Hoque and Noon claim that many workplace equal opportunities policies in the UK are merely ‘empty shells’. This article will discuss this claim and consider the extent to which radical equal ...opportunities policies may address these shortcomings. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that contemporary society is still far from the goal of fully addressing inequality, and the EO policies still face the problem of the ‘empty shell’.
With the development of optical fiber communication, tunable laser design has become an international research hot spot. In this paper, a new type distributed feedback (DFB) tunable laser is ...introduced. It uses the Reconstruction-Equivalent-Chirp (REC) technology, combining the stepped chirp sampling structure and superstructure fiber Bragg grating structure. We can obtain continuous tunable multi-channel laser and achieve the purpose of eliminating chirp of the chirp pulse and compressing pulse width at the same time. Through the simulation calculation, it can be known that the output power of each laser's channel are roughly equal. The laser can realize the tuning between 1530 nm to 1560 nm. And for the initial pulse with the conditions of Tin = 20 ps, the chirp coefficient C = 5 and time-bandwidth product is 2.25, time-bandwidth product will change to 0.458 after REC compression. The compression ratio is about 5:1, which means the pulse frequency chirp can be basically eliminated. The structure only needs to be manufactured by traditional lithography. Its low cost and excellent performance leads to a good applied prospect.
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•In-Zr/SAPO-34 catalysts were used for direct CO2 hydrogenation to lower olefins.•In-Zr composite oxides were prepared with the introduction of different Zr content.•A selectivity for ...C2=–C4= was up to 80% in hydrocarbons with 2% CH4 and 64% CO.•The addition of a certain amount of Zr can markedly enhance catalytic performance.
Direct production of lower olefins (C2=−C4=: ethylene, propylene and butylene), basic carbon-based building blocks, from carbon dioxide (CO2) hydrogenation is highly attractive, although the selectivity towards olefins has been too low. Here we present a series of bifunctional catalysts contained indium-zirconium composite oxides with different In:Zr atomic ratios and SAPO-34 zeolite, which can achieve a selectivity for C2=–C4= as high as 65–80% and that for C2–C4 of 96% with only about 2.5% methane among the hydrocarbon products at CO2 conversion of 15–27%. The selectivity of CO via the reverse water gas shift reaction is lower than 70%. The product distribution is completely different from that obtained via CO2-based Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and deviates greatly from the classical Anderson-Schulz-Flory distribution. The zirconium component plays a critical role in determining the physicochemical properties and catalytic performance of bifunctional catalysts. Catalyst characterization and density functional theory calculations demonstrate that the incorporation of a certain amount of zirconium can create more oxygen vacancy sites, stabilize the intermediates in CO2 hydrogenation and prevent the sintering of the active nanoparticles, thus leading to significantly enhanced catalytic activity, selectivity of hydrocarbons and stability for direct CO2 hydrogenation to lower olefins at the relatively high reaction temperature of 380 °C.
Molecular targeted therapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has changed markedly. Although sorafenib was used in clinical practice as the first molecular targeted agent in 2007, the SHARPE ...and Asian-Pacific trials demonstrated that sorafenib only improved overall survival (OS) by approximately 3 months in patients with advanced HCC compared with placebo. Molecular targeted agents were developed during the 10-year period from 2007 to 2016, but every test of these agents from phase II or phase III clinical trial failed due to a low response rate and high toxicity. In the 2 years after, 2017 through 2018, four successful novel drugs emerged from clinical trials for clinical use. As recommended by updated Barcelona Clinical Liver cancer (BCLC) treatment algorithms, lenvatinib is now feasible as an alternative to sorafenib as a first-line treatment for advanced HCC. Regorafenib, cabozantinib, and ramucirumab are appropriate supplements for sorafenib as second-line treatment for patients with advanced HCC who are resistant, show progression or do not tolerate sorafenib. In addition, with promising outcomes in phase II trials, immune PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors nivolumab and pembrolizumab have been applied for HCC treatment. Despite phase III trials for nivolumab and pembrolizumab, the primary endpoints of improved OS were not statistically significant, immune PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint therapy remains to be further investigated. This review summarizes the development and progression of molecular targeted and immune-based checkpoint therapies in HCC.
Medical time series are sequential data collected over time that measures health-related signals, such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), and intensive care unit (ICU) ...readings. Analyzing medical time series and identifying the latent patterns and trends that lead to uncovering highly valuable insights for enhancing diagnosis, treatment, risk assessment, and disease progression. However, data mining in medical time series is heavily limited by the sample annotation which is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and expert-depending. To mitigate this challenge, the emerging self-supervised contrastive learning, which has shown great success since 2020, is a promising solution. Contrastive learning aims to learn representative embeddings by contrasting positive and negative samples without the requirement for explicit labels. Here, we conducted a systematic review of how contrastive learning alleviates the label scarcity in medical time series based on PRISMA standards. We searched the studies in five scientific databases (IEEE, ACM, Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed) and retrieved 1908 papers based on the inclusion criteria. After applying excluding criteria, and screening at title, abstract, and full text levels, we carefully reviewed 43 papers in this area. Specifically, this paper outlines the pipeline of contrastive learning, including pre-training, fine-tuning, and testing. We provide a comprehensive summary of the various augmentations applied to medical time series data, the architectures of pre-training encoders, the types of fine-tuning classifiers and clusters, and the popular contrastive loss functions. Moreover, we present an overview of the different data types used in medical time series, highlight the medical applications of interest, and provide a comprehensive table of 51 public datasets that have been utilized in this field. In addition, this paper will provide a discussion on the promising future scopes such as providing guidance for effective augmentation design, developing a unified framework for analyzing hierarchical time series, and investigating methods for processing multimodal data. Despite being in its early stages, self-supervised contrastive learning has shown great potential in overcoming the need for expert-created annotations in the research of medical time series.
