Determination of reference intervals of serum levels of human epididymis protein 4 (HE4) in Chinese women

The detailed numbers of subjects from different centers. (DOCX 17.3 kb

Feasibility Study of Synthetic Oil Based Nanofluids for Use in Thermal Oil Heaters

Paper presented at 2018 Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers International Congress, 27-30 May 2018.Thermal oil heaters can be considered as an alternative to steam boilers for process heating use. Instead of boiling water, thermal oil heaters use heat transfer oils with high boiling points which allows operation at low pressures. To increase thermal oil heater efficiency, a nanofluid consisting of a common heat transfer oil, the synthetic TH66, and copper nanoparticles has been proposed. Based on existing correlations for nanofluids, a figure of merit (FOM) was created to evaluate heat transfer performance while factoring in pumping power increases. A maximum FOM increase of 13% was found for a thermal oil heater using the nanofluid when compared to one that uses the base fluid oil

Characterization of argon direct-current glow discharge with a longitudinal electric field applied at ambient air

A direct-current-driven plasma jet is developed by applying a longitudinal electric field on the flowing argon at ambient air. This plasma shows a torch shape with its cross-section increased from the anode to the cathode. Comparison with its counterparts indicates that the gas flow plays a key role in variation of the plasma structure and contributes much to enlarging the plasma volume. It is also found that the circular hollow metal base promotes generation of plasma with a high-power volume density in a limited space. The optical emission spectroscopy (OES) diagnosis indicates that the plasma comprises many reactive species, such as OH, O, excited N 2, and Ar metastables. Examination of the rotational and vibrational temperature indicates that the plasma is under nonequilibrium condition and the excited species OH(A 2 N# +), O(5 P), and N 2 (C 3 N u) are partly generated by energy transfer from argon metastables. The spatially resolved OES of plasma reveals that the negative glow, Faraday dark space, and positive column are distributed across the gas gap. The absence of the anode glow is attributed to the fact that many electrons in the vicinity of the anode follow ions into the positive column due to the ambipolar diffusion in the flowing gas

Regional soil erosion assessment based on a sample survey and geostatistics

Soil erosion is one of the most significant environmental problems in China. From 2010 to 2012, the fourth national census for soil erosion sampled 32 364 PSUs (Primary Sampling Units, small watersheds) with the areas of 0.2–3 km2. Land use and soil erosion controlling factors including rainfall erosivity, soil erodibility, slope length, slope steepness, biological practice, engineering practice, and tillage practice for the PSUs were surveyed, and the soil loss rate for each land use in the PSUs was estimated using an empirical model, the Chinese Soil Loss Equation (CSLE). Though the information collected from the sample units can be aggregated to estimate soil erosion conditions on a large scale; the problem of estimating soil erosion condition on a regional scale has not been addressed well. The aim of this study is to introduce a new model-based regional soil erosion assessment method combining a sample survey and geostatistics. We compared seven spatial interpolation models based on the bivariate penalized spline over triangulation (BPST) method to generate a regional soil erosion assessment from the PSUs. Shaanxi Province (3116 PSUs) in China was selected for the comparison and assessment as it is one of the areas with the most serious erosion problem. Ten-fold cross-validation based on the PSU data showed the model assisted by the land use, rainfall erosivity factor (R), soil erodibility factor (K), slope steepness factor (S), and slope length factor (L) derived from a 1 : 10 000 topography map is the best one, with the model efficiency coefficient (ME) being 0.75 and the MSE being 55.8 % of that for the model assisted by the land use alone. Among four erosion factors as the covariates, the S factor contributed the most information, followed by K and L factors, and R factor made almost no contribution to the spatial estimation of soil loss. The LS factor derived from 30 or 90 m Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital elevation model (DEM) data worsened the estimation when used as the covariates for the interpolation of soil loss. Due to the unavailability of a 1 : 10 000 topography map for the entire area in this study, the model assisted by the land use, R, and K factors, with a resolution of 250 m, was used to generate the regional assessment of the soil erosion for Shaanxi Province. It demonstrated that 54.3 % of total land in Shaanxi Province had annual soil loss equal to or greater than 5 t ha−1 yr−1. High (20–40 t ha−1 yr−1), severe (40–80 t ha−1 yr−1), and extreme ( \u3e  80 t ha−1 yr−1) erosion occupied 14.0 % of the total land. The dry land and irrigated land, forest, shrubland, and grassland in Shaanxi Province had mean soil loss rates of 21.77, 3.51, 10.00, and 7.27 t ha−1 yr−1, respectively. Annual soil loss was about 207.3 Mt in Shaanxi Province, with 68.9 % of soil loss originating from the farmlands and grasslands in Yan\u27an and Yulin districts in the northern Loess Plateau region and Ankang and Hanzhong districts in the southern Qingba mountainous region. This methodology provides a more accurate regional soil erosion assessment and can help policymakers to take effective measures to mediate soil erosion risks

Hybrid tilted fiber grating based refractive index and liquid level sensing system

