Application and Prospect of Geographical Information System in Strategic Environmental Assessment

Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is a new and promising tool to evaluate the possible environmental impacts and other sustainability aspects of government policies, plans and programs as well as their alternatives, aiming at the effectively integration of environmental concerns into their decision-making processes. It is recognized that spatial issues are always evolved in the SEA process for the reason that the strategic decision-maker pays much attention to the geographical distribution of various impacts. The essential features of strategic decisions, such as the macro-scale on time and geography, complexity of spatial information and social-economic-environmental multiplex system, are leading to the insufficiency of traditional EIA-based methods in assisting strategic decision-making. SEA practitioners have to seek for more effective approaches to handle the spatial uncertainties. Geographical information system (GIS), integrating computer design and database technology, is able to gather, simulate, analyze and display spatial information effectively, and provides a technological support to the synthesized evaluation and quantitative analysis. Based on the statement of SEA conception and characteristics, the author employs a detailed discussion on the advantages of GIS in SEA process and finds that GIS can not only help SEA operators to grasp the macro-scale of time and geography of strategic decisions much better, but also provide visible and intuitionistic displays on the spatial information to make decision-makers and publics understanding and accepting final conclusions much easier. Meanwhile, the author indicates that GIS with various tools, simulation models and powerful spatial analysis functions, can contribute to a more scientific, synthetic forecast and cumulative effects evaluation; provide much more quantitative analysis and improve the reliability of SEA results. Finally, the challenges and prospects of GIS in SEA process are presented in this paper. Key words: Strategic environmental assessment; Geographical information system; Information display; Spatial analysis Financial supports from National Social Sciences Fund (NSSF) in China: Research on Circular Economy Based on Win-win of Economic Development and Ecological Environmental Protection (06&ZD029) are highly appreciated

Optical Monitoring of the Seyfert Galaxy NGC 4151 and Possible Periodicities in the Historical Light Curve

We report B, V, and R band CCD photometry of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 4151 obtained with the 1.0-m telescope at Weihai Observatory of Shandong University and the 1.56-m telescope at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory from 2005 December to 2013 February. Combining all available data from literature, we have constructed a historical light curve from 1910 to 2013 to study the periodicity of the source using three different methods (the Jurkevich method, the Lomb-Scargle periodogram method and the Discrete Correlation Function method). We find possible periods of P_1=4\pm0.1, P_2=7.5\pm0.3 and P_3=15.9\pm0.3 yr.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Accepted by Research in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Giant gallstone performed by emergency laparoscopic cholecystectomy

AbstractINTRODUCTIONGallstone disease is very common, but the gallstone bigger than 5cm in diameter is very rare. It is very challenging to be removed by laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) and poses extra difficulty in emergency.PRESENTATION OF CASEA 70-year-old man complained of abdominal pain in the right upper quadrant with fever of 38°C for two days. Abdominal ultrasound indicated acute cholecystitis and a single, extremely large gallstone (95mm×60mm×45mm). Emergency laparoscopic cholecystectomy was performed successfully.DISCUSSIONGallstone over 5cm in diameter is very rare. LC will be very difficult for these cases, especially for the emergency cases. Emergency laparoscopic cholecystectomy can be successfully performed with clear exposure of the anatomy of the Calot's triangle. To the best of our knowledge, such giant gallstone has been rarely reported.CONCLUSIONWe have proven that for the rare giant gallstone about 10cm in size, LC is a feasible option if the anatomy of the Calot's triangle can be clearly exposed; otherwise, open cholecystectomy is a safe choice

Fourier-based Rotation-invariant Feature Boosting: An Efficient Framework for Geospatial Object Detection

Geospatial object detection of remote sensing imagery has been attracting an increasing interest in recent years, due to the rapid development in spaceborne imaging. Most of previously proposed object detectors are very sensitive to object deformations, such as scaling and rotation. To this end, we propose a novel and efficient framework for geospatial object detection in this letter, called Fourier-based rotation-invariant feature boosting (FRIFB). A Fourier-based rotation-invariant feature is first generated in polar coordinate. Then, the extracted features can be further structurally refined using aggregate channel features. This leads to a faster feature computation and more robust feature representation, which is good fitting for the coming boosting learning. Finally, in the test phase, we achieve a fast pyramid feature extraction by estimating a scale factor instead of directly collecting all features from image pyramid. Extensive experiments are conducted on two subsets of NWPU VHR-10 dataset, demonstrating the superiority and effectiveness of the FRIFB compared to previous state-of-the-art methods