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Drawing on recent scholarship on mass incarceration and prisoner re-entry, this study examines the reciprocal relationship between returning parolees and neighbourhood crime rates in five large cities in Texas. Besides the more common approach of counting the number of people on parole in communities (parolee concentration), we propose a novel approach for measuring people on parole by capturing their exposure in the community as parolee embeddedness (i.e., the cumulative number of days that people on parole resided in the neighbourhood). Results show that parolee concentration has a significant positive effect on both violent and property crime, but parolee embeddedness is significantly associated with reductions in violent and property crime. Our findings detect different effects depending on the measurement of people on parole and their community context, illustrating the need to better understand the dynamics of parolee re-entry in the era of mass incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrolyte design is the optimal strategy to achieve extremely low temperature operation of lithium‐ion batteries. Here, the diffusion coefficient of Li+ is proposed to improve the ion transport kinetics at low temperatures. The diffusion coefficient of Li+ is improved by constructing a Li+ solvation sheath with weak steric effects. Specifically, high binding energy BF4− anions are added to a 1 M LiPF6 in propyl acetate (PA) electrolyte. Since the binding energy of Li+ with BF4− is greater than that of PA. Therefore, the small‐sized BF4− replaces the large‐sized PA molecule to form a Li+ solvation sheath with a weak steric effect, which increases the diffusion coefficient of Li+. Using the high diffusion coefficient electrolyte, the 800 mAh pouch cell retain 91 % and 75 % of its room temperature capacity at −40 °C(0.5 C rate) and −60 °C (0.2 C rate), respectively. And it also shows stable cycling at −40 °C. This work provides a new strategy for designing low‐temperature electrolytes of lithium‐ion batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultrasonic surface rolling processing (USRP) was applied on 4Cr13 stainless steel. Microstructure observations of the USRP sample surface indicate that the processing can exhibit significant plastic deformation, with a maximum depth of about 253.4 μm, and refine the average surface grain to 0.5 μm. In contrast to the untreated sample, the USRP sample has a minimum surface roughness Ra of 80.1 nm, which is 93.1% lower. Tests of mechanical properties showed a 37.0% increase in the maximum surface microhardness for USRP samples. The residual compressive stress can be as high as-484.4 MPa. It has also been found that USRP can enhance tribological properties under different normal loads. Adhesion oxidation wear dominate in the process of dry-sliding friction based on the surface/interface analysis. The improvement in antifriction and wear resistance is mainly attributed to the reduction in surface roughness and the increase in mechanical properties after USRP treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial population data are typically organized into nested hierarchies of areal units, in which each unit is a union of units at the next lower level. There is increasing interest in analyses at fine geographic detail, but these lowest rungs of the areal unit hierarchy are often incompletely tabulated because of cost, privacy, or other considerations. Here, the authors introduce a novel algorithm to impute crosstabs of up to three dimensions (e.g., race, ethnicity, and gender) from marginal data combined with data at higher levels of aggregation. This method exactly preserves the observed fine-grained marginals, while approximating higher-order correlations observed in more complete higher level data. The authors show how this approach can be used with U.S. census data via a case study involving differences in exposure to crime across demographic groups, showing that the imputation process introduces very little error into downstream analysis, while depicting social process at the more fine-grained level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature describes the occupational gender wage gap at the national labor market level as well as in specific occupations. Yet, among those studies of within-occupational inequality, few have focused on how occupational career change affects gender wage inequality. With an increasing number of female workers entering into the police labor force as well as the high turnover rate in the police sector, it is important to explore wage changes in this highly unionized and hyper-masculine occupation. Using two-wave panel data from the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-MORG) from 1979 to 2016, this study examines how change in occupational career along with change in union membership may lead to different wage rewards or penalties for police men and police women. Our findings reveal that individuals experience a large increase in wages when joining the police occupation, and this wage bonus is greater for women than for men. Furthermore, individuals joining the police as well as a union see a wage bonus, but wage loss when leaving the police and a union. Overall, police men have a larger wage loss than police women when leaving the police force and losing union membership. Policy implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of ultrasonic surface rolling (USR) on the fretting wear properties of the 7075 aluminum alloy. A white light interferometer, Vickers hardness tester, and X-ray diffractometer were employed to comparatively analyze the variations in surface roughness, hardness. and grain size before and after the USR treatment. The fretting tests were carried out under oil lubricated and dry fretting conditions, using a ball-on-flat contact tangential fretting tester. The worn surface morphology, wear debris, and chemical composition were analyzed using an optical microscope (OM), a scanning electron microscope (SEM), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), etc. The results revealed that after USR treatment, the surface roughness was reduced by 90%, the