Green supply chain management (GSCM) has become a proactive approach to enhance environmental performance. Under stakeholder pressures and regulations, firms need to enhance GSCM practice, which are ...influenced by practices such as green purchasing, green design, product recovery, and collaboration with customers and suppliers. As proactive firms adopt GSCM, their economic performance and environmental performance will be improved. Hence, this study aims to examine the influential factors among eight criteria of three main GSCM practices, namely practices, performances, and external pressures. To deal with the vagueness of human being’s perceptions, this study utilizes the fuzzy set theory and decision making trial and evaluation laboratory method to form a structural model to find out the cause and effect relationships among criteria. The results and managerial implications are discussed.
Users with anomalous behaviors in online communication systems (e.g. email and social medial platforms) are potential threats to society. Automated anomaly detection based on advanced machine ...learning techniques has been developed to combat this issue; challenges remain, though, due to the difficulty of obtaining proper ground truth for model training and evaluation. Therefore, substantial human judgment on the automated analysis results is often required to better adjust the performance of anomaly detection. Unfortunately, techniques that allow users to understand the analysis results more efficiently, to make a confident judgment about anomalies, and to explore data in their context, are still lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel visual analysis system, TargetVue, which detects anomalous users via an unsupervised learning model and visualizes the behaviors of suspicious users in behavior-rich context through novel visualization designs and multiple coordinated contextual views. Particularly, TargetVue incorporates three new ego-centric glyphs to visually summarize a user's behaviors which effectively present the user's communication activities, features, and social interactions. An efficient layout method is proposed to place these glyphs on a triangle grid, which captures similarities among users and facilitates comparisons of behaviors of different users. We demonstrate the power of TargetVue through its application in a social bot detection challenge using Twitter data, a case study based on email records, and an interview with expert users. Our evaluation shows that TargetVue is beneficial to the detection of users with anomalous communication behaviors.
Solar‐driven photocatalysis with graphitic carbon nitride (g‐C3N4) is considered to be the most promising approach for the generation of H2 from water, the degradation of organic pollutants, and the ...reduction of CO2. However, bulk g‐C3N4 exhibits several drawbacks, such as a low specific surface area, high defect density, and fast charge recombination, which result in low photocatalytic performance. The construction of 3D porous hydrogels for g‐C3N4 through nanostructural engineering is a rapid, feasible, and cost‐effective technique to improve the adsorption capability, stability, and separability of the hydrogel composite; to increase the number of active sites; and to create an internal conductive path for facile charge transfer and high photocatalytic activity. This minireview summarizes recent progress in photocatalytic water splitting and dye degradation by using g‐C3N4‐based hydrogels, with respect to state‐of‐the‐art methods for synthesis, preparation, modification, and multicomponent coupling. Furthermore, comprehensive outlooks, future challenges, and concluding remarks regarding the use of g‐C3N4‐based hydrogels as highly efficient photocatalysts are presented.
Gelling to split: Recent developments in graphitic carbon nitride (g‐C3N4)‐based hydrogels, with regard to synthesis, preparation, and multicomponent coupling, and their photocatalytic reactions, including water splitting, wastewater purification, and CO2 reduction, are reviewed. Particular focus is given to g‐C3N4‐based hydrogels as photocatalysts.
Researchers have recently revealed that hybrid lead halide perovskites exhibit ferroelectricity, which is often associated with other physical characteristics, such as a large nonlinear optical ...response. In this work, the nonlinear optical properties of single crystal inorganic–organic hybrid perovskite CH3NH3PbBr3 are studied. By exciting the material with a 1044 nm laser, strong two‐photon absorption‐induced photoluminescence in the green spectral region is observed. Using the transmission open‐aperture Z‐scan technique, the values of the two‐photon absorption coefficient are observed to be 8.5 cm GW−1, which is much higher than that of standard two‐photon absorbing materials that are industrially used in nonlinear optical applications, such as lithium niobate (LiNbO3), LiTaO3, KTiOPO4, and KH2PO4. Such a strong two‐photon absorption effect in CH3NH3PbBr3 can be used to modulate the spectral and spatial profiles of laser pulses, as well as to reduce noise, and can be used to strongly control the intensity of incident light. In this study, the superior optical limiting, pulse reshaping, and stabilization properties of CH3NH3PbBr3 are demonstrated, opening new applications for perovskites in nonlinear optics.
The two‐photon absorption properties of CH3NH3PbBr3 are investigated by exciting the material with a 1044 nm laser. Such a strong two‐photon absorption effect can be used to modulate the spectral and spatial profiles of laser pulses. In this study, the superior optical limiting, pulse reshaping, and stabilization properties of CH3NH3PbBr3 are demonstrated.
Inconel 718 produced by selective laser melting (SLM) has been characterized with focus on the microstructure, the dependence of sample orientation on the mechanical properties and the effects of ...post heat treatments. The as-manufactured IN718 has a very fine cellular-dendritic structure with fine Laves phases precipitating in the interdendritic region, and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis shows that both the vertically and horizontally built samples have relatively weak texture. The vertically built samples show lower tensile strength but higher ductility than the horizontally built samples, and the mechanism is shown to be partly due to the crystallographic feature but more importantly due to the different amount of residual stress and dislocations accumulated in these two kinds of samples. Applying heat treatments can significantly increase the strength while decrease the ductility correspondingly, and difference in yield strength between the vertically and horizontally built samples decreases with increasing the heat treatment temperatures, mainly due to the removal of residual stress and dislocations.
