Study on Competitive Advantages of Starbucks Surfers’ Paradise Coffee Shop

This study is conducted to give a clear picture of the competitive advantage of the Starbucks Surfers’ Paradise coffee shop. With this purpose as the direction, a thorough marketing research is conducted. According to results of the research, a conclusion of the competitive advantages of the shop is achieved based on the analysis of its marketing mix and positioning. Generally speaking, the Starbucks Surfers’ Paradise coffee shop’ convenient location, guaranteed high quality of both coffee and service, and the Starbucks brand itself give it assurance of success.Key words: Competitive advantages; Starbucks; Marketing mi

Surface engineering and self-cleaning properties of the novel TiO2/PAA/PTFE ultrafiltration membranes

Immobilization of nano-scaled TiO2 onto polymeric ultrafiltration (UF) membrane offers desirable antifouling and self-cleaning properties to the membrane, which is practical in wastewater purification only if the mechanical strength and long-term self-cleaning durability are realized. This paper reported the surface roughness, mechanical properties, thermal stability, and recycling self-cleaning performance of the novel TiO2/PAA/PTFE UF membranes, which were coated via an innovative plasma-intensified coating strategy. Through careful characterizations, the enhanced engineering properties and the self-cleaning performance were correlated with the surface chemical composition and the creative coating technique. In the recycling photocatalytic self-cleaning tests in photodegradation of methylene blue (MB) solution, about 90 % MB photocatalytic capability of TiO2/PAA/PTFE composite membranes could be recovered with simple hydraulic cleaning combined with UV irradiation. The mechanical properties and thermal stability of TiO2/PAA/PTFE also satisfy the practical application in water and wastewater treatments, despite that the original engineering properties were slightly influenced by PAA grafting and TiO2 coating. The changed properties of the composite UF membrane relative to PTFE are reasonably attributed to the variation of the surface chemical species and chemical bonding, as well as the thickness and evenness of the surface functional layer

Prospect of aquaponics for the sustainable development of food production in urban

Aquaponics refers to a system that combines aquaculture (raising aquatic animals like fish) with hydroponics (cultivating vegetable plants in water) in a symbiotic environment. This system has great potential as a new industrialised food production approach to meet the needs of rapid urbanisation. An evolutional food production system with high productivity and low resource consumption is desirable. Aquaponics is designed based on excellent ecology recycling system, i.e. the food residues and metabolic products in the effluent of aquaculture are pollutants to the environment; they are also the source of nutrients that can be converted and mineralised via microbial treatment and eventually up taken by plants in the hydroponics section. The effluent of hydroponics section is then recycled as clean water for the aquaculture section. Home-based aquaponics (HA), factory-based aquaponics (FA) and building-based aquaponics (BA) are the typical forms of aquaponics for different urban development. The sustainability of aquaponics practices is evaluated using the “triple-bottomline” approach, which requires assessment of impacts on environmental, economic and societal systems. There is a lack of systematic research and modelling work reported on aquaponics, especially in terms of ecological manipulation. Understanding the conversion of the pollutants in the combined system is essential to achieve the optimal manipulation of ecology for optimal system operation. Future work will focus on the production of pollutants in aquaculture, the conversion and degradation of the pollutants in the microbial treatment section, and uptake of organic nutrients and inorganic salts in the hydroponics section. Development of a model, capable of describing the release of pollutants, conversion and uptake of nutrients and the production of metabolic products, is desirable. The model could be developed based on the mass balance of nutrition, productivity of fish and plants and the environmental factors. The aquaponics system could be simulated and analysed using this model so as to provide an optimal system for the design and implementation of different type of aquaponics

Occurrence and Distribution of Microcystins in Lake Taihu, China

The occurrence and distribution of microcystins were investigated in Lake Taihu, the third largest lake in China. An extensive survey, larger and broader in scale than previous studies, was conducted in summer 2010. The highest microcystin concentration was found at southern part of Taihu, which was newly included in this survey. In northern coastal areas, total cellular concentrations of 20 to 44 μg/L were observed. In northern offshore waters, levels were up to 4.8 μg/L. Microcystin occurrence was highly correlated with chemical oxygen demand, turbidity, and chlorophyll-a. Extracellular/total cellular microcystin (E/T) ratios were calculated and compared to other water quality parameters. A higher correlation was found using E/T ratios than original microcystin values. These results show that algal blooms are having a severe impact on Lake Taihu, and further and extensive monitoring and research are required to suppress blooms effectively