hardness was increased by 13HV, and the grains were refined. Moreover, the wear was reduced under oil lubrication conditions but increased under dry fretting conditions. It can be concluded that the microstructure and mechanical properties of the 7075 aluminum alloy surface can be enhanced by the USR treatment. The improved fretting performance in oil should be attributed to the increased surface hardness, which helps reduce abrasive wear and plastic deformation. However, under dry fretting conditions, the wear was increased due to the presence of hard debris particles that peel off from the USR-treated surface, leading to aggravated abrasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas existing ecology of crime research frequently uses a cross‐sectional design, an open question is whether theories underlying such studies will operate similarly in longitudinal research. Using latent trajectory models and longitudinal data in half‐mile egohoods from the Southern California region over a 10‐year period (2000–2010), we explore this question and assess whether the changes in key measures of social disorganization theory are related to changes in violent or property crime through three possible relationships: 1) a monotonic relationship, 2) an asymmetric relationship, and 3) a perturbation relationship in which any change increases crime. We find evidence that measures can exhibit any of these three possible relationships, highlighting the importance of not assuming monotonic relationships. Most frequently observed are asymmetric relationships, which we posit are simultaneously capturing more than one theoretical process of neighborhoods and crime. Specific findings include asymmetric relationships between change in concentrated disadvantage, racial/ethnic minority composition, or population and violent crime, as well as relationships between change in Asian composition or population and property crime. We consider how this strategy opens a needed area of future research assessing how measures for other theories operate as environments change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study emphasizes the effect of ultrasonic surface rolling (USR) on the surface roughness, hardness, and tribological properties of ductile iron under different normal loads. Results revealed that surface roughness was reduced by 96% and surface hardness increased by 37.8% after USR treatment. By increasing normal load, the average friction coefficient of the USR-treated specimens decreased, but the wear rate of both USR-treated and untreated specimens increased, mainly because the dominant wear mechanism changed. The average friction coefficient of the untreated specimen (~ 0.32) was much higher than the USR-treated specimen (~ 0.24) when the normal load was 30 N. However, the wear rate of the USR-treated specimen was larger than that of the untreated specimen when the normal load was greater than 20 N because the higher hardness abrasive particles on the worn surface of the USR-treated specimen not only accelerated abrasive particle wear, but also caused more severe adhesive wear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that violence in romantic relationships is a serious social and public health problem throughout the world among young adults. College students, as a vulnerable group, experience high rates of dating violence, irrespective of gender and nation. Yet, we still know relatively little about whether dating violence shows gender similarities or differences in different cultural settings. United States and China are both patriarchal societies but have diverse cultural background. There may be different gendered patterns of dating violence across these two countries. This study examined the gender differences in physical assault victimization and perpetration among college students in the United States and China, while controlling for dominance, jealousy, violence approval, and a number of demographic factors. Logistic regression analyses were conducted for a total of 5,631 individuals from the United States and China who participated in the International Dating Violence Study from 2001 to 2006. Results demonstrated that male and female college students in China were significantly less likely to be victims of minor physical assault compared with students in the United States. In addition, female students, both in the United States and China, were more likely to perpetrate minor and severe physical assault against their partners than male students in this sample. But Chinese females had a higher percentage of assault against their dating partners than females in the United States. This study contributes to the research on dating violence by exploring cross-cultural gender differences in both victimization and perpetration of physical violence among college students. The implications of findings and future research direction were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An accurate and simple analytical approach for the determination of residues cinerin I, cinerin II, jasmolin I, jasmolin II, pyrethrin I and pyrethrin II (six active ingredients of pyrethrins) in fresh and dried goji berries was developed and validated for analysis by gas chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. Good linearity (determination coefficient >0.99), accuracy (average recoveries of 88.3%–111.5%) and precision (intra- and inter-day relative standard deviations of 0.4%–8.3%) were obtained with the optimised determination method. The LODs and LOQs of the six analytes in two goji matrices were 0.24–2.1 µg/kg and 0.8–7 µg/kg, respectively. In a field trial, the terminal residual levels of pyrethrins (the sum of the concentrations of the six target analytes) in fresh and dried goji berry samples were <20–304 µg/kg at harvest, which could provide some information for the establishment of a maximum residue limit of pyrethrins on goji berries in China. Moreover, the risk assessment results indicated that because the risk quotient values were ≪100%, the potential dietary risk of pyrethrins on goji berries could be negligible for Chinese consumers. These detection and field results could provide some supporting data for the determination of pyrethrin