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Context: National Wetland Parks (NWPs) are a unique form of protected areas in China that have experienced a rapid increase in number from zero to more than 900 over the past two decades. Aims: We examine the underlying causes of the boom in NWPs and assess their far-reaching ecological and socio-economic impacts. Methods: Utilising GIS information and vector maps, we analysed the spatial distribution of pilot and approved NWPs from 2005 to 2019. Document analysis was employed to explore resource-orientated and legal drivers that have prompted the growth of NWPs. Key results: China's NWPs developed in three phases, namely, the exploration phase (2005–2007), the expansion phase (2008–2014) and the normalisation phase (2015–present). The demand for outdoor recreation and improved wetland legislation were the primary facilitators for the growth of NWPs. Conclusions: The expansion of NWPs is an important contributor to nature conservation and ecological civilisation, yielding a range of ecological, economic and social benefits. Implications: China's experiences in NWPs offers valuable lessons and implications for global nature conservation. Implementing a long-term management mechanism for NWPs is recommended to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands. The number of National Wetland Parks (NWPs) distributed across China has grown from zero to more than 900 over the past two decades. Is this unlimited growth always beneficial? After analysing the distribution and dynamic trends of China's NWPs, we examined the resource-orientated and legal drivers that prompted the growth and its far-reaching ecological, economic, social outcomes and impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hefei's gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate ranks first among all cities in China, and it was the fastest-growing city in China from 2000 to 2020. The high-speed economic development inevitably led to rapid changes in land cover types, e.g., an increment in artificial features (built-up) and decrement in natural features (vegetation). However, (1) many previous studies focus on the land cover change in metropolis or at the global scale, yet few focus on underdeveloped but fast-growing cities; (2) land cover studies mainly focus on global variations, yet seldom on local characteristics. Thus, it is of great significance to monitor the land cover change for the city with the fastest economic growth in China based on the long time-series satellite images from both global and local perspectives. In this study, with support from huge amounts of data (including 719 Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI satellite images, land surface temperature, nighttime satellite images, DEM, multiple land cover products, and various auxiliary data), processing and parallel computing abilities of the GEE platform, classification maps of land cover in Hefei from 2000 to 2020 are produced based on a random forest machine learning method, and the spatio-temporal variations and driving factors are analyzed from both global and local viewpoints. The results show that: (1) the classification accuracy is excellent; the average overall accuracy is 93% and the Kappa coefficient is 0.88; (2) the general spatio-temporal variations in land cover in Hefei from 2000 to 2020 are obvious; the built-up area expanded from 419.72 km2 to 1530.20 km2, with a total growth rate of 264.58%. With the expansion of the built-up area, the vegetation coverage decreased by 16.61% (1652.56 km2); (3) the land surface temperature shows an increment trend in the new town yet a decrement trend in the old town due to the change in vegetation coverage and the decentration of administration centers; further analysis shows that the population and the social economy are two driving factors for land cover changes. It is worth noting that both the area and coverage of vegetation in the old town and water body area in Hefei increased significantly, although the fast urbanization inevitably caused a decrement in vegetation and water area in the whole city, indicating both the high-speed economic development and improvement in green surfaces simultaneously experienced in Hefei from 2000 to 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Science Technology & Industry / Keji he Chanye is the property of Chinese Society of Technology Economics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Nanchang University (Natural Science) is the property of Journal of Nanchang University (Natural Science) Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged at the end of 2019, generating a rapidly evolving pandemic, raising serious global health implications. Among them was the fear of a mechanical ventilator shortage due to COVID-19's high contagion rate and pathophysiology. Fears of a ventilator shortage unleashed a wave of innovations. This manuscript describes the AmboVent, a ventilator, rapidly developed with a sense of urgency, by a group of Israeli volunteers. Using a decentralized approach, we worked extensively and managed within ten days to create a working ventilator. It utilizes a 64-year-old technological concept, the bag valve mask (BVM), sometimes known by the proprietary name Ambu bag, which we transformed into an automatic, controlled, and feature-rich ventilator by endowing it with contemporary computing technology. Applying a functional rather than a commercial-oriented approach can result in the ad hoc development of lifesaving solutions during a rapidly spreading pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stability Community of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) held a virtual workshop on "Vaccine Stability Considerations to Enable Rapid Development