Correlation between English Permo-Triassic sandstone lithofacies and permeability and its importance for groundwater

Predicting contaminant movement in aquifers is essential for the protection of groundwater resources. Contaminant movement is strongly influenced by hydraulic property heterogeneity. The aim of this project has been to determine if hydraulic property values are correlated with geological structures, even if the aquifer is a cemented sandstone: if they are, the correlations could be used in gaining insight into, and quantitatively estimating, solute transport. Example Permo-Triassic sandstone lithofacies associations across England were examined in order to determine common lithofacies geometries. Several thousand measurements of permeability and several hundred measurements of porosity were determined on a core from northern England and two outcrops from the Midlands in order to examine correlations with lithofacies. Two types of synthetic fluvial multiple channel systems with flow a long and across channels were then numerically simulated to determine the significance of the correlations found. Results indicate that the Permo-Triassic sandstones have a wide range of lithologies and permeabilities, varying between and within sequences and regions. Permeability is generally greater for aeolian sandstone than for fluvial sandstone. The borehole core stud y shows that lithofacies correlate with porosity, permeability, and permeability to porosity ratio, though some significant overlaps occur for permeabilities of the three coarser lithofacies. Mudclasts can reduce sandstone permeability of the two coarser lithofacies by up to 6 % and 8% respectively. Markov chain analysis indicates that the sequences of lithofacies are structured, and hence the permeability is also similarly structured. The two outcrop studies confirm that permeability structures vary more between than within beds. Solute transport modelling indicates that differing solute breakthrough patterns will occur with different types of hydraulic property distributions based on lithofacies geometry. Thus lithofacies correlations can be used to help predict solute movement, but transverse dispersion, not explicitly studied here, also appears particularly important. Generally, the heterogeneous porous medium can be reasonably represented by an equivalent homogeneous medium for prediction purposes, however determining appropriate properties for the equivalent homogeneous medium is challenging

Molecular organization in MAPLE‐deposited conjugated polymer thin films and the implications for carrier transport characteristics

The morphological structure of poly(3‐hexylthiophene) (P3HT) thin films deposited by both Matrix Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation (MAPLE) and solution spin‐casting methods are investigated. The MAPLE samples possessed a higher degree of disorder, with random orientations of polymer crystallites along the side‐chain stacking, π–π stacking, and conjugated backbone directions. Moreover, the average molecular orientations and relative degrees of crystallinity of MAPLE‐deposited polymer films are insensitive to the chemistries of the substrates onto which they were deposited; this is in stark contrast to the films prepared by the conventional spin‐casting technique. Despite the seemingly unfavorable molecular orientations and the highly disordered morphologies, the in‐plane charge carrier transport characteristics of the MAPLE samples are comparable to those of spin‐cast samples, exhibiting similar transport activation energies (56 vs. 54 meV) to those reported in the literature for high mobility polymers. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2017, 55, 39–48Molecular order in poly(3‐hexylthiophene) (P3HT) films deposited by the novel vapor‐assisted deposition technique Matrix Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation (MAPLE) was investigated. The structure of MAPLE‐deposited films is insensitive to the substrate chemistries and processes random crystallite orientation. The seemingly unfavorable morphology in MAPLE‐deposited samples however does not have detrimental effects on in‐plane transport characteristics, suggesting that field‐effect carrier transport in conjugated polymer devices is resilient to structure.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135123/1/polb24237.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135123/2/polb24237_am.pd

Monitoring thermal pollution in rivers downstream of dams with Landsat ETM+ thermal infrared images

