The Environmental Impact of Plastic Waste

The pollution caused by disposable plastic products is becoming more and more serious, and “plastic limit” has become a global consensus. This article mainly discusses the pollution problem from the following aspects: Integrate all relevant important indicators to establish a multiple regression model of the maximum amount of disposable plastic waste to estimate the maximum amount of disposable waste in the future without causing further damage to the environment; Establish an environmental safety level evaluation model and analyze the impact of plastic waste on environmental safety; Try to set the lowest level target that can be achieved by global waste at this stage, and conduct correlation analysis on the impact of humans, enterprises, and the environment; Select several countries based on their comprehensive strengths, conduct a comparative analysis of their plastic production, economic strength, and environment, and try to explore their responsibilities

How To Reorganize Social Network For Better Knowledge Contribution During Mobile Collaboration? A Study Based On Anti-Social Behavioral Perspective

Mobile collaboration is an emerging kind of collaboration that adopts mobile devices (i.e., laptops, PDAs, and smart phones) and social media software to improve the efficiency and productivity of collaboration. However, many collaborative teams suffer from an anti-social behavior called social loafing. Social loafing will hinder knowledge exchange within the team and further influence team performance and project outcomes. Moreover, the state of an individual’s social loafing is unobservable and changes overtime, making it difficult to be identified in real time. Therefore, our research aims to investigate the evolution of social loafing and its impact on knowledge contribution in the mobile collaboration context. We propose a machine learning model to infer individuals’ unobserved and evolving social loafing state from the series of task behaviors (quantity and quality of the contributed knowledge). Also, we explore how one’s centrality in a social network affects his/her knowledge contribution behavior when he/she is in different social loafing states. We conduct an empirical study and the results show that individuals with high or low social loafing state are very ‘sticky’ to maintain the previous state and the centrality in the network only positively influences individuals in medium social loafing state. In conclusion, our research adopts a machine leaning method to infer the evolution of individuals’ social loafing and provides a comprehensive understanding of knowledge contribution in team work

6G Non-Terrestrial Networks Enabled Low-Altitude Economy: Opportunities and Challenges

The unprecedented development of non-terrestrial networks (NTN) utilizes the low-altitude airspace for commercial and social flying activities. The integration of NTN and terres- trial networks leads to the emergence of low-altitude economy (LAE). A series of LAE application scenarios are enabled by the sensing, communication, and transportation functionalities of the aircrafts. The prerequisite technologies supporting LAE are introduced in this paper, including the network coverage and aircrafts detection. The LAE functionalities assisted by aircrafts with respect to sensing and communication are then summarized, including the terrestrial and non-terrestrial targets sensing, ubiquitous coverage, relaying, and traffic offloading. Finally, several future directions are identified, including aircrafts collaboration, energy efficiency, and artificial intelligence enabled LAE.Comment: This paper has been submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio

Combined effects of tenofovir and interferon α1b on viral load and levels of peripheral regulatory T cells in chronic hepatitis B subjects

Purpose: To study the combined effects of tenofovir and interferon α1b on viral load and peripheral blood regulatory T cell concentrations of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) subjects. Methods: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (86 cases) were randomly assigned to two groups: control group and study group. In control subjects, tenofovir was given orally (300 mg/kg bwt/day). In addition to tenofovir, the study group received interferon α1b injection intramuscularly at a dose of 50 μg/kg thrice a week. Liver function, serum hepatitis B viral (HBV) load, and serum levels of peripheral blood regulatory T-lymphocytes were determined. Clinical effectiveness and adverse reactions in both groups were also assessed. Results: After treatment, total effectiveness was higher in the study group (86.04 %) than in control patients (62.79 %) (p < 0.05). Serum aspartate transaminase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and total bilirubin (TBIL) significantly decreased in the study group, relative to control, but HBV DNAnegative, HbeAg-negative and HbsAg-negative cells were markedly higher in patients in the study group (p < 0.05). Moreover, there were higher CD4+ T and CD8+ T counts, and CD4+ T/CD8+ T ratio in study subjects than in control subjects (p < 0.05). Conclusion: The combination of tenofovir with interferon α1b effectively improves liver functions in patients with CHB, reduces viral load, and exerts anti-HBV effect by regulating the levels of peripheral blood T-lymphocytes

