E-Waste Recycling and Related Social Issues in China

AbstractChina has set a goal of establishing a Circular Economy policy for recycling resources in the near future. To further efforts to build a circular society, we analyzed the current status of E-waste recycling and related social issues, including the case of Guiyu town. Some policy suggestions on establishing recycling systems are recommended

Vision-based indoor localization via a visual slam approach

With an increasing interest in indoor location based services, vision-based indoor localization techniques have attracted many attentions from both academia and industry. Inspired by the development of simultaneous localization and mapping technique (SLAM), we present a visual SLAM-based approach to achieve a 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) pose in indoor environment. Firstly, the indoor scene is explored by a keyframe-based global mapping technique, which generates a database from a sequence of images covering the entire scene. After the exploration, a feature vocabulary tree is trained for accelerating feature matching in the image retrieval phase, and the spatial structures obtained from the keyframes are stored. Instead of querying by a single image, a short sequence of images in the query site are used to extract both features and their relative poses, which is a local visual SLAM procedure. The relative poses of query images provide a pose graph-based geometric constraint which is used to assess the validity of image retrieval results. The final positioning result is obtained by selecting the pose of the first correct corresponding image. © Authors 2019

Modelling the Linkage Between Landscape Metrics and Water Quality Indices of Hydrological Units in Sihu Basin, Hubei Province, China: An Allometric Model

AbstractStudying quantitative relationships between landscape pattern and water quality is a fundamental step to assess the impacts of non-point source pollution. Many hydrological models with multi-functionality have been developed as useful tools to study several key mechanisms in non-point source pollution. In landscape ecological studies, however, the empirical modelling approaches have been dominated with emphasis on the relationships between the landscape metrics and water quality indices. The main techniques for developing those models of landscape-water quality are statistical regression analysis based on linear models. In this article, Allometric models and the traditional multiple linear regression models for estimating the linkage between landscape metrics and water quality were tested in Sihu Basin, Hubei Province, China. The models at patch class level were established in 24 hydrological units of the basin, which took nine water quality indices (EC, pH, SS, DO, COD, TN, TP, NO3--N, NH4+-N) as the dependent variables and eighteen landscape metrics calculated in FRAGSTATS 3.3 as independent variables. The results suggested that, compared with the traditional multiple linear regression models, Allometric models were more suitable for SS, DO, TP, TN, NH4+-N, in which landscape pattern metrics could explain the 80.5%, 77.7%, 58.2%, 43.9%, 67.6% of total variation, respectively. There had little difference between multiple linear regression models and Allometric models for EC and NO3--N. The coefficients of determination in Allometric models were not as strong as that obtained in the multiple linear regression models for pH and COD. The above results indicated that using Allometric model may potentially provide a new way to study the linkage between landscape metrics and water quality indices, which will help protect our regional water resources

Correlating low energy impact damage with changes in modal parameters: a preliminary study on composite beams

This paper is an experimental study of the effects of multi-site damage on the vibration response of a composite beam damaged by low energy impact. The variation of the modal parameters with different levels of impact energy and density of impact is studied. Specimens are impacted symmetrically in order to induce a global rate of damage. A damage detection tool Damage Index is introduced in order to verify the estimation of damping ratios. Design of Experiments is used to establish the sensitivity of both energy of impact and density of damage. The DOE analysis results (using natural frequency only) indicate that impact energy for 2nd, 3rd and 4th bending modes is the most significant factor contributing to the changes in the modal parameters for this kind of symmetrical dynamic test

Technical note: concentration and composition of airborne aerobic bacteria inside an enclosed rabbit shed

[EN] Numerous studies have been conducted to analyse bacterial aerosols in animal houses, which is beneficial for the control of animal diseases. However, little information on aerosols in enclosed rabbit sheds was available. An FA-1 sampler was employed to collect air samples in an enclosed rabbit house in the Qingdao region of China. Concentration, composition, and aerodynamics of bacterial aerosols inside the enclosed rabbit shed were systematically analysed. The concentration of airborne bacteria inside the rabbit shed was 2.11-6.36×104 colony forming unit/m3 (CFU/m3). Seventeen species of bacteria belonging to eight genera were identified. Among these, there were 11 species belonging to 4 genera of gram-positive bacteria, and 6 species belonging to 4 genera of gram-negative bacteria. The dominant species of bacteria were, in descending order, Micrococcus luteus (49.4%), Staphylococcus epidermidis (25.5%), and Alcaligenes odorans (10.2%). A total of about 76.3% of airborne bacteria was distributed in stages C-F of the FA-1 sampler (that ranges from A to F), with aerodynamic radii <3.3 μm in diameter. These particulates could enter lower respiratory tracks and even alveoli, posing a potential threat to the health of both animals and breeders.This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81501357).Li, S.; Li, M.; Mu, T.; Miao, Z. (2016). Technical note: concentration and composition of airborne aerobic bacteria inside an enclosed rabbit shed. World Rabbit Science. 24(1):71-75. https://doi.org/10.4995/wrs.2016.4170SWORD7175241Simpson, J. C., Niven, R. M., Pickering, C. A., Fletcher, A. M., Oldham, L. A., & Francis, H. M. (1998). Prevalence and predictors of work related respiratory symptoms in workers exposed to organic dusts. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 55(10), 668-672. doi:10.1136/oem.55.10.66

Exogenous application of plant growth regulators induce chilling tolerance in direct seeded super and non-super rice seedlings through modulations in morpho-physiological attributes