residues in other crops and the proper application and safety assessment of pyrethrins in goji plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Ensuring the yield, quality, and profitability of okra by preventing and controlling pests with the application of insecticides has increased in the last decade. Some insecticide residues might remain in edible parts of okra (fruits) and lead to several potential human health problems. Therefore, research on the residue behaviour, risk assessment and removal approach of insecticides on okra fruits is important for food safety, together with the proper application and residual elimination of insecticides in okra. RESULTS: A simple liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) method was established and validated for determining the tebufenozide residues in okra fruits. The recoveries of tebufenozide in okra fruits were >72% with relative standard deviations of 0.6 to 6.1%. The dissipation rates of tebufenozide were different in okra fruits cultivated under open land and glasshouse field conditions because of the discriminating humidity and temperature conditions. The dietary intake of the tebufenozide residues from okra fruit consumption for Chinese consumers was fairly low, with approximately no potential health risk. The processing factor values of washing, blanching, washing + blanching and soaking were all less than one, which indicated that these processes could effectively reduce the residual hydrazide in the okra fruit. CONCLUSION: The developed method for analysing tebufenozide in okra fruits was applicable for field studies on this insecticide. The potential health risk of tebufenozide in okra fruits could be negligible to the health of different age groups of Chinese consumers. The soaking process effectively removed tebufenozide residues from okra fruits. The obtained data will help Chinese governments establish a maximum residue limit of tebufenozide in okra and provide data for the risk assessment and removal of tebufenozide in other crops. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has found a meaningful income gap between males and females across several occupational settings, and this is also true within law enforcement. As more female workers enter the criminal justice system, it is important to revisit and update these patterns of gender inequality to account for the changing gender dynamics within this occupation. Using Current Population Survey data, we document the gender differences in pay among police over the past 28 years. Police officers experience income advantage compared with the general working population, but they also show a stable gender gap in pay. While this stable inequality is better than other public-sector jobs—which have experienced a growth in the gender pay gap—it represents a continued disadvantage for police women, despite the growing number of women working in law enforcement and the rules governing public-sector employment. We further decompose the gendered pattern in police pay by whether these individuals work for federal, state, or local agencies, and find that those working for state government show stark declines in the gender gap in pay while those working for local or federal agencies experience little to no change in this gender income inequality over time. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our findings and directions for future research on gender inequality within law enforcement occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry method was developed and validated to simultaneously determine chlorpyrifos, imidacloprid, and imidacloprid metabolites in soil, wheat grain, and wheat straw matrices. Satisfactory linearity (R2 ≥ 0.9965) of the method was obtained for all analytes. The ranges of limits of detection and limits of quantification for seven analytes in three matrices were 0.17–66.7 and 0.5–200 μg/kg, respectively. Average recoveries were 72.85–81.25% for chlorpyrifos, 78.54–84.70% for imidacloprid, 73.83–81.03% for imidacloprid olefin, 71.47–80.61% for 5‐hydroxy imidacloprid, 71.79–81.32% for imidacloprid urea, 70.42–82.20% for imidacloprid nitroguanidine, and 70.91–82.46% for imidacloprid 6‐chloronicotinic acid in soil, wheat grain, and wheat straw. The intra‐ and interday relative standard deviations were less than 8%. The established method was successfully applied for the residual analysis of chlorpyrifos, imidacloprid, and imidacloprid metabolites in actual soil, wheat grain, and wheat straw samples. The results indicated that the established method could be used to detect trace amounts of chlorpyrifos, imidacloprid, and imidacloprid metabolites in wheat and that the method might be able to provide some data on the detection of these seven compounds in other crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, it is very popular to make friends, share photographs, and exchange news throughout social networks. Social networks widely expand the area of people’s social connections and make communication much smoother than ever before. In a social network, there are many social groups established based on common interests among persons, such as learning group, family group, and reading group. People often describe their profiles when registering as a user in a social network. Then social networks can organize these users into groups of friends according to their profiles. However, an important issue must be considered, namely many users’ sensitive profiles could have been leaked out during this process. Therefore, it is reasonable to design a privacy-preserving friends-finding protocol in social network. Toward this goal, we design a fuzzy interest matching protocol based on private set intersection. Concretely, two candidate users can first organize their profiles into sets, then use Bloom filters to generate new data structures, and finally find the intersection sets to decide whether being friends or not in the social network. The protocol is shown to be secure in the malicious model and can be useful for practical purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a promising hydrogen storage material, sodium borohydride (NaBH4) exhibits superior stability in alkaline solutions and delivers 10.8 wt.