Check-Testing of Manufacturer Self Reported Labeling Data & Compliance with MEPS

China first adopted minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) in 1989. Today, there are standards for a wide range of domestic, commercial and selected industrial equipment. In 1999, China launched a voluntary endorsement label, which has grown to cover over 40 products including water-saving products. Further, in 2005, China started a mandatory energy information label that initially covered two products and in 2007 was extended to cover four products total including: air conditioners; household refrigerators; clothes washers; and unitary air conditioners. These programs have had an important impact in reducing the energy consumption of appliances in China. China has built up a strong infrastructure to develop and implement standards. Historically, however, the government's primary focus has been on the technical requirements for specifying efficiency performance. Less attention has been paid to monitoring and enforcement with a minimal commitment of resources and little expansion of administrative capacity in this area. Thus, market compliance with both mandatory standard and labeling programs has been questionable. Furthermore, actual energy savings have quite possibly been undermined as a result. The establishment of a regularized monitoring system for tracking compliance with the mandatory standard and energy information label programs in China is a major area for program improvement. Over the years, the Collaborative Labeling and Appliance Standards Program (CLASP) has partnered with several Chinese institutions to promote energy-efficient products in China. CLASP, together with its implementing partner Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has assisted China in developing and updating the above-mentioned standards and labeling programs. Because of the increasing need for the development of a monitoring system to track compliance with the standard, CLASP, with support from Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ), has expanded its on-going collaboration with the China National Institute of Standards (CNIS) to include enforcement and monitoring. CNIS has already begun working on the issue of compliance. In early 2007, LBNL compiled a report, with the support of METI, summarizing the findings from these activities and indicating China's progress to date. The report concluded that although the existing legal basis for monitoring and enforcement is sufficient- with multiple laws and regulations defining the responsibility of each government agency and specifying a system of fines and penal-ties for non-compliance-compared with international best practices, there is still a big gap in China's monitoring and enforcement efforts for mandatory standards and labels. In sum, the report concludes that while the sample size is far smaller than the mid-term goal of developing a regular check testing program for 20 percent of the market for each of the three products, this study provides highly valuable feedback on manufacturer compliance rates in the absence of a large-scale national testing program. With METI/IEEJ support, CLASP could assist the China Energy Label Center (CELC) in expanding its verification testing programs to cover more models and products, and in developing a plan for ramping up the national verification testing program over the next three to five years. This is particularly important as the information labeling program gains more visibility and expands to additional product categories. CLASP could also assist CELC to plan for a round-robin testing scheme-first among three national laboratories with sub-sequent expansion of this program to other regional test laboratories--with the goal of improving the consistency of testing results from different testing laboratories

SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents

Humans are social beings; we pursue social goals in our daily interactions, which is a crucial aspect of social intelligence. Yet, AI systems' abilities in this realm remain elusive. We present SOTOPIA, an open-ended environment to simulate complex social interactions between artificial agents and evaluate their social intelligence. In our environment, agents role-play and interact under a wide variety of scenarios; they coordinate, collaborate, exchange, and compete with each other to achieve complex social goals. We simulate the role-play interaction between LLM-based agents and humans within this task space and evaluate their performance with a holistic evaluation framework called SOTOPIA-Eval. With SOTOPIA, we find significant differences between these models in terms of their social intelligence, and we identify a subset of SOTOPIA scenarios, SOTOPIA-hard, that is generally challenging for all models. We find that on this subset, GPT-4 achieves a significantly lower goal completion rate than humans and struggles to exhibit social commonsense reasoning and strategic communication skills. These findings demonstrate SOTOPIA's promise as a general platform for research on evaluating and improving social intelligence in artificial agents.Comment: Preprint, 43 pages. The first two authors contribute equall

Gadolinium‐Doped Iron Oxide Nanoprobe as Multifunctional Bioimaging Agent and Drug Delivery System

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116012/1/adfm201502868.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116012/2/adfm201502868-sup-0001-S1.pd

Boundedness of Weighted Hardy Operator and Its Adjoint on Triebel-Lizorkin-Type Spaces

Let p∈[1,∞], q∈[1,∞), τ∈(0,∞), and α∈(0,1) such that τ>1/p-1/q and α≤n(1/p-τ), let Uψ be the weighted Hardy operator and Vψ its adjoint operator with respect to the weight function ψ. In this paper, the authors establish a sufficient and necessary condition on weight function ψ to ensure the boundedness of Uψ and Vψ on the Triebel-Lizorkin-type spaces Ḟp,qα,τ(ℝn) and their predual spaces, Triebel-Lizorkin-Hausdorff spaces, which unify and generalize the known results on Q-type spaces

The Influence of Slag/Fly Ash Ratio and Sodium Silicate Modulus on the Properties of 1-3-2 Alkali-Based Piezoelectric Composite

In this paper, a comprehensive experimental investigation on the effect of the slag-to-fly ash ratio (hereafter referred to as SL/FA) and sodium silicate modulus on the properties of a 1-3-2 piezoelectric composite was carried out. The influence of the SL/FA ratio on various properties was initially investigated. Compared with other specimens, specimens with SL/FA = 40%:60% had the highest electromechanical coupling coefficient (Kt = 77.67%, Kp = 71%). Therefore, the specimen with SL/FA = 40%:60% was chosen to explore the effect of the sodium silicate modulus. Additionally, the specimen with SL/FA = 40%:60% and a sodium silicate modulus of 1.3 had the best electromechanical conversion efficiency with Kt = 75.68% and Kp = 75.95%. The 1-3-2 alkali-based piezoelectric composite proved to have the characteristics of a low cost, optimal piezoelectric and mechanical properties, higher tunability, and better compatibility with concrete. It is a potential alternative to cement-based piezoelectric composites and may be widely utilized to monitor the health of concrete structures

