Linking a storm water management model to a novel two-dimensional model for urban pluvial flood modeling

This article describes a new method of urban pluvial flood modeling by coupling the 1D storm water management model (SWMM) and the 2D flood inundation model (ECNU Flood-Urban). The SWMM modeling results (the overflow of the manholes) are used as the input boundary condition of the ECNU Flood-Urban model to simulate the rainfall–runoff processes in an urban environment. The analysis is applied to the central business district of East Nanjing Road in downtown Shanghai, considering 5-, 10-, 20-, 50-, and 100-year return period rainfall scenarios. The results show that node overflow, water depth, and inundation area increase proportionately with the growing return periods. Water depths are mostly predicted to be shallow and surface flows generally occur in the urban road network due to its low-lying nature. The simulation result of the coupled model proves to be reliable and suggests that urban surface water flooding could be accurately simulated by using this methodology. Adaptation measures (upgrading of the urban drainage system) can then be targeted at specific locations with significant overflow and flooding

A vulnerability assessment of urban emergency in schools of Shanghai

Schools and students are particularly vulnerable to natural hazards, especially pluvial flooding in cities. This paper presents a scenario-based study that assesses the school vulnerability of emergency services (i.e., Emergency Medical Service and Fire & Rescue Service) to urban pluvial flooding in the city center of Shanghai, China through the combination of flood hazard analysis and GIS-based accessibility mapping. Emergency coverages and response times in various traffic conditions are quantified to generate school vulnerability under normal no-flood and 100-y pluvial flood scenarios. The findings indicate that severe pluvial flooding could lead to proportionate and linear impacts on emergency response provision to schools in the city. Only 11% of all the schools is predicted to be completely unreachable (very high vulnerability) during flood emergency but the majority of the schools would experience significant delay in the travel times of emergency responses. In this case, appropriate adaptations need to be particularly targeted for specific hot-spot areas (e.g., new urbanized zones) and crunch times (e.g., rush hours)

Bias of area counted from sub-pixel map:Origin and correction

With the increasingly widespread use of sub-pixel mapping techniques in land cover/use mapping, more accurate area information is often required for a specific land cover type in a particular study region. However, the bias of area counted from sub-pixel maps (called area bias below), and the inadequate understanding of the area bias's origin and influential factors pose a challenge to using this information accurately. Traditional model-assisted estimators combining the map and the reference sample showed unreliable performances in the case of small sample sizes collected in target regions. This work presented a theoretical analysis of the origin of area bias. It then proposed a novel bias-adjusted estimator which can effectively deal with the small sample sizes. The theoretical analysis illustrated that area bias mainly originates from two terms, i.e., the abundance-dependent error and the probability distribution of abundances. We next developed a stratified bias-adjusted area estimator named the two-term method (TTM) by incorporating the sub-pixel map and a reference sample obtained from both target and external regions. We validated the effects of different sub-pixel mapping methods, different spatial resolutions, the varying spatial structures of statistical units on area bias, and the performance of TTM in correcting the biased areas in multiple cases. The results showed that area bias varied from zero to approximately 20% with the variation of three influential factors. TTM effectively corrected the biased area values to nearly the true values, showing approximate equivalence with the traditional stratified regression estimator (STRE) when adequate reference samples are collected sorely inside target regions. However, in cases of small samples from target regions, TTM showed significant superiority over STRE in reducing the variance and MSE due to the incorporation of external reference samples. We conclude that the theoretical analysis resulted in a better understanding of area bias counted from sub-pixel maps and an improved area estimator for dealing with the cases of small sample sizes inside target regions.</p

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Fine-mapping analysis including over 254,000 East Asian and European descendants identifies 136 putative colorectal cancer susceptibility genes

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 200 common genetic variants independently associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but the causal variants and target genes are mostly unknown. We sought to fine-map all known CRC risk loci using GWAS data from 100,204 cases and 154,587 controls of East Asian and European ancestry. Our stepwise conditional analyses revealed 238 independent association signals of CRC risk, each with a set of credible causal variants (CCVs), of which 28 signals had a single CCV. Our cis-eQTL/mQTL and colocalization analyses using colorectal tissue-specific transcriptome and methylome data separately from 1299 and 321 individuals, along with functional genomic investigation, uncovered 136 putative CRC susceptibility genes, including 56 genes not previously reported. Analyses of single-cell RNA-seq data from colorectal tissues revealed 17 putative CRC susceptibility genes with distinct expression patterns in specific cell types. Analyses of whole exome sequencing data provided additional support for several target genes identified in this study as CRC susceptibility genes. Enrichment analyses of the 136 genes uncover pathways not previously linked to CRC risk. Our study substantially expanded association signals for CRC and provided additional insight into the biological mechanisms underlying CRC development

Hybrid Method for Inverse Elastic Obstacle Scattering Problems

The problem of determining the shape of an object from knowledge of the far-field of a single incident wave in two-dimensional elasticity was considered. We applied an iterative hybrid method to tackle this problem. An advantage of this method is that it does not need a forward solver, and therefore, the exact boundary condition is not essential. By deriving the Fréchet derivatives of two boundary operators, we established reconstruction algorithms for objects with Dirichlet, Neumann, and Robin boundary conditions; by introducing a general boundary condition, we also established the reconstruction algorithm for objects with unknown physical properties. Numerical experiments showed the effectiveness of the proposed method

Denial-of-Service Attack Defense Strategy for Continuous Variable Quantum Key Distribution via Deep Learning

In the practical Continuous Variable Quantum Key Distribution (CVQKD) system, there is a large gap between the ideal theoretical model and the actual physical system. There are still some inevitable flaws, which give quantum hackers the opportunity to manipulate the channel in complex communication environments and launch Denial of Service attacks on the quantum channel. Therefore, a DoS attack-aware defense scheme for the CVQKD system based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) is proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed model can effectively detect DoS attacks launched by quantum hackers in CVQKD system in a complex communication environment, and the model has strong robustness due to the addition of the attention mechanism module. In addition, multiple sets of comparative experiments show that compared with the existing artificial neural network model, the CNN-based model has higher accuracy and stability

Coupling and Coordination Measurement of the Development Level of China’s Financial Industry and Logistics Industry

Based on the panel data of 31 China’s provinces and cities, depending on discussing the significance of the coordination development of the financial industry and the logistics industry, the entropy method and the coupling coordination degree model were used to empirically analyze the dynamic coupling development of China's financial industry and logistics industry. Empirical analysis shows that during the sample period, the coordination development level of China's logistics industry and the financial industry had achieved a transition from overall disorder to overall coordination, but there was still a large potential for improvement. The level of coupling and coordination development was east-central-west declining trend in three steps. Guangdong was the province with the highest level of coupling and coordination development. Tibet, Qinghai, Ningxia, Hainan, and Tianjin were the provinces and cities with the lowest level of coupling and coordination development