General mechanisms of drought response and their application in drought resistance improvement in plants

Plants often encounter unfavorable environmental conditions because of their sessile lifestyle. These adverse factors greatly affect the geographic distribution of plants, as well as their growth and productivity. Drought stress is one of the premier limitations to global agricultural production due to the complexity of the water-limiting environment and changing climate. Plants have evolved a series of mechanisms at the morphological, physiological, biochemical, cellular, and molecular levels to overcome water deficit or drought stress conditions. The drought resistance of plants can be divided into four basic types-drought avoidance, drought tolerance, drought escape, and drought recovery. Various drought-related traits, including root traits, leaf traits, osmotic adjustment capabilities, water potential, ABA content, and stability of the cell membrane, have been used as indicators to evaluate the drought resistance of plants. In the last decade, scientists have investigated the genetic and molecular mechanisms of drought resistance to enhance the drought resistance of various crops, and significant progress has been made with regard to drought avoidance and drought tolerance. With increasing knowledge to comprehensively decipher the complicated mechanisms of drought resistance in model plants, it still remains an enormous challenge to develop water-saving and drought-resistant crops to cope with the water shortage and increasing demand for food production in the future.     

含砂雾封层在桥面铺装工程中的应用

结合含砂雾封层在国道205桥面铺装上的应用,深入分析了含砂雾封层的防水、防老化作用机理,本文系统总结了国道205桥面雾封层施工质量的控制要点,并对施工前后封层各项性能指标进行跟踪检测,分析结果表明采取含砂雾封层措施确实能对桥面早期微裂缝进行有效封水,延缓桥面病害的发生,延长沥青路面的使用寿命。     

连续刚构铁路桥收缩徐变效应监测与分析

对连续刚构铁路桥箱梁温度场及桥梁线形进行长期、连续监测,通过主梁跨中下挠的理论与实测对比揭示了连续刚构铁路桥收缩徐变效应。对比了国内外常用收缩徐变估算模型,选择CEB-FIP徐变模型对黄河特大连续刚构桥进行了有限元分析。采用实测温度数据,以箱梁内测温度、外侧温度、顶底板温度梯度、左右侧温度梯度作为箱梁温度场的评判指标,对箱梁1年内的四季温度场分布进行分析。在基于相同温度场的条件下,通过理论值与实测值对比,发现分析成果与实测结果较吻合,说明混凝土的收缩徐变是引起连续刚构铁路桥跨中下挠的主要原因,对比结果还说明通过改善箱梁顶底板应力差能够改善收缩徐变长期效应。     

An Economic Model-Based Matching Approach Between Buyers and Sellers Through a Broker in an Open E-Marketplace

A broker in an open e-marketplace enables buyers and sellers to do business with each other. Although a broker plays an important role in e-marketplaces, theory and guidelines for matching between buyers and sellers in multi-attribute exchanges are limited. Therefore, a challenge for a broker’s responsibility is how to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree as its goals under the consideration of trade-off between a buyer’s buying quantity and price paid to a seller, and other attributes. To solve this challenge, this paper proposes an economic model-based matching approach between a buyer’s requirements and a seller’s offers. The major contributions of this paper are that (i) a broker can model a seller’s price policy as per a buyer’s buying quantity through communication between a broker and a seller; (ii) due to each buyer’s different quantity demand, a broker models a buyer’s satisfaction degree as per a buyer’s buying quantity based on communication between a broker and a buyer; and (iii) to carry out a broker’s matching processes, an objective function and a set of constraints are generated to help a broker to maximize a buyer’s total satisfaction degree. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach.     

Study on the Centralization Strategy of the Blood Allocation Among Different Departments within a Hospital

By far, the researches on how to distribute blood products among different departments in hospital have not been further studied, though the problem of blood shortage and wastage that caused by improper blood allocation is severe, which may endanger patient’s lives and impose considerable costs on hospitals. In order to solve this problem, this paper mainly studies on how to distribute the blood items among different departments within a hospital and investigates the allocation approach with the novel management method by centralizing the inventory of several different departments. By integrating the blood inventory requirements of some departments, the hospital could reduce the rate of blood shortage and wastage effectively, release the pressure of the occupancy of resources and reduce the bullwhip effect of blood products. This paper illustrates the centralization principle in hospital and formulates the mixed integer programming model to work out the optimal allocation network scheme and the optimal inventory setting for every department. And the results of the numerical example demonstrate that this centralization method could considerably reduce blood shortage and wastage in hospital by about 72% and 90% respectively. Furthermore, it could decrease the total cost by about 108,540 RMB a month on blood supply chain management in the hospital and improve the effect of some certain surgeries by transfusing the fresh blood to patients.     

