Advantages and dynamics of urban agglomeration development on Yangtze River Delta

National Natural Science Foundation of China 40971101 40901087Urban agglomeration on Yangtze River Delta (UA-YRD) had some advantages in the aspects of water, land, ecological environment, location and transportation. Relying on the resource-environment bases and other advantages, UA-YRD has achieved great development. Based on index system and model of comprehensive evaluation, the paper calculates the development level of UA-YRD since 1978. The result shows that from 1978 to 2007, the development level increased year by year at an annual rate of 0.0333, and the process of development could be divided into three stages, i.e. low-speed development stage (1978-1991), rapid development stage (1991-2000), and high-speed development stage (2000-2007). The speeds are 0.0083, 0.0356 and 0.0766, respectively. During the 30-year development, foreign economic activity has the greatest effect on development, followed by transportation, industrial economic activity and telecommunication (in order). Additionally, different driving forces have different effects in different stages. The paper suggests that more attention should be paid to the high-speed development stage and the important driving forces to drive its development. At the same time, the limitation of resource and environment should not be neglected and a long effective mechanism needs to be established to sustain harmonious development among the UA development, resource utilization and environmental protection. Some comparative studies should be carried out urgently to support and promote sustainable development of UA effectively, especially towards evolution, driving forces and braking forces

The Agent-construction System for procuring mega projects in China

Topics: - Innovation in construction: theories and best practices (General Themes)While heated discussions have been directed towards various innovative procurement systems such as PPP, PFI, and BOT that carry the great expectation to help materialise the projects and deliver value to the society, a procurement system named agent-construction system (ACS or in Chinese Dai Jian Zhi) is being prevailing in China’s public procurement. This research aims to examine ACS by relating them to China’s particular Political, Economics, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal (PESTEL) background. It is found that the ACS is promising in procuring public projects owing to two merits: (a) clearly defined right and responsibilities; and (b) appropriate allocation of resources and risks amongst parties involved. The research is particularly useful when governments worldwide are searching for innovative procurement approaches to help deliver public projects and services. It also sheds light on how to devise an innovative procurement system. A word of caution, nevertheless, is that readers should not follow this “good practice” slavishly. One ought to truly understand the essence of procurement innovation and devise suitable innovative procurement systems in a given PESTEL setting.postprin

Human motion tracking based on complementary Kalman filter

Miniaturized Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) has been widely used in many motion capturing applications. In order to overcome stability and noise problems of IMU, a lot of efforts have been made to develop appropriate data fusion method to obtain reliable orientation estimation from IMU data. This article presents a method which models the errors of orientation, gyroscope bias and magnetic disturbance, and compensate the errors of state variables with complementary Kalman filter in a body motion capture system. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method significantly reduces the accumulative orientation estimation errors

灾后的哀伤辅导与升华

Conference Theme: Rehabilitation after Disaster - 災後康復: 四川汶川地震傷患康復論壇postprint第十一屆京港醫學交流會議：災後康復: 四川汶川地震傷患康復論壇, 中國, 四川, 成都, 2009年10月24-25日.The 11th Beijing-Hong Kong Medical Exchange : Rehabilitation after Disaster, Chengdu, Sichuan, 24-25 October 2009

Monotone iterative procedure and systems of a finite number of nonlinear fractional differential equations

The aim of the paper is to present a nontrivial and natural extension of the comparison result and the monotone iterative procedure based on upper and lower solutions, which were recently established in (Wang et al. in Appl. Math. Lett. 25:1019-1024, 2012), to the case of any finite number of nonlinear fractional differential equations.The author is very grateful to the reviewers for the remarks, which improved the final version of the manuscript. This article was financially supported by University of Łódź as a part of donation for the research activities aimed at the development of young scientists, grant no. 545/1117

The optical microscopy with virtual image breaks a record: 50-nm resolution imaging is demonstrated

We demonstrate a new 'microsphere nanoscope' that uses ordinary SiO2 microspheres as superlenses to create a virtual image of the object in near field. The magnified virtual image greatly overcomes the diffraction limit. We are able to resolve clearly 50-nm objects under a standard white light source in both transmission and reflection modes. The resolution achieved for white light opens a new opportunity to image viruses, DNA and molecules in real time

Self-rated health in middle-aged and elderly Chinese : distribution, determinants and associations with cardio-metabolic risk factors

