Reefer container monitoring system based on WSN and cloud technology

Reefer containers are the main transportation method for the import and export of food and medicine. For high-quality products is necessary to monitor the condition of the reefer containers in order to avoid affecting goods quality due to environmental variations. Monitoring the reefer containers which are used to transport fruits, vegetables, and dairy products is one of the examples. In this context appears the necessity to develop this work expressed by a distributed sensor system for monitoring reefer containers. With the support of the WSN (wireless sensor network) including a set of sensors, it is possible to obtain the information about the temperature, humidity and location data of the reefer container and upload those data to a cloud platform expressed in the case of the purposed system by The Things Network platform. Based on LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) routing algorithm, the embedded software was developed to guarantee a well-balanced distribution of the energy load among WSN end-nodes. A web application and a mobile application has been developed to display the data coming from the WSN node. To check if the reefer container working in a good condition, an alarm software module has been developed to highlight abnormal data coming for the system. The routing algorithm has been simulated and the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by simulation results. The effectiveness of the proposed system was experimentally tested, and several results are included in this dissertation.Os contentores frigoríficos são o principal método de transporte para a importação e exportação de alimentos e medicamentos. Em produtos de alta qualidade, é necessário monitorizar as condições dos contentores frigoríficos, a fim de evitar a perda da qualidade das merca dorias devido a variações térmicas. Por exemplo, monitorarizando os contentores frigoríficos usados para transportar frutas, vegetais e laticínios. Neste contexto, aparece a necessidade do desenvolvimento deste projeto descrito por um sistema de sensores distribuídos para monitorizar contentores frigoríficos. Com o suporte da rede de sensores sem fios, incluindo um conjunto de sensores, é possível obter informações sobre os dados da temperatura, humidade e localização do contentor refrigerado e fazer uplo ad desses dados numa plataforma em cloud expressa no caso do sistema proposto por plataforma de rede de coisas. Com base no algoritmo de roteamento LEACH, o software incorporado foi desenvolvido para garantir uma distribuição equilibrada da carga de energi a entre os nós de WSN. Uma aplicação Web e uma aplicação móvel foram desenvolvidas para mostrar os dados provenientes do nó WSN. Para verificar a qualidade dos dados, um módulo de software de alarme foi também desenvolvido para destacar dados anormais que chegam ao sistema. O algoritmo de roteamento foi simulado e a eficiência do algoritmo é verificada pelos resultados da simulação. A eficiência do sistema proposto foi testada experimentalmente e os vários resultados estão incluídos nesta dissertação

Reason and Guarantee Measures for Construction Cracks of Pavement Concrete in High Temperature Period

The crack problem of concrete pavement is the key to ensure road safety and long-term service. The special environment of high temperature in summer is easy to lead to concrete cracking, this paper analyzes the reason of concrete cracking according to the situation, and puts forward the maintenance measures of concrete pavement under high temperature from the aspects of raw material quality management, concrete mixing, transportation, pouring and so on, which can provide reference for the quality control of concrete road under the high temperature

Links between mental health problems and future thinking from the perspective of adolescents with lived experience of depression and anxiety:a qualitative study

Abstract Background Depression and anxiety are common during adolescence and could have detrimental impacts on young people’s ability to make and implement plans for their future. However, to the best of our knowledge, no other study has adopted a qualitative approach in investigating these effects from the perspective of adolescents with lived experiences of depression and anxiety. We sought to understand how young people perceive and interpret the impact of mental health conditions on their thinking about the future. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 adolescents aged 16–19 years in the UK (median age = 19, IQR = 1.5), who had a history of protracted periods of clinical or subclinical depression and/or anxiety. They were asked to reflect on how their ability to think about the future and the content of the future-related thinking was impacted during periods of poor mental health, compared with periods of feeling well. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and subjected to thematic content analysis. Results Five domains were identified. First, the impact of mood on future thinking capability focuses on reduced ability and motivation to engage in future thinking. Second, the impact of mood on images, thoughts, and feelings about the future includes the emotional valence of future-related thoughts, their vividness, structure, and the extent to which they intimated subjective feelings of control (i.e., agency). Third, social influences focuses on social factors that might ameliorate or exacerbate future thinking. Fourth, reflections on personal worries and expectations about the future captures personal interpretations of past worries and hopes and how future thinking affected mood. Finally, personal coping refers to how young people cope with the negative emotions that come with future thinking. Conclusions This study provided a nuanced and granular account of how depression and anxiety impacted young people’s future thinking based on their lived experiences. By highlighting the different ways that variations in future thinking were experienced as a function of depression and anxiety, our analysis highlighted new factors that should be considered in studies of adolescent mental health risk, which could inform the development of new therapeutic approaches