Recently, super rice has gained much importance due to its high yield potential while exogenous application of plant growth regulators (PGRs) is an important aspect in plant development and defense responses under stress conditions. In this study we conducted two pot experiments. Firstly, four super rice cultivars, viz. Peizataifeng, Huayou 213, Yuxiangyouzhan and Huahang 31 were subjected to a series of five chilling temperatures, i.e. 11 °C, 12 °C, 13 °C, 14 °C and 15 °C (day/night) for about 25–27 days. Secondly, seeds of Peizataifeng (super rice) and Yuejingsimiao 2 (non-super rice) were then treated with different combinations of salicylic acid (SA), brassinolide (BR), calcium chloride (CaCl2) and fulvic acid (FA) and then exposed to chilling stress at 13 °C for four days. Resultantly, Peizataifen (super rice) was found with the lowest seedling survival rate at all chilling temperatures among all four super rice cultivars, however, it was still found more resistant when compared with Yuejingsimiao 2 (non-super rice) in the second experiment. Furthermore synergistic effect of all PGRs alleviated low temperature stress in both rice cultivars by improving seedling survival rates, leaf area, seedling dry weight, seedling height, root morphology and by modulating antioxidant enzymes, improving proline content and lowering lipid peroxidation

The Suaineadh Project : a stepping stone towards the deployment of large flexible structures in space

The Suaineadh project aims at testing the controlled deployment and stabilization of space web. The deployment system is based on a simple yet ingenious control of the centrifugal force that will pull each of the four daughters sections apart. The four daughters are attached onto the four corners of a square web, and will be released from their initial stowed configuration attached to a central hub. Enclosed in the central hub is a specifically designed spinning reaction wheel that controls the rotational speed with a closed loop control fed by measurements from an onboard inertial measurement sensor. Five other such sensors located within the web and central hub provide information on the surface curvature of the web, and progression of the deployment. Suaineadh is currently at an advanced stage of development: all the components are manufactured with the subsystems integrated and are presently awaiting full integration and testing. This paper will present the current status of the Suaineadh project and the results of the most recent set of tests. In particular, the paper will cover the overall mechanical design of the system, the electrical and sensor assemblies, the communication and power systems and the spinning wheel with its control system

Major-minor long short-term memory for word-level language model

Language model plays an important role in natural language processing (NLP) systems like machine translation, speech recognition, learning token embeddings, natural language generation and text classification. Recently, the multi-layer Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models have been demonstrated to achieve promising performance on word-level language modeling. For each LSTM layer, larger hidden size usually means more diverse semantic features, which enables the language model to perform better. However, we have observed that when a certain LSTM layer reaches a sufficiently large scale, the promotion of overall effect will slow down as its hidden size increases. In this paper, we analyze that an important factor leading to this phenomenon is the high correlation between the newly extended hidden states and original hidden states, which hinders diverse feature expression of the LSTM. As a result, when the scale is large enough, simply lengthening the LSTM hidden states will cost tremendous extra parameters but has little effect. We propose a simple yet effective improvement on each LSTM layer consisting of a large-scale Major LSTM and a smallscale Minor LSTM to break the high correlation between the two parts of hidden states, which we call Major-Minor LSTMs (MMLSTMs). In experiments, we demonstrate the language model with MMLSTMs surpasses the existing state-of-the-art model on Penn Treebank (PTB) and WikiText-2 (WT2) datasets, and outperforms the baseline by 3.3 points in perplexity on WikiText-103 dataset without increasing model parameter counts

Zero Temperature Glass Transition in the Two-Dimensional Gauge Glass Model

We investigate dynamic scaling properties of the two-dimensional gauge glass model for the vortex glass phase in superconductors with quenched disorder. From extensive Monte Carlo simulations we obtain static and dynamic finite size scaling behavior, where the static simulations use a temperature exchange method to ensure convergence at low temperatures. Both static and dynamic scaling of Monte Carlo data is consistent with a glass transition at zero temperature. We study a dynamic correlation function for the superconducting order parameter, as well as the phase slip resistance. From the scaling of these two functions, we find evidence for two distinct diverging correlation times at the zero temperature glass transition. The longer of these time scales is associated with phase slip fluctuations across the system that lead to finite resistance at any finite temperature, while the shorter time scale is associated with local phase fluctuations.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures; v2: some minor correction

Comparative analysis of the testis and ovary transcriptomes in Zebrafish by combining experimental and computational tools

Studies on the zebrafish model have contributed to our understanding of several important developmental processes, especially those that can be easily studied in the embryo. However, our knowledge on late events such as gonad differentiation in the zebrafish is still limited. Here we provide an analysis on the gene sets expressed in the adult zebrafish testis and ovary in an attempt to identify genes with potential role in (zebra)fish gonad development and function. We produced 10,533 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from zebrafish testis or ovary and downloaded an additional 23,642 gonad-derived sequences from the zebrafish EST database. We clustered these sequences together with over 13,000 kidney-derived zebrafish ESTs to study partial transcriptomes for these three organs. We searched for genes with gonad-specific expression by screening macroarrays containing at least 2600 unique cDNA inserts with testis-, ovary- and kidney-derived cDNA probes. Clones hybridizing to only one of the two gonad probes were selected, and subsequently screened with computational tools to identify 72 genes with potentially testis-specific and 97 genes with potentially ovary-specific expression, respectively. PCR-amplification confirmed gonad-specificity for 21 of the 45 clones tested (all without known function). Our study, which involves over 47,000 EST sequences and specialized cDNA arrays, is the first analysis of adult organ transcriptomes of zebrafish at such a scale. The study of genes expressed in adult zebrafish testis and ovary will provide useful information on regulation of gene expression in teleost gonads and might also contribute to our understanding of the development and differentiation of reproductive organs in vertebrates