Photo-Enhanced Singlet Oxygen Generation of Prussian Blue-Based Nanocatalyst for Augmented Photodynamic Therapy

Summary: Therapeutic effects of photodynamic therapy (PDT) remain largely limited because of tumor hypoxia. Herein, we report safe and versatile nanocatalysts (NCs) for endogenous oxygen generation and imaging-guided enhanced PDT. The NCs (named as PSP) are prepared by coating Prussian blue (PB) with mesoporous silica to load photosensitizer (zinc phthalocyanine, ZnPc), followed by the modification of polyethylene glycol chains. The inner PB not only acts like a catalase for hydrogen peroxide decomposition but also serves as a photothermal agent to increase the local temperature and then speed up the oxygen supply under near-infrared irradiation. The loaded ZnPc can immediately transform the formed oxygen to generate cytotoxic singlet oxygen upon the same laser irradiation due to the overlapped absorption between PB and ZnPc. Results indicate that the PSP-ZnPc (PSPZP) NCs could realize the photothermally controlled improvement of hypoxic condition in cancer cells and tumor tissues, therefore demonstrating enhanced cancer therapy by the incorporation of PDT and photothermal therapy. : Drug Delivery System; Chemistry; Inorganic Chemistry; Catalysis; Biological Sciences Subject Areas: Drug Delivery System, Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Catalysis, Biological Science

Core–Shell Metal-Organic Frameworks as Fe²⁺ Suppliers for Fe²⁺-Mediated Cancer Therapy under Multimodality Imaging

Integrated theranostic agents can provide comprehensive and efficient tools for simultaneous cancer diagnosis and therapy; however, limitations on efficiency and safety offer great room for improvement. Artesunate (AS), as an iron-dependent drug, has been investigated in cancer therapy, depending on free-radical generation for its action, which may reduce side effects commonly associated with conventional chemotherapy agents with low selectivity to target tumors. However, rapid clearance of its free form and limited availability of Fe ion in tumor sites become the main bottlenecks in cancer therapy. Herein, core–shell Mn₃[Co­(CN)₆]₂@MIL-100­(Fe) metal-organic frameworks (CS-MOFs) nanocube was designed using a layer-by-layer method, which holds great potential for synchronous co-delivery of AS and ferric ions for cancer therapy. Moreover, the heterogeneous hybrid CS-MOFs show single- and two-photon fluorescence, together with T₂ and enhanced T₁ magnetic resonance imaging ability. pH-responsive degradation of CS-MOFs enables on-demand Fe­(III) and AS release in the tumor microenvironment. The intracellular ferric ions will further be reduced to ferrous ion that catalyze AS to generate carbon-centered free radicals and reactive oxygen species (ROS). The potential of this alternative antitumor modality under multimodality imaging is demonstrated both <i>in vitro</i> and <i>in vivo</i>. In addition, compared with free AS alone, the nanodrug system CS-MOFs@AS shows significantly enhanced tumor delivery specificity and negligible long-term toxicity. <i>In vivo</i> therapy results indicate that the antitumor efficacy of CS-MOFs@AS was 5.79 times greater than that of free AS, making it a promising Fe²⁺-mediated drugs delivery system

A pH-Responsive Yolk-Like Nanoplatform for Tumor Targeted Dual-Mode Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Chemotherapy

Incorporation of T₁ and T₂ contrast material in one nanosystem performing their respective MR contrast role and simultaneously serving as an efficient drug delivery system (DDS) has a significant potential application for clinical diagnosis and chemotherapy of cancer. However, inappropriate incorporation always encountered many issues, such as low contact area of T₁ contrast material with water-proton, inappropriate distance between T₂ contrast material and water molecule, and undesirable disturbance of T₂ contrast material for T₁ imaging. Those issues seriously limited the T₁ or T₂ contrast effect. In this work, we developed a yolk-like Fe₃O₄@Gd₂O₃ nanoplatform functionalized by polyethylene glycol and folic acid (FA), which could efficiently exert their tumor targeted T₁–T₂ dual-mode MR imaging and drug delivery role. First, this nanoplatform possessed a high longitudinal relaxation rate (<i>r</i>₁) (7.91 mM^–1 s^–1) and a stronger transverse relaxation rate (<i>r</i>₂) (386.5 mM^–1 s^–1) than that of original Fe₃O₄ (268.1 mM^–1 s^–1). Second, cisplatin could be efficiently loaded into this nanoplatform (112 mg/g) and showed pH-responsive release behavior. Third, this nanoplatform could be effectively internalized by HeLa cells with time and dosage dependence. Fourth, the FA receptor-mediated nanoplatform displayed excellent T₁–T₂ dual mode MR contrast enhancement and anticancer activity both <i>in vitro</i> and <i>in vivo</i>. Fifth, no apparent toxicity for vital organs was observed with systemic delivery of the nanoplatform <i>in vivo</i>. Thus, this nanoplatform could be a potential nanotheranostic for tumor targeted T₁–T₂ dual-mode MR imaging and chemotherapy