and Deployment", on March 24-25, 2021. The workshop included distinguished speakers and panelists from across the industry, academia, regulatory agencies, as well as health care leaders. This paper presents a review of the topics covered. Specifically the challenges in accelerating vaccine development and analytical characterization techniques to establish shelf-life were covered. Additionally, vaccine stability modeling using prior knowledge stability models and advanced kinetic analysis played a key in the EUA approaches discussed during the workshop. Finally, the role of stability studies in addressing the challenges of vaccine distribution and deployment during the pandemic were a focus of presentations and panel discussions. Although the workshop did not have any presentation topics directly dedicated to the mRNA vaccines, the techniques discussed are generally applicable. The mRNA vaccine developers were represented in the panel discussions, where experts involved in the EUA approval/deployment stages for this vaccine type could discuss the challenges as applied to their vaccines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kuala Muda has seen significant change over the last two decades. Population growth and rapid development are predicted to have an impact on the environment in this region. There are some unsustainable activities due to development that sacrificed environmental values in Kuala Muda, including deforestation that changed the land cover of Kuala Muda in addition to pollution that affected the water quality of Sungai Merbok Basin and Sungai Muda Basin as a water catchment area. These are the most important sources of water for irrigated agriculture and potable water in Kedah, Penang and Perlis. Clearing mangrove forests for aquaculture will have an impact as they are important for the protection of the coastline and surrounding communities from the effects of winds and waves from the Straits of Malacca. Flooding is also a major issue during the monsoon season. Kedah has recently faced a water crisis, with Sungai Muda' water level falling during the dry season. Better management and protection of Kuala Muda is thus very important as it provides invaluable environmental services to the northern states of Peninsular Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of high quality, equitable, and accessible education resources is a key to supporting continuing professional development (CPD) in health organizations. The Health Education and Training Institute (HETI) and its operational model for districts (District HETI Operational Model), is a novel approach that supports this imperative for over 155,000 staff working across the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The model uses three principles in education and training development. These include collaborative partnerships, rapid resource development, and effective leadership within virtual teams. A state-wide learning management system has been implemented to support this initiative. Over 451 standardized, education, and training online modules have been developed for medical, nursing and midwifery, dental, allied health, and nonclinical NSW Health employees since 2013. These educational resources are accessible 24 hours a day. Cost-effective online programs have enabled more than 13.6 million learner completions. Program evaluations highlight the value of these resources in providing a positive learning experience. Furthermore, the District HETI Operational Model has been recognized by multiple national and international excellence awards in learning and development. The principles of the District HETI Operational Model apply to other health organizations that may choose to adopt a similar model. Such a model may support equity of access to contemporary, standardized, evidence-based education resources for health professionals working across geographically and clinically diverse environments. Implementation of a similar model for future CPD interventions warrants consideration by practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction of critical systems (e.g. disaster/emergency management systems) demands extra efforts from the developers as compared to non-critical systems. A critical system may be comprised of hardware communication infrastructure and the management system software. Many of hardware failures or in-capabilities can be handled by the resilient software components. The management software's main tasks are to continuously collect data (from distributed sensors), to predict possible threats, and to intimate the right authorities for timely action to avoid/reduce the damages of the threats. For the construction of such systems, by reusing existing reliable software components, a verifiable software composition mechanism is highly desired. In this paper, we select a component model (EX-MAN) from the component-based development approaches for providing pre-defined exogenous connectors. In this paper, at the methodological level, we define an approach to verify the correctness of exogenous connectors. To evaluate our approach, we design an emergency management system in EX-MAN and implement the system in our tool for EX-MAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid development is essential for IoT (Internet of Things) application developers to obtain first-mover advantages and reduce the development cost. In this article, we present TinyLink, a holistic system for rapid development of IoT applications. The key idea of TinyLink is to use a top-down approach for designing both the hardware and the software of IoT applications. Developers write the application code in a C-like language to specify the key logic of their applications, without dealing with the details of the specific hardware