Search Results (102)

Acetone necessitates reliable detection for the sake of both industrial and environmental safety. Metal oxides are widely used as functional materials for the development of gas sensors because techniques like nanostructure modification, doping, and solid solution formation can enhance their sensitivity and selectivity by tuning structural and electronic properties. This study developed PrFeTiO₅ nanostructures, synthesized via the solid-state reaction for acetone sensing. The sensor demonstrated a high response to acetone at an operating temperature of 400 °C, with a low influence of humidity, displaying outstanding selectivity towards acetaldehyde, NH₃, H₂, CO, and CO₂, making it suitable across various applications. Full article

In agile, adaptive, and hybrid project management, the Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) technique is increasingly being used to prioritize the most relevant business opportunities for organizations. However, this decision-making process often involves the evaluation of multiple interconnected factors whose interactions can influence outcomes in unforeseen ways. Traditional decision-making models tend to assume independence between variables for the sake of simplicity and tractability. In real-world contexts, however, variables rarely operate in isolation; their interdependence introduces complexities that challenge the validity, robustness, and practical applicability of conventional decision-making tools. The objective of this research is to address the problem of interdependence among WSJF variables. To achieve this, Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) was applied to evaluate the impact and influence of interdependencies during the decision-making process. The findings demonstrate that incorporating FCM into WSJF yields a 76% correlation in prioritization order with the best outcomes, compared to linear WSJF, while revealing a 24% variation that highlights areas for further study. This evidence indicates that accounting for interdependence leads to more efficient and reliable decision-making than traditional approaches. Full article

The medical application of human embryonic stem cell technology has sparked ethical controversies, with the core issue being whether human embryos possess the same right to life as humans. According to classical Confucianism, humans are born from the essential Qi 精氣 (jingqi) of heaven and earth, making them the noblest beings in the world. Human embryos are the simple form of human life in its early stages, and as living human beings, they should therefore possess the legitimacy and justification to life. Confucianism advocates benevolence toward people 仁民 (renmin) and love for things 愛物 (aiwu) distinguishing between benevolence and love: benevolence toward people is benevolence, while love for all things is love. How people treat one another is how they should treat human embryos. Things exist to serve humanity; humans may utilise things but must not be treated as tools. Embryo life must not be harmed or sacrificed for the sake of saving human life. One should show benevolence to people and love to things. Therefore, the attitude toward human embryos should be “benevolence.” Human embryos inherently possess the potential to become human beings and do not require medical intervention to demonstrate their value. However, when humans extract and utilise stem cells from human embryos for their own benefit, this is tantamount to treating the embryos as things and reducing them to the status of things, thereby blurring the ethical boundaries between humans and things and disrupting the distinction between the recipients of benevolence and love. The extraction of human embryonic stem cells is ultimately an artificial technological achievement. Humans are not superior beings to heaven, and such practices must be confined within the moral framework of technological ethics and bioethics. Notwithstanding the technological advancements that have furnished humans with contemporary instruments, the necessity for a sense of awe for the heaven remains. Full article

By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse. Full article

With the increasing aggravations of urban traffic jams, intelligent route planning to reduce traffic time is becoming increasingly critical for drivers. However, traditional route-planning methods, such as graph search and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based methods, struggle to capture the complex dynamics of road networks. Specifically in A*-type methods, routes should be searched instantly on the whole graph for the sake of dynamic changes in edge time consumption. As for RNN-based methods, their shortcomings in capturing long-distance sequence dependencies makes them unsuitable for route planning in metropolises with long routes. Therefore, to better adapt to the complexity of urban traffic, in this paper, an innovative route-planning model called Route Planning with Transformer (RoPT) is proposed. This model is based on the fusion of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and a Transformer, which uses GCNs for capturing complex spatial dependencies between the current intersection and the destination in a road network. Depending on the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer, the long-distance temporal dependencies between intersections could also be captured effectively. With comprehensive experiments on two real-world traffic datasets, the Porto dataset and the Chengdu dataset, it is demonstrated that RoPT outperforms the best methods, to the best of our knowledge. Moreover, the latent features learned from RoPT are more interpretable. Full article