NB-IoT Uplink Synchronization by Change Point Detection of Phase Series in NTNs

Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) are widely recognized as a potential solution to achieve ubiquitous connections of Narrow Bandwidth Internet of Things (NB-IoT). In order to adopt NTNs in NB-IoT, one of the main challenges is the uplink synchronization of Narrowband Physical Random Access procedure which refers to the estimation of time of arrival (ToA) and carrier frequency offset (CFO). Due to the large propagation delay and Doppler shift in NTNs, traditional estimation methods for Terrestrial Networks (TNs) can not be applied in NTNs directly. In this context, we design a two stage ToA and CFO estimation scheme including coarse estimation and fine estimation based on abrupt change point detection (CPD) of phase series with machine learning. Our method achieves high estimation accuracy of ToA and CFO under the low signal-noise ratio (SNR) and large Doppler shift conditions and extends the estimation range without enhancing Random Access preambles

Plural priming revisited: inverse preference and spillover effects

Maldonado & Chemla & Spector (2017) observe that the distributive interpretation of sentences involving multiple plural expressions gives rise to stronger priming effects than their cumulative interpretation, and propose to interpret this observation in terms of structural priming involving the phonologically silent distributivity operator. We report on a new experiment that included an additional baseline condition, whose results reveal that (i) the observed priming effects are inverse preference effects in that only the less dominant reading in the baseline condition gives rise to sizable priming effects, and (ii) both distributive and cumulative interpretations can have priming effects, depending on speakers’ baseline preferences. We argue that these findings undermine Maldonado et al.’s claim that their results offer empirical evidence in support of the existence of a silent distributivity operator in syntax

Investigating the accuracy of blood oxygen saturation measurements in common consumer smartwatches

Blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) is an important measurement for monitoring patients with acute and chronic conditions that are associated with low blood oxygen levels. While smartwatches may provide a new method for continuous and unobtrusive SpO2 monitoring, it is necessary to understand their accuracy and limitations to ensure that they are used in a fit-for-purpose manner. To determine whether the accuracy of and ability to take SpO2 measurements from consumer smartwatches is different by device type and/or by skin tone, our study recruited patients aged 18–85 years old, with and without chronic pulmonary disease, who were able to provide informed consent. The mean absolute error (MAE), mean directional error (MDE) and root mean squared error (RMSE) were used to evaluate the accuracy of the smartwatches as compared to a clinical grade pulse oximeter. The percent of data unobtainable due to inability of the smartwatch to record SpO2 (missingness) was used to evaluate the measurability of SpO2 from the smartwatches. Skin tones were quantified based on the Fitzpatrick (FP) scale and Individual Typology Angle (ITA), a continuous measure of skin tone. A total of 49 individuals (18 female) were enrolled and completed the study. Using a clinical-grade pulse oximeter as the reference standard, there were statistically significant differences in accuracy between devices, with Apple Watch Series 7 having measurements closest to the reference standard (MAE = 2.2%, MDE = -0.4%, RMSE = 2.9%) and the Garmin Venu 2s having measurements farthest from the reference standard (MAE = 5.8%, MDE = 5.5%, RMSE = 6.7%). There were also significant differences in measurability across devices, with the highest data presence from the Apple Watch Series 7 (88.9% of attempted measurements were successful) and the highest data missingness from the Withings ScanWatch (only 69.5% of attempted measurements were successful). The MAE, RMSE and missingness did not vary significantly across FP skin tone groups, however, there may be a relationship between FP skin tone and MDE (intercept = 0.04, beta coefficient = 0.47, p = 0.04). No statistically significant difference was found between skin tone as measured by ITA and MAE, MDE, RMSE or missingness

Spatiotemporal patterns and driving mechanism of tourism ecological security in Guangxi, China

Tourism ecological security (TES) is an important index reflecting the sustainable development of the regional economy. The construction of the China and ASEAN Free Trade Area has increased the total tourist consumption of Guangxi province by 36.48%. Unfortunately, overconsumption of resources, air pollution, disturbance of indigenous life, and other environmental degradation problems emerged due to the significant increase in tourists. Measuring the resilience of the tourism ecosystem is an urgent need to promote the high-quality development of tourism in Guangxi. To explore the dynamic changes in TES and its driving mechanism, the DPSIR (driver–pressure–state–impact–response) model for the tourism ecosystem was developed. The dynamic changes in TES and its driving mechanism from 2010 to 2019 were analyzed using fuzzy matter-element analysis, Markov chains, Geodetector, and other methods. The results show that: (1) the TES value increased steadily by 72.73%; the improvement speed was Northeast > Southwest > Southeast > Northwest; (2) TES was negatively correlated with location, 14 cities developed independently; (3) the TES has a smaller probability to shift the lower level; (4) urbanization, water consumption, green area, tourism revenue, and the number of students in colleges had significant effects on TES. Four policies were proposed to improve TES: (1) developing forest tourism; (2) implementing greening projects in abandoned mining areas; (3) increasing tourism technical personnel; and (4) reducing clearance time for inbound tourists