An Analysis of Food Grain Consumption in Urban Jiangsu Province of China

The impacts of economic and demographic variables on the demand for food grain commodities in urban Jiangsu province of China are estimated, using both the QUAIDS and the AIDS models. Results show that the demands for wheat flour and coarse grains are price-elastic while the demands for rice and grain products are price-inelastic. Certain demographic variables show as having a significant impact on food grain demand. Finally, a decomposition of causes of changes in rice consumption over the period of 1995–2007 is performed.AIDS model, China food grain demand, China urban household demand, Agribusiness, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Crop Production/Industries, Demand and Price Analysis, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Development, Production Economics, Public Economics, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, D12, Q18, Q13,

Herramienta de apoyo al diagnóstico basada en el análisis de historias clínicas

Actualmente una de las tareas más importantes a las que se enfrenta un médico es encontrar el diagnóstico de un paciente en el menor tiempo posible para poder hacer frente a la situación. Este proyecto tiene como objetivo ayudar al personal médico ofreciéndoles la posibilidad de comparar un gran número de informes en busca de aquellos más similares respecto a la información extraída de cada informe. Para ello, hay que conseguir representar todos los informes de una manera similar, tal y como se describe en este proyecto, de forma que la comparación sea lo más sencilla y precisa posible. Esta aplicación se divide en tres partes: las dos primeras llevan a cabo la construcción de las representaciones extrayendo la mayor información posible de cada informe médico y la tercera parte se encarga de realizar la búsqueda por similitud en dichas representaciones

Arsenic Release Batch Test for Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria

The United States Environmental Protection Agency revised regulations related to the drinking water content of arsenic (As) in 2006 lowering the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) from 50 μg/L to10 μg/L. The concentration of arsenic in ground water is associated with iron-reducing, sulfate-reducing and methanogenic conditions. In highly reducing systems, the dominant pathway for arsenic release is poorly understood, but reflects contributions from sulfide minerals (e.g., pyrite) and acid-volatile monosulfides (AVS). This research will evaluate arsenic release and sequestration processes under highly-reducing conditions, with the goal of identifying mechanisms and pathways responsible for arsenic release from aquifer solids under such conditions using a single culture of sulfate-reducing organisms (insert name). During the 4 week anaerobic incubation, sampling was conducted over 20 days. Samples were analyzed to determine dissolved concentrations of inorganic elements (e.g. As, S,), and concentration of anion such as acetate. Based on the first 20 days data, the result shows that the iron started being reduced, but sulfate reduction still cannot be clearly observed due to the slow rate of anaerobic bacteria growth. This suggests, more time of sampling and analytical experiments are still needed to be conducted in the following two months.USGSNo embarg

Experimental and Numerical Study of Macro-Cell Corrosion Between Crossed Steel Bars

Reinforcing steel bars embedded in concrete are always intersected with each other to form rebar mesh or three-dimensional steel cage. The present study aims to investigate the phenomenon of severe corrosion observed at stirrups or some intersections of steel rebar mesh, which has not been well studied before. Macro-cell corrosion between crossed steel bars was considered to be the major cause for this phenomenon. In this regard, crossed steel bars were divided into intersected zone (IZ) and non-intersected zone (NIZ). The macro-cell current at the face-to-face IZ was calculated by Ohm’s law. A one-dimensional model based on transmission line method was employed to obtain the distribution of macro-cell current on the NIZ juxtaposed to the IZ. Experiments of steel bars in aqueous solutions and concrete were undertaken to verify the numerical model. The results demonstrated a good match between experiments and numerical model. It was also shown that the distribution of macro-cell current on the non-intersected areas was influenced by the resistivity of electrolyte. Based on the corrosion rate model presented in this study, the severe corrosion observed at stirrups or some intersection zones of rebar mesh can be explained and quantified