Background: Self-rated health (SRH) has been demonstrated to be an accurate reflection of a person's health and a valid predictor of incident mortality and chronic morbidity. We aimed to evaluate the distribution and factors associated with SRH and its association with biomarkers of cardio-metabolic diseases among middle-aged and elderly Chinese. Methods: Survey of 1,458 men and 1,831 women aged 50 to 70 years, conducted in one urban and two rural areas of Beijing and Shanghai in 2005. SRH status was measured and categorized as good (very good and good) vs. not good (fair, poor and very poor). Determinants of SRH and associations with biomarkers of cardio-metabolic diseases were evaluated using logistic regression. Results: Thirty two percent of participants reported good SRH. Males and rural residents tended to report good SRH. After adjusting for potential confounders, residence, physical activity, employment status, sleep quality and presence of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and depression were the main determinants of SRH. Those free from cardiovascular disease (OR 3.68; 95%CI 2.39; 5.66), rural residents (OR 1.89; 95% CI 1.47; 2.43), non-depressed participants (OR 2.50; 95% CI 1.67; 3.73) and those with good sleep quality (OR 2.95; 95% CI 2.22; 3.91) had almost twice or over the chance of reporting good SRH compared to their counterparts. There were significant associations -and trend- between SRH and levels of inflammatory markers, insulin levels and insulin resistance. Conclusion: Only one third of middle-aged and elderly Chinese assessed their health status as good or very good. Although further longitudinal studies are required to confirm our findings, interventions targeting social inequalities, lifestyle patterns might not only contribute to prevent chronic morbidity but as well to improve populations' perceived health

Effects of tidal-forcing variations on tidal properties along a narrow convergent estuary

A 1D analytical framework is implemented in a narrow convergent estuary that is 78 km in length (the Guadiana, Southern Iberia) to evaluate the tidal dynamics along the channel, including the effects of neap-spring amplitude variations at the mouth. The close match between the observations (damping from the mouth to ∼ 30 km, shoaling upstream) and outputs from semi-closed channel solutions indicates that the M2 tide is reflected at the estuary head. The model is used to determine the contribution of reflection to the dynamics of the propagating wave. This contribution is mainly confined to the upper one third of the estuary. The relatively constant mean wave height along the channel (< 10% variations) partly results from reflection effects that also modify significantly the wave celerity and the phase difference between tidal velocity and elevation (contradicting the definition of an “ideal” estuary). Furthermore, from the mouth to ∼ 50 km, the variable friction experienced by the incident wave at neap and spring tides produces wave shoaling and damping, respectively. As a result, the wave celerity is largest at neap tide along this lower reach, although the mean water level is highest in spring. Overall, the presented analytical framework is useful for describing the main tidal properties along estuaries considering various forcings (amplitude, period) at the estuary mouth and the proposed method could be applicable to other estuaries with small tidal amplitude to depth ratio and negligible river discharge.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Intervention effects of Ganoderma lucidum spores on epileptiform discharge hippocampal neurons and expression of Neurotrophin-4 and N-Cadherin

Epilepsy can cause cerebral transient dysfunctions. Ganoderma lucidum spores (GLS), a traditional Chinese medicinal herb, has shown some antiepileptic effects in our previous studies. This was the first study of the effects of GLS on cultured primary hippocampal neurons, treated with Mg2+ free medium. This in vitro model of epileptiform discharge hippocampal neurons allowed us to investigate the anti-epileptic effects and mechanism of GLS activity. Primary hippocampal neurons from <1 day old rats were cultured and their morphologies observed under fluorescence microscope. Neurons were confirmed by immunofluorescent staining of neuron specific enolase (NSE). Sterile method for GLS generation was investigated and serial dilutions of GLS were used to test the maximum non-toxic concentration of GLS on hippocampal neurons. The optimized concentration of GLS of 0.122 mg/ml was identified and used for subsequent analysis. Using the in vitro model, hippocampal neurons were divided into 4 groups for subsequent treatment i) control, ii) model (incubated with Mg2+ free medium for 3 hours), iii) GLS group I (incubated with Mg2+ free medium containing GLS for 3 hours and replaced with normal medium and incubated for 6 hours) and iv) GLS group II (neurons incubated with Mg2+ free medium for 3 hours then replaced with a normal medium containing GLS for 6 hours). Neurotrophin-4 and N-Cadherin protein expression were detected using Western blot. The results showed that the number of normal hippocampal neurons increased and the morphologies of hippocampal neurons were well preserved after GLS treatment. Furthermore, the expression of neurotrophin-4 was significantly increased while the expression of N-Cadherin was decreased in the GLS treated group compared with the model group. This data indicates that GLS may protect hippocampal neurons by promoting neurotrophin-4 expression and inhibiting N-Cadherin expression