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Strength training is becoming increasingly popular among all age groups, as it helps the participants increase muscle strength, improve body flexibility, reduce health risks, and reshape physical forms. However, strength training imposes strict regulations on gestures and requires professional instruction in real time for the sake of body-building efficiency and safety. For this purpose, in this article, we propose a novel low-cost system named iCoach, to provide real-time monitoring and coaching service for strength training participants. Specifically, we design and implement a smart fitness glove, which can be seamlessly equipped with a pervasive inertial unit. With this customized but low-cost device, we can recognize various training programs, detect nonstandard behaviors while exercising, and assess exercising qualities of a user. Our primary experimental results show that iCoach can recognize 15 sets of training programs, detect three common nonstandard behaviors, and assess the quality of training with high accuracy and reliability.

Background As a classic oral drug used in diabetic patients, metformin has exhibited an anticancer role in many types of cancers in recent years. Here, we aimed to investigate the role of metformin in the growth of breast cancer and its novel targets. Methods A cell viability assay was utilized to examine the inhibitory effect of metformin on proliferation of breast cancer cells. Western blotting and RT-PCR assays were used to detect the regulation of metformin on the expression of oncogenic HMGA2. The luciferase reporter vector of HMGA2 promoter was constructed. A luciferase reporter gene assay was performed to analyze the effect of metformin on HMGA2 promoter activity in breast cancer cells. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assay was performed to show the binding of Sp1 to HMGA2 promoter in breast cancer cells with or without metformin treatment. The function of metformin-regulated HMGA2 in breast cancer growth was tested using a cell viability assay. Results Cell proliferation was obviously inhibited in breast cancer cells treated with different concentrations of metformin. The level of mRNA and protein of HMGA2 was significantly reduced by metformin in the cells. Mechanistically, metformin was able to inactivate the HMGA2 promoter through downregulating transcription factor Sp1 in the cells. In terms of function, treatment with metformin suppressed the proliferation of breast cancer cells and overexpressed HMGA2 reversed the inhibition of cell proliferation mediated by metformin. Conclusion Metformin resists the growth of breast cancer through targeting Sp1/HMGA2 signal.

Ideological and political education is an important content to ensure the direc-tion of education and improve the quality of talent training in China. In recent years, it has been widely concerned by the education system and the society. The traditional ideological and political course is gradually transferred to the curriculum ideological and political education, and provides guidance for the comprehensive promotion of ideological and political education. This paper makes a summary and reflection on the current ideological and political edu-cation in China, introduces the practical significance of cultivating students’ cultural self-confidence through curriculum setting, analyzes the relevance between college English curriculum setting and ideological and political educa-tion, and proposes a path planning for enhancing the relevance.

With the explosive popularity of mobile devices, people tend to use them in different areas of daily life including shopping online, searching information, social networking and etc.. In spite of great convenience, the wide-use of mobile devices also brings about serious risk of privacy leakage through screen peeking. Even though various methods have been proposed to address this problem, they have different types of shortcomings such as additional hardware cost, not applicable to long texts and etc.. To alleviate screen peeking in a smarter way, we propose a pure software-based screen privacy protection system named iScreen for commercial mobile devices, which can effectively reduce peeper’s readability but without affecting a valid user’s. The key idea of iScreen is to make use of the differences of viewing angles and distances between the valid user and shoulder surfer, and accordingly adjust the font size, color scheme and screen brightness. By this means, iScreen can obviously sacrifice the shoulder surfer’s readability with little degradation of the user’s. We build a prototype on Android smartphones and conduct real-world experiments to evaluate its performance.

Purpose – The research study aims to assess the women’s Business education and leadership training program at a higher institutional level in order to examine how the program impacts and contributes to women’s empowerment. Further, this research sought to explore women’s leadership training aspect that has not explicitly elucidated. Besides, this study looks upon women’s self-perception by empowering them with skills and leadership capabilities to change hard-core gender stereotypes in society. Research methodology – The sample size comprised of 82 enrolled female students in the training program. The qualitative statistics (i.e., three focus groups) evaluated with the Kirkpatrick model. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied to compare pre-and post-training quantitative data (i.e., questionnaire). Effect size is measured to check the effectiveness of the training program. Findings – The post-training evaluation revealed higher scores in knowledge, tools, and leadership skills. The training program encouraged women to bring change in self-perception and gain confidence for transformative changes in society. Findings support the effectiveness of leadership education and training programs. Research limitations – This research conducted in a Pakistani patriarchal cultural context and one region of Pakistan (Punjab). Hence the results are carefully generalised. The long term outcomes of this leadership training program and women’s performance in the job market are not studied. Practical implications – Findings suggest that a training program positively affects women’s learning, knowledge, and behaviour. Training programs empower women with practical tools for self and business development. The program encouraged women to gain better insight into work-life challenges and enhance personal competencies to gain equal rights. Originality/Value – This research will significantly contribute to the relatively scarce literature on the effectiveness of women’s business education and leadership training programs at a higher institutional level in the Pakistani context for women empowerment.