components. Taking the application code as input, TinyLink automatically generates the hardware configuration as well as the binary program executable on the target hardware platform. TinyLink provides unified APIs for applications to interact with the underlying hardware components. We implement TinyLink and evaluate its performance using real-world IoT applications. Results show that (1) TinyLink achieves rapid development of IoT applications, reducing 52.58% of lines of code on average compared with traditional approaches; (2) TinyLink searches a much larger design space and thus can generate a superior solution for the hardware configuration, compared with the state-of-the-art approach; (3) TinyLink incurs acceptable overhead in terms of execution time and program memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use change in Pandaan District was identified as the fourth-highest in East Java Province. This change is due to the population increase caused by the strategic location of the Pandaan Sub-district, which is passed by the Surabaya-Malang City connecting road, creating a rapid development of built-up land. The spread of built-up land development with low density becomes the initial identification of the sprawl phenomenon. Changes in land-use due to push factors caused inconsistencies in the development of existing land as stipulated in spatial planning documents. This study aims to determine land-use change and land-use prediction in Pandaan Sub-district to be used for future planning. Research methods incorporated spatial analysis of land-use change and the land-use planning process in ArcMap and SELVA IDRISI. The land use forecasts for modeling are based on the use of the Cellular Automata (CA) -Markov method and the ANN / MLP method. Land-use changes were identified through land-use comparisons in recent years. The land-use prediction was determined through the land-use change transition by including the motivating and inhibiting variables of land-use changes. The results of the study stated that the most significant land-use change occurred in rural/urban villages passed by arterial and collector road connecting Surabaya-Malang City. CAMarkov results showed that the results of land-use prediction have a linear development pattern in the spreading road networks and residential settlements. The prediction results show that settlement increase13,62% and industry increase 20,7%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survival, especially the youth, is critical for the reproduction of a species. Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) cubs are not well developed and are vulnerable at birth, and they have developed many survival strategy to assist with survival until adulthood, including rapid growth of their young. By analysing the changes in the daily milk intake and weight gain during the early stages of cub growth for 11 years (2004-2014) over 42 healthy giant panda cubs, we found that milk intake by the cubs increased rapidly during the first 10 days. After 10 days, the daily milk intake decreased gradually and stabilized beginning at 35 days. In addition, the cubs with lower birth weight exhibited higher daily milk intake, while those with higher birth weight consumed less milk per unit of body weight. This study explored the characteristics of daily milk intake during the early growth stage of giant panda cubs, offering insight into adaptations strategy of newborns in this species and providing valuable information for artificial rearing to improve the survival rate of captive panda cubs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of tourism in the inland waters, various types of accidents in the waters have posed a great threat to human life, property, and the environment. This has caused concern in all circles of society. According to water tourism safety issues, and relying on Internet technology, shipping safety, and public safety management theory, this paper has proposed the concept and design plan of an Internet + maritime emergency management platform. This platform includes functions such as the intelligent perception of a ship's navigation status, the scientific selection of a maritime emergency rescue site, the emergency rescue scene, the online dynamic management of maritime emergency resources, and the online production of a maritime emergency rescue plan. The design scheme has been used in the platform's development. This paper has taken the application of the Internet + maritime emergency management platform for the Liujiaxia reservoir in the Gansu Province of China as an example. The results showed that the design of the platform that has been proposed in this paper is reasonable and that it can provide scientific, fast and accurate decision information for emergency command in the Liujiaxia reservoir and improve the effective control of the accident site as well as the use of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While a trade‐off between larval development and adult life span is key to understand why not all animals develop at their maximum rate and why life histories align along a fast‐slow continuum, it has been rarely studied. More general, the physiological mechanisms underlying life‐history trade‐offs are poorly understood and there is ongoing debate about the mediatory role of oxidative stress. We explicitly investigated the role of oxidative stress in mediating the trade‐off between larval development and adult life span in the damselfly Lestes viridis. We exposed larvae to time stress (by manipulating photoperiods) and manipulated oxidative stress levels using the mitochondrial uncoupler 2,4‐dinitrophenol (DNP) that causes a reduced production of reactive oxygen species. In addition, we considered other costs of an