Comprehensive Evaluation of Emergency Shelters in Wuhan City Based on GIS

Emergency shelters, which reflect the city's ability to respond to and deal with major public emergencies to a certain extent, are essential to a modern urban emergency management system. This paper is based on spatial analysis methods, using Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze the suitability of the 28 emergency shelters in Wuhan City. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution is further used to evaluate the accommodation capacity of emergency shelters in central urban areas, which provides a reference for the optimization of existing shelters and the site selection of new shelters, and provides a basis for improving the service capacity of shelters. The results show that the overall situation of emergency shelters in Wuhan is good, with 96\% of the places reaching the medium level or above, but the suitability level needs to be further improved, especially the effectiveness and accessibility. Among the seven central urban areas in Wuhan, Hongshan District has the strongest accommodation capacity while Jianghan District has the weakest, with noticeable differences.Comment: the 29th International Conference on Geoinformatics, E

Optimized Design Method for Satellite Constellation Configuration Based on Real-time Coverage Area Evaluation

When using constellation synergy to image large areas for reconnaissance, it is required to achieve the coverage capability requirements with minimal consumption of observation resources to obtain the most optimal constellation observation scheme. With the minimum number of satellites and meeting the real-time ground coverage requirements as the optimization objectives, this paper proposes an optimized design of satellite constellation configuration for full coverage of large-scale regional imaging by using an improved simulated annealing algorithm combined with the real-time coverage evaluation method of hexagonal discretization. The algorithm can adapt to experimental conditions, has good efficiency, and can meet industrial accuracy requirements. The effectiveness and adaptability of the algorithm are tested in simulation applications.Comment: the 29th International Conference on Geoinformatics, E

Validation of the Oregon Scientific BPU 330 for self-monitoring of blood pressure according to the International Protocol

Li Li1, XinYu Zhang1, ChunHong Yan1, QingXiang Liang21Biomedical Engineering Lab, Faculty of Information Engineering, ShenZhen University, ShenZhen, China; 2Bao An People’s Hospital, ShenZhen, ChinaObjective: Extensive marketing of devices for self-measurement of blood pressure has created a need for purchasers to be able to satisfy themselves that such devices have been evaluated according to agreed criteria. The Oregon Scientific BPU 330 blood pressure monitor is an electronic device for upper arm measurement. This study assessed the accuracy of the Oregon Scientific BPU 330 blood pressure monitor according to the International Protocol by the Working Group on Blood Pressure Monitoring of the European Society of Hypertension for validation of blood pressure measuring devices.Method: 52 participants over 30 years of age were studied in the validation. Nine blood pressure measurements were taken alternately with a mercury sphygmomanometer by two observers, and by the supervisor, using the BPU 330 device. A total of 33 participants were selected for the analysis. The validation was divided into two phases. Phase 1 included 15 participants. If the device passed phase 1, 18 more participants were included. The 99 pairs of measurements were compared according to the International Protocol. The device was given a pass/fail recommendation based on its accuracy compared with the mercury standard (within 5, 10, and 15 mmHg), as well as the number met in the ranges specified by the International Protocol.Results: The mean and standard deviation of the difference between the mean of the observers and the BPU 330 device were 1.7 ± 4.7 mmHg and 2.8 ± 3.9 mmHg for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), respectively. In phase 1, the device passed with a total of 33, 43, and 44 SBP readings; 38, 44, and 45 DBP readings were within 5, 10, and 15 mmHg, respectively. In phase 2.1, 81, 95, and 96 for SBP, and 83, 95, and 98 for DBP readings fell within the zones of 5, 10, and 15 mmHg, respectively. In phase 2.2, the last phase, 28 participants fell within the zone of two of the three comparisons, lying within 5 mmHg for SBP and 29 participants for DBP. No participants fell within the zone of all three of their comparisons over 5 mmHg apart for both SBP and DBP.Conclusion: The BPU 330 can be recommended for self-monitoring of blood pressure in the adult population, according to the International Protocol.Keywords: blood pressure, self-monitoring, hypertension, International Protoco

Curvelet-Based Joint Waveform and Envelope Inversion of Early-Arrival Imaging Shallow Geological Structure