Background Randomised control trials and genetic analyses have demonstrated that vitamin D or 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) levels may not play a causal role in the development of cardiovascular disease. However, it is unclear if 25(OH)D is causally associated with cause-specific vascular disease and lipids. Therefore, we examined the causal association of 25(OH)D with myocardial infarction, stroke, ischaemic heart disease, ischaemic stroke, subarachnoid haemorrhage, intracerebral haemorrhage, and lipid levels among both Chinese and Europeans. Methods We used a Mendelian randomisation (MR) design in the China Kadoorie Biobank, the Copenhagen City Heart Study, and the Copenhagen General Population Study. The 25(OH)D-related genetic variants in the CYP2R1 and DCHR7 genes were genotyped in 99,012 Chinese adults and 106,911 Danish adults. Results In Chinese adults, plasma 25(OH)D levels were not significantly associated with cause-specific vascular disease or mortality, with the exception of intracerebral haemorrhage (HR, 1.09 [95% CI, 1.01,1.18] per 25 nmol/L higher plasma 25(OH)D). In Europeans, plasma 25(OH)D levels were inversely associated with all types of vascular diseases and mortality. However, MR analysis did not demonstrate causal associations of genetically increased 25(OH)D levels with cause-specific vascular diseases, or mortality in both Chinese and European adults. In addition, each 25 nmol/L higher 25(OH)D was observationally associated with lower total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, but higher high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels. Likewise, MR analysis showed that 25(OH)D levels were not causally associated with lipids in both Chinese and European adults after Bonferroni correction. Conclusions We found no evidence to support that genetically increased 25(OH)D was associated with a lower risk of ischaemic stroke, intracerebral haemorrhage, subarachnoid haemorrhage, and lipid levels in both Chinese and European adults. These results suggest that the inverse associations of vitamin D with vascular disease could be the result of confounding. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12916-019-1401-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Dynamic web applications play a vital role in providing resources manipulation and interaction between clients and servers. The features presently supported by browsers have raised business opportunities, by supplying high interactivity in web-based services, like web banking, e-commerce, social networking, forums, and at the same time, these features have brought serious risks and increased vulnerabilities in web applications that enable cyber-attacks to be executed. One of the common high-risk cyber-attack of web application vulnerabilities is cross-site scripting (XSS). Nowadays, XSS is still dramatically increasing and considered as one of the most severe threats for organizations, users, and developers. If the ploy is successful, the victim is at the mercy of the cybercriminals. In this research, a robust artificial neural network-based multilayer perceptron (MLP) scheme integrated with the dynamic feature extractor is proposed for XSS attack detection. The detection scheme adopts a large real-world dataset, the dynamic features extraction mechanism, and MLP model, which successfully surpassed several tests on an employed unique dataset under careful experimentation, and achieved promising and state-of-the-art results with accuracy, detection probabilities, false positive rate, and AUC-ROC scores of 99.32%, 98.35 %, 0.3%, and 99.02%, respectively. Therefore, it has the potentials to be applied for XSS-based attack detection in either the client-side or the server-side.

Background MiR-145 has been identified as a tumor suppressive microRNA in multiple cancers. In this current investigation, we searched for new direct targets of miR-145 and evaluated their effect on breast cancer development. Methods Targetscan was used to predict the target genes of miR-145. The targeting of miR-145 on oncogenic HBXIP was verified by luciferase reporter gene analysis. The effect of miR-145 on the level of messenger RNA and protein of HBXIP was evaluated by quantitative real-time PCR and immunoblotting. Correlations between miR-145 and HBXIP, as well as miR-145 expression, were analyzed in 30 paired breast cancer and noncancerous tissues by quantitative real-time PCR. Methyl thiazol tetrazolium and colony formation assays were applied to determine the cell proliferation ability. Results HBXIP was identified as a novel target gene of miR-145 in breast cancer. MiR-145 was found to dose-dependently decrease messenger RNA and protein expression of HBXIP in breast cancer MCF-7 cells. Notably, miR-145 expression was negatively related to HBXIP expression and was obviously reduced in breast cancer samples. Finally, miR-145 suppressed cell proliferation while its inhibitor, anti-miR-145, accelerated cell proliferation. Interestingly, silencing of HBXIP reversed the acceleration of cell proliferation induced by anti-miR-145 in breast cancer. Conclusion Oncogenic HBXIP is a new direct target of tumor suppressive miR-145. Our findings reveal that miR-145-targeting HBXIP could be a potential therapeutic target in breast cancer.

Background There is abundant evidence to indicate that HBXIP functions as an oncoprotein and transcription co-activator during the development and promotion of cancers. In multiple cancers, ZEB1 serves as a transcription activator to regulate gene expression. We explored the roles of ZEB1 in HBXIP-induced breast cancer growth. Methods HBXIP regulation of ZEB1 was evaluated by reverse transcription PCR and immunoblotting. The stimulation of ZEB1 promoter by HBXIP and/or Sp1 was tested using luciferase reporter gene analysis. The alteration of cell proliferation mediated by HBXIP-induced ZEB1 was tested using methyl-thiazolyl-tetrazolium and 5-Ethynyl-2'-deoxyuridine (EdU) incorporation analysis. ZEB1 and HBXIP expression in human breast cancer tissues was analyzed using quantitative real-time PCR. The relationship between HBXIP and ZEB1 was confirmed by Pearson's correlation coefficient. Results We observed dose-dependent upregulation of ZEB1 by HBXIP in breast cancer cells. HBXIP can activate the ZEB1 promoter by interacting with transcription factor Sp1. Cell viability and EdU incorporation analysis showed that HBXIP could drive cell proliferation by enhancing ZEB1 in breast cancer. Using quantitative real-time PCR, ZEB1 overexpression and a positive relationship between ZEB1 and HBXIP were observed in clinical breast cancer samples. Conclusion Oncogenic HBXIP controls the transcription regulation of ZEB1 by co-activating Sp1, thereby accelerating breast cancer growth.

