How psychological factors related to consumer preferences on plug-in electric passenger vehicles in Chinese cities?A comparison of cities with and without restrictions

This study examines the impacts of psychological factors on Chinese consumers’preferences of PEV features as well as PEV uptake intension in cities with and without license number plate restrictions. Psychological factors are relatively less investigated factors in the domestic literature, but consumers may not behave rational as researchers expected when facing such a complex choice problem. This study generates three latent psychological factors, namely knowledge of policy and PEVs, social influence, and environmental ttitudes/innovativeness, and integrates them with object-case best-worst scaling model through a hybrid choice model. Evidences show that knowledge and environmental attitudes are weaker compare to social influence and innovativeness, but these factors affect consumers’ preferences differently both at individual level and city level. To facilitate market-oriented PEV uptake, especially in areas without restrictions, improve reputation through interpersonal communication on technical features are expected. While in large cities with restrictions, through neighborhood effects and innovativeness, emphasizing air pollution and CO2 emission reduction features could be more efficient

The Practice of Policy about Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure in China——Data From A-Share Listed Companies of Heavy Polluting Industries

Corporate environmental disclosure policy is a system tool to solve the environmental information asymmetry problem, it has an extremely important significance to improve public participation in environmental activities, and promote the improvement of corporate environmental performance. However, there is less literature about the direct corporate environmental information disclosure policy, and these studies are mostly qualitative or small sample studies, reliability is low. In this paper, all the listed companies of A shares heavily polluting industries are studied as a large sample to research the health of corporate environmental information disclosure system, in order to find out that the system operation runs low performance, the quality of environmental information disclosure is not good enough, revealing the main reason lies in the system is unreasonable design, the poor independence of the regulatory authorities, and then, put forward some specific proposals.Objective: To investigate the practice of corporate environmental information disclosure policy, reveal its cause.Results: around seventy percent of heavily polluting industries listed companies have disclosed environmental information; the disclosure of the information mostly described in text or data; majority of environmental information disclosed in the Report of the Board of Directors or Accounting Statements; the disclosure of the mainly contents of environmental management and environmental governance; large gap between inter-industry enterprises  in the quality and quantity of environmental information disclosure.Research limitations and significance of research: This article examines only the data of corporate environmental disclosure policy operation of 2010, is a cross-sectional study. Follow-up longitudinal studies should be carried out to study the changes in corporate environmental disclosure before and after the implementation of the policy, empirical test whether the policy has a substantial impact on corporate environmental disclosure.Practical significance: this article summarizes the problems of corporate environmental disclosure, reveals its cause, and puts forward a reasonable proposal, which has an important reference value for government decision-making.Innovation and value: select all the listed companies of heavily polluting industries of 2010 as study sample firstly, to reflect the most important aspects of corporate environmental information disclosure policy runs

Unprecedented Migratory Bird Die-Off: A Citizen-Based Analysis on the Spatiotemporal Patterns of Mass Mortality Events in the Western United States

Extensive, severe wildfires, and wildfire-induced smoke occurred across the western and central United States since August 2020. Wildfires resulting in the loss of habitats and emission of particulate matter and volatile organic compounds pose serious threatens to wildlife and human populations, especially for avian species, the respiratory system of which are sensitive to air pollutions. At the same time, the extreme weather (e.g., snowstorms) in late summer may also impact bird migration by cutting off their food supply and promoting their migration before they were physiologically ready. In this study, we investigated the environmental drivers of massive bird die-offs by combining socioecological earth observations data sets with citizen science observations. We employed the geographically weighted regression models to quantitatively evaluate the effects of different environmental and climatic drivers, including wildfire, air quality, extreme weather, drought, and land cover types, on the spatial pattern of migratory bird mortality across the western and central US during August-September 2020. We found that these drivers affected the death of migratory birds in different ways, among which air quality and distance to wildfire were two major drivers. Additionally, there were more bird mortality events found in urban areas and close to wildfire in early August. However, fewer bird deaths were detected closer to wildfires in California in late August and September. Our findings highlight the important impact of extreme weather and natural disasters on bird biology, survival, and migration, which can provide significant insights into bird biodiversity, conservation, and ecosystem sustainability

Clinical observation of phacoemulsification in patients with previous trabeculectomy