Food Demand in Urban China

This study is composed of three essays. The objective of the first essay is to estimate the impacts of economic and non-economic factors on food consumption patterns in urban China. A complete food demand system of households is estimated using a two-stage budgeting procedure which incorporates both an almost ideal demand system (AIDS) and a quadratic almost ideal demand system (QUAIDS) in each stage. The purpose of the second essay is to determine the differences in price and income elasticities across income classes in urban China. An incomplete demand system for 10 major food commodity groups is estimated using the LINQUAD model, which is defined as being linear in income and linear and quadratic in prices, for low-, medium-, and high-income groups, respectively. The third essay estimates the impact of changes in income distribution on food demand in urban China. This essay is based on the estimates obtained in the second essay. All the three essays use the 2004 China's urban household survey data for Jiangsu province. Findings and Conclusions: The results of the first essay show that the demand for animal products is significantly more sensitive to consumer food expenditure changes than other food categories, while the demand for grains and oils & fats depends more on price changes than income changes. Moreover, the demographic profile of urban consumers in Jiangsu does have a significant impact on the food demand. Finally, the AIDS and the QUAIDS models yield very similar results in this application. The results of the second essay show that the high-income households in urban Jiangsu are less responsive to price and income changes for most food groups considered in this study compared to the low- and medium-income families. The results of experiment simulation in the third essay show that a drive toward a more equal distribution of income would increase expenditures for food groups that were consumed at home.Department of Agricultural Economic

FunCodec: A Fundamental, Reproducible and Integrable Open-source Toolkit for Neural Speech Codec

This paper presents FunCodec, a fundamental neural speech codec toolkit, which is an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit FunASR. FunCodec provides reproducible training recipes and inference scripts for the latest neural speech codec models, such as SoundStream and Encodec. Thanks to the unified design with FunASR, FunCodec can be easily integrated into downstream tasks, such as speech recognition. Along with FunCodec, pre-trained models are also provided, which can be used for academic or generalized purposes. Based on the toolkit, we further propose the frequency-domain codec models, FreqCodec, which can achieve comparable speech quality with much lower computation and parameter complexity. Experimental results show that, under the same compression ratio, FunCodec can achieve better reconstruction quality compared with other toolkits and released models. We also demonstrate that the pre-trained models are suitable for downstream tasks, including automatic speech recognition and personalized text-to-speech synthesis. This toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/FunCodec.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ICASSP 202

Comparative Study on Sealing Technology of Gas Drainage Borehole in Soft Coal Seam

This paper discusses four kinds of hole sealing technologies for gas drainage in soft coal seam, which are polyurethane hole sealing, cement mortar hole sealing, full-length screen pipe hole sealing and pipe direct connection technology. Through the observation of negative pressure loss, the sealing effect of four sealing technologies is analyzed, the polyurethane sealing effect is poor, the cement mortar, the full-length screen pipe combined with cement mortar and the direct connection technology of pipe are good; through the observation of gas concentration, the gas drainage effect of four sealing technologies is analyzed, the polyurethane sealing technology is the worst, and the direct connection technology of pipe is the worst. The gas drainage effect is the best; according to the sealing effect and gas drainage effect, the traditional polyurethane and cement mortar sealing technology cannot meet the gas drainage demand of the soft coal seam. In the case of slow drilling deformation, the full-length screen pipe sealing technology can be used. In the case of rapid drilling deformation, the direct connection of pipe sealing technology should be used

Probabilistic activity driven model of temporal simplicial networks and its application on higher-order dynamics

Network modeling characterizes the underlying principles of structural properties and is of vital significance for simulating dynamical processes in real world. However, bridging structure and dynamics is always challenging due to the multiple complexities in real systems. Here, through introducing the individual's activity rate and the possibility of group interaction, we propose a probabilistic activity driven (PAD) model that could generate temporal higher-order networks with both power-law and high-clustering characteristics, which successfully links the two most critical structural features and a basic dynamical pattern in extensive complex systems. Surprisingly, the power-law exponents and the clustering coefficients of the aggregated PAD network could be tuned in a wide range by altering a set of model parameters. We further provide an approximation algorithm to select the proper parameters that can generate networks with given structural properties, the effectiveness of which is verified by fitting various real-world networks. Lastly, we explore the co-evolution of PAD model and higher-order contagion dynamics, and analytically derive the critical conditions for phase transition and bistable phenomenon. Our model provides a basic tool to reproduce complex structural properties and to study the widespread higher-order dynamics, which has great potential for applications across fields