To assess the correlation between Z-scores of positive noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) results and the positive predictive value (PPV) of NIPT.Pregnancies with positive NIPT results at Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Centre between July 2017 and May 2020 were included in this study. Fetal karyotyping or microarray analysis was provided to patients with abnormal NIPT results for confirmatory testing. Logistic regression analyses was applied to study the relationship between the Z scores and the PPV performance. The optimal cutoff values for indicating fetal common trisomies were obtained based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, and then the PPV were calculated in pregnancies with positive NIPT results at Z-score greater than or equal to cutoff value and in patients with a Z-score between 3 and cutoff value respectively.A total of 214 pregnancies with positive NIPT results for fetal common trisomies were validated by invasive prenatal diagnosis and follow up in this study. Of these, NIPT indicated trisomy 13 in 25 cases, trisomy 18 in 54 cases and trisomy 21 in 135 patients. Logistic regression analyses showed a significant association (p 0.05) between the Z-scores and true positive results for T21 and T18. For T13, the significant association was not observed (p 0.05). The ROC curve analysis showed that the optimal cutoff Z-score for indicating fetal trisomies 13, 18, and 21 were 6.889, 7.574 and 6.612 respectively, and the corresponding area under curve were 0.706, 0.916, and 0.954. In this cohort with abnormal NIPT results, the cutoff values revealed a sensitivity of 96.8% and a specificity of 90% for indicating trisomies 21, and a sensitivity of 88.9% and a specificity of 92.6% for trisomies 18. However, probably due to the sample size, the sensitivity and specificity for indicating trisomy 13 were lower (85.7% and 61.1%) than that for trisomies 21 and 18. The PPVs in pregnancies with positive NIPT results at Z-score greater than or equal to cutoff value were 99.18% (121/122) for trisomy 21, 92.31% (24/26) for trisomy 18 and 46.15% (6/13) for trisomy 13. In patients with a Z-score between 3 and cutoff Z-score, the PPV of NIPT for trisomies 21, 18, and 13 were 30.77% (4/13), 10.71% (3/28), and 8.33% (1/12) respectively. Moreover, by classifying Z scores as 3 ≤ Z 5, 5 ≤ Z 10, and Z ≥ 10, the majority of Z scores were above 10 with a PPV of 99% for T21 and just 5.2% were between 3 and 5 with a PPV of 14.3%. In contrast for T18, over a third of tests had Z scores between 3 and 5. The PPV in this group is just over 5%.The present results show that the PPV performance of NIPT for fetal trisomies 13, 18, and 21 are closely associated with Z-score. The higher the Z-score, the greater the likelihood that the aneuploidy result is correct. Our experience in evaluating the Z-score accuracy of NIPT in this study could be of use in similar work.

Teaching and learning are important in tertiary education. The article focuses on the cultivation of students’ critical thinking, the introduction of Bloom’s Taxonomy and SOLO Taxonomy, and how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy and SOLO Taxonomy. Through questioning, classroom implementation, writing, and risk management, the teacher could classify the learning content according to the difficulty of knowledge using Bloom’s Taxonomy. It discusses how to make students-centered and how to training their critical thinking in the training process, how to move the obstacles existing in the process of cultivating students’ critical thinking for the purpose of accomplish it.

Imbalanced data classification has always been a hot topic in traditional machine learning. The usual method is oversampling. Its main idea is to randomly synthesize the new minority samples between the minority samples and their neighboring samples, to put the data in a particular state of equilibrium. The existing improved methods have improved the classifier's performance to some extent, but most of the focus is on the minority sample. In this paper, a denoise-based oversampling method (DNOS) is proposed, which performs different denoise processes for the majority and minority samples. Then, it is combined with ADASYN to oversampling the data. Experimental results show that DNOS has a better classification effect than ADASYN.

In order to improve the recognition and detection ability of movie and TV 3D animation images, a method of movie and TV 3D animation image information fusion and feature extraction based on dynamic information fusion and edge contour feature detection is proposed. Establishing a visual information acquisition model of a movie and television three-dimensional animation image, performing corner detection and feature point extraction of the movie and television three-dimensional animation image by adopting a key feature point matching method, extracting dynamic information feature quantity of the edge of the movie and television three-dimensional animation image, combining saliency detection, feature fusion and optimal segmentation of the movie and television three-dimensional animation image, establishing a super-resolution reconstruction feature distribution set of the movie and television three-dimensional animation image. The edge information space region fusion method is used to fuse pixel information and optimize feature reorganization of movie and television three-dimensional animation images. The fuzzy feature distribution set of movie and television three-dimensional animation images is extracted. The information fusion and feature extraction of movie and television three-dimensional animation images are realized by combining wavelet multi-layer decomposition algorithm. The simulation results show that the feature resolution capability of using this method for information fusion and feature extraction of movie and TV 3D animation images is higher, and the output peak signal-to-noise ratio of movie and TV 3D animation image reconstruction is improved.

