Employees’ Collaborative Use of Green Information Systems

Green information system (GIS) plays an important role in the sustainable development of organizations, especially for those in emerging economy that face both economic and environmental pressures. To fulfill the purpose, employees need to work together on tasks using all kinds of GIS functions such as online collaboration and remote meeting. Researchers study GIS adoption at either the organizational level or the individual level, but few examine such technology-enabled collaboration as a cross-level phenomenon. Extending the belief-action-outcome (BAO) framework, this study investigates the motivation, effort and performance of collaborative GIS use. In particular, there are two aspects of motivation: GIS strategy as extrinsic motivation and GIS belief as intrinsic motivation, as well as two types of performance: tangible environmental performance and intangible green image. Collective GIS effort mediates the relationships between motivation and performance variables. Empirical evidence based on survey observations collected in China supports most hypothesized relationships. The findings provide helpful insights on the best practices to promote the collaborative use of GIS for corporate sustainability

Effects of thin Covers on the Release of Coal Gangue Contaminants

AbstractThe effects of the different ecological covers on the release of coal gangue contaminants were evaluated by the batch pot of experiments. The tests were carried for 12 weeks on the coal gangue by different approaches, which were the coverings with 1-2cm artificial matrix that contained acid buffer and plant ameliorant(Tr1:thin matrix cover), 1-2cm slurry of artificial matrix (Tr2: thin coating),and control groups(CK),and planted Lolium perenne, Chenopodium ambrosioides L, and sporopollen of Funaria hygrometrica Hedw on the surface layer, respectively. During the pot experiments, the leachates were collected and analyzed for pH, electrical conductivity (EC), and concentration of Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn, SO42-, F- .The results showed that the coal gangue was uninterruptedly oxidized to form acidic when it was exposed to open air, and 3 or 5 weeks later, dissolution of Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn and SO42-, F− in the coal gangue started and increased significantly, and this is a typical acid mine drainage (AMD) formation process. Compared to the CK, thin matrix cover could retard the allotted time of the production of acidity and release of contaminants, but was easily invalid to long-term. The pH of thin coating was at a high value with time, and the concentration of Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn, SO42− and F- reduced significantly. The data indicated that the thin coating could effectively stop or retard the production of acidity and the release of contaminants generated by coal gangue. It suggests that thin coating covers on the coal gangue could be a suitable method for pollution abatement and controlling on-site

Distributed Optimization for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems with Dynamic Event-Triggered Communication

In this paper, we propose a fully distributed algorithm for second-order continuous-time multi-agent systems to solve the distributed optimization problem. The global objective function is a sum of private cost functions associated with the individual agents and the interaction between agents is described by a weighted undirected graph. We show the exponential convergence of the proposed algorithm if the underlying graph is connected, each private cost function is locally gradient-Lipschitz-continuous, and the global objective function is restricted strongly convex with respect to the global minimizer. Moreover, to reduce the overall need of communication, we then propose a dynamic event-triggered communication mechanism that is free of Zeno behavior. It is shown that the exponential convergence is achieved if the private cost functions are also globally gradient-Lipschitz-continuous. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results

Nanosecond Electric Pulses Differentially Affect Inward and Outward Currents in Patch Clamped Adrenal Chromaffin Cells

This study examined the effect of 5 ns electric pulses on macroscopic ionic currents in whole-cell voltage-clamped adrenal chromaffin cells. Current-voltage (I-V) relationships first established that the early peak inward current was primarily composed of a fast voltage-dependent Na+ current (INa), whereas the late outward current was composed of at least three ionic currents: a voltage-gated Ca2+ current (ICa), a Ca2+-activated K+ current (IK(Ca)), and a sustained voltage-dependent delayed rectifier K+ current (IKV). A constant-voltage step protocol was next used to monitor peak inward and late outward currents before and after cell exposure to a 5 ns pulse. A single pulse applied at an electric (E)-field amplitude of 5 MV/m resulted in an instantaneous decrease of ~4% in peak INa that then declined exponentially to a level that was ~85% of the initial level after 10 min. Increasing the E-field amplitude to 8 or 10 MV/m caused a twofold greater inhibitory effect on peak INa. The decrease in INa was not due to a change in either the steady-state inactivation or activation of the Na+ channel but instead was associated with a decrease in maximal Na+ conductance. Late outward current was not affected by a pulse applied at 5 MV/m. However, for a pulse applied at the higher E-field amplitudes of 8 and 10 MV/m, late outward current in some cells underwent a progressive ~22% decline over the course of the first 20 s following pulse exposure, with no further decline. The effect was most likely concentrated on ICa and IK(Ca) as IKV was not affected. The results of this study indicate that in whole-cell patch clamped adrenal chromaffin cells, a 5 ns pulse differentially inhibits specific voltage-gated ionic currents in a manner that can be manipulated by tuning E-field amplitude

Experimental study of the salt solution erosing influence on strength of concrete with recycled coarse aggregate

There are carried out the experimental study of the loss of the recycled concrete’s strength depending on the recycled coarse aggregate substitution ratio, quantity of the fly ash and age of the concrete through investigation of the concrete’s compressive strength. It is shown that compared with natural gravel, the recycled coarse aggregates accumulate damages at crushing process and have a lot of micro cracks. In addition, the surface of gravel is wrapped in porous adhesive mortar which provides corrosion resistance of concrete deterioration. With the amount of recycled coarse aggregate increasing, the compressive strength of recycled concrete decreases. The addition of fly ash, which creates a compaction effect, helps improve the erosion resistance of recycled concrete. It is shown that positive effect of aging of recycled concrete is significantly higher than negative effect of salt solution erosion, so with time the strength of recycled concrete is increased