AIM: To observe the clinical effect of transparent corneal incision phacoemulsification in cataract patients who had undergone different kinds of glaucoma filtration surgeries.<p>METHODS: Totally 43 cases(50 eyes), in which 23 patients with primary angle-closure glaucoma(group A, 26 eyes)and 20 patients with primary open angle glaucoma(group B, 24 eyes), all had undergone glaucoma filtration surgery for more than 6 months. Visual acuity, intraocular pressure, slit lamp, gonioscope, corneal endothelial cell counts, <i>etc</i>., were done before surgery.And transparent corneal incision phacoemulsification combined with artificial lens implantation operation were preformed, postoperative follow-up of 3 to 12 months, visual acuity, intraocular pressure, corneal endothelial cell counts and vision field, <i>etc</i>. were observed and recorded.<p>RESULTS: The visual acuity of 50 eyes(100%)increased with different degree postoperatively, 41 eyes(82%)with postoperative visual acuity ≥0.3; average preoperative intraocular pressure: group A 18.08±5.08mmHg(1mmHg=0.133kpa), group B 14.48±3.52mmHg; Postoperative follow-up average intraocular pressure: group A 13.65±3.51mmHg, group B 14.28±3.41 mmHg, intraocular pressure changed significantly pre and post-operation in group A(<i>P</i><0.05), there was no significant difference between pre and post-operation in group B(<i>P</i>>0.05); Postoperative intraocular pressure of 1 eye in group A and 3 eyes in group B rose within three days post-operation, the intraocular pressure fluctuated between 21-33mmHg, with drug therapy and drug withdral when intraocular pressure epistrophy; Intraocular pressure was stable in the follow-up process.Corneal endothelial cell density: pre-operation group A was 2 293.57±352.24(cells/mm²), group B 2 658.14±458.69(cells/mm²), post- operation group A 2 175.95±379.16(cells/mm²), group B 2 442.97±477.30(cells/mm²), cell loss rate: 5.13% in group A, and 8.10% in group B. Postoperative visual acuity was related to vision field damage in patients, the more visual field damage, the longer the duration. <p>CONCLUSION: Visual function restore is stable in transparent corneal incision phacoemulsification in cataract patients who underwent glaucoma filtration surgeries; the intraocular pressure can be controlled effectively, and can further reduce the intraocular pressure of angle-closure glaucoma. Preoperative comprehensive evaluation of the affected eye and appropriate technique selection are benefit to the improvement of operation effect and the reduction of complications

Design and Implementation of Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Environmental monitoring represents a major application domain for wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, despite significant advances in recent years, there are still many challenging issues to be addressed to exploit the full potential of the emerging WSN technology. In this dissertation, we introduce the design and implementation of low-power wireless sensor networks for long-term, autonomous, and near-real-time environmental monitoring applications. We have developed an out-of-box solution consisting of a suite of software, protocols and algorithms to provide reliable data collection with extremely low power consumption. Two wireless sensor networks based on the proposed solution have been deployed in remote field stations to monitor soil moisture along with other environmental parameters. As parts of the ever-growing environmental monitoring cyberinfrastructure, these networks have been integrated into the Texas Environmental Observatory system for long-term operation. Environmental measurement and network performance results are presented to demonstrate the capability, reliability and energy-efficiency of the network

Statistical Characteristics of Bed Load Rolling

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive

Feedback Linearization Control for Path Tracking of Articulated Dump Truck

The articulated dump truck is a widespread tansport vehicle for narrow rough terrain environment. To achieve the autonomous driving in the underground tunnel, this ariticle proporses a path following strategy of articulated vehicle based on feedback linearization algorithm. Fisrt of all, the articulated vehicle kinematics model, which reflects the relationship of the structure parameters and state variables, is established. Refering to the model, the nonlinear errors equation between real path and reference path, which are as the feedback from the path tracking process, is solved and linearized. After estimating the system controllable, according to the error equation, the path following controller with feedback linearization algorithm is designed through calaculating the parameters with the pole assignment. Finally, the hardware in the loop simulation on NI cRIO and PXI controller is lunched for verifying the control quality and real-time path tracking performance

Support Vector Selection for Regression Machines

In this paper, we propose a method to select support vectors to improve the performance of support vector regression machines. First, the orthogonal least-squares method is adopted to evaluate the support vectors based on their error reduction ratios. By selecting the representative support vectors, we can obtain a simpler model which helps avoid the over-fitting problem. Second, the simplified model is further refined by applying the gradient descent method to tune the parameters of the kernel functions. Learning rules for minimizing the regularized risk functional are derived. Experimental results have shown that our approach can improve effectively the generalization capability of support vector regressors