Effects of Strain Rate,Temperature and Grain Size on the Mechanical Properties and Microstructure Evolutions of Polycrystalline Nickel Nanowires: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Through molecular dynamics(MD)simulation,the dependencies of temperature,grain size and strain rate on the mechanical properties were studied.The simulation results demonstrated that the strain rate from 0.05 to 2 ns~(–1 )affected the Young’s modulus of nickel nanowires slightly,whereas the yield stress increased.The Young’s modulus decreased approximately linearly;however,the yield stress firstly increased and subsequently dropped as the temperature increased.The Young’s modulus and yield stress increased as the mean grain size increased from 2.66 to6.72 nm.Moreover,certain efforts have been made in the microstructure evolution with mechanical properties association under uniaxial tension.Certain phenomena such as the formation of twin structures,which were found in nanowires with larger grain size at higher strain rate and lower temperature,as well as the movement of grain boundaries and dislocation,were detected and discussed in detail.The results demonstrated that the plastic deformation was mainly accommodated by the motion of grain boundaries for smaller grain size.However,for larger grain size,the formations of stacking faults and twins were the main mechanisms of plastic deformation in the polycrystalline nickel nanowire.     

部件寿命服从威布尔分布时典型系统的寿命与剩余寿命估计

在实际工程中,对系统寿命以及剩余寿命的估计非常重要。在已知系统中部件寿命与可靠度的前提下,关于如何快速得到系统级寿命与剩余寿命的相关研究比较缺乏。针对这一问题,首先研究了可靠度、寿命以及剩余寿命的关系,进一步假设部件寿命服从同一威布尔分布,根据部件的寿命与可靠度函数,推导得到串联、并联和表决系统寿命与剩余寿命期望的封闭表达式,并给出了相应的计算方法。对于冷备系统,当部件寿命服从同一指数分布时,推得了系统寿命及剩余寿命期望的封闭表达式,而当部件寿命服从同一威布尔分布时,给出了系统寿命与剩余寿命的数值计算方法。仿真试验证明本文所提出的方法是准确高效的。最后,以卫星中的动量轮r/n(G)表决系统为例开展了实例研究,证明了该方法在工程实践中的有效性。     

Fuzzy Views on Black-Litterman Portfolio Selection Model

In this paper, views of investor are described in fuzzy sets, and two fuzzy Black-Litterman models are constructed with fuzzy views and fuzzy random views respectively. In the models, expected returns and uncertainty matrix of views are redefined and the views are formulated by fuzzy approaches suitably. Then the models are tested with data from Chinese financial markets. Empirical results show that the fuzzy random views model performs the best, and both the fuzzy models are better than the traditional ones, demonstrating that the fuzzy approaches can contain more information in the views and measure the uncertainty more correctly.     

Aristotle Said “Happiness is a State of Activity” — Predicting Mood Through Body Sensing with Smartwatches

We measure and predict states of Activation and Happiness using a body sensing application connected to smartwatches. Through the sensors of commercially available smartwatches we collect individual mood states and correlate them with body sensing data such as acceleration, heart rate, light level data, and location, through the GPS sensor built into the smartphone connected to the smartwatch. We polled users on the smartwatch for seven weeks four times per day asking for their mood state. We found that both Happiness and Activation are negatively correlated with heart beats and with the levels of light. People tend to be happier when they are moving more intensely and are feeling less activated during weekends. We also found that people with a lower Conscientiousness and Neuroticism and higher Agreeableness tend to be happy more frequently. In addition, more Activation can be predicted by lower Openness to experience and higher Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Lastly, we find that tracking people’s geographical coordinates might play an important role in predicting Happiness and Activation. The methodology we propose is a first step towards building an automated mood tracking system, to be used for better teamwork and in combination with social network analysis studies.