The Pressure Relief and Permeability Increase Mechanism of Crossing-Layers Directional Hydraulic Fracturing and Its Application

AbstractIn order to reduce roof-floor blind area of hydrofracture in underground mines, expand influenced range of fracturing, improve the effect of hydrofracture, a pressure relief and permeability increase model of hydraulic fracturing was built on the basis of analysing the mechanism of crack initiation and the characteristics of fracture development. After discussing the mechanism of directional hydraulic fracturing and carrying out related numerical simulation, a directional hydraulic fracturing technique was proposed. The coal fracture development distribution rule in the process of directional hydraulic fracturing was analysed, and the directional hydraulic fracturing technique was applied in the F15-31010 mining workface of The Twelfth Coal of Pingdingshan Coal Mining Group. The results show that single-drill hole fracturing effective radius rise to 6m under the pressure of 27Mpa, which is 3-5 times more than before, and the average concentration of single-drill hole gas drainage promote to 87.5%, average flow up 55.6% than no-directional hydraulic fracturing. All these suggest that the technology obtains remarkable effect, and has a high application value

Power Scaling for Spatial Modulation with Limited Feedback

Spatial modulation (SM) is a recently developed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique which offers a new tradeoff between spatial diversity and spectrum efficiency, by introducing the indices of transmit antennas as a means of information modulation. Due to the special structure of SM-MIMO, in the receiver, maximum likelihood (ML) detector can be combined with low complexity. For further improving the system performance with limited feedback, in this paper, a novel power scaling spatial modulation (PS-SM) scheme is proposed. The main idea is based on the introduction of scaling factor (SF) for weighting the modulated symbols on each transmit antenna of SM, so as to enlarge the minimal Euclidean distance of modulated constellations and improve the system performance. Simulation results show that the proposed PS-SM outperforms the conventional adaptive spatial modulation (ASM) with the same feedback amount and similar computational complexity

Comprehensive analysis, immune, and cordycepin regulation for SOX9 expression in pan-cancers and the matched healthy tissues

SRY-box transcription factor 9 (SOX9) (OMIM 608160) is a transcription factor. The expression of SOX9 in pan-cancers and the regulation by small molecules in cancer cell lines are unclear. In the current study, we comprehensively analyzed the expression of SOX9 in normal tissues, tumor tissues and their matched healthy tissues in pan-cancers. The study examined the correlation between immunomodulators and immune cell infiltrations in normal and tumor tissues. Cordycepin (CD), an adenosine analog for SOX9 expression regulation, was also conducted on cancer cells. The results found that SOX9 protein is expressed in a variety of organs, including high expression in 13 organs and no expression in only two organs; in 44 tissues, there was high expression in 31 tissues, medium expression in four tissues, low expression in two tissues, and no expression in the other seven tissues. In pan-cancers with 33 cancer types, SOX9 expression was significantly increased in fifteen cancers, including CESC, COAD, ESCA, GBM, KIRP, LGG, LIHC, LUSC, OV, PAAD, READ, STAD, THYM, UCES, and UCS, but significantly decreased in only two cancers (SKCM and TGCT) compared with the matched healthy tissues. It suggests that SOX9 expression is upregulated in the most cancer types (15/33) as a proto-oncogene. The fact that the decrease of SOX9 expression in SKCM and the increase of SOX9 in the cell lines of melanoma inhibit tumorigenicity in both mouse and human ex vivo models demonstrates that SOX9 could also be a tumor suppressor. Further analyzing the prognostic values for SOX9 expression in cancer individuals revealed that OS is long in ACC and short in LGG, CESC, and THYM, suggesting that high SOX9 expression is positively correlated with the worst OS in LGG, CESC, and THYM, which could be used as a prognostic maker. In addition, CD inhibited both protein and mRNA expressions of SOX9 in a dose-dependent manner in 22RV1, PC3, and H1975 cells, indicating CD’s anticancer roles likely via SOX9 inhibition. Moreover, SOX9 might play an important role in tumor genesis and development by participating in immune infiltration. Altogether, SOX9 could be a biomarker for diagnostics and prognostics for pan-cancers and an emerging target for the development of anticancer drugs

Global Context Aggregation Network for Lightweight Saliency Detection of Surface Defects

Surface defect inspection is a very challenging task in which surface defects usually show weak appearances or exist under complex backgrounds. Most high-accuracy defect detection methods require expensive computation and storage overhead, making them less practical in some resource-constrained defect detection applications. Although some lightweight methods have achieved real-time inference speed with fewer parameters, they show poor detection accuracy in complex defect scenarios. To this end, we develop a Global Context Aggregation Network (GCANet) for lightweight saliency detection of surface defects on the encoder-decoder structure. First, we introduce a novel transformer encoder on the top layer of the lightweight backbone, which captures global context information through a novel Depth-wise Self-Attention (DSA) module. The proposed DSA performs element-wise similarity in channel dimension while maintaining linear complexity. In addition, we introduce a novel Channel Reference Attention (CRA) module before each decoder block to strengthen the representation of multi-level features in the bottom-up path. The proposed CRA exploits the channel correlation between features at different layers to adaptively enhance feature representation. The experimental results on three public defect datasets demonstrate that the proposed network achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and running efficiency compared with other 17 state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, GCANet achieves competitive accuracy (91.79% $F_{\beta}^{w}$, 93.55% $S_\alpha$, and 97.35% $E_\phi$) on SD-saliency-900 while running 272fps on a single gpu