Emotions show high significance on human health. Automatic emotion recognition is helpful for monitoring psychological disorders, mental problems and exploring behavioral mechanisms. Existing approaches adopt costly and bulky specialized hardware such as EEG/ECG helmet, possess privacy risks, or with low accuracy and user experience. With the increasing popularity of wearables, people tend to equip multiple smart devices, which provides potential opportunity for emotion perception. In this paper, we present a pervasive and portable system called MW-Emotion to recognize common emotional states with multi-modal wearable devices. However, ubiquitous wearable devices perceive shallow information which is not obviously related to human emotions. MW-Emotion excavates intrinsic mapping relationship between emotions and sensing data. Our experiments show that MW-Emotion can recognize different emotion states with a relatively high accuracy of 83.1%.

Interactive image segmentation has gained much popularity since it can enhance the segmentation performance with human interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can effectively estimate the binary labels based on Conditional Random Field (CRF) models combining region-level information with pixels-level information. The user scribbles are treated as soft constraints. We use pixel-layer with local CRF and region-layer with fully connected CRF to model the graph. Then we combine the pixel information and region information together to calculate the pixels' likelihood term. In contrast to using relations between the pixel-layer and the region-layer during the probability computation, we calculate the probabilities of pixels and regions separately to reduce computational complexity. After the likelihood computation, a graph cut based model is used to refine the pixel-level label predictions of the image in order to avoid label inconsistency in regions and capture the boundary details. Due to the less relationship between layers and utilizing the refinement, the proposed model can provide high accuracy and user inputs insensitive results. Our experiments show that the proposed approach can efficiently and accurately segment the images compared with other state of art methods with only a few scribbles. Graph cut based fine tuning improves our segmentation accuracy and our method needs less computational cost than traditional multi-layer-based methods.

Soy sauce is a traditional condiment that plays an important role in people's daily life. The configuration process is one of the most crucial step in soy sauce production, which will directly affect the flavor and quality of the final product. However, due to the multiple variables and the control errors in the configuration system, it is still a challenging task. In this paper we propose a novel automatic soy sauce configuration system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a method for automatically blending soy sauce and configuring Amino-Acid-Nitrogen (AAN) concentration for Guangdong soy sauce production. More specifically, we build a nonlinear constrained optimization model which can be set as different objective functions and constraints for corresponding purposes in different conditions. A new pretreatment configuration has been proposed to simplify the design as well as the optimization of AAN concentration model. We employed cross-method to choose initial values in order to speed up the convergence. Furthermore, we introduce an error compensation algorithm, which is based on the analysis of the final blending concentration error, to improve the accuracy of the configuration model. The proposed method has been tested with the soy sauce configuration problem. Experimental results show that our method can meet the production requirements and improve the accuracy and efficiency of soy sauce configuration process.

Galectin-3 has a relatively high level of expression in triple-negative breast cancers and is a potential marker for this disease. However, the clinical and prognostic implications of galectin-3 expression in breast cancer remain unclear. We examined mastectomy specimens from 1086 breast cancer cases and matching, adjacent non-cancerous tissues using immunohistochemistry. Overall, triple-negative breast cancers expressed galectin-3 more strongly than did other breast cancers types (63.59% vs 21.36%, P = 0.001). Galectin-3 expression was not found to be an independent prognostic factor for breast cancer by Cox regression analysis, but was associated with chemotherapeutic resistance. Apoptosis was only weakly induced by arsenic trioxide (ATO) treatment in galectin-3-positive breast cancer cells (MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7), although ATO treatment up-regulated galectin-3 expression. Knockdown of galectin-3 in MDA-MB-231 cells sensitized them to killing by ATO. These findings support a possible role for galectin-3 as a marker for triple-negative breast cancer progression and as a therapeutic target in combination with ATO treatment, although the mechanisms that underlie this synergy require further investigation.

The rapid development of big data has brought new opportunities for the operation and development of private colleges and universities. As an important way for private colleges and universities to assess teachers’ work, performance evaluation is not only an important guarantee for promoting teachers’ work, but also an important influencing factor for private colleges and universities to stand for a long time. There are some problems in the traditional way of university performance evaluation. This paper will further explore the specific application of big data in the performance evaluation of private universities based on its application characteristics.

Reliability assessment is the key to ensure the security of power system, however, the rapid development of "source-network-load-storage" cause enormous obstacle to the traditional reliability method. A improved method for reliability assessment of generation and transmission systems is proposed in this paper which lays importance on the coordinate operation and uncertainty of "source-network-load-storage". Firstly, the reliability and operation model of "source-network-load- storage" is proposed to handle certain novel elements. Then the reliability assessment with operation simulation is proposed to make balance between generation and load under uncertainty. Finally, numerical analysis focusing on the different form and proportion of "source-network-load-storage" is tested in IEEE RTS-79 system so as to demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the improved method.