We report a refractive index (RI) and liquid level sensing system based on a hybrid grating structure comprising of a 45° and an 81° tilted fiber gratings (TFGs) that have been inscribed into a single mode fiber in series. In this structure, the 45°-TFG is used as a polarizer to filter out the transverse electric (TE) component and enable the 81°-TFG operating at single polarization for RI and level sensing. The experiment results show a lower temperature cross-sensitivity, only about 7.33 pm/°C, and a higher RI sensitivity, being around 180 nm/RIU at RI=1.345 and 926 nm/RIU at RI=1.412 region, which are significantly improved in comparison with long period fiber gratings. The hybrid grating structure has also been applied as a liquid level sensor, showing 3.06 dB/mm linear peak ratio sensitivity

Large Language Models as Evaluators for Recommendation Explanations

The explainability of recommender systems has attracted significant attention in academia and industry. Many efforts have been made for explainable recommendations, yet evaluating the quality of the explanations remains a challenging and unresolved issue. In recent years, leveraging LLMs as evaluators presents a promising avenue in Natural Language Processing tasks (e.g., sentiment classification, information extraction), as they perform strong capabilities in instruction following and common-sense reasoning. However, evaluating recommendation explanatory texts is different from these NLG tasks, as its criteria are related to human perceptions and are usually subjective. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can serve as evaluators of recommendation explanations. To answer the question, we utilize real user feedback on explanations given from previous work and additionally collect third-party annotations and LLM evaluations. We design and apply a 3-level meta evaluation strategy to measure the correlation between evaluator labels and the ground truth provided by users. Our experiments reveal that LLMs, such as GPT4, can provide comparable evaluations with appropriate prompts and settings. We also provide further insights into combining human labels with the LLM evaluation process and utilizing ensembles of multiple heterogeneous LLM evaluators to enhance the accuracy and stability of evaluations. Our study verifies that utilizing LLMs as evaluators can be an accurate, reproducible and cost-effective solution for evaluating recommendation explanation texts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-SZ/LLMasEvaluator

Parallel computing of disturbance response instability theory of rockbursts

At present, theoretical analyses of rockbursts have entered into the quantitative analysis stage from the qualitative analysis stage. The critical stress of the roadway surrounding rock has become the important basis for safe assessment of the roadway. Theoretical breakthrough becomes extremely difficult due to the extreme complexity of rockbursts. Calculation of the critical stress of the roadway surrounding rock based on the analytical formula is not applicable for the complex situation, such as non-circular roadway, non-hydrostatic pressure and complex strata structures. Combination of theories of rockbursts and numerical simulation possesses a broad application prospect, promoting theories of rockbursts to a further actual application. This is an extremely valuable development direction. Achievement of this aspect depends on the rapid development of the numerical technologies. In this paper, the self-developed advanced parallel computing system of strata movement (StrataKing, a parallel computing method in nonlinear fracture mechanics base on a hybrid Lagrangian and discrete element method) and the disturbance response instability theory of rockbursts was combined. A numerical method for the disturbance response instability theory of rockbursts for the circular roadway was proposed firstly. The idea of the method is that the Ⅱ-type fracture energy in nonlinear fracture mechanics is seen as a moderate variable. Thus, the relation between the critical stress of the circular roadway surrounding rock under hydrostatic pressure and the burst energy index was established. To obtain the numerical solution of the burst energy index, an ideal numerical test for a rock specimen in uniaxial compression, which is subjected to a single shear fracture, was conducted so that effects of other factors on the relative straight portion of the post-peak stress-strain curve can be neglected. For a high-angle shear fracture, the result for the non-standard rock specimen was converted into that for the standard rock specimen. The converted burst energy index is in the range of 0.17−13.52, falling into the survey data of 131 rockburst coal mines in China. The numerical critical stress of the circular roadway surrounding rock is 0.4−2.5 times of the analytical result, qualitatively consistent with the survey data (the modified coefficient of the critical stress of the circular roadway surrounding rock is usually greater than 1, even reaching 8) of 20 rockburst coal mines in China. We believe that the roadway surrounding rock subjected to the localized failure has a higher load-carrying capacity than subjected to the uniform failure. Thus, the phenomenon that numerical results are higher than analytical results can be explained. The relation between rockbursts and localization has been discussed, and not for the relation between the disturbance response instability theory and localization in the past. In the present paper, localization was acted as a medium so that a closed relation between the disturbance response instability theory and rockburst was established in terms of the fracture mechanism. StrataKing can provide a powerful support of computing power for safe assessment of roadway surrounding rock in rockburst coal mines

Numerical and experimental analysis of sensitivity-enhanced RI sensor based on Ex-TFG in thin cladding fiber

We report a highly sensitive refractive index (RI) sensor in the aqueous solution, which is based on an 81°-tilted fiber grating structure inscribed into a thin cladding fiber with 40 μm cladding radius. The numerical analysis has indicated that the RI sensitivity of cladding resonance mode of the grating can be significantly enhanced with reducing cladding size. This has been proved by the experimental results as the RI sensitivities of TM and TE resonance peaks in the index region of 1.345 have been increased to 1180 nm/RIU and 1150 nm/RIU, respectively, from only 200 and 170 nm/RIU for the same grating structure inscribed in standard telecom fiber with 62.5-μm cladding radius. Although the temperature sensitivity has also increased, the change in temperature sensitivity is still insignificant in comparison with RI sensitivity enhancement