Assessing service quality of e-waste recycling: A case study from Putrajaya, Malaysia

The quality of recycling services will reflect the effectiveness of recycling performance further improvements. Putrajaya residents were selected as a study site to evaluate the recycling services and assess the ability of the services provided. Data were collected using a stratified random sampling of the households using the questionnaires that have been prior tested for reliability.The critical incident technique (CIT) was used to identify and analyse the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of recycling services. Five successful service constructs identified were a good feeling, secured environment, facilities and efficiency, educational and peer pressure.The paper highlights the form of recovery strategies undertaken by the authorities as perceived by the households

biological properties of hsc scientific basis for hsct

Hematopoiesis—from the Greek term for "blood making"—is the adaptive process by which mature and functional blood cells are continuously replaced over the entire lifetime of an individual. Erythrocytes, platelets, and the various subsets of leukocytes all have finite although different life spans. As a consequence, the daily production of red blood cells, platelets, and neutrophils in homeostatic conditions amount to more than 300 billion cells

Robotic thymectomy for myasthenia gravis

[No abstract available

Learning to Place Objects onto Flat Surfaces in Upright Orientations

We study the problem of placing a grasped object on an empty flat surface in an upright orientation, such as placing a cup on its bottom rather than on its side. We aim to find the required object rotation such that when the gripper is opened after the object makes contact with the surface, the object would be stably placed in the upright orientation. We iteratively use two neural networks. At every iteration, we use a convolutional neural network to estimate the required object rotation, which is executed by the robot, and then a separate convolutional neural network to estimate the quality of a placement in its current orientation. Our approach places previously unseen objects in upright orientations with a success rate of 98.1% in free space and 90.3% with a simulated robotic arm, using a dataset of 50 everyday objects in simulation experiments. Real-world experiments were performed, which achieved an 88.0% success rate, which serves as a proof-of-concept for direct sim-to-real transfer

Object Handovers: A Review for Robotics

This article surveys the literature on human-robot object handovers. A handover is a collaborative joint action, where an agent, the giver, gives an object to another agent, the receiver. The physical exchange starts when the receiver first contacts the object held by the giver and ends when the giver fully releases the object to the receiver. However, important cognitive and physical processes begin before the physical exchange, including initiating implicit agreement with respect to the location and timing of the exchange. From this perspective, we structure our review into the two main phases delimited by the aforementioned events: a prehandover phase and the physical exchange. We focus our analysis on the two actors (giver and receiver) and report the state of the art of robotic givers (robot-to-human handovers) and the robotic receivers (human-to-robot handovers). We report a comprehensive list of qualitative and quantitative metrics commonly used to assess the interaction. While focusing our review on the cognitive level (e.g., prediction, perception, motion planning, and learning) and the physical level (e.g., motion, grasping, and grip release) of the handover, we also discuss safety. We compare the behaviors displayed during human-to-human handovers to the state of the art of robotic assistants and identify the major areas of improvement for robotic assistants to reach performance comparable to human interactions. Finally, we propose a minimal set of metrics that should be used in order to enable a fair comparison among the approaches

Carbon dioxide removal could result in the use of lower-grade iron ore in a decarbonized net-negative emission steel industry

Reducing the emissions from steel production is essential in meeting climate targets while maintaining economic prosperity. Here we show that applying deep emissions mitigation to the steel industry together with the reaction of by-product slag with atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) could result in a carbon negative industry on the order of up to a GtCO2 yr-1 by mid-century. We used a bespoke technoeconomic assessment model that simulates a base-case scenarios in which steel is produced using a blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace. This system was augmented with a range of climate change intervention technologies including biomass based reducant, directly reduced iron, carbon capture and storage, and slag carbonation. Surprisingly, strong incentivisation ($200 – 500 tCO2-1) for emissions reduction and CO2 removal from the atmosphere may create conditions under which lower grade ores are commercially viable and also achieve deep emissions mitigation. The additional costs for emissions reduction could be wholly offset by value generated through carbon removal from biomass energy carbon capture and storage together with slag carbonation

Clonal expansion capacity defines two consecutive developmental stages of long-term hematopoietic stem cells.

Long-term hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs [LT-HSCs]) are well known to display unpredictable differences in their clonal expansion capacities after transplantation. Here, by analyzing the cellular output after transplantation of stem cells differing in surface expression levels of the Kit receptor, we show that LT-HSCs can be systematically subdivided into two subtypes with distinct reconstitution behavior. LT-HSCs expressing intermediate levels of Kit receptor (Kit(int)) are quiescent in situ but proliferate extensively after transplantation and therefore repopulate large parts of the recipient's hematopoietic system. In contrast, metabolically active Kit(hi) LT-HSCs display more limited expansion capacities and show reduced but robust levels of repopulation after transfer. Transplantation into secondary and tertiary recipient mice show maintenance of efficient repopulation capacities of Kit(int) but not of Kit(hi) LT-HSCs. Initiation of differentiation is marked by the transit from Kit(int) to Kit(hi) HSCs, both of which precede any other known stem cell population