accelerated development in terms of reductions in immune function (the activity of phenoloxidase [PO]) and energy storage (fat content). Larvae accelerated their development but not growth under time stress, allowing to identify costs of rapid development without confounding effects of rapid growth. Rapid development came at the cost of a much shorter life span, which was associated with an increase in oxidative damage to lipids, proteins and DNA. Other costs in the adult stage of a rapid larval development included a lower body mass and reduced immune function, while the fat and protein contents were not reduced. Time‐stressed animals exposed to DNP developed even faster and did not show the increase in oxidative damage. Notably, they did not suffer the costs of rapid development: they had no shorter life span, lower body mass or reduced PO activity. Our results provide strong experimental support for a trade‐off between rapid development and life span and for the mediatory role of oxidative stress in shaping this life‐history trade‐off. Our study highlights that manipulation of mitochondrial uncoupling may be a powerful method to study the mechanistic underpinnings of life‐history trade‐offs. A plain language summary is available for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Rapid development and production of vaccines against emerging diseases requires well established, validated, robust technologies to allow industrial scale production and accelerated licensure of products. Areas covered: A versatile Vero cell platform has been developed and utilized to deliver a wide range of candidate and licensed vaccines against emerging viral diseases. This platform builds on the 35 years’ experience and safety record with inactivated whole virus vaccines such as polio vaccine. The current platform has been optimized to include a novel double inactivation procedure in order to ensure a highly robust inactivation procedure for novel emerging viruses. The utility of this platform in rapidly developing inactivated whole virus vaccines against pandemic (-like) influenza viruses and other emerging viruses such as West Nile, Chikungunya, Ross River and SARS is reviewed. The potential of the platform for development of vaccines against other emerging viruses such as Zika virus is described. Expert commentary: Use of this platform can substantially accelerate process development and facilitate licensure because of the substantial existing data set available for the cell matrix. However, programs to provide vaccines against emerging diseases must allow alternative clinical development paths to licensure, without the requirement to carry out large scale field efficacy studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose Implementing new magnetic resonance experiments, or sequences, often involves extensive programming on vendor-specific platforms, which can be time consuming and costly. This situation is exacerbated when research sequences need to be implemented on several platforms simultaneously, for example, at different field strengths. This work presents an alternative programming environment that is hardware-independent, open-source, and promotes rapid sequence prototyping. Methods A novel file format is described to efficiently store the hardware events and timing information required for an MR pulse sequence. Platform-dependent interpreter modules convert the file to appropriate instructions to run the sequence on MR hardware. Sequences can be designed in high-level languages, such as MATLAB, or with a graphical interface. Spin physics simulation tools are incorporated into the framework, allowing for comparison between real and virtual experiments. Results Minimal effort is required to implement relatively advanced sequences using the tools provided. Sequences are executed on three different MR platforms, demonstrating the flexibility of the approach. Conclusion A high-level, flexible and hardware-independent approach to sequence programming is ideal for the rapid development of new sequences. The framework is currently not suitable for large patient studies or routine scanning although this would be possible with deeper integration into existing workflows. Magn Reson Med 77:1544-1552, 2017. © 2016 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing availability of high quality digital texts and usage data about them provides opportunities to identify new uses for collections, alternative ways to present and explore content, and expanded audiences for the materials. Using this information and a rapid development model called a “flash build,” JSTOR is creating and partnering with other organizations to build new tools that add value to library investments in digital collections. Two examples are discussed: “Classroom Readings,” a tool designed to help educators find articles on JSTOR that are good candidates for teaching, and “Understanding Shakespeare,” a resource created in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library that enables scholars to follow links in lines from Shakespeare plays to articles on JSTOR that reference them. The rapid development model used for these projects is easily reproducible and effective, and could be applied to many library-driven efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The first complete simulation based on OpenSurgSim (OSS) is used as a case study for analyzing how the toolkit can accelerate the development of surgical simulations. The Burr Hole Trainer (BHT) is designed to train non-neurosurgeons to drill holes in the skull to relieve intracranial pressure, and the majority of its simulation functionality is provided by OSS. Based on code size, using OSS cut the development time in half, reduced the necessary size of the development team by