% theoretical hydrogen storage capacity. Nevertheless, its hydrolysis reaction at room temperature must be activated and accelerated by adding an effective catalyst. In this study, we synthesize Co nanoparticles supported on bagasse-derived porous carbon (Co@xPC) for catalytic hydrolytic dehydrogenation of NaBH4. According to the experimental results, Co nanoparticles with uniform particle size and high dispersion are successfully supported on porous carbon to achieve a Co@150PC catalyst. It exhibits particularly high activity of hydrogen generation with the optimal hydrogen production rate of 11086.4 mLH2∙min−1∙gCo−1 and low activation energy (Ea) of 31.25 kJ mol−1. The calculation results based on density functional theory (DFT) indicate that the Co@xPC structure is conducive to the dissociation of [BH4]−, which effectively enhances the hydrolysis efficiency of NaBH4. Moreover, Co@150PC presents an excellent durability, retaining 72.0% of the initial catalyst activity after 15 cycling tests. Moreover, we also explored the degradation mechanism of catalyst performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simple and rapid analytical method for the detection of trifloxystrobin, trifloxystrobin acid and tebuconazole in soil, brown rice, paddy plants and rice hulls was established and validated by liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry. Acceptable linearity (R2 > 0.99), accuracy (average recoveries of 74.3–108.5%) and precision (intra‐ and inter‐day relative standard deviations of 0.9–8.8%) were obtained using the developed determination approach. In the field trial, the half‐lives of trifloxystrobin and tebuconazole in paddy plants were 5.7–8.3 days in three locations throughout China, and the terminal residue concentrations of trifloxystrobin and tebuconazole were <100 and 500 μg/kg (maximum residue limits set by China), respectively, at harvest, which indicated that, based on the recommended application procedure, trifloxystrobin and tebuconazole are safe for use on rice. The risk assessment results demonstrated that, owing to risk quotient values of both fungicides being <100%, the potential risk of trifloxystrobin and tebuconazole on rice was acceptable for Chinese consumers. These data could provide supporting information for the proper use and safety evaluation of trifloxystrobin and tebuconazole in rice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simple pretreatment method with liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC–MS/MS) was developed and validated to simultaneously determine dichlorvos and phoxim in tobacco and soil matrices. Satisfactory linearity (R2 ≥ 0.9991) of the method was obtained for both analytes. The limits of detection and limits of quantification for dichlorvos and phoxim in three matrices were 0.0015–0.006 and 0.005–0.02 mg/kg, respectively. Average recoveries were 78.24–92.21% for dichlorvos and 76.62–100.51% for phoxim in soil, green tobacco leaves and cured tobacco leaves. The intra‐ and inter‐day relative standard deviations were <6%. The established method was successfully applied for the residual analysis of dichlorvos and phoxim in real soil and tobacco samples. The results indicated that the established method could be used to detect trace amounts of dichlorvos and phoxim in tobacco. The data could also help the Chinese government establish maximum residue limits of dichlorvos and phoxim on tobacco and establish proper and safe use of dichlorvos and phoxim on tobacco plants in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry method was developed and validated to simultaneously determine metalaxyl and azoxystrobin in soil, potato, and potato foliage samples. The samples were extracted by 20 mL of acetonitrile and purified with dispersive solid-phase extraction using octadecyl silane as sorbent. The method showed good linearity (determination coefficients ≥ 0.9926) for metalaxyl (2.5-500 ng/mL) and azoxystrobin (5-1000 ng/mL). The limits of detection and quantification for both fungicides were 1.5-20 μg/kg. The average recoveries in soil, potato, and potato foliage were 83.07-92.87% for metalaxyl and 82.71-98.53% for azoxystrobin. The intra- and inter-day relative standard deviations were all less than 9%. The method was successfully applied on the residual analysis of metalaxyl and azoxystrobin in field trial samples. The results showed that the concentrations of metalaxyl and azoxystrobin in potato samples collected from Guizhou and Hunan were below 50 and 100 μg/kg (maximum residue limit set by China), respectively, at 5 days after the last application. When following the recommended application manual, metalaxyl and azoxystrobin do not present health concerns to the population because the risk quotients are far below 100%. All the above data could help and promote the safe and proper use of metalaxyl and azoxystrobin in potato. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private set intersection (PSI) protocols enable 2 parties to compute the intersection of their inputs without compromising anything about the datasets beyond the intersection. With the advent of cloud computing, outsourcing computation has been attracted wide range of attention from research community and applied widely in the industry. The cloud computing allows resources restrained devices to outsource their expensive computation to the cloud. Based on Abadi's O-PSI, we present a variant of delegated private set intersection protocol secure in the semi-honest model under RSA assumption, and we also give an efficient and secure outsourcing computation algorithm for RSA cryptosystem. Depending on this algorithm, we transform a variant of delegated private set intersection protocol into an improved outsourced one. It enables the clients only to perform simple modular multiplication for computing what they want during the execution of protocol. Besides, the variant of delegated protocol can be easily extended to multiple clients. Compared with the state of the art, our proposed protocol has great advantage in efficiency. We finally evaluate these protocols and prove their security in the semi-honest model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]