The impacts of air pollution on human and natural capital in China: A look from a provincial perspective

Abstract Air quality has a significant impact on human health and natural systems worldwide. China, as one of the largest developing countries, faces very much serious air pollution and requires much attention. While the influences of air pollution on human or nature have been extensively investigated, few scholars considered the two effects of air pollution on human health and nature simultaneously based on the same framework. Indeed, human and nature coexist in the same biosphere on which they depend for their development and the impacts of air pollution on human health and nature occur at the same time with different and synergic effects. Only by considering both impacts we can develop a more comprehensive understanding of air pollution impacts, in particular including SO2, NO2, CO, PM10 and PM2.5. Impacts can be looked at from the point of view of damage provided and damage repair (health recovery, replacement cost). Therefore, considering the different pollutants and sectors, the influences of air pollution on human health and nature are accounted for in this study by applying the Emergy Accounting and Life Cycle Assessment Eco-indicator 99 methods under a unified framework in 31 provinces of China taken as case study. While LCA provides an accurate assessment of the direct consequences of pollution on human and natural capital (human health and biodiversity losses), the Emergy Accounting approach quantifies the biosphere work associated to repair or replace such losses over time. Furthermore, the spatial agglomeration characteristics of emissions, human and natural capital losses analyzed by means of Moran's I index. Results show that: (1) Concerning human capital losses, the amount of emissions of PM10 and PM2.5 only account for 10% of total impacts, compared to SO2, NO2, and CO emissions, but in some provinces cause more than 70% of human capital losses. And more than 80% of PM2.5 and PM10 that cause human capital losses come from the industrial and civil sectors. (2) As far as natural capital losses are concerned, compared with SO2, the losses caused by NO2 account for 80% in most provinces. And the power, industrial and transportation sectors are the three major sources of NO2 causing natural capital losses. (3) The spatial agglomeration characteristics, such as high-high cluster, high-low cluster, low-low cluster and low–high cluster, are different for air pollution emissions, human and natural capital losses. A comprehensive and detailed understanding of the impacts of air pollution is crucial for policy makers to take informed decisions

Type-Directed Operational Semantics for Gradual Typing

The semantics of gradually typed languages is typically given indirectly via an elaboration into a cast calculus. This contrasts with more conventional formulations of programming language semantics, where the semantics of a language is given directly using, for instance, an operational semantics. This paper presents a new approach to give the semantics of gradually typed languages directly. We use a recently proposed variant of small-step operational semantics called type-directed operational semantics (TDOS). In TDOS type annotations become operationally relevant and can affect the result of a program. In the context of a gradually typed language, such type annotations are used to trigger type-based conversions on values. We illustrate how to employ TDOS on gradually typed languages using two calculi. The first calculus, called ? B^g, is inspired by the semantics of the blame calculus, but it has implicit type conversions, enabling it to be used as a gradually typed language. The second calculus, called ? B^r, explores a different design space in the semantics of gradually typed languages. It uses a so-called blame recovery semantics, which enables eliminating some false positives where blame is raised but normal computation could succeed. For both calculi, type safety is proved. Furthermore we show that the semantics of ? B^g is sound with respect to the semantics of the blame calculus, and that ? B^r comes with a gradual guarantee. All the results have been mechanically formalized in the Coq theorem prover

Type-Directed Operational Semantics for Gradual Typing (Artifact)

This artifact includes the Coq formalization associated with the paper Type-Directed Operational Semantics for Gradual Typing submitted in ECOOP 2021. The paper illustrates how to employ TDOS on gradually typed languages using two calculi. The first calculus, called ?B, is inspired by the semantics of the blame calculus(?B^g) and is sound with ?B^g. The second calculus, called ?B^r, explores a different design space in the semantics of gradually typed languages. This document explains how to run the Coq formalization. Artifact can either be compiled in the pre-built docker image with all the dependencies installed or it could be built from the scratch. Sections 1-7 explain the basic information about the artifact. Section 7 explains how to get the docker image for the artifact. Section 8 explains the prerequisites and the steps to run coq files from scratch. Section 9 explains coq files briefly. Section 10 shows the correspondence of important lemmas, definitions and pictures discussed in the paper with their respective Coq formalization

Strongly enhanced dielectric and energy storage properties in lead-free perovskite titanate thin films by alloying

Lead-free perovskite oxide thin films prepared by alloying of titanates and materials with lower melting points are shown to have enhanced ferroelectric and dielectric properties. BaTiO3 (or SrTiO3) with 25% addition of BiFeO3 has much improved crystalline perfection because of the lower melting point of the BiFeO3 giving enhanced growth kinetics. The maximum dielectric peak temperature of BaTiO3 is increased by similar to 200 degrees C and leakage currents are reduced by up to a factor of similar to 100. The loss tangent reduces up to 300 degrees C, with a factor of > 14 reduction at room temperature. The dielectric breakdown strength is higher by a factor of similar to 3 (> 2200 kV cm(-1)) and from room temperature up to 500 degrees C the dielectric constant is > 1000. Also, a low variation of dielectric constant of similar to 9% from room temperature to 330 degrees C is obtained, compared to similar to 110% for BaTiO3. The maximum polarization (P-max) is double that of BaTiO3, at 125.3 mu C cm(-2). The film has high energy storage densities of > 52 J cm(-3) at 2050 kV cm(-1), matching Pb-based ferroelectric films. The strongly improved performance is important for applications in energy storage and in high temperature (up to 300 degrees C) capacitors as well as wider application in other electronic and energy technologie

Knowledge-guided Pairwise Reconstruction Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Grounding

Weakly supervised referring expression grounding (REG) aims at localizing the referential entity in an image according to linguistic query, where the mapping between the image region (proposal) and the query is unknown in the training stage. In referring expressions, people usually describe a target entity in terms of its relationship with other contextual entities as well as visual attributes. However, previous weakly supervised REG methods rarely pay attention to the relationship between the entities. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-guided pairwise reconstruction network (KPRN), which models the relationship between the target entity (subject) and contextual entity (object) as well as grounds these two entities. Specifically, we first design a knowledge extraction module to guide the proposal selection of subject and object. The prior knowledge is obtained in a specific form of semantic similarities between each proposal and the subject/object. Second, guided by such knowledge, we design the subject and object attention module to construct the subject-object proposal pairs. The subject attention excludes the unrelated proposals from the candidate proposals. The object attention selects the most suitable proposal as the contextual proposal. Third, we introduce a pairwise attention and an adaptive weighting scheme to learn the correspondence between these proposal pairs and the query. Finally, a pairwise reconstruction module is used to measure the grounding for weakly supervised learning. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets show our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.Comment: Accepted by ACMMM 2019. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1908.1056

Using economic evaluations to support acupuncture reimbursement decisions: current evidence and gaps

Hongchao Li and colleagues explore the global challenges of including economic evaluations in decisions about reimbursement for acupunctur