Road traffic safety management of visual pollution by outdoor advertisements

Visual pollution is a type of pollution that hinders the ability of the one to enjoy the view. The visual pollution can caused from many sources such as haze and lighting features. However, the most common and critical source of visual pollution is in the form of advertising especially in urban areas are signboards and billboards. Multiple studies have shown that excessive advertising in term of signboard and billboard can brought harmful effects to the public. The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of visual pollution caused by outdoor advertisements in Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. To fulfill this aim, three main objectives were developed. First, to study the policy and rules that governed the billboards and signboards installation, to determine the public perception on the visual pollution in term of billboards and signboards and finally is to propose the solutions to minimize the visual pollution and increase public awareness on the visual pollution. Two types of survey were conducted, which are interview and questionnaire distribution. Five respondents were randomly picked to determine their understanding on visual pollution by short interview session method. Based on the interview session, most of the interviewee was unfamiliar with visual pollution concept. This shows that the public level of awareness on visual pollution are still low compared to other types of pollution. A total of fifty visual type questionnaires that consists of three picture questions were dispersed. Based on the questionnaire result, most of the respondents from public believed that having large amount which is more than four number of billboards and signboards in a same area could cause the most visual pollution to the public. In addition, electronic billboard is also believed to cause higher visual pollution to the public compared to the conventional billboard. Nevertheless, billboard cause the most eye discomfort and distraction especially during night time from the public perception. The policy and rules that governed the billboards and signboards installation are studied in this research. The guideline for the installation of signboard and billboard was found to be not detailed which causing improper management and ultimately lead to visual pollution

A Generalized Alternative Theorem of Partial and Generalized Cone Subconvexlike Set-Valued Maps and Its Applications in Linear Spaces

We first introduce a new notion of the partial and generalized cone subconvexlike set-valued map and give an equivalent characterization of the partial and generalized cone subconvexlike set-valued map in linear spaces. Secondly, a generalized alternative theorem of the partial and generalized cone subconvexlike set-valued map was presented. Finally, Kuhn-Tucker conditions of set-valued optimization problems were established in the sense of globally proper efficiency

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Local Search Optimization for a Multi-state Series-parallel System

Generally, the redundancy allocation problem is characterized as a kind of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, which is difficult to solve with the classical method because it has exponentially increasing complexity with the augmented size. In this paper, we propose the efficient approach with two phases that is comprised of particle swarm optimization (PSO), which can efficiently represent the region search, and a local search, to solve the adjacent domains of best particle, which is great useful to improve optimization efficiency, and the parameter of local search is also studied

Local Search Optimization for a Multi-state Series-parallel System

Generally, the redundancy allocation problem is characterized as a kind of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, which is difficult to solve with the classical method because it has exponentially increasing complexity with the augmented size. In this paper, we propose the efficient approach with two phases that is comprised of particle swarm optimization (PSO), which can efficiently represent the region search, and a local search, to solve the adjacent domains of best particle, which is great useful to improve optimization efficiency, and the parameter of local search is also studied

A Human Health Risk Assessment of Trace Elements Present in Chinese Wine

The concentrations of trace elements in wines and health risk assessment via wine consumption were investigated in 315 wines. Samples were collected from eight major wine-producing regions in China. The concentrations of twelve trace elements were determined by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and Duncan’s multiple range test was applied to analyze significant variations (p < 0.05) of trace elements in different regions. Based on a 60 kg adult drinker consuming 200 mL of wine per day, the estimated daily intake (EDI) of each element from wines was far below the provisional tolerable daily intake (PTDI). Health risk assessment indicated the ingestion influence of individual elements and combined elements through this Chinese wine daily intake did not constitute a health hazard to people. However, Cr and Mn were the potential contaminants of higher health risk in Chinese wines. The cumulative impact of wine consumption on trace elements intake in the daily diet of drinkers should not be ignored due to the presence of other intake pathways

Optical design considerations of rear-side dielectric for higher efficiency of PERC solar cells

10.1364/OE.27.00A758OPTICS EXPRESS2712A758-A76

Retrieval of Atmospheric CO2 and CH4 Variations Using Ground-Based High Resolution Fourier Transform Infrared Spectra

High resolution Fourier transform near IR solar spectra are used to estimate the column-averaged dry-air mole fraction (DMF) of CO2 and CH4 variations in the atmosphere. The preliminary retrieval results for CO2 and CH4 variations in the area of Hefei, China, are presented, and the underlying error sources are also analyzed. Both a forward analysis and an inversion algorithm are included in the retrieval. The forward analysis uses the modeled atmospheric transmittance to line-by-line (LBL) convolute the instrument line shape function. The influences of the temperature, pressure, humidity, and a priori gases are considered in the atmospheric transmittance model. The inversion algorithm is based on the nonlinear iterative and nonlinear least squares spectral fitting, which is used to obtain VCDCO2 and VCDCH4 (which represent vertical column density of CO2 and CH4, resp.). Furthermore, the VCDO2 is also retrieved for converting the VCDs into DMFs. DMFs are final products of data analysis. The inversion results can clearly resolve the tiny variations of CO2 and CH4 under strong atmospheric background. Spectral fitting residuals for both VCDCO2 and VCDCH4 are less than 0.5%. Finally, CO2 and CH4 diurnal variations are investigated based on a typical observation. About 2 ppm amplitude for DMFCO2 diurnal variations and less than 15 ppb amplitude for DMFCH4 are observed