two-thirds, and saved millions of US dollars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Marketing & Management of Innovations / Marketing ì Menedžment Ìnnovacìj is the property of Sumy State University, Department of Marketing & Management of Innovative Activity and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Speech-user interfaces offer truly hands-free, eyes-free interaction, have unmatched throughput rates, and are the only plausible interaction modality for illiterate users across the world, but they are not yet developed in abundance to support every type of user, language, or acoustic scenario. Two approaches present exciting opportunities for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – This paper aims to present a general review of the circumstances of America and Japan's rapid corporate, economic and industrial development in the twentieth century. Design/methodology/approach – The approach considered and evaluated how the circumstances of America and Japan's growth might apply to China and India, two of the fastest growing economies of the twenty-first century. Findings – The findings suggest that both America and Japan might be considered exceptional cases and, as such, neither one might be regarded as a good model for emulation. However, the circumstances of Japan's rapid growth appear closer to those of contemporary China and India and on that basis the authors suggest that Japan might be a better model for emulation. Originality/value – The American model is too novel and unlikely to be imitated, replicated or repeated whereas Japan's high population density, agrarian origins, state assisted and administered development, adaptation and hybridization of local and imported methods and technologies, kinship, pseudo-kinship and locality based business groupings, and rapid, come-from-behind charge toward industrialization, urbanization and international emergence, all suggest that Japan offers a more relevant and useful development model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe a model for aligning books and documents from bilingual corpus with a goal to create 'perfectly' aligned bilingual corpus on word-to-word level. Presented algorithms differ from existing algorithms in consideration of the presence of human translator which usage we are trying to minimize. We treat human translator as an oracle who knows exact alignments and the goal of the system is to optimize (minimize) the use of this oracle. The effectiveness of the oracle is measured by the speed at which he can create 'perfectly' aligned bilingual corpus. By 'Perfectly' aligned corpus we mean zero entropy corpus because oracle can make alignments without any probabilistic interpretation, i.e., with 100% confidence. Sentence level alignments and word-to-word alignments, although treated separately in this paper, are integrated in a single framework. For sentence level alignments we provide a dynamic programming algorithm which achieves low precision and recall error rate. For word-to-word level alignments Expectation Maximization algorithm that integrates linguistic dictionaries is suggested as the main tool for the oracle to build 'perfectly' aligned bilingual corpus. We show empirically that suggested pre-aligned corpus requires little interaction from the oracle and that creation of perfectly aligned corpus can be achieved almost with the speed of human reading. Presented algorithms are language independent but in this paper we verify them with English-Lithuanian language pair on two types of text: law documents and fiction literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, intense international competition, rapidly changing technologies, fragmented and demanding markets, and increasing product complexity, force fast development for all high-technology products. The manufacturers of high-technology products have responded to these pressures, and doubling of development speed is commonplace. Even with the reductions in time-to-market attained thus far, product development speed can be much faster (and companies will do it). Success demands a new organizational mindset and new product development methods. Development speed will intensify in the future for all high-technology products, including medical devices. Companies must continually seek to improve the speed of their product development or be swept aside by their fleet-footed competitors [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Concerned about the noise pollution in urban environments, the European Commission (EC) has created an Environmental Noise Directive 2002/49/EC (END) requiring Member states to publish noise maps and noise management plans every five years for cities with a high density of inhabitants, major roads, railways and airports. The END also requires the noise pressure levels for these sources to be presented independently. Currently, data measurements and the representations of the noise pressure levels in such maps are performed semi-manually by experts. This process is time and cost consuming, as well as limited to presenting only a static picture of the noise levels. To overcome these issues, we propose the deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks with several nodes in urban environments that can enable the generation of real-time noise level maps, as well as detect the source of the sound thanks to machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art of the hardware used in wireless acoustic applications and propose a low-cost sensor based on an ARM cortex-A microprocessor. This node is able to process machine learning algorithms for sound source detection in-situ, allowing the deployment of highly scalable sound identification systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]