Sugar&ndash, acetic acid&ndash, ethanol&ndash, water mixture (SAEWM) trapping has initially shown the potential efficacy for monitoring or trapping insects. It is unknown how SAEWM-baited traps affect field number of oriental fruit moth (OFM), Grapholita molesta (Busck) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), the female/male ratio trapped, and the type of natural-enemy insects captured. This study investigated changes in seasonal population dynamics and diurnal flight rhythm of OFM, the number and female/male ratio of OFM and the numbers of Coccinellidae and Chrysopidae trapped by SAEWM in peach&ndash, apple mixed-planting orchards. The SAEWM performed well in trapping OFM, most of which were adult females, with the maximum trapping at 2.5 m above ground. The daily trapping peak occurred between 18:00 and 20:00, during each continuous monitoring period, with another peak occurring at 4:00&ndash, 8:00, after the second monitoring period (2&ndash, 5 July). However, the use of SAEWM also resulted in the trapping of Coccinellidae and Chrysopidae, of which peak trapping time partially overlapped with the second and third peak trapping times of OFM. We suggest the cessation of SAEWM trapping during the peak activity time of Coccinellidae and Chrysopidae, or application of alternative attractive mixture that do not trap the natural enemy insects, in order to protect the ecological balance in the field.

Club cell protein (CC16) is expressed primarily by club cells possesses anti‑inflammatory properties and is located in the bronchiolar epithelium. Previous studies have demonstrated that CC16 deficiency is associated with the progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In the present study, the therapeutic effects of recombinant rat CC16 protein in mice with COPD were examined and the underlying mechanisms investigated. A total of 30 adult male C57/BL6 mice were randomly divided into three groups (10 mice/group). A mouse COPD model was generated by exposing 20 mice to cigarette smoke (CS) for 24 weeks. A total of 10 mice were treated intranasally with rCC16 (2.5 µg/g body weight) and control mice were exposed to normal room air. Results indicated that rCC16 treatment ameliorated pathological damage in the lungs and reduced the production of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)‑α, interleukin (IL)‑6 and IL‑8, which were induced by CS exposure. After rCC16 administration, endogenous CC16 was upregulated and the body weight of COPD mice was increased, whereas the opposite was observed in CS‑exposed mice. Additionally, rCC16 treatment inhibited the DNA binding of NF‑κB/p65 in lung tissues and reduced nuclear translocation of NF‑κB/p65 in BALF and epithelial cells. Moreover, rCC16 treatment lead to a decrease in the total number of BALF cells, including macrophages, which was elevated in COPD mice. In conclusion, the present results demonstrate that rCC16 has therapeutic effects on COPD by downregulating pro‑inflammatory factors via the NF‑κB pathway.

Object tracking is a difficult work in complex situations including crowded environment, occlusion, out of view, and fast motion. Recently, many tracking strategies have been designed to handle the object tracking in complex conditions. However, most of the designed methods are inefficient to tackle the target aspect ratio variation and disappearance problems during the long-term tracking. Hence, it is most important to design a tracking algorithm that effectively reduce the drifting problem and recapture the target from the tracking failure. In this paper, we proposed a robust correlation filter-based moving object tracker with scale adaptation and online re-detection. First, we trained a translation filter using kernelized correlation filter with the multiple features for identifying the initial target location in each frame. Second, we used the high confidence score of the correlation output to reduce the model-drifting problem. Third, we introduced a new online re-detection strategy to relocate the target at the time of tracking failure. This re-detection component activated dynamically based on the present and historical confidence scores of the target. To tackle the aspect ratio and scale variation problems, we used detection proposal with the correlation filter method. The experimental evaluation on the several benchmark datasets proved that our results significantly better compared with the other methods.

The accurate pattern of systematic assessment of regional-level solar energy resource potential including seasonal variability and annual trends is essential during renewable solar energy project development. Understanding the linkage between solar energy potential and photovoltaic (PV) development is of particular interest to developers and financers. However, a dearth of long-term, high-resolution solar radiation data makes these patterns and linkages challenging, and thus techniques to improve these characterizations are of great value. To improve knowledge of the renewable energy potential and sustainable development, we assessed high-resolution global surface solar radiation (SSR) dataset derived from remote sensing, and explicitly linked spatio-temporal pattern of solar energy potential across different timescales and PV development in Tibet using geographical statistics methods. With the framework, we provided an intuitive SSR mapping and more than 330 kWh/m2 of PV power potential was predicted in most areas of Tibet. We found spatio-temporal heterogeneity of solar energy seasonal variability: The SSR variation is less than 26% in most areas of Tibet in spring and summer, greater than 30% for autumn and winter; while the middle reaches of Yarlung Zangbo River remains at a low level. We also found PV power was not affected by SSR annual trends in most areas of Tibet during 2000–2016, ranging from −2 to 2 kWh/m2 per year. Additionally, we identified the mismatch between solar energy potential and PV development, characterized by a low average PV installed capacity with affluent solar energy potential, unstable power generation and a high light abandonment rate for PV. The main challenges facing long-term strategic development plans for solar PV was also assessed. Framework and findings herein provide a helpful guide to those responsible for making better decisions in some of the key stages of solar energy development at local and regional scale.

