Parallel-Machine Scheduling Problems with Past-Sequence-Dependent Delivery Times and Aging Maintenance

We consider parallel-machine scheduling problems with past-sequence-dependent (psd) delivery times and aging maintenance. The delivery time is proportional to the waiting time in the system. Each machine has an aging maintenance activity. We develop polynomial algorithms to three versions of the problem to minimize the total absolute deviation of job completion times, the total load, and the total completion time

The Protective Effect of Cordymin, a Peptide Purified from the Medicinal Mushroom Cordyceps sinensis, on Diabetic Osteopenia in Alloxan-Induced Diabetic Rats

The aim of this study was to investigate the protective effect of cordymin on diabetic osteopenia in alloxan-induced diabetic rats and the possible mechanisms involved. The diabetic rats received daily intraperitoneal injection with cordymin (20, 50, and 100 mg/kg/day) for 5 weeks. Cordymin could restore the circulating blood glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP), tartrate resistant acid phosphatase (TRAP), and insulin levels in a dose-dependent manner. Also, the treatment of diabetic rats with cordymin could partially reverse the β cells death and decrease the total antioxidant status (TAOS) in the diabetic rats. The results may directly and indirectly account for the possible mechanism of the beneficial effect of cordymin on diabetic osteopenia, which was confirmed with the increased bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD) in diabetic rats (P<0.05). All those findings indicate that cordymin may play a protective role in diabetic osteoporosis

Effect and safety of shengxuening (extract from excrement of bombyxin) for renal anemia: a systematic review

OBJECTIVETo assess the effect and safety of Shengxuening (SXN), extract from excrement of bombyxin, in the treatment of renal anemia, compared to ferrous succinate and ferrous sulfate.METHODSAccording to the participant, intervention, comparison, outcomes, study design (PICOS) principles, we searched the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database, Chinese Evidence-Based Medicine Database, Wanfang Database (From establishment to December 2014). Two reviewers selected articles independently according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The quality of included studies was assessed by using the Cochrane Handbook. All statistical analyses were conducted by using Revman (vision 5.2) software.RESULTSA total of 14 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were enrolled in the review. The results revealed that, when compared with blank group, SXN significantly improved the hemoglobin (HB) levels [MD = 6.29, 95% CI (1.65–10.94), P < 0.0008] and albumin (ALB) [MD = 10.98, 95% CI (6.97–14.99), P < 0.00001]. In addition, SXN could significantly increase the HB levels [MD = 10.98, 95% CI (6.97, 14.99), P < 0.00001]. Compared with other oral medicine SXN could improve the HB levels effectively [MD = 8.49, 95% CI (2.40, 14.58), P = 0.006]. And the subgroups analysis shown that compared with ferrous-sulfate there were significant differences [MD = 17.4, 95% CI (15.06, 19.73), P < 0.000 01] and the result of ferrous-succinate had significant differences [MD = 5.34, 95% CI (2.12, 8.56), P = 0.001] too. Compared with Intravenous iron groups, there were statistical differences [MD = −5.04, 95% CI (−9.59, −0.50), P = 0.03]. In the safety analysis, the rate of adverse reactions in SXN groups and control groups were 19.3% and 3.7%, respectively (P < 0.000 01). Due to our studies were of poor methodological quality, and the sample size were small, the results were influenced by bias.CONCLUSIONSOur findings suggest that the SXN had better effect and was safer in the treatment of RA than ferrous succinate and ferrous sulfate

Conversational Speech Recognition by Learning Audio-textual Cross-modal Contextual Representation

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in conversational settings presents unique challenges, including extracting relevant contextual information from previous conversational turns. Due to irrelevant content, error propagation, and redundancy, existing methods struggle to extract longer and more effective contexts. To address this issue, we introduce a novel Conversational ASR system, extending the Conformer encoder-decoder model with cross-modal conversational representation. Our approach leverages a cross-modal extractor that combines pre-trained speech and text models through a specialized encoder and a modal-level mask input. This enables the extraction of richer historical speech context without explicit error propagation. We also incorporate conditional latent variational modules to learn conversational level attributes such as role preference and topic coherence. By introducing both cross-modal and conversational representations into the decoder, our model retains context over longer sentences without information loss, achieving relative accuracy improvements of 8.8% and 23% on Mandarin conversation datasets HKUST and MagicData-RAMC, respectively, compared to the standard Conformer model.Comment: Submitted to TASL