People are more likely to fall victim to depression during adolescence since it is a period of rapid biopsychosocial transformation. Despite this, most depression research has concentrated on ...clinical issues, and evaluating depressive symptoms in teenagers is not as widespread. This study used item response theory (IRT) to examine the psychometric properties of the Patient Health Report scale (PHQ-9) in Chinese adolescents. Meanwhile, item function difference tests were used to check whether there were differences in depression symptoms in this group based on education and gender.
In this research, the PHQ-9 was employed as a measurement tool, and 5958 valid data points were obtained from 12 secondary schools in China (M
= 13.484; SD
= 1.627; range 11-19 years; 52.17% boys).
IRT shows that all items of the PHQ-9 satisfy monotonicity, unidimensionality and local independence and that they have good psychometric properties. Furthermore, DIF analysis revealed gender and educational disparities in adolescent depressive symptoms.
The study indicates that the PHQ-9 possesses favourable psychometric properties for use in Chinese adolescents. As a result, it serves as a valuable tool for effectively screening depressive symptoms in adolescents. It provides a foundation for prioritizing the development of secondary school students' physical and mental health.
Summary
High turnover rate among Chinese social work practitioners is a big challenge facing the nation’s social work profession. Turnover intention, the determinant predictor of actual turnover, has ...been widely used instead of the actual turnover. Among many predictors, burnout (exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy) was recognized as a key predictor of turnover intention. In addition, recently, organizational justice is getting more and more attention by social work scholars in affecting employees’ intention to leave the organization. This article aims to empirically test how different dimensions of organizational justice influence social workers’ turnover intention, regarding burnout as a mediator, and including the development and validation of a new organizational justice scale in Chinese context.
Findings
In total, 616 social workers (223 from Beijing for Study 1 and 393 from Jiangmen for Study 2) participated in the study. The results revealed that interpersonal justice is the most important dimension for predicting social workers’ turnover intention, whereas cynicism plays a mediator role in that relationship.
Application
Turnover is an organizational behavior. Therefore, it is more important for organization managers and policy makers to consider the factors from organizational conditions that are influencing turnover. This study provides the field of social work in China with solid evidence that more attention should be paid to management issues in solving the challenge of a high turnover rate.
Cities and urban areas are an important part of global sustainable development, and the health and well-being of urban residents are closely related to the quality, quantity, and diversity of urban ...ecosystem services. Although the rapid urbanization process has changed the structure and function of urban ecosystems, which is notably different from natural ecosystems, the affected ecosystem services and their interactions—the trade-off impact of urbanization intensity on ecosystem services—remain to be discussed. Using land use/land cover and impervious surface area remote sensing datasets, and InVEST and RUSLE-related ecosystem services models to evaluate seven typical ecosystem services in Shenzhen, this study explored the evolution of multiple ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies during the transition from a natural ecosystem to an urban ecosystem, and how they are affected by urbanization intensity through correlation analysis and a discrete time-step simulation model. The results show that: (1) from 1978 to 2018, in the process of ecosystem transformation, grain production dropped from 228,795 tons to 11,733 tons, fruit production peaked in 1990 at 271,508 tons, and service capacity of both showed obvious degradation. Conversely, the cultural service capacity was remarkably enhanced. (2) With the increase in urbanization level, the trade-off and synergy of ecosystem services gradually transition from linear to nonlinear. The rapid urbanization process drives the nonlinear degradation of ecosystem services and the nonlinear enhancement of synergy. (3) Over the past four decades, ecosystem service bundles within the same kilometer grid have shown a quadratic curve-like decrease with increasing impervious surface area, slowly in the early stages and faster in the later stages. This study concludes that urbanization intensity has a significant impact on ecosystem service trade-offs, which can provide support for the formulation of ecological protection and restoration strategies in territorial space based on ecosystem services.
The regulation of the melting point of zinc smelting slag has an important impact on the subsequent smelting processes of the metal. In actual production, uncontrollable melting points may result in ...inconsistent product quality, which has a great negative impact on the smelter’s efficiency and environmental protection. However, the regulation mechanism of the melting point of the smelting slag is complex, with many influencing factors, and there is no recognized high-precision calculation method. In response to these challenges, this study introduces an innovative approach for optimizing the melting point of zinc smelting slag based on the improved Snake Optimization (ISO) algorithm. The melting point of zinc smelting slag is modeled using the Catboost algorithm, and the model parameters are optimized using the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) to improve the accuracy of the model. Next, the ISO algorithm is employed to conduct optimization calculations, determining the optimal values of various production process parameters that minimize the melting point. The effectiveness of this approach was evaluated using diverse modeling algorithms and test functions, subsequently applied to optimize and validate actual production data from a smelter in Shaanxi, China. Statistical analyses reveal that the TPE-optimized Catboost model exhibits an R2 of 93.89%, an RMSE of 7.02 °C, an MAE of 6.19 °C, and an MRE of 7.88%, surpassing performance metrics of alternative algorithms. Regarding optimization efficacy, the proposed ISO algorithm achieves an average reduction of 65 °C in the melting point and demonstrates superior robustness compared to both actual production data and alternative algorithms.
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