This paper re-examines the Inner Alchemy methods found in The Secret of Golden Flower, or Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi (太乙金華宗旨, abbreviated as JZ), a text created through fuji (spirit-writing) attributed to Lüzu (呂祖) in Changzhou 常州 during the late 17th century. Recent research has shown that Pan Yi’an (潘易庵), one of the primary editors of JZ, was, in fact, the same person as Pan Jingguan (潘靜觀), who assisted in the editing of Illuminating the Mystery of Concordance of the Three According to the Book of Changes (Cangtongqi chanyou, 参同契闡幽) and Illuminating the Mystery of Awakening the Perfection (Wuzhen pian chanyou, 悟真篇闡幽) as a disciple of Zhu Yuanyu (朱元育), the editor of these works. Meanwhile, in my recent research, I have reconstructed the Inner Alchemy methods described in these two works. (For the sake of convenience, in this discussion, I will refer to this system as the “Chanyou neidan method”, as both works include the term “Chanyou” in their titles.) Upon re-examining JZ with this framework in mind, I began to suspect that its content might be based on the Chanyou neidan method. This hypothesis is rendered highly plausible by the fact that Pan Yi’an, a key editor of JZ, was the same individual as Pan Jingguan, who assisted in the editing of the two Chanyou works. The aim of this paper is to analyze the similarities and differences between the content of JZ and the Chanyou neidan method, demonstrating that the former is indeed based on the latter. Furthermore, I intend to show that while JZ incorporates the Chanyou neidan method, it also simplifies its content significantly, making it a practical manual designed for literati (士大夫 shidafu) of the Qing dynasty to integrate Inner Alchemy into their daily lives. Additionally, although JZ was created through fuji (spirit-writing), I propose that fuji also functioned as a means for Qing-era literati to adapt Daoist cultivation practices to their own lifestyles. Full article

YOLOv8-PEL shows outstanding performance in detection accuracy, computational efficiency, and generalization capability, making it suitable for real-time and resource-constrained applications. This study aims to address the challenges of vehicle detection in scenarios with fixed camera angles, where precision is often compromised for the sake of cost control and real-time performance, by leveraging the enhanced YOLOv8-PEL model. We have refined the YOLOv8n model by introducing the innovative C2F-PPA module within the feature fusion segment, bolstering the adaptability and integration of features across varying scales. Furthermore, we have proposed ELA-FPN, which further refines the model’s multi-scale feature fusion and generalization capabilities. The model also incorporates the Wise-IoUv3 loss function to mitigate the deleterious gradients caused by extreme examples in vehicle detection samples, resulting in more precise detection outcomes. We employed the COCO-Vehicle dataset and the VisDrone2019 dataset for our training, with the former being a subset of the COCO dataset that exclusively contains images and labels of cars, buses, and trucks. Experimental results demonstrate that the YOLOv8-PEL model achieved a mAP@0.5 of 66.9% on the COCO-Vehicle dataset, showcasing excellent efficiency with only 2.23 M parameters, 7.0 GFLOPs, a mere 4.5 MB model size, and 176.8 FPS—an increase from the original YOLOv8n’s inference speed of 165.7 FPS. Despite a marginal 0.2% decrease in accuracy compared to the original YOLOv8n, the parameters, GFLOPs, and model size were reduced by 25%, 13%, and 25%, respectively. The YOLOv8-PEL model excels in detection precision, computational efficiency, and generalizability, making it well-suited for real-time and resource-constrained application scenarios. Full article

Aspergillus oryzae has been used to ferment various cereal grains throughout history, as seen in the examples of sake, soy sauce, and miso. It is known that this fermentation enhances the nutritional quality of the raw materials by breaking down complex molecules into simpler, more digestible forms and increasing the bioactive compounds. In this study, intermediate wheatgrass (IWG) was fermented with three different strains of A. oryzae suitable for making sake, soy sauce, and miso. Whole IWG flour was mixed with water (1:2 w/w), autoclaved at 121 °C for 20 min, cooled, mixed with A. oryzae spores, and fermented for seven days at 30 °C. Sugars, protein, amino acids, kojic acid, total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, and DPPH radical scavenging activity were measured. The protein content increased significantly (p < 0.05) from 18.0 g/100 g to over 30 g/100 g after seven days. Lysine showed a positive correlation with protein content across all three strains, with its ratio increasing as the protein content increased, while all other essential amino acids displayed a negative correlation and a decreasing ratio with the protein content. Autoclaving increased the verbascose content of IWG, and further increases were observed during the first two days of fermentation across all three strains, followed by a subsequent decline. Peak glucose content was observed on days 3~4 but also decreased in the subsequent days. Total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, kojic acid, and DPPH scavenging activity peaked around day 4~5 for all three strains, followed by a slight decrease in the subsequent days. The findings of this study highlight the potential of solid-state fermentation to improve the nutritional profile of IWG, emphasizing that the selection of A. oryzae strains and the fermentation duration can affect the fermentation outcome and nutritional enhancements. Full article