Dams play a significant role in altering the spatial pattern of temperature in rivers and contribute to thermal pollution, which greatly affects the river aquatic ecosystems. Understanding the temporal and spatial variation of thermal pollution caused by dams is important to prevent or mitigate its harmful effect. Assessments based on in-situ measurements are often limited in practice because of the inaccessibility of water temperature records and the scarcity of gauges along rivers. By contrast, thermal infrared remote sensing provides an alternative approach to monitor thermal pollution downstream of dams in large rivers, because it can cover a large area and observe the same zone repeatedly. In this study, Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) thermal infrared imagery were applied to assess the thermal pollution caused by two dams, the Geheyan Dam and the Gaobazhou Dam, located on the Qingjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze River downstream of the Three Gorges Reservoir in Central China. The spatial and temporal characteristics of thermal pollution were analyzed with water temperatures estimated from 54 cloud-free Landsat ETM+ scenes acquired in the period from 2000 to 2014. The results show that water temperatures downstream of both dams are much cooler than those upstream of both dams in summer, and the water temperature remains stable along the river in winter, showing evident characteristic of the thermal pollution caused by dams. The area affected by the Geheyan Dam reaches beyond 20 km along the downstream river, and that affected by the Gaobazhou Dam extends beyond the point where the Qingjiang River enters the Yangtze River. Considering the long time series and global coverage of Landsat ETM+ imagery, the proposed technique in the current study provides a promising method for globally monitoring the thermal pollution caused by dams in large rivers

Molecular weight dependent structure and charge transport in MAPLE‐deposited poly(3‐hexylthiophene) thin films

In this work, poly(3‐hexylthiophene) (P3HT) films prepared using the matrix‐assisted pulsed laser evaporation (MAPLE) technique are shown to possess morphological structures that are dependent on molecular weight (MW). Specifically, the structures of low MW samples of MAPLE‐deposited film are composed of crystallites/aggregates embedded within highly disordered environments, whereas those of high MW samples are composed of aggregated domains connected by long polymer chains. Additionally, the crystallite size along the side‐chain (100) direction decreases, whereas the conjugation length increases with increasing molecular weight. This is qualitatively similar to the structure of spin‐cast films, though the MAPLE‐deposited films are more disordered. In‐plane carrier mobilities in the MAPLE‐deposited samples increase with MW, consistent with the notion that longer chains bridge adjacent aggregated domains thereby facilitating more effective charge transport. The carrier mobilities in the MAPLE‐deposited simples are consistently lower than those in the solvent‐cast samples for all molecular weights, consistent with the shorter conjugation length in samples prepared by this deposition technique. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2018, 56, 652–662The structure of MAPLE‐deposited P3HT thin films is shown to possess molecular weight (MW) dependence behavior. The MAPLE films deposited from low MW materials consist of crystallite domains embedded within a highly amorphous environment, whereas those deposited from high MW materials are composed of long polymer chains bridging the aggregate domains. The in‐plane mobility is shown to increase with MW, highlighting the importance of domain connectivity in facilitating charge transport in conjugated polymers.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142537/1/polb24588-sup-0001-suppinfo1.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142537/2/polb24588_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142537/3/polb24588.pd

A METHOD TO IMPROVE THE TIME OF COMPUTING BETWEENNESS CENTRALITY IN SOCIAL NETWORK GRAPH

The Betweenness centrality is an important metric in the graph theory and can be applied in the analyzing social network. The main researches about Betweenness centrality often focus on reducing the complexity. Nowadays, the number of users in the social networks is huge. Thus, improving the computing time of Betweenness centrality to apply in the social network is neccessary. In this paper, we propose the algorithm of computing Betweenness centrality by reduce the similar nodes in the graph in order to reducing computing time. Our experiments with graph networks result shows that the computing time of the proposed algorithm is less than Brandes algorithm. The proposed algorithm is compared with the Brandes algorithm [3] in term of execution time

Aspects of Life Insurance Agents' Performance in Vietnam: A Study from the Impact of Customer-Oriented Behavior

This study examined the influence of life insurance agents' customer-oriented action research on aspects of agents' personal sales performance. In particular, the agent's performance is considered in terms of behavioral effectiveness and outcome performance. The research was conducted through interviews and surveys of insurance agents of life insurance businesses in Hanoi city, with 158 feedback forms received. Data collection is group processed through supporting software support SPSS and PLS-SEM. The study results show that customer-oriented behavior substantially impacts life insurance agents' behavioral performance more than outcome performance. At the same time, behavioral performance also plays a mediating role in providing the performance of customer-oriented behavior to the performance outcomes of life insurance agents. The research results are the basis for the authors to propose some key tips for life insurance businesses in the current context of Vietnam's insurance market

Pro-poor intervention strategies in irrigated agriculture in Asia: poverty in irrigated agriculture: issues and options: Vietnam