To investigate the effect of electroacupuncture (EA) of acupoints Neiguan (PC 6) and Tianquan (PC 2) on the skin temperature, blood perfusion, and alpha1- and beta2-adrenoreceptor (α1-AR and β2-AR) protein and mRNA level in rats with acute myocardial ischemia.Thirty male adult Wistar rats [(230 ± 20) g] were randomly assigned into five groups (n = 6 each): a control group, sham operation group, model group, model group treated with EA at low frequency (L-EA, 2 Hz, 1 mA) and model group treated with EA at high frequency (H-EA, 100 Hz, 1 mA). The rat model was prepared by ligating the left anterior descending coronary artery. Electroacupuncture was performed at the left Neiguan (PC 6) for 20min daily for 3 d. After the 3rd time of the treatment, measurements of skin blood perfusion and temperature in Neiguan (PC 6) and Tianquan (PC 2) in all groups were made by laser speckle contrast imaging and infrared thermal image instrument. Real-time PCR and ELISA were used to measure mRNA level and protein level of α1-AR and β2-AR in the skin tissues of Neiguan (PC 6) and Tianquan (PC 2), respectively. Serum levels of cTnT and electrocardiogram were used to identify the state of myocardium.In the group receiving electroacupunture at Neiguan (PC 6), compared with control group, the skin temperature, blood perfusion, and β2 -AR mRNA and protein level of model group significantly decreased (P0.05), α1-AR mRNA and protein level of model group significantly increased (P0.05); compared with model group, the skin temperature, blood perfusion, and β2 -AR mRNA and protein level of L-EA significantly increased (P0.05), α1-AR mRNA and protein level of L-EA and H-EA significantly decreased (P0.05). The same trend has taken place in the former four groups of the Tianquan (PC 2).Low-or high-frequency electroacupuncture can improve the skin temperature and blood perfusion which may be induced by decreasing the level of α1-AR and increasing the level of β2 -AR of the Neiguan (PC 6) and Tianquan (PC 2) in the rat with acute myocaidial ischemia.

This article investigated quantitative data of carbon- and oxygen-containing groups of lignites, gas coals and anthracites through nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) experiments. In this study, these three different coal samples were denoted as HM, QM and WY, respectively. For HM, the aromatic structures are scarce and simple, the side chains are abundant and long, and many hydrophilic oxygen-containing functional groups are present on the surface. Thus, HM has strong hydrophilicity. For QM, the aromatic rings have compact structure, but the content of oxygen-containing functional groups approximates 50%, which means that QM can be easily wetted. For WY, the polycyclic aromatic structures are compact and the oxygen-containing functional groups on the surface are nearly detached. Therefore, WY is characterized by poor wettability. Then, two commonly-used suppressants (AEO-9 and rapid penetrant T) were used and coal dust wettability was measured. However, these two suppressants, especially the rapid penetrant T, show poor wetting performance on WY but work well with HM and QM. From the perspective of structure, the hydrophobic groups in AEO-9 are similar to carbon structures in WY, and thus AEO-9 is superior to rapid penetrant in the wetting performance of WY, according to the principle of like dissolves like. In other words, for the coal dusts with good wettability, the application of appropriate dust suppressants guarantees satisfactory dust removal performance. However, for the dusts with poor wettability, macromolecular surfactant with similar structures should be developed in order to achieve better dust removal performance.

With the widespread popularity of the Internet and the transformation of the world into a global village, Web applications have been drawn increased attention over the years by companies, organizations, and social media, making it a prime target for cyber-attacks. The cross-site scripting attack (XSS) is one of the most severe concerns, which has been highlighted in the forefront of information security experts' reports. In this study, we proposed XGBXSS, a novel web-based XSS attack detection framework based on an ensemble-learning technique using the Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithm (XGboost) with extreme parameters optimization approach. An enhanced feature extraction method is presented to extract the most useful features from the developed dataset. Furthermore, a novel hybrid approach for features selection is proposed, comprising information gain (IG) fusing with sequential backward selection (SBS) to select an optimal subset reducing the computational costs and maintaining the high-performance of detector' simultaneously. The proposed framework has successfully exceeded several tests on the holdout testing dataset and achieved avant-garde results with accuracy, precision, detection probabilities, F-score, false-positive rate, false-negative rate, and AUC-ROC scores of 99.59%, 99.53 %, 99.01%, 99.27%, 0.18%, 0.98%, and 99.41%, respectively. Moreover, it can bridge the existing research gap concerning previous detectors, with a higher detection rate and lesser computational complexity. It also has the potential to be deployed as a self-reliant system, which is efficient enough to defeat such attacks, including zero-day XSS-based attacks.

