The utilization of shrinkage reducing admixture (SRA) in concrete has been received considerable attention in recent years. SRA is being used very commonly to reduce the shrinkage of concrete, and ...has presented considerable effect on the properties of concrete. This paper exhibits an overview of characteristics of SRA and effect of SRA on the hydration, workability, mechanical properties, durability and dimensional stability of concrete. Meanwhile, the mechanism is also analyzed and discussed. Moreover, in order to grasp the application of SRA completely, some aspects of efforts which need to be carried out further are also provided.
Recurrence rates of diabetic foot ulcers vary widely in the published literature. The aim of this systematic review is to estimate recurrence rates of diabetic foot ulcers. We did a PubMed search and ...performed a review of reference lists for studies reporting recurrence of diabetic foot ulcers. The weighted relative risk (RR) and corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) for recurrence was estimated. Forty‐nine studies reporting recurrence of diabetic foot ulcers were included. A pooled estimate for recurrence rate was 22.1% per person‐year (py) (95% CI, 19.0‐25.2%). Recurrence rate was 24.9% per py in Europe (95% CI, 20.0%‐29.7%), 17.8% per py in North America (95% CI, 12.7%‐22.9%), 16.9% per py in Africa (95% CI, 4.7%‐29.0%), and 17.0% per py in Asia (95% CI, 11.1%‐23.0%). Turkey had the highest recurrence rate of 44.4% per py (95% CI, 24.9%‐63.9%), and Bangladesh had the lowest of 4.3% per py (95% CI, 2.3%‐6.3%). Recurrence rates of diabetic foot ulcers before 2002, between 2002 and 2008, and after 2008 were 22.2% per py (95% CI, 17.6%‐26.8%), 21.9% per py (95% CI, 17.0%‐26.8%), and 21.8% per py (95% CI, 16.3%‐27.2%), respectively. Recurrence rates of diabetic foot ulcers are high. Recurrence rates vary widely in different regions and have decreased recently. More attention towards recurrence of diabetic foot ulcers is urgently required.
Young adults are increasingly burdened with student loan debt. It is timely and important to examine how student loan debt influences their already vulnerable financial status. Is there a ...relationship between student loan debt and financial hardship among young adults? Do white young adults and minority young adults have different experiences in student loan debt and financial hardship? Analyzing data from the 2015 National Financial Capacity Study, the study results show that student loan debt was negatively related to several measures of financial hardship: difficulty in paying bills, difficulty in meeting health care needs, and delay in the payment of home mortgage. After controlling for a range of socioeconomic factors and financial literacy, minority young adults were more likely to experience financial hardship than their white counterparts. In addition, it appears that student loan debt had additional negative impact on late payment of home mortgage among minority young adults. Policy and practice implications are discussed.
Abstract
Majorana-based quantum gates are not complete for performing universal topological quantum computation while Fibonacci-based gates are difficult to be realized electronically and hardly ...coincide with the conventional quantum circuit models. In reference Hu and Kane (2018
Phys. Rev. Lett.
120
066801), it has been shown that a strongly correlated Majorana edge mode in a chiral topological superconductor can be decomposed into a Fibonacci anyon
τ
and a thermal operator anyon
ɛ
in the tricritical Ising model. The deconfinement of
τ
and
ɛ
via the interaction between the fermion modes yields the anyon collisions and gives the braiding of either
τ
or
ɛ
. With these braidings, the complete members of a set of universal gates, the Pauli gates, the Hadamard gate and extra phase gates for one-qubit as well as controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate for two-qubits, are topologically assembled. Encoding quantum information and reading out the computation results can be carried out through electric signals. With the sparse-dense mixed encodings, we set up the quantum circuit where the CNOT gate turns out to be a probabilistic gate and design the corresponding devices with thin films of the chiral topological superconductor. As an example of the universal topological quantum computing, we show the application to Shor’s integer factorization algorithm.
Highly enriched grapefruit juice is expected to be obtained through forward osmosis (FO) without degradation of its nutrients. However, this technology is facing several key issues that must be ...explored to validate the suitability of FO as a dewatering process, namely, membrane performance testing, fouling control, and product quality assessment. In this work, grapefruit juice was dewatered using a commercial thin-film composite FO membrane that exhibited stable performance. The simulation results also suggested that the dewatering could be further enhanced by improving the S value of the current TFC FO membrane. Severe membrane fouling was observed, and it was predominantly due to suspended particles larger than 0.45 μm, such as pectin. However, sustainable osmotic dewatering operation could be attained by implementing appropriate fouling control strategies, such as separating large-sized particles by sedimentation or centrifugation prior to osmosis and recovering the declined water flux by physical cleaning. The dehydrated feed exhibited no significant loss of nutritional value, suggesting that the FO membrane dewatered the juice effectively while retaining its constituents. In addition, the FO process could be further improved to obtain enhanced-quality grapefruit juice by applying pressure to the feed stream or employing a sugar-based draw solution such as glucose.
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•This work probed the challenging issues in osmotic dewatering of grapefruit juice.•Stable flux induced by TFC FO membrane can be improved further by reducing S value.•The severe fouling by particulate substances was alleviated by their separation.•Hydraulic flushing well restored the declined flux caused by dissolved matters.•Applying pressure or adopting glucose further reduced the reversely diffused salts.
Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is among the most common malignancies, but little is known about its spatial intratumoral heterogeneity (ITH) and temporal clonal evolutionary processes. To ...address this, we performed multiregion whole-exome sequencing on 51 tumor regions from 13 ESCC cases and multiregion global methylation profiling for 3 of these 13 cases. We found an average of 35.8% heterogeneous somatic mutations with strong evidence of ITH. Half of the driver mutations located on the branches of tumor phylogenetic trees targeted oncogenes, including PIK3CA, NFE2L2 and MTOR, among others. By contrast, the majority of truncal and clonal driver mutations occurred in tumor-suppressor genes, including TP53, KMT2D and ZNF750, among others. Interestingly, phyloepigenetic trees robustly recapitulated the topological structures of the phylogenetic trees, indicating a possible relationship between genetic and epigenetic alterations. Our integrated investigations of spatial ITH and clonal evolution provide an important molecular foundation for enhanced understanding of tumorigenesis and progression in ESCC.
This article presents an efficient and fast echelon battery equalization method based on wide voltage range bidirectional converter combined with DBSCAN (density-based spatial clustering of ...applications with noise) clustering control strategy. Thanks to the wide voltage range and bidirectional buck-boost characteristics of the four-switch bidirectional converter, the battery energy can be reasonably redistributed between the battery and the super capacitor. The converter operating in synchronous rectification mode can not only achieve bidirectional energy flow in a wide voltage range, but also has a high energy conversion efficiency. The DBSCAN clustering algorithm is used to divide all battery cells into groups, and each group may contain one or more adjacent and nonadjacent battery cells. First, the nonadjacent single cells are balanced and integrated into adjacent group with the closest voltage. Then, the groups with different voltages are balanced by group-to-group, thereby realizing rapid balance of the entire battery pack. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, simulations and experimental verification were carried out. The experimental results show that, comparing with traditional battery balancing methods, the proposed method achieves shorter balancing time and higher balancing efficiency.
We argue that composition scholarship's defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology's spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of ...sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages, literacy practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent, ongoing products of iterations, and thus manifestations of writer agency. Using the "White Shoes" essay from David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University," we show how such a framework addresses the writer's agency iterating the "same," and how it resolves concerns to meet students' need and right to learn both dominant and subordinate languages. (Contains 18 notes.)
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