Irrigated farming / Poverty / Farm income / Irrigation management / Institutions / Legal aspects / Water rates / User charges / Participatory management / Privatization / Participatory rural appraisal / Performance indexes / Irrigation programs / Irrigation systems / Pumping / Irrigation canals / Social aspects / Economic aspects / Rivers / Hydrology / Dams / Households / Income / Regression analysis / Drainage / Cooperatives / Water delivery / Water distribution / Rice / Financing / Drought / Vietnam / Red River Delta / Nam Duong Irrigation System / Nam Thach Han Irrigation System / Han River

A Large-Scale Study of a Sleep Tracking and Improving Device with Closed-loop and Personalized Real-time Acoustic Stimulation

Various intervention therapies ranging from pharmaceutical to hi-tech tailored solutions have been available to treat difficulty in falling asleep commonly caused by insomnia in modern life. However, current techniques largely remain ill-suited, ineffective, and unreliable due to their lack of precise real-time sleep tracking, in-time feedback on the therapies, an ability to keep people asleep during the night, and a large-scale effectiveness evaluation. Here, we introduce a novel sleep aid system, called Earable, that can continuously sense multiple head-based physiological signals and simultaneously enable closed-loop auditory stimulation to entrain brain activities in time for effective sleep promotion. We develop the system in a lightweight, comfortable, and user-friendly headband with a comprehensive set of algorithms and dedicated own-designed audio stimuli. We conducted multiple protocols from 883 sleep studies on 377 subjects (241 women, 119 men) wearing either a gold-standard device (PSG), Earable, or both concurrently. We demonstrate that our system achieves (1) a strong correlation (0.89 +/- 0.03) between the physiological signals acquired by Earable and those from the gold-standard PSG, (2) an 87.8 +/- 5.3% agreement on sleep scoring using our automatic real-time sleep staging algorithm with the consensus scored by three sleep technicians, and (3) a successful non-pharmacological stimulation alternative to effectively shorten the duration of sleep falling by 24.1 +/- 0.1 minutes. These results show that the efficacy of Earable exceeds existing techniques in intentions to promote fast falling asleep, track sleep state accurately, and achieve high social acceptance for real-time closed-loop personalized neuromodulation-based home sleep care.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figure

LIGNANS FROM LEAVES OF AMESIODENDRON CHINENSE AND THEIR CYTOTOXIC ACTIVITY

ABSTRACTFrom leaves of Amesiodendron chinense (Mer.) Hu four lignans (+)-aptosimon (1), (+)-isolariciresinol (2), (-)-cleomiscosin A (3), and (-)-cleomiscosin C (3) were isolated. Their structures were determined by spectroscopic analysis including MS, 1D and 2D NMR as well as by comparison with reported data in literature. All compounds were evaluated for cytotoxic activities against five human cancer cell lines, KB, SK-LU-1, MCF-7, HepG-2, and SW-480. They showed weak cytotoxic activity on five tested human cancer cell lines with IC50 values ranging from 32.61 to 95.18 µg/ml

Soluble proteins of chemical communication: an overview across arthropods

Detection of chemical signals both in insects and in vertebrates is mediated by soluble proteins, highly concentrated in olfactory organs, which bind semiochemicals and activate, with still largely unknown mechanisms, specific chemoreceptors. The same proteins are often found in structures where pheromones are synthesised and released, where they likely perform a second role in solubilising and delivering chemical messengers in the environment.A single class of soluble polypeptides, called Odorant-Binding Proteins (OBPs) is known in vertebrates, while two have been identified in insects, OBPs and CSPs (Chemosensory Proteins). Despite their common name, OBPs of vertebrates bear no structural similarity with those of insects. We observed that in arthropods OBPs are strictly limited to insects, while a few members of the CSP family have been found in crustacean and other arthropods, where however, based on their very limited numbers, a function in chemical communication seems unlikely.The question we address in this review is whether another class of soluble proteins may have been adopted by other arthropods to perform the role of OBPs and CSPs in insects. We propose that lipid-transporter proteins of the Niemann-Pick type C2 family could represent likely candidates and report the results of an analysis of their sequences in representative species of different arthropods