Occurrence and Distribution of Microcystins in

The occurrence and distribution of microcystins were investigated in Lake Taihu, the third largest lake in China. An extensive survey, larger and broader in scale than previous studies, was conducted in summer 2010. The highest microcystin concentration was found at southern part of Taihu, which was newly included in this survey. In northern coastal areas, total cellular concentrations of 20 to 44 g/L were observed. In northern offshore waters, levels were up to 4.8 g/L. Microcystin occurrence was highly correlated with chemical oxygen demand, turbidity, and chlorophyll-a. Extracellular/total cellular microcystin (E/T) ratios were calculated and compared to other water quality parameters. A higher correlation was found using E/T ratios than original microcystin values. These results show that algal blooms are having a severe impact on Lake Taihu, and further and extensive monitoring and research are required to suppress blooms effectively

Study on Imbalance Development of China’s Economic Growth and Income Distribution

In the past 30 years, China’s economy has scored remarkable achievements named as a miracle of economic growth. During that period, income levels and wealth of Chinese people have been a huge increase and improvement. At the same time, we cannot deny the fact that economic growth and uneven income distribution is a developing trend: increasing people’s income growth rate is lower than the growth rate of gross national income; income distribution abnormalities, and the gap between the poor and rich is widened. With statistical data, this thesis tries to reveal the typical fact of China’s rapid economic growth since 1978 first, then discussing the status of distribution of income and degree of abnormal development. Finally, this thesis puts forward some countermeasures

Comparison and Validation of Deep Learning Models for the Diagnosis of Pneumonia

As a respiratory infection, pneumonia has gained great attention from countries all over the world for its strong spreading and relatively high mortality. For pneumonia, early detection and treatment will reduce its mortality rate significantly. Currently, X-ray diagnosis is recognized as a relatively effective method. The visual analysis of a patient’s X-ray chest radiograph by an experienced doctor takes about 5 to 15 minutes. When cases are concentrated, this will undoubtedly put tremendous pressure on the doctor’s clinical diagnosis. Therefore, relying on the naked eye of the imaging doctor has very low efficiency. Hence, the use of artificial intelligence for clinical image diagnosis of pneumonia is a necessary thing. In addition, artificial intelligence recognition is very fast, and the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved better performance than human beings in terms of image identification. Therefore, we used the dataset which has chest X-ray images for classification made available by Kaggle with a total of 5216 train and 624 test images, with 2 classes as normal and pneumonia. We performed studies using five mainstream network algorithms to classify these diseases in the dataset and compared the results, from which we improved MobileNet’s network structure and achieved a higher accuracy rate than other methods. Furthermore, the improved MobileNet’s network could also extend to other areas for application

Fabrication of TiO2-modified polytetrafluoroethylene ultrafiltration membranes via plasma-enhanced surface graft pretreatment

Surface hydrophilic modification of polymer ultrafiltration membrane using metal oxide represents an effective yet highly challenging solution to improve water flux and antifouling performance. Via plasma-enhanced graft of poly acryl acid (PAA) prior to coating TiO2, we successfully fixed TiO2 functional thin layer on super hydrophobic polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) ultrafiltration (UF) membranes. The characterization results evidenced TiO2 attached on the PTFE-based UF membranes through the chelating bidentate coordination between surface-grafted carboxyl group and Ti4+. The TiO2 surface modification may greatly reduce the water contact angle from 115.8° of the PTFE membrane to 35.0° without degradation in 30-day continuous filtration operations. The novel TiO2/PAA/PTFE membranes also exhibited excellent antifouling and self-cleaning performance due to the intrinsic hydrophilicity and photocatalysis properties of TiO2, which was further confirmed by the photo-degradation of MB under Xe lamp irradiation