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Young people's future thinking and mental health:The development and validation of the Adolescent Future Thinking Rating Scale

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to develop and validate a new scale of future thinking and adolescent mental health-the Adolescent Future Thinking Rating Scale (AFTRS). METHODS: A provisional AFTRS was developed from interviews with 19 adolescents. It was completed by three samples: exploratory (n = 161) aged 16-21 years, who also completed established measures of future thinking, cognitive risk factors, depression and anxiety; replication (n = 209) aged 16-25 years; and test-retest (n = 102) aged 17-23 years. The reliability, convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity were examined. RESULTS: Exploratory factor analyses identified the AFTRS-18 and AFTRS-12. Both had three sub-scales: (i) Concerns about Maladaptive Future Thinking, (ii) Future Positivity, and (iii) Ability to Visualise the Future. Established future thinking measures were combined into two factors: Negative Future Emotions (Cognitive Triad Inventory-View of Future and Beck's Hopelessness Scale) and Immediacy Preference (Consideration of Future Consequences and Quick Delay Questionnaire). The AFTRS-18 and AFTRS-12 were similarly associated with both factors and with depression/anxiety. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were high. CONCLUSIONS: The AFTRS-12 and AFTRS-18 are reliable and valid measures of the three key dimensions of adolescent future thinking and mental health. The first subscale remained significant in predicting depression and anxiety after controlling for general cognitive risks

UFO-Net: A Linear Attention-Based Network for Point Cloud Classification

Three-dimensional point cloud classification tasks have been a hot topic in recent years. Most existing point cloud processing frameworks lack context-aware features due to the deficiency of sufficient local feature extraction information. Therefore, we designed an augmented sampling and grouping module to efficiently obtain fine-grained features from the original point cloud. In particular, this method strengthens the domain near each centroid and makes reasonable use of the local mean and global standard deviation to extract point cloud’s local and global features. In addition to this, inspired by the transformer structure UFO-ViT in 2D vision tasks, we first tried to use a linearly normalized attention mechanism in point cloud processing tasks, investigating a novel transformer-based point cloud classification architecture UFO-Net. An effective local feature learning module was adopted as a bridging technique to connect different feature extraction modules. Importantly, UFO-Net employs multiple stacked blocks to better capture feature representation of the point cloud. Extensive ablation experiments on public datasets show that this method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. For instance, our network performed with 93.7% overall accuracy on the ModelNet40 dataset, which is 0.5% higher than PCT. Our network also achieved 83.8% overall accuracy on the ScanObjectNN dataset, which is 3.8% better than PCT

In vitro propagation of Camellia fascicularis: a plant species with extremely small populations

Camellia fascicularis is an endangered evergreen ornamental plant with pale yellow flowers. An efficient and reproducible in vitro regeneration method is required for its large-scale propagation and germplasm conservation. In this study, one axillary buds per nodal stem were obtained from C. fascicularis cultured on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium containing 0.1 mg/L of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) combined with 1.0 of mg/L 6-benzylaminopurine (BA). Axillary buds from the stem segments were transferred to the modified woody plant medium (WPM) supplemented with 3.0 mg/L of BA in combination with 0.3 mg/L of IAA for multiplication, thereby resulting in the highest shoot multiplication rate of 6.8. Multiple shoots were divided into nodal stems and shoot tips and were induced to root. The shoot tips were induced to root by culturing on 1/2 MS medium supplemented with 2.0 mg/L of indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) in combination with 0.3 mg/L of α-naphthalene acetic acid (NAA), which resulted in 76.0% rooting efficiency with 2.3 roots per shoot. The optimal hormone ratio for inducing root of nodal stems was 1.0 mg/L of IBA in combination with 2.0 mg/L of NAA, which produced 72.7% rooting efficiency with 1.7 roots per nodal stem. These two rooted plantlets were successfully acclimatized and established in a greenhouse.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author

