This paper focuses on the life of Liu Shu (1520–1657), a woman warrior who lived through the social and political turmoil of the violent dynastic transition from the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty to the ...Qing (1636–1911) dynasty. Drawing on the writings of Liu Shu and on different versions of accounts of her life written by male literati in different time periods, this paper intends to reveal the multiplicity and complexity of how a woman could exert her agency and interact with the dominant structure. Commonly, women’s agency has been understood as resistance against the male-dominant patriarchal system. However, recently, scholars such as Saba Mahmood have problematized universalizing overtly resistant acts against the patriarchal society to bring radical changes as demonstrations of women’s agency. These scholars argue that this approach fails to recognize that through their autonomy and while living a life of self-fulfillment, women have the capacity to reproduce, sustain, or subtly change the social norms and views of values that justify and support the patriarchal structure. In light of these scholars’ studies, this paper explores Liu Shu’s engagement in political and military activities and her Buddhist practices to analyze how she transgressed established gender norms in order to uphold rather than reject the virtues promoted by patriarchal ideology. The paper also discusses how conflicting demands on women by a male-centered society in the drastic dynastic transition enabled her to negotiate with or challenge the dominant structure. It also considers how her disobedient acts were accepted and applauded by some male literati to address their own agenda in different cultural, historical, and political contexts.
This paper proposes a stochastic day-ahead scheduling of electric power systems with flexible resources for managing the variability of renewable energy sources (RES). The flexible resources include ...thermal units with up/down ramping capability, energy storage, and hourly demand response (DR). The Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is used in this paper for simulating random outages of generation units and transmission lines as well as representing hourly forecast errors of loads and RES. Numerical tests are conducted for a 6-bus system and a modified IEEE 118-bus system and the results demonstrate the benefits of applying demand response as a viable option for managing the RES variability in the least-cost stochastic power system operations.
Lung cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide. Long non-coding RNAs have been documented aberrantly expressed and exerted crucial role in variety of cancers. Urothelial carcinoma associated 1 ...(UCA1) is a potential new type of biomarkers for tumor diagnosis and exerts oncogenic effect on various human cancers. However, the mechanism of oncogenic role of UCA1 in lung cancer remains unclear. In this study, we firstly confirmed the role of UCA1 in lung cancer and found that UCA1 down-regulation inhibited cell proliferation and migration in both SKMES-1 and H520 lung cancer cells. Then we demonstrated that repressed UCA1 promoted the miR-193a expression and miR-193a could bind to the predicted binding site of UCA1. We then dissected the role of miR-193a in lung cancer and proved the anti-tumor role of miR-193a. Furthermore, we found that miR-193a displayed its role in lung cancer via modulating the HMGB1 expression. In addition, we found that over-expression of HMGB1 could restore the UCA1 knockdown induced repression of cell proliferation and migration. In summary, our study demonstrated that UCA1 exerts oncogenes activity in lung cancer, acting mechanistically by upregulating HMGB1 expression through ‘sponging’ miR-193a.
•UCA1 affected the cellular function in lung cancer cells.•microRNA-193a played important role by regulating HMGB1 expression in lung cancer cells.•UCA1 exerted its role via modulation of UCA1/microRNA-193a/HMGB1 axis in lung cancer cells.
This paper proposes a day-ahead stochastic scheduling model in electricity markets. The model considers hourly forecast errors of system loads and variable renewable sources as well as random outages ...of power system components. A chance-constrained stochastic programming formulation with economic and reliability metrics is presented for the day-ahead scheduling. Reserve requirements and line flow limits are formulated as chance constraints in which power system reliability requirements are to be satisfied with a presumed level of high probability. The chance-constrained stochastic programming formulation is converted into a linear deterministic problem and a decomposition-based method is utilized to solve the day-ahead scheduling problem. Numerical tests are performed and the results are analyzed for a modified 31-bus system and an IEEE 118-bus system. The results show the viability of the proposed formulation for the day-ahead stochastic scheduling. Comparative evaluations of the proposed chance-constrained method and the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) method are presented in the paper.
Recent advances in the cyber-physical smart grid (CPSG) have enabled a broad range of new devices based on the information and communication technology (ICT). However, these ICT-enabled devices are ...susceptible to a growing threat of cyber-physical attacks. This paper performs a thorough review of the state-of-the-art cyber-physical security of the smart grid. By focusing on the physical layer of the CPSG, this paper provides an abstracted and unified state-space model, in which cyber-physical attack and defense models can be effectively generalized. The existing cyber-physical attacks are categorized in terms of their target components. We then discuss several operational and informational defense approaches that present the current state-of-the-art in the field, including moving target defense, watermarking, and data-driven approaches. Finally, we discuss challenges and future opportunities associated with the smart grid cyber-physical security.