Recent legislation in Texas changes the legal civic engagement landscape. With Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs now prohibited on public university campuses, advocates of affirmative steps to reach historically underserved groups may face unexpected obstacles. And recent Supreme Court decisions, on the use of race as a factor in college admissions, further increase the challenges. Due to these shifts in the goals public universities can legally pursue, what are the most appropriate civic engagement policy steps to eliminate barriers to success and realize a diverse student body? Building on the Town Hall program at Tarleton State University, and the specific ways in which it leverages trust, we make three recommendations: (1) Institutions should maintain an openness to outreach, through the leadership of student groups and invited guest speakers and other initiatives, to those on campus who struggle with the burden of invisibility; (2) Town Hall and related civic engagement programs should fine-tune the selection of advanced peer leaders, making it easier for them to pursue expertise in the classroom, in turn facilitating their ability to attract speakers as recommended in (1); and (3) institutions should ensure an opening for representatives to travel to underserved parts of the state, with the effect if not University-wide intention of increasing inclusion. Building on the research of Eric Morrow, Boleslaw Z. Kabala, and Christine Hartness in 2023, we seek to leverage trust for the sake of a genuinely inclusive environment, consistent with current legal limitations on civic engagement in Texas. Full article

With the rapid development of the autonomous vehicles industry, there has been a dramatic proliferation of research concerned with related works, where road markings detection is an important issue. When there is no public open data in a field, we must collect road markings data and label them by ourselves manually, which is huge labor work and takes lots of time. Moreover, object detection often encounters the problem of small object detection. The detection accuracy often decreases when the detection distance increases. This is primarily because distant objects on the road take up few pixels in the image and object scales vary depending on different distances and perspectives. For the sake of solving the issues mentioned above, this paper utilizes a virtual dataset and open dataset to train the object detection model and cross-field testing in the field of Taiwan roads. In order to make the model more robust and stable, the data augmentation method is employed to generate more data. Therefore, the data are increased through the data augmentation method and homography transformation of images in the limited dataset. Additionally, Inverse Perspective Mapping is performed on the input images to transform them into the bird’s eye view, which solves the “small objects at far distance” problem and the “perspective distortion of objects” problem so that the model can clearly recognize the objects on the road. The model testing on the front-view images and bird’s eye view images also shows a remarkable improvement of accuracy by 18.62%. Full article

Biochar is a potential material for making slow-releasing phosphorus (P) fertilizers for the sake of increasing soil P-use efficiency. The adsorption of phosphorus by pineapple leaf biochar (PB) prepared at different pyrolysis temperatures and its mechanism remain unclear. In order to study the effect of preparation temperature on the structural characteristics of biochar from pineapple leaves and the adsorption of phosphorus by biochar, pineapple leaves were used as raw materials to prepare biochar by restricting oxygen supply at 300 °C, 500 °C, and 700 °C. The structural characteristics and adsorption of phosphorus by pineapple leaf biochar at different temperatures (PB300, PB500, and PB700) were analyzed. The results showed the following: (1) The pore structure of biochar pyrolysis at 300 °C (PB300) did not significantly change, while the surface structure of biochar pyrolysis at 700 °C (PB700) significantly changed, the specific surface area (S_BET) increased by 26.91~37.10 times that observed in PB300 and PB500, and the pore wall became thinner. (2) The number of functional groups (C=O) in PB700 decreased, and the relative content of C-H/-CHO in PB500 and PB700 increased by 4.38 times that observed in PB300. (3) The adsorption of phosphorus by biochar was a multi-molecular layer chemisorption, accompanied by single-molecular-layer physical adsorption and intramolecular diffusion. For PB300, both the physical and chemical processes of the adsorption of PO₄³⁻ by biochar were weakened, and the chemical process was dominated by cationic (Ca²⁺, Mg²⁺, Fe³⁺, and Al³⁺) adsorption at 500 °C. For PB700, the physical adsorption dominated by pore size structure was the main process, and the physicochemical adsorption at 700 °C was significantly stronger than that observed at 300 °C and 500 °C. These results indicate that biochar prepared at 500 °C can save energy in the preparation process and has excellent physical and chemical structure, which can be used as the basic material for further modification and preparation of biochar phosphate fertilizer. Full article

Global urbanization, population growth, and climate change have considerably impacted water resources, making sustainable water resource management (WRM) essential. Understanding the changes in hydrological components is important for effective WRM, particularly in cities such as Higashi-Hiroshima, which is known for its saké brewing industry. This study used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) with Hydrological Response Units (HRUs) to achieve high spatial precision in assessing the impacts of land use change and climate variability on hydrological components in a suburban catchment in western Japan. Over the 30-year study period (1980s–2000s), land use change was the main driver of hydrological variability, whereas climate change played a minor role. Increased surface runoff, along with decrease in groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, and baseflow, resulted in an overall reduction in water yield, with a 34.9% decrease in groundwater recharge attributed to the transformation of paddy fields into residential areas. Sustainable WRM practices, including water conservation, recharge zone protection, and green infrastructure, are recommended to balance urban development with water sustainability. These findings offer valuable insights into the strategies for managing water resources in rapidly urbanizing regions worldwide, emphasizing the need for an integrated WRM system that considers both land use and climate change impacts. Full article

