Bog Bodies Investigated in the Light of Forensic Medicine

Bog Bodies Investigated in the Light of Forensic Medicin

The Transformation Of Trust In China’s Alternative Food Networks: Disruption, Reconstruction, And Development

Food safety issues in China have received much scholarly attention, yet few studies systematically examined this matter through the lens of trust. More importantly, little is known about the transformation of different types of trust in the dynamic process of food production, provision, and consumption. We consider trust as an evolving interdependent relationship between different actors. We used the Beijing County Fair, a prominent ecological farmers’ market in China, as an example to examine the transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks. We argue that although there has been a disruption of institutional trust among the general public since 2008 when the melamine-tainted milk scandal broke out, reconstruction of individual trust and development of organizational trust have been observed, along with the emergence and increasing popularity of alternative food networks. Based on more than six months of fieldwork on the emerging ecological agriculture sector in 13 provinces across China as well as monitoring of online discussions and posts, we analyze how various social factors—including but not limited to direct and indirect reciprocity, information, endogenous institutions, and altruism—have simultaneously contributed to the transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks. The findings not only complement current social theories of trust, but also highlight an important yet understudied phenomenon whereby informal social mechanisms have been partially substituting for formal institutions and gradually have been building trust against the backdrop of the food safety crisis in China.published_or_final_versio

EPS Producing Microorganisms from Municipal Wastewater Activated Sludge

Bacterial exopolysacchrides (EPSs) are produced by many bacteria. Nowadays there is an increasing interest in the isolation and exploitation of these polymers for industrial purposes. In general, biosynthesis of EPS varies from one strain to other strain and it depends on genes and enzymes involved in EPS production and secretion. In this study, EPS producing strains were isolated from municipal wastewater treatment plant and their potential of EPS production was evaluated. The role of EPS in sludge flocculation was also studied. Three types of EPS (LB-EPS (Loosely bound EPS), TB-EPS (Tightly bound EPS) and B-EPS (broth EPS)) were harvested and their characteristics were studied. The bioflocculation capacity of the obtained EPS was evaluated by measuring the kaolin clay flocculation activity. The LB-EPS was better than TB-EPS and B-EPS for bioflocculation

EPS Producing Microorganisms from Municipal Wastewater Activated Sludge

Bacterial exopolysacchrides (EPSs) are produced by many bacteria. Nowadays there is an increasing interest in the isolation and exploitation of these polymers for industrial purposes. In general, biosynthesis of EPS varies from one strain to other strain and it depends on genes and enzymes involved in EPS production and secretion. In this study, EPS producing strains were isolated from municipal wastewater treatment plant and their potential of EPS production was evaluated. The role of EPS in sludge flocculation was also studied. Three types of EPS (LB-EPS (Loosely bound EPS), TB-EPS (Tightly bound EPS) and B-EPS (broth EPS)) were harvested and their characteristics were studied. The bioflocculation capacity of the obtained EPS was evaluated by measuring the kaolin clay flocculation activity. The LB-EPS was better than TB-EPS and B-EPS for bioflocculation

Assessing Safety Risk Management Performance in Chinese Subway Construction Projects: A Multistakeholder Perspective

The rapid development of subway projects in China presents significant safety risks to those involved. Building on the previous empirical research that identified and classified the safety risks of these projects, the aim of this paper is to assess the safety risk management performance in Chinese subway construction projects from a multistakeholder perspective. Questionnaire surveys and semistructured interviews were conducted with three hundred and ninety-nine and eight construction professionals, respectively, who worked on subway construction projects in southeast China. The results indicate that the top five areas of safety risk management performance are related to construction plan development, management of high-risk construction works, hazard identification and communication, government-related factors, and client-related factors. In contrast, the bottom five areas of safety risk management performance are related to engineering consultant-related factors, the site's natural environment and weather conditions, regular tests, machine calibration and maintenance, site construction schedule, and construction preparedness. The relationship between this safety risk management performance and the perceived importance of each risk factor is also reported, identifying priority areas for improvements on these projects. These findings contribute new conceptual insights to the paucity of research on the safety risk management performance of Chinese subway construction projects from a multistakeholder perspective. The results also provide new practical insights for policymakers and project managers to help them develop more effective and focused strategies to further improve the safety performance of these major projects

Isotropic reconstruction of 3D fluorescence microscopy images using convolutional neural networks

Fluorescence microscopy images usually show severe anisotropy in axial versus lateral resolution. This hampers downstream processing, i.e. the automatic extraction of quantitative biological data. While deconvolution methods and other techniques to address this problem exist, they are either time consuming to apply or limited in their ability to remove anisotropy. We propose a method to recover isotropic resolution from readily acquired anisotropic data. We achieve this using a convolutional neural network that is trained end-to-end from the same anisotropic body of data we later apply the network to. The network effectively learns to restore the full isotropic resolution by restoring the image under a trained, sample specific image prior. We apply our method to $3$ synthetic and $3$ real datasets and show that our results improve on results from deconvolution and state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques. Finally, we demonstrate that a standard 3D segmentation pipeline performs on the output of our network with comparable accuracy as on the full isotropic data

Cloud service-oriented dashboard for work cell management in RFID-enabled ubiquitous manufacturing

This article aims at developing a service-oriented dashboard for operators and supervisors of manufacturing shopfloor work-cells to realize information visibility and traceability effectively with cloud and RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies. The work is based on a case of an illustrative assembly line consisting of a number of work cells. The dashboard is deployed for facilitating assembly operations in ubiquitous manufacturing environment. The utilization of the system leads to significant improvements in work cell productivity and quality, operational flexibility and decision efficiency. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio