Policy Incentives for the Adoption of Electric Vehicles across Countries

Electric vehicles (EVs) have prominent advantages for reducing CO 2 emissions and alleviating the dependence on fossil fuel consumption in the transport sector. Therefore, many countries have set targets for EV development in recent years and have employed a number of policies to achieve environmental objectives and alleviate the energy pressure. Despite the fact that the adoption of EVs has increased in the past few years, more policies, such as financial incentives, technology support or charging infrastructure, should be made by governments to promote broader range use of EVs. In this paper, we review the relevant policies that different countries may adopt for stimulating the market of EVs. Based on this, we analyze the relationship between the policies and the adoption of EVs by taking America as an example. In conclusion, some effective policies are summarized to spur the market. Therefore, each country should learn from each other and employ effective policies based on the actual situation. Document type: Articl

A general model of hormesis in biological systems and its application to pest management

Hormesis, a phenomenon whereby exposure to high levels of stressors is inhibitory but low (mild, sublethal and subtoxic) doses are stimulatory, challenges decision-making in the management of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, nutrition and ecotoxicology. In the latter, increasing amounts of a pesticide may lead to upsurges rather than declines of pests, ecological paradoxes that are difficult to predict. Using a novel re-formulation of the Ricker population equation, we show how interactions between intervention strengths and dose timings, dose–response functions and intrinsic factors can model such paradoxes and hormesis. A model with three critical parameters revealed hormetic biphasic dose and dose timing responses, either in a J-shape or an inverted U-shape, yielding a homeostatic change or a catastrophic shift and hormetic effects in many parameter regions. Such effects were enhanced by repeated pulses of low-level stimulations within one generation at different dose timings, thereby reducing threshold levels, maximum responses and inhibition. The model provides insights into the complex dynamics of such systems and a methodology for improved experimental design and analysis, with wide-reaching implications for understanding hormetic effects in ecology and in medical and veterinary treatment decision-making. We hypothesized that the dynamics of a discrete generation pest control system can be determined by various three parameter spaces, some of which reveal the conditions for occurrence of hormesis, and confirmed this by fitting our model to both hormetic data from the literature and to a non-hormetic dataset on pesticidal control of mirid bugs in cotton

FACC: A Novel Finite Automaton Based on Cloud Computing for the Multiple Longest Common Subsequences Search

Searching for the multiple longest common subsequences (MLCS) has significant applications in the areas of bioinformatics, information processing, and data mining, and so forth, Although a few parallel MLCS algorithms have been proposed, the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithms are not satisfactory with the increasing complexity and size of biologic data. To overcome the shortcomings of the existing MLCS algorithms, and considering that MapReduce parallel framework of cloud computing being a promising technology for cost-effective high performance parallel computing, a novel finite automaton (FA) based on cloud computing called FACC is proposed under MapReduce parallel framework, so as to exploit a more efficient and effective general parallel MLCS algorithm. FACC adopts the ideas of matched pairs and finite automaton by preprocessing sequences, constructing successor tables, and common subsequences finite automaton to search for MLCS. Simulation experiments on a set of benchmarks from both real DNA and amino acid sequences have been conducted and the results show that the proposed FACC algorithm outperforms the current leading parallel MLCS algorithm FAST-MLCS