The frequent emergence of drug-resistant bacteria has created an urgent demand for new antimicrobial agents. Traditional methods of novel antibiotic development are almost obsolete. Antimicrobial ...peptides (AMPs) are now regarded as a potential solution to revive the traditional methods of antibiotic development, although, until now, many AMPs have failed in clinical trials. A comprehensive database of AMPs with information about their antimicrobial activity and cytotoxicity will help promote the process of finding novel AMPs with improved antimicrobial activity and reduced cytotoxicity and eventually accelerate the speed of translating the discovery of new AMPs into clinical or preclinical trials. LAMP, a database linking AMPs, serves as a tool to aid the discovery and design of AMPs as new antimicrobial agents. The current version of LAMP has 5,547 entries, comprising 3,904 natural AMPs and 1,643 synthetic peptides. The database can be queried using either simply keywords or combinatorial conditions searches. Equipped with the detailed antimicrobial activity and cytotoxicity data, the cross-linking and top similar AMPs functions implemented in LAMP will help enhance our current understanding of AMPs and this may speed up the development of new AMPs for medical applications. LAMP is freely available at: http://biotechlab.fudan.edu.cn/database/lamp.
The dramatic increase of renewable energy resources in recent years, together with the long-existing load forecast errors and increasingly involved price sensitive demands, has introduced significant ...uncertainties into power systems operation. In order to guarantee the operational security of power systems with such uncertainties, robust optimization has been extensively studied in security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) problems, for immunizing the system against worst uncertainty realizations. However, traditional robust SCUC models with single-band uncertainty sets may yield over-conservative solutions in most cases. This paper proposes a multi-band robust model to accurately formulate various uncertainties with higher resolution. By properly tuning band intervals and weight coefficients of individual bands, the proposed multi-band robust model can rigorously and realistically reflect spatial/temporal relationships and asymmetric characteristics of various uncertainties, and in turn could effectively leverage the tradeoff between robustness and economics of robust SCUC solutions. The proposed multi-band robust SCUC model is solved by Benders decomposition (BD) and outer approximation (OA), while taking the advantage of integral property of the proposed multi-band uncertainty set. In addition, several accelerating techniques are developed for enhancing the computational performance and the convergence speed. Numerical studies on a 6-bus system and the modified IEEE 118-bus system verify the effectiveness of the proposed robust SCUC approach for enhancing uncertainty modeling capabilities and mitigating conservativeness of the robust SCUC solution.
In this paper, a chance-constrained system of systems (SoS) based decision-making approach is presented for stochastic scheduling of power systems encompassing active distribution grids. Based on the ...concept of SoS, the independent system operator (ISO) and distribution companies (DISCOs) are modeled as self-governing systems. These systems collaborate with each other to run the entire power system in a secure and economic manner. Each self-governing system accounts for its local reserve requirements and line flow constraints with respect to the uncertainties of load and renewable energy resources. A set of chance constraints are formulated to model the interactions between the ISO and DISCOs. The proposed model is solved by using analytical target cascading (ATC) method, a distributed optimization algorithm in which only a limited amount of information is exchanged between collaborative ISO and DISCOs. In this paper, a 6-bus and a modified IEEE 118-bus power systems are studied to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
•Improving marine ecological welfare is essential for development of marine economy.•No unified method for measurement of marine ecological welfare performance exists.•Environmental factors strongly ...affect regional marine ecological welfare performance.
This study used three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Tobit regression models to comprehensively evaluate the performance levels, trends, and differences of marine ecological welfare (MEW) in China, and explore its influencing factors to derive relevant policy suggestions. The evaluation results indicate that the three-stage DEA model performed better on MEW than the traditional DEA model by effectively eliminating the influence of random errors and external environmental factors. However, it underestimated the coastal MEW performance of the country. The southern marine economic circle showed an overall improvement, whereas the overall northern marine economic circle did not improve much; the eastern marine economic circle was stable. Moreover, the external environmental factors significantly impacted the performance of MEW, and the value of average MEW performance of each province changed to some extent under the influence of the slack variables of resource consumption and environmental consumption input. Other factors that significantly influenced China’s coastal MEW performance were the level of economic developments on land and government environmental regulations, which correlated positively. Meanwhile, inadequate development momentum in marine research and technology or poor achievement transformation rate negatively influenced it. Finally, countermeasures and suggestions were proposed based on the results of empirical analysis.
This paper proposes a day-ahead scheduling model in which the hourly demand response (DR) is considered to reduce the system operation cost and incremental changes in generation dispatch when the ...ramping cost of thermal generating units is considered as penalty in day-ahead scheduling problem. The power output trajectory of a thermal generating unit is modeled as a piecewise linear function. The day-ahead scheduling is formulated as a mixed-integer quadratically constrained programming (MIQCP) problem with quadratic energy balance constraint, ramping cost, and DR constraints. A Lagrangian relaxation (LR) based method is applied to solve this problem. Numerical tests are conducted on a 6-bus system and the modified IEEE 118-bus system. The results demonstrate the merits of the proposed scheduling model as well as the impact of introducing ramping costs as penalty and DR as incentives in the day-ahead scheduling of power systems.
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