract is concluded. Although the issues to be discussed arise in the post-contractual stage, they can often be traced to the processes involved at the formation stage

Automated Dilated Spatio-Temporal Synchronous Graph Modeling for Traffic Prediction

Accurate traffic prediction is a challenging task in intelligent transportation systems because of the complex spatio-temporal dependencies in transportation networks. Many existing works utilize sophisticated temporal modeling approaches to incorporate with graph convolution networks (GCNs) for capturing short-term and long-term spatio-temporal dependencies. However, these separated modules with complicated designs could restrict effectiveness and efficiency of spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, most previous works adopt the fixed graph construction methods to characterize the global spatio-temporal relations, which limits the learning capability of the model for different time periods and even different data scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose an automated dilated spatio-temporal synchronous graph network, named Auto-DSTSGN for traffic prediction. Specifically, we design an automated dilated spatio-temporal synchronous graph (Auto-DSTSG) module to capture the short-term and long-term spatio-temporal correlations by stacking deeper layers with dilation factors in an increasing order. Further, we propose a graph structure search approach to automatically construct the spatio-temporal synchronous graph that can adapt to different data scenarios. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can achieve about 10% improvements compared with the state-of-art methods. Source codes are available at https://github.com/jinguangyin/Auto-DSTSGN

Effects of Calcination Temperature on Preparation of Boron-Doped TiO 2

Boron-doped TiO2 photocatalyst was prepared by a modified sol-gel method. Being calcinated at temperatures from 300°C to 600°C, all the 3% B-TiO2 samples presented anatase TiO2 phase, and TiO2 crystallite sizes were calculated to be 7.6, 10.3, 13.6, and 27.3 nm, respectively. The samples were composed of irregular particles with rough surfaces in the size range within 3 μm. Ti atoms were in an octahedron skeleton and existed mainly in the form of Ti4+, while the Ti-O-B structure was the main boron existing form in the 3% B-TiO2 sample. When calcination temperature increased from 300°C to 600°C, specific surface area decreased sharply from 205.6 m2/g to 31.8 m2/g. The average pore diameter was 10.53 nm with accumulative pore volume of 0.244 mL/g for the 3% B-TiO2 sample calcinated at 400°C, which performed optimal photocatalytic degradation activity. After 90 min of UV-light irradiation, degradation rate of methyl orange was 96.7% on the optimized photocatalyst

Dilemma in All-optical Characterization of Single-layer NiI2 Multiferroics

Matters Arising in Nature on "Evidence for a single layer van der Waals multiferroic". The search for two dimensional multiferroic materials is an exciting yet challenging endeavor. Recently, Song reported the exciting discovery of type II multiferroic order in an antiferromagnetic (AFM) NiI2 single layer and concluded the ferroelectric (FE) polarization induced by a helical magnetic order1. Their finding was presented from all optical experimental evidence, based on the methods of second harmonic generation (SHG) and linear dichroism (LD). However, the all optical characterizations cannot serve as unanimous evidence of the FE existence, particularly in conjunction with magnetic orders in a single layer NiI2 multiferroic. We have designed and built a Magneto-Optical-Electric Joint-measurement Scanning Imaging system (MOEJSI) for identification of two-dimensional vdW multiferroic.Comment: 7 page

Electronically Induced Ferromagnetic Transitions in Sm5Ge4-Type Magnetoresponsive Phases

The correlation between magnetic and structural transitions in Gd5SixGe4−x hampers the studies of valence electron concentration (VEC) effects on magnetism. Such studies require decoupling of the VEC-driven changes in the magnetic behavior and crystal structure. The designed compounds, Gd5GaSb3 and Gd5GaBi3, adopt the same Sm5Ge4-type structure as Gd5Ge4 while the VEC increases from 31  e−/formula in Gd5Ge4 to 33  e−/formula in Gd5GaPn3 (Pn: pnictide atoms). As a result, the antiferromagnetic ground state in Gd5Ge4 is tuned into the ferromagnetic one in Gd5GaPn3. First-principles calculations reveal that the nature of interslab magnetic interactions is changed by introducing extra p electrons into the conduction band, forming a ferromagnetic bridge between the adjacent [∝2Gd5T4] slabs