The misclassification between corrupted asystole (ASY) and corrupted ventricular fibrillation (VF) is generally regarded as one of the major reasons for the poor performance of current rhythm diagnosis methods.A novel method combining a least mean-square (LMS) filter and an amplitude spectrum area (AMSA) analysis was developed for improving the diagnosis of VF/ASY corrupted by CCs.Innovations in this paper: This proposed new method is aimed specially at corrupted VF/ASY detection using only the surface ECG signal without other additional reference signals.A pilot test was performed to evaluate this method performance. In recent years, numerous adaptive filtering techniques have been developed to suppress the chest compression (CC) artifact for reliable analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) rhythm without CC interruption. Unfortunately, the result of rhythm diagnosis during CCs is still unsatisfactory in many studies. The misclassification between corrupted asystole (ASY) and corrupted ventricular fibrillation (VF) is generally regarded as one of the major reasons for the poor performance of reported methods. In order to improve the diagnosis of VF/ASY corrupted by CCs, a novel method combining a least mean-square (LMS) filter and an amplitude spectrum area (AMSA) analysis was developed based only on the analysis of the surface of the corrupted ECG episode. This method was tested on 253 VF and 160 ASY ECG samples from subjects who experienced cardiac arrest using a porcine model and was compared with six other algorithms. The validation results indicated that this method, which yielded a satisfactory result with a sensitivity of 93.3%, a specificity of 96.3% and an accuracy of 94.8%, is superior to the other reported techniques. After improvement using the human ECG records in real cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) scenarios, the algorithm is promising for corrupted VF/ASY detection with no hardware alterations in clinical practice.

Constructing a subsea tunnel is exceptionally difficult because of the complex geological conditions involved in the process. Water or mud inrush is a geological hazard that occurs suddenly during the construction of a cross-harbor tunnel, thereby causing major disasters and economic losses. The weak structural planes in a fault zone are the naturally preferred planes for water inrush. It is necessary to analyze the mechanism and to develop a risk prediction method for water or mud inrush from such faults. In order to effectively predict the risk of water or mud inrush during the construction of a subsea tunnel, this paper analyzes the mechanism of water or mud inrush from extensional faults, shear faults and compressive faults based on cusp catastrophe model. The potential function for the risk of water or mud inrush is built, and then the index of water inrush (IP) is obtained based on the equations of equilibrium for the fault surface. Water or mud inrush occurs only when IP > 1. The proposed method of risk prediction is successfully used in Qingdao Kiaochow Bay subsea tunnel to prove its applicability and feasibility.

Objective. To evaluate the clinical therapeutic efficacy and safety of JieDuTongLuoShengJin granules + HCQ in patients with pSS. Methods. 40 patients with low-activity-level pSS and without visceral involvement participated in this study and were randomized to receive either JieDuTongLuoShengJin granules with HCQ or placebo with HCQ. Patients and investigators were blinded to treatment allocation. The primary endpoint was week 12 ESSPRI score, while secondary endpoints included ESSDAI, salivary and lacrimal gland function, and some laboratory variables. Safety-related data were also assessed. Results. Comparing with the placebo group, the treatment group experienced statistically significant improvement in the mean change from baseline for the primary endpoint of ESSPRI score and also in PGA. Moreover, in comparison with baseline values, the treatment group had significantly improved ESSDAI score, unstimulated saliva flow rate, and several laboratory variables. However, upon comparison of the two groups, there were no significant differences for them. The incidence of AEs was 10.0%, one in treatment group and three in placebo group. Conclusion. Treatment with a combination of JieDuTongLuoShengJin granules with HCQ is effective in improving patients’ subjective symptoms and some objective indicators of pSS. These results indicate that JieDuTongLuoShengJin is promising as a safe and effective treatment of pSS.

There are many different kinds of energy in future multi-energy system, such as electric, gas, heat and hydrogen. Distributed generation system integrated as microgrid is one of the most important use form of multi-energy system for customer-side. Considering typical grid-connected distributed generation system and three phase unbalanced feature of low-voltage micro-grid, three-phase stability simulation technique is a very important analysis tool for system-level energy optimization management, design of control strategy, structure stability and so on. A unified interface model of grid-connected system for synchronous generator and inverter is discussed in this paper. The unified model is given in three conventional dq coordinates and described by Norton model which is the parallel connection of injection current source and constant admittance matrix. Based on the characteristics of the unified interface model and detailed dynamics of distributed sources, an alternative implicit trapezoidal integration algorithm is developed for the stability simulation of distributed generation system. The significance of the proposed modeling method is validated by test example simulation results.

With the rapid increase of power generation from intermittent renewable energy, it is very challenging to maintain the power system safe and reliable operation. Meanwhile, the consumption of electricity is not kept a constant value throughout minutes, hours, days, weeks and seasons, which increases the complexity and risk of grid instability. To address these challenges, one of the viable options is to extend the applications of energy storage technology in power systems. At present, the large-scale energy storage technologies applied to power systems mainly include pumped hydroelectric storage and compressed air energy storage system (CAES). The intension of this paper is to present a modelling method for the main components of large-scale CAES such as centrifugal compressor, radial expander, air reservoir and generator. The models presented in this paper are verified by using the operation data of an existing CAES power station and some data extracted from other literatures. Finally, the whole CAES system is simulated to study characteristics of the system using the model presented.

This works demonstrates an improved local two-way optical phase comparison method. Based on this scheme, we implement a real-time frequency comparison over a bi-directional 200-km fiber spool link with a Bi-EDFA. The achieved relative frequency stability is 9.7E-18 at 1 s integration time and reaches 1.4E-21 at 10,000 s.