Coupling of RF Antennas to Large Volume Helicon Plasma

Large volume helicon plasma sources are of particular interest for large scale semiconductor processing, high power plasma propulsion and recently plasma-material interaction under fusion conditions. This work is devoted to studying the coupling of four typical RF antennas to helicon plasma with infinite length and diameter of $0.5$~m, and exploring its frequency dependence in the range of $13.56-70$~MHz for coupling optimization. It is found that loop antenna is more efficient than half helix, Boswell and Nagoya III antennas for power absorption; radially parabolic density profile overwhelms Gaussian density profile in terms of antenna coupling for low-density plasma, but the superiority reverses for high-density plasma. Increasing the driving frequency results in power absorption more near plasma edge, but the overall power absorption increases with frequency. Perpendicular stream plots of wave magnetic field, wave electric field and perturbed current are also presented. This work can serve as an important reference for the experimental design of large volume helicon plasma source with high RF power

A novel method of analyzing proline synonymous codons in E. coli

AbstractProline is a special imino acid in protein and the isomerization of the prolyl peptide bond has notable biological significance and influences the final structure of protein greatly, so the correlation between proline synonymous codon usage and local amino acid, the correlation between proline synonymous codon usage and the isomerization of the prolyl peptide bond were both investigated in the Escherichia coli genome by using a novel method based on information theory. The results show that in peptide chain, the residue at the first position C-terminal influences the usage of proline synonymous codon greatly and proline synonymous codons contain some factors influencing the isomerization of the prolyl peptide bond

Electrocatalytic Oxidation of Venlafaxine at a Multiwall Carbon Nanotubes-Ionic Liquid Gel Modified Glassy Carbon Electrode and Its Electrochemical Determination

The electrocatalytic oxidation of venlafaxine (VEN) was investigated at a glassy carbon electrode (GCE), the modified electrode by a gel containing multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and a room-temperature ionic liquid (RTIL), 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophate (BMIMPF6) in 0.10 mol L−1 phosphate buffer solution (PBS, pH 6.8). It was found that an irreversible anodic oxidation peak of VEN with the peak potential (Epa) as 0.780 V appeared at MWCNTs-RTIL/GCE. The electrode reaction process was a diffusion-controlled one and the electrochemical oxidation involved two electrons transferring and two protons participation. Furthermore, the charge-transfer coefficient (α), and the electrode reaction rate constant (kf) of VEN were found to be 0.91 and 3.04×10−2 s−1, respectively. Under the optimized conditions, the electrocatalytic oxidation peak currents were linearly dependent on the concentration of VEN in the concentration range from 2.0×10−6 mol L−1 ~ 2.0×10−3 mol L−1 with the limit of detection (S / N = 3) as 1.69×10−6 mol L−1. The proposed method has been successfully applied in the electrochemical quantitative determination of VEN content in commercial venlafaxine hydrochloride capsules and the determination results could meet the requirement of the quantitative determination

Data-driven design of fault diagnosis for three-phase PWM rectifier using random forests technique with transient synthetic features

A three-phase pulse-width modulation (PWM) rectifier can usually maintain operation when open-circuit faults occur in insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), which will lead the system to be unstable and unsafe. Aiming at this problem, based on random forests with transient synthetic features, a data-driven online fault diagnosis method is proposed to locate the open-circuit faults of IGBTs timely and effectively in this study. Firstly, by analysing the open-circuit fault features of IGBTs in the three-phase PWM rectifier, it is found that the occurrence of the fault features is related to the fault location and time, and the fault features do not always appear immediately with the occurrence of the fault. Secondly, different data-driven fault diagnosis methods are compared and evaluated, the performance of random forests algorithm is better than that of support vector machine or artificial neural networks. Meanwhile, the accuracy of fault diagnosis classifier trained by transient synthetic features is higher than that trained by original features. Also, the random forests fault diagnosis classifier trained by multiplicative features is the best with fault diagnosis accuracy can reach 98.32%. Finally, the online fault diagnosis experiments are carried out and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can accurately locate the open-circuit faults in IGBTs while ensuring system safety.Comment: IET Power Electronic