This article explores the specific role of courage in the context of the Anthropocene’s moment; it first examines Aristotle’s conception of virtues, focusing on courage, before comparing it to Confucian thought and analyzing the historical dialogue between Western and Chinese traditions on ethics through the works of François Noël (1651–1729). Aristotle views moral cultivation as a social process wherein habits shape inner dispositions; in his view, courage is linked to other virtues, such as temperance and justice. For Aristotle, courage implies the appropriate balance between extremes and must be directed toward a worthy end, such as promoting positive change within a community. This Aristotelian perspective was later incorporated into a biblical framework by Aquinas and Suarez, emphasizing dichotomies between body and soul, as well as between humans and other living beings. These dichotomies must be challenged in the face of the Anthropocene’s emergencies. The second part of this contribution proceeds to a detour examining Confucian ethics, which rests on a different anthropology, emphasizing continuities rather than discontinuities. Like Aristotelian thought, Confucian thought also underscores moral education within a community; it prioritizes humanity, embodied through empathy and loyalty. In the Analects, courage is balanced by a sense of rituals and righteousness. Mencius further distinguishes several types of courage, stressing self-cultivation and the ruler’s responsibility to make empathetic, appropriate decisions for the community’s sake. From this perspective, courage is understood as the continuous perseverance in self-cultivation, coupled with a firm intention oriented toward the good of the community. Zhu Xi’s comments on Zilu’s courage in the Analects extend this Confucian tradition. Finally, this article highlights how a dialogue between Aristotelian and Confucian ethics began four centuries ago, particularly through Noël’s Philosophia Sinica, which combined these traditions. This inter-religious approach to ethics, enriched by figures such as Aquinas, Suarez, Zhu Xi, and neo-Confucian thinkers, requires re-evaluation because the understanding of personal ethics and nature has evolved. The modern naturalistic approach, with its emphasis on dichotomies, has contributed to a mechanistic view of nature, fostering its exploitation, and a devaluation of the body. This contrast highlights the urgent need for renewed dialogue between Western and Chinese ethical traditions to address contemporary challenges, with François Noël serving as a historical witness of these exchanges. Full article

In this paper, for the sake of enhancing the security of wireless transmission, we proposed a novel system based on spatial and direction modulation (SDM) combined with generalized spatial modulation (GSM) which is aided by covert information mapping (CIM), termed as the CIM-GSDM system. In such a system, the legitimated user is equipped with distributed receivers so as to demodulate the conveyed signal by exploiting its indices while disturbing eavesdroppers for information security. More specifically, part of the information is modulated into the indices of the legitimated distributed receiver subsets with the aid of the mapped covert information and the interference matrix, while another part of the message is arranged by conventional amplitude-phase modulation. The proposed system can reap the benefits from both GSM and CIM to make eavesdropper suffer great mixture. Furthermore, the detection scheme and theoretical analysis of error performance are discussed as well. The simulation results exhibit that the bit error rate (BER) performance of legitimate user is much better than that of the eavesdropper while the proposed scheme improves the security compared to the original CIM-SDM system at the same spectral efficiency. Full article

Various microorganisms, referred to as kuratsuki microorganisms, inhabit each sake brewery. Previously, kuratsuki yeasts had been used for sake production in each sake brewery. Kuratsuki lactic acid bacteria have been used to produce kimoto, a fermentation starter. Kuratsuki non-lactic acid bacteria were examined to evaluate their potential roles and effects in sake production. The addition of kuratsuki bacteria to the sake-making process can change the flavor and taste of the sake. This change was observed in both the coculture experiments between sake yeast and kuratsuki bacteria and the sake making tests with and without kuratsuki bacteria. The comprehensive gene expression analysis of sake yeast cocultured with kuratsuki bacteria showed that 1.2% of the yeast genes were upregulated and 1.0% were downregulated following the addition of kuratsuki bacteria. This indicates that the change in flavor and taste of sake due to the addition of kuratsuki bacteria was caused by the interaction between sake yeast and kuratsuki bacteria. To understand the implications of kuratsuki bacteria in sake production, it is essential to study the interactions between sake yeast and kuratsuki bacteria. Full article