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The tangible and intangible needs of people with disabilities have been neglected in research agendas over the past decades, particularly in China. Bringing more benefits to people with disabilities and combining information delivery with Internet technology to improve their quality of life is impossible if their special needs are ignored. This study employed the crowdsourcing through social media method to investigate information needs of people who are disabled. The results indicate that using the popular social media platforms WeChat and QQ can be an effective means of reaching out to this group. Information needs can be mainly divided into internal and external needs. Leisure, tourism, and entertainment as well as assistive devices are major internal information needs, whereas work, entrepreneurship, and living services are the main external information needs.

There was a large amount of dredged materials produced stably in the Yangtze waterway each year. How to dispose these dredged materials was a major technical problem in the field of port and waterway engineering. The dredged materials were valuable resource, and the utilization of dredged materials in landscape can be an important direction in the future. To analyze the feasibility of dredging for landscaping, the waterway dredged sediments from middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin, such as Dongting Lake, Chenglingji section, Zhenjiang section, Nantong section and Taihu Lake were collected, and the nutrient characteristics, heavy metal content and pollution degree were analyzed. The results showed that the pH, moisture content, petroleum hydrocarbons, organic matter and available P in Yangtze River waterway dredging sediments were 7.28~7.74, 3.75~28.27%, 14.21~121.84 ppm, 1.88~5.29% and 16.96~65.38 ppm respectively, which were moderate pollution and suitable for plants growth. The content of available N and available K content were 67.12~87.97 ppm and 2.78~20.11 ppm, which were too low to meet the needs of plant growth. Extra sources of nitrogen and potassium should be added into the sediments when reused. Dredged sediments were contaminated by heavy metals Cu, Pb and Zn, the evaluation results showed that their enrichment effect was not obvious, which won’t affect the sediment utilization. Dredged sediments were widely contaminated by Cd (0.05~2.68 mg/kg), and there was a certain enrichment effect, so some Cd hyperaccumulators should be planted to remediate Cd in dredged sediments.

The problem of minimizing average inventory costs in a distribution system consisting of one warehouse and multiple retailers subject to fill rate service constraints is studied. An effectives algorithm to evaluate the optimal base-stock policy and cost under local control is provided. Properties of the optimal base-stock levels at each location are established. In addition, heuristics and closed-form approximations that yield insights into the drivers of system performance are also provided. An extensive numerical study to gain insight into the optimal solution, stock positioning and when to use the heuristics and approximations is presented. An example of how logistics postponement and fill-rate constraints affect the distribution system's performance is quantified. A discussion on how to study and allocate stocks across an arborescence system with more than two echelons is presented. Keywords: Inventory/production, multi-stage, fill rate, stock positioning, newsvendor solution, heuristics and approximations, 1. Introduction and literature review Designing efficient distribution systems to meet uncertain customer demand while minimizing inventory holding cost and satisfying service requirements is a fundamental operations management problem. Managers [...]

Purpose: To design a new deep learning network for fast and accurate water–fat separation by exploring the correlations between multiple echoes in multi‐echo gradient‐recalled echo (mGRE) sequence and evaluate the generalization capabilities of the network for different echo times, field inhomogeneities, and imaging regions. Methods: A new multi‐echo bidirectional convolutional residual network (MEBCRN) was designed to separate water and fat images in a fast and accurate manner for the mGRE data. This new MEBCRN network contains 2 main modules, the first 1 is the feature extraction module, which learns the correlations between consecutive echoes, and the other one is the water–fat separation module that processes the feature information extracted from the feature extraction module. The multi‐layer feature fusion (MLFF) mechanism and residual structure were adopted in the water–fat separation module to increase separation accuracy and robustness. Moreover, we trained the network using in vivo abdomen images and tested it on the abdomen, knee, and wrist images. Results: The results showed that the proposed network could separate water and fat images accurately. The comparison of the proposed network and other deep learning methods shows the advantage in both quantitative metrics and robustness for different TEs, field inhomogeneities, and images acquired for various imaging regions. Conclusion: The proposed network could learn the correlations between consecutive echoes and separate water and fat images effectively. The deep learning method has certain generalization capabilities for TEs and field inhomogeneity. Although the network was trained only in vivo abdomen images, it could be applied for different imaging regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cadmium (Cd) pollution is considered one of the global environmental issues due to its adverse effects on plant and human health. With the rapid development of nanotechnology and the practical application of engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) in agriculture, the mechanisms underlying the interactions between NPs and heavy metal on their uptake, accumulation, and phytotoxicity in crops are still not fully understood. Therefore, the impact of TiO 2 NPs (0, 100, 250 mg/L) and Cd (0, 50 μM) co-exposure on hydroponic maize (Zea mays L.) was determined under two exposure modes. Results showed that root co-exposure to TiO 2 NPs and 100 mg/L Cd significantly enhanced Cd uptake and produced greater phytotoxicity in maize than foliar exposure to TiO 2 NPs. Meanwhile, plant dry weight and chlorophyll content showed a reduction of 45.3% and 50.5%, respectively, when compared with single Cd treatment. In addition, the accumulation of Ti in shoots and roots increased by 1.61 and 4.29 times, respectively when root exposure to 250 mg/L TiO 2 NPs. By contrast, foliar exposure of TiO 2 NPs could markedly decrease shoot Cd contents from 15.2% to 17.8% and had a stronger influence on alleviating Cd-induced toxicity via increasing superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione S-transferase (GST) activities and upregulating several metabolic pathways, including galactose metabolism and citrate cycle, alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism, as well as glycine, serine and threonine metabolism. This study provides a new strategy for the application of TiO 2 NPs in crop safety production in Cd contaminated soils., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)