AbstractNear-surface imaging structures often plays a significant role in the field of environmental and engineering geophysics. Early-arrival waveform inversion (EWI) is state-of-the-art method to imaging near-surface structures due to its high resolution. However, the method faces with cycle-skipping issue which might lead to an unexpected local minimum. Envelope inversion (EI) could deal with this issue which contributes to the ultralow-frequency information extracted from the envelope but has a low resolution. We have developed a curvelet-based joint waveform and envelope inversion (CJWEI) method for inverting imaging near-surface velocity structures. By inverting two types of data, we are able to recover the low- and high-wavenumber structures and mitigate the cycle-skipping problem. Curvelet transform was used to decompose seismic data into different scales and provide a multiscale inversion strategy to further reduce non-uniqueness of waveform inversion efficiently. With synthetic test and real data application, we demonstrate that our method can constrain the anomalies and hidden layers in the shallow structure more efficiently as well as is robust in terms of noise. The proposed multiscale joint inversion offers a computational efficiency and high precision to imaging fine-scale shallow underground structures

Construction of homogenized daily surface air temperature for the city of Tianjin during 1887–2019

Century-long continuous daily observations from some stations are important for the study of long-term trends and extreme climate events in the past. In this paper, three daily data sources – (1) the Department of Industry Agency of the British Concession in Tianjin covering 1 September 1890–31 December 1931, (2) the Water Conservancy Commission of North China covering 1 January 1932–31 December 1950 and (3) monthly journal sheets for Tianjin surface meteorological observation records covering 1 January 1951–31 December 2019 – have been collected from the Tianjin Meteorological Archive. The completed daily maximum and minimum temperature series for Tianjin from 1 January 1887 (1 September 1890 for minimum) to 31 December 2019 has been constructed and assessed for quality control with an early extension from 1890 back to 1887. Several significant breakpoints are detected by the penalized maximal T test (PMT) for the daily maximum and minimum time series using multiple reference series around Tianjin from monthly Berkeley Earth (BE), Climatic Research Unit Time-Series version 4.03 (CRU TS4.03) and Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) v3 data. Using neighboring daily series the record has been homogenized with quantile matching (QM) adjustments. Based on the homogenized dataset, the warming trend in annual mean temperature in Tianjin averaged from the newly constructed daily maximum and minimum temperature is evaluated as 0.154 ± 0.013 ∘C per decade during the last 130 years. Trends of temperature extremes in Tianjin are all significant at the 5 % level and have much more coincident change than those from the raw data, with amplitudes of −1.454, 1.196, −0.140 and 0.975 d per decade for cold nights (TN10p), warm nights (TN90p), cold days (TX10p) and warm days (TX90p) at the annual scale. The adjusted daily maximum, minimum and mean surface air temperature dataset for Tianjin city presented here is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.924561 (Si and Li, 2020)

Continental scale surface air temperature variations: Experience derived from the Chinese region

Although there are still slight differences during some periods, the global surface air temperature (SAT) change series developed by different groups are generally very consistent with each other. However, there are still considerable uncertainties in the analysis of air temperature series at the regional scale. At the slightly larger sub-continental scale, to understand the trend and magnitude of regional climate warming in China, many teams of scientists have tried to establish a series of air temperature changes across the country from the 1880s onwards. However, until recently, the conclusions reached by these different teams remained markedly different, implying clear uncertainties. The reasons for the uncertainties are inhomogeneities in some SAT series, incomplete data and the biased nature of the station distribution. In addition, many studies have attributed the rapid warming rates in China to contributions from urbanization. However, additional research has shown that the characteristics of the periodic variations in temperature change across China in recent decades indicate that China has warmed faster than other areas at the same latitude and the average for the Northern Hemisphere. Although rapid urbanization in some parts of China has led to local-scale warming, due to the relatively small overall sizes of urbanized areas, the latest conclusions confirm that urbanization contributed less than 5% of the regional air temperature changes in China over the past century. Since approximately 1998, the general characteristics of air temperature changes in China have also shown warming, but more in extremes than average values. These phenomena can be explained by the physical mechanisms of atmospheric circulation changes. This paper discusses all these issues including summarizing the process and experience of establishing a series of air temperature changes at the sub-continental scale and estimating the magnitude of climate change by developing a series of regional temperature changes throughout the 20th century

Novel effects of piperlogumine on uterine fibroid tumor: An in vitro mouse model study