"Media events" generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. We examine how collective ...patterns of user behavior under conditions of shared attention are distinct from other "bursts" of activity like breaking news events. Using 290 million tweets from a panel of 193,532 politically active Twitter users, we compare features of their behavior during eight major events during the 2012 U.S. presidential election to examine how patterns of social media use change during these media events compared to "typical" time and whether these changes are attributable to shifts in the behavior of the population as a whole or shifts from particular segments such as elites. Compared to baseline time periods, our findings reveal that media events not only generate large volumes of tweets, but they are also associated with (1) substantial declines in interpersonal communication, (2) more highly concentrated attention by replying to and retweeting particular users, and (3) elite users predominantly benefiting from this attention. These findings empirically demonstrate how bursts of activity on Twitter during media events significantly alter underlying social processes of interpersonal communication and social interaction. Because the behavior of large populations within socio-technical systems can change so dramatically, our findings suggest the need for further research about how social media responses to media events can be used to support collective sensemaking, to promote informed deliberation, and to remain resilient in the face of misinformation.
The increasing availability of spatiotemporal data continuously collected from various sources provides new opportunities for a timely understanding of the data in their spatial and temporal context. ...Finding abnormal patterns in such data poses significant challenges. Given that there is often no clear boundary between normal and abnormal patterns, existing solutions are limited in their capacity of identifying anomalies in large, dynamic and heterogeneous data, interpreting anomalies in their multifaceted, spatiotemporal context, and allowing users to provide feedback in the analysis loop. In this work, we introduce a unified visual interactive system and framework, Voila, for interactively detecting anomalies in spatiotemporal data collected from a streaming data source. The system is designed to meet two requirements in real-world applications, i.e., online monitoring and interactivity. We propose a novel tensor-based anomaly analysis algorithm with visualization and interaction design that dynamically produces contextualized, interpretable data summaries and allows for interactively ranking anomalous patterns based on user input. Using the "smart city" as an example scenario, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework through quantitative evaluation and qualitative case studies.
This study examines how market demand affects green product innovation, and firm performance in the context of Vietnamese motorcycle industry. The paper seeks to answer two key questions: (a) how ...does market demand influence a firm’s green product innovation? and (b) how can green product innovation affects firm performance? This study collected a total of 208 valid questionnaires from four leading foreign motorcycle firms in Vietnam. The empirical findings show that market demand is positively correlated to both green product innovation and firm performance; while green product innovation performance is also positively correlated to firm performance. In addition, this study also categorizes three types of green product innovation and discusses their effects on market demand and firm performance.
As the main drug for the treatment of type II diabetes, presently used α-glucosidase. inhibitors generally have serious side effects. Developing new, effective, safe, and economical α-glucosidase ...inhibitors from medicinal and edible plant resources have become a research hotspot. In this paper, Kombucha was used for the fermentation of dried mulberry leaves (ML-DS) and fresh mulberry leaves (ML-FS), with the aim of increasing the content and α-glucosidase inhibitory efficiency of active substances in ML.The research results indicated that both dried and fresh mulberry could be used as fermentation substrates for Kombucha, especially ML-FS. After 12 d of fermentation, pH value and reducing sugar concentration of the ML-FS was rapidly decreased from 6.46 to 2.78 and from 108.43 ± 5.33 mg/ml to 19.40 ± 1.67 mg/ml, respectively. As for the total flavonoid content in the extract of ML (MLF), the MLF content in the ML-FS that fermented for 12 d (ML-D12-FS) was increased by 49.46% compared to that in the unfermented ML (ML-D0-FS). Meanwhile, Kombucha fermentation also can significantly improve the α-glucosidase inhibitory activity of MLF. At the concentration of 45.6 mg/L, the inhibition rate of ML-D12-FS on α-glucosidase reached to 85.88%, and the IC50 value decreased to 5.5 mg/L which was 16.7 mg/L for ML-D0-FS. This paper would provide an economical and green method for the production of α-glucosidase inhibitors from mulberry leaves.
Materials manufactured with electron beam melting (EBM) have different microstructures and properties to those manufactured using conventional manufacturing methods. A detailed study of the ...microstructures and mechanical properties of Inconel 718 manufactured with EBM was performed in both as-manufactured and heat-treated conditions. Different scanning strategies resulted in different microstructures: contour scanning led to heterogeneous grain morphologies and weak texture, while hatch scanning resulted in predominantly columnar grains and strong 〈001〉// building direction texture. Precipitates in the as-manufactured condition included γ′, γ″, δ, TiN and NbC, among which considerable amounts of γ″ yielded relatively high hardness and strength. Strong texture, directionally aligned pores and columnar grains can lead to anisotropic mechanical properties when loaded in different directions. Heat treatments increased the strength and led to different δ precipitation behaviours depending on the solution temperatures, but did not remove the anisotropy. Ductility seemed to be not significantly affected by heat treatment, but instead by the NbC and defects inherited from manufacturing. The study thereby might provide the potential processing windows to tailor the microstructure and mechanical properties of EBM IN718.
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