Recently, wearable devices have become increasingly popular in our lives because of their neat features and stylish appearance. However, due to the tiny size, it is inconvenient for users to interact with a device using conventional methods, especially for text entry. Although some methods have been proposed to handle this problem, they have different limitations and are not applicable to many existing mobile devices. As a result, we take the first step to propose a digits-entry system, i.e., AcouDigits, in which digits can be entered in the air using a finger without taking help from any additional hardware. We implement AcouDigits on two commercial devices and conduct experiments to evaluate its performance in recognizing ten basic digits. Experimental results show that AcouDigits can achieve average accuracies of 91.7% and 87.4% in recognizing basic digits and 26 English alphabets, respectively.

Energy storage systems play a crucial role in ensuring stable operation. However, the development of system-level energy storage is hindered due to the restrictions of economy, geography, and other factors. Transitions of traditional power systems into integrated energy distribution systems (IEDS) have provided new solutions to the problems mentioned above. Through intelligent control management methods, the utilization of multi-energy-type resources both on the supply and demand sides shows the potential for equivalent storage characteristics. Inspired by the aggregation principles, this paper aims at proposing a novel model named generalized multi-source energy storage (GMSES), including the modeling and cooperation of three kinds of available resources: conventional energy storage (CES), multi-energy flow resources (MFR), and demand response resources (DRR). Compared with the conventional means of storage, GMSES can be regarded as a more cost-effective and flexible participant in the proposed hierarchical energy scheduling framework that can realize system-level storage services in IEDS. On this basis, a multi-timescale energy scheduling strategy is proposed to reshape the regulation of IEDS operations and deal with the fluctuations caused by renewable energy and loads, where the general parameter serialization (GPS)-based control strategy is utilized to select and control the responsive loads in DRR. Furthermore, a hierarchical scheduling algorithm is developed to generate the optimal set-points of GMSES. Case studies are analyzed in an electricity-gas coupled IEDS. The simulation results show that the coupled co-optimization GMSES model is conducive to achieving the goal of self-management and economical operation, while the influence of the underlying IEDS on the upper energy system is reduced, as the tie-line power fluctuations are smoothed out.

This paper studies the current situation and existing problems of cold chain logistics distribution, and gives corresponding countermeasures to these problems. In order to realize the transformation of China from the fresh producing country to the fresh producing and selling country as soon as possible, it is necessary to enter the domestic and foreign markets through the scientific management of logistics, such as strengthening fresh-keeping, deep processing and transportation process, and to shape its own brand with the advantages of quality and price.

Non-intrusive load appliance monitoring, an important part of energy management system, is the process of disaggregating household's total electricity consumption into its contributing appliances, which facilitates analyzing user's behavior, providing users with electricity usage detail list and providing data support for electricity company's electricity price policy making and client management. In this paper.the current research status of non-intrusive load disaggregation and monitoring both at home and abroad are reviewed in the following aspects:technical framework, data measurement and preprocessing, event detection.feature extraction, load identification. Finally, what need to be improved in recent research, and the future direction of research are analyzed.

Powerful terahertz (THz) radiation sources are crucial to the development of THz science. High-energy strong-field THz pulses have many significant applications such as in the ultrafast control of matter and the THz-driven electron acceleration. In recent years, ultraintense laser-plasma interactions have been proposed as a novel approach to strong-field THz generation. In this paper, the experimental results are presented about the generation of THz radiation from a solid foil irradiated by a 10-TW femtosecond laser pulse. The THz energy as a function of laser energy and defocusing amount is studied. It is found that both the THz energy and the laser-to-THz conversion efficiency increase nonlinearly with the laser energy increasing. At maximum laser energy ~270 mJ, the measured THz pulse energy is 458 μJ, corresponding to a laser-to-THz energy conversion efficiency of 0.17%. No indication of saturation is observed in the experiment, implying that a stronger THz radiation could be achieved with higher laser energy. By simultaneously monitoring the backward scattered laser light spectrum, it is qualitatively understood that the observed THz radiation as a function of laser energy and laser defocusing distance is closely related to the electron heating mechanisms at different laser intensities. The THz spectrum and polarization are characterized by using different band-pass filers and a wire-grid polarizer, respectively. The THz radiation covers an ultrabroad band ranging from 0.2 THz to 30 THz, and shows a radially polarized distribution. By fitting the measured THz spectrum with the theory of coherent transition radiation, the THz pulse duration is inferred to be about 30 fs. At the THz focal spot of ~1 mm in size, the THz field strength is evaluated to be 3.68 GV/m. Such a strong-field THz source will enable the study of extreme THz-matter interactions.

Based on some key characteristics of 5G and blockchain, we analyze the technical feasibility and necessity of combining 5G and blockchain in IoT construction. We prove that the combination of 5G and blockchain can effectively improve network and data security of 5G by discussing the practical problems that can be solved by this method(including distributed deployment of network platforms, slicing management, network security authentication, spectrum resource management, data sharing security), while moderately reducing network complexity. Finally, we discuss the application of 5G and blockchain combined technical architecture in the construction of the Internet of Things (IoT), focusing on the requirements of power transmission, substation, distribution and consumption. We analyze the 5G network slicing management based on blockchain technology, which can realize the dynamic selection of the best resources among multiple resources to create end-to-end network slices that meet business needs and security isolation requirements, and enhance the security of the network and the data in multiple scenarios and applications, it will provide a strong network infrastructure support for the Energy IoT service system.