Purpose: To investigate the in vivo anti-tumor effect of piperlongumine (PL) in a mouse model of leiomyoma xenograft and in leiomyoma cell lines. Methods: The anti-proliferative effect of PL on ELT-3 cells was determined using MTT assay. Human and rat leiomyoma cells were used for the in vitro investigations. Rat leiomyoma cell lines were treated with various PL concentrations (50 - 100 μM)) for 48 h. Immunodeficient mice were subcutaneously injected with varying doses of estrogen or progesterone, and xenografted with explanting human leiomyoma cells in in vivo experiments. Proliferation assessment, caspase-3 expression, analysis of tumour samples, insertion of pellets of oestrogen-progesterone, tissue treatment and implantation, and immuno-histochemical analyses were carried out using appropriate procedures. Results: Piperlongumine (PL) produced significant and dose-dependent increase in caspase-3 activity, apoptosis and suppression of cellular proliferation (p < 0.01). Moreover, Western blot data demonstrated that PL decreased phosphorylation of Akt signaling pathway. The results showed significant (p < 0.01) inhibition of tumor growth, including in ultra-sound in vivo studies, when compared with 30-day control and animals treated with PL (100 μg/g). Immuno-histochemical studies showed that PL decreased the expression of proliferation marker in xenografted tumor tissues (p < 0.02). Conclusion: These results suggest that piperlongumine has potentials as a therapeutic agent for the management of uterine leiomyoma. However, additional studies using human cell lines are required to understand its genetic and molecular mechanisms

A new evaluation of the role of urbanization to warming at various spatial scales: Evidence from the Guangdong‐Hong Kong‐Macao Region, China

The urbanization impacts on Surface Air Temperature (SAT) change in the Guangdong‐Hong Kong‐Macao region (GHMR) from 1979 to 2018 are examined using homogeneous surface observations, reanalysis, and remote sensing. Results show that the warming due to urbanization tends to be smaller or insignificant as the spatial scale increases. The urbanization contribution to the local warming can reach as high as 50% in the center of each metropolis, remains high (~25%) in the Greater Bay Area (GBA), and decreases to about 10% in the whole GHMR. The warming in GHMR is nearly uniform throughout the day, and therefore the observed trend of the Diurnal Temperature Range (DTR) is not statistically significant. However, the urbanization contribution exhibits distinct seasonal variations, large in summer and autumn while smaller in winter and spring

An IoT-oriented data placement method with privacy preservation in cloud environment

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd IoT (Internet of Things) devices generate huge amount of data which require rich resources for data storage and processing. Cloud computing is one of the most popular paradigms to accommodate such IoT data. However, the privacy conflicts combined in the IoT data makes the data placement problem more complicated, and the resource manager needs to take into account the resource efficiency, the power consumption of cloud data centers, and the data access time for the IoT applications while allocating the resources for the IoT data. In view of this challenge, an IoT-oriented Data Placement method with privacy preservation, named IDP, is designed in this paper. Technically, the resource utilization, energy consumption and data access time in the cloud data center with the fat-tree topology are analyzed first. Then a corresponding data placement method, based on the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), is designed to achieve high resource usage, energy saving and efficient data access, and meanwhile realize privacy preservation of the IoT data. Finally, extensive experimental evaluations validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed method

Assessment of Ruminal Bacterial and Archaeal Community Structure in Yak (Bos grunniens)

The aim of this study was to determine the microbial community composition in the rumen of yaks under different feeding regimes. Microbial communities were assessed by sequencing bacterial and archaeal 16S ribosomal RNA gene fragments obtained from yaks (Bos grunniens) from Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, China. Samples were obtained from 14 animals allocated to either pasture grazing (Graze), a grazing and supplementary feeding regime (GSF), or an indoor feeding regime (Feed). The predominant bacterial phyla across feeding regimes were Bacteroidetes (51.06%) and Firmicutes (32.73%). At genus level, 25 genera were shared across all samples. The relative abundance of Prevotella in the graze and GSF regime group were significantly higher than that in the feed regime group. Meanwhile, the relative abundance of Ruminococcus was lower in the graze group than the feed and GSF regime groups. The most abundant archaeal phylum was Euryarchaeota, which accounted for 99.67% of the sequences. Ten genera were detected across feeding regimes, seven genera were shared by all samples, and the most abundant was genus Methanobrevibacter (91.60%). The relative abundance of the most detected genera were similar across feeding regime groups. Our results suggest that the ruminal bacterial community structure differs across yak feeding regimes while the archaeal community structures are largely similar