Raft-Forensics: High Performance CFT Consensus with Accountability for Byzantine Faults

Crash fault tolerant (CFT) consensus algorithms are commonly used in scenarios where system components are trusted, such as enterprise settings. CFT algorithms offer high throughput and low latency, making them an attractive option for centralized operations that require fault tolerance. However, CFT consensus is vulnerable to Byzantine faults, which can be introduced by a single corrupt component. Such faults can break consensus in the system. Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms withstand Byzantine faults, but they are not as competitive with CFT algorithms in terms of performance. In this work, we explore a middle ground between BFT and CFT consensus by exploring the role of accountability in CFT protocols. That is, if a CFT protocol node breaks protocol and affects consensus safety, we aim to identify which node was the culprit. Based on Raft, one of the most popular CFT algorithms, we present Raft-Forensics, which provides accountability over Byzantine faults. We theoretically prove that if two honest components fail to reach consensus, the Raft-Forensics auditing algorithm finds the adversarial component that caused the inconsistency. In an empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that Raft-Forensics performs similarly to Raft and significantly better than state-of-the-art BFT algorithms. With 256 byte messages, Raft-Forensics achieves peak throughput 87.8% of vanilla Raft at 46% higher latency, while state-of-the-art BFT protocol Dumbo-NG only achieves 18.9% peak throughput at nearly $6\times$ higher latency

Links between mental health problems and future thinking from the perspective of adolescents with experience of depression and anxiety: a qualitative study

Abstract Background Depression and anxiety are common during adolescence and could have detrimental impacts on young people’s ability to make and implement plans for their future. However, to the best of our knowledge, no other study has adopted a qualitative approach in investigating these effects from the perspective of adolescents with lived experiences of depression and anxiety. We sought to understand how young people perceive and interpret the impact of mental health conditions on their thinking about the future. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 adolescents aged 16–19 years in the UK (median age = 19, IQR = 1.5), who had a history of protracted periods of clinical or subclinical depression and/or anxiety. They were asked to reflect on how their ability to think about the future and the content of the future-related thinking was impacted during periods of poor mental health, compared with periods of feeling well. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and subjected to thematic content analysis. Results Five domains were identified. First, the impact of mood on future thinking capability focuses on reduced ability and motivation to engage in future thinking. Second, the impact of mood on images, thoughts, and feelings about the future includes the emotional valence of future-related thoughts, their vividness, structure, and the extent to which they intimated subjective feelings of control (i.e., agency). Third, social influences focuses on social factors that might ameliorate or exacerbate future thinking. Fourth, reflections on personal worries and expectations about the future captures personal interpretations of past worries and hopes and how future thinking affected mood. Finally, personal coping refers to how young people cope with the negative emotions that come with future thinking. Conclusions This study provided a nuanced and granular account of how depression and anxiety impacted young people’s future thinking based on their lived experiences. By highlighting the different ways that variations in future thinking were experienced as a function of depression and anxiety, our analysis highlighted new factors that should be considered in studies of adolescent mental health risk, which could inform the development of new therapeutic approaches

CircRNA: functions and properties of a novel potential biomarker for cancer

Abstract Circular RNAs, a novel class of endogenous noncoding RNAs, are characterized by their covalently closed loop structures without a 5′ cap or a 3′ Poly A tail. Although the mechanisms of circular RNAs’ generation and function are not fully clear, recent research has shown that circular RNAs may function as potential molecular markers for disease diagnosis and treatment and play an important role in the initiation and progression of human diseases, especially in tumours. This review summarizes some information about categories, biogenesis, functions at the molecular level, properties of circular RNAs and the possibility of circular RNAs as biomarkers in cancers