Uncontrollable Environment Research Articles

Surrendering the Self

In his novel Annihilation, author Jeff Vandermeer provides a science-fiction narrative on nature as an unstoppable and uncontrollable environment where plants, animals, humans, and the land exist as a collective and connected entity of interactions. The novel utilizes Lovecraftian horror elements of an uncontrollable nature, human contamination, and an unknowable future controlled by nonhuman forces to portray both a multispecies environment and the posthuman future. Read through a multispecies lens and framed by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, this essay is an analysis of how Annihilation’s setting—Area X—necessitates the removal of human-centered processes and the human concept of individualism for favor of a flourishing multispecies environment. Its analysis exemplifies the genre of science fiction as a method to expand the boundaries of our perceived human-centered world. The narrative and rhetorical structures utilized by Vandermeer in his representation of real-world environments and natural processes as uncanny horrors and an off-center reality accurately represent the unknown future beyond the human species.

A self-calibrating flexible SERS substrate incorporating PB@Au assemblies for reliable and reproducible detection.

The precise quantitative analysis using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) in an uncontrollable environment still faces a significant obstacle due to the poor reproducibility of Raman signals. Herein, we propose a facile method to fabricate a self-calibrating substrate based on a flexible polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film comprising assemblies of Prussian blue (PB) and Au NPs (PB@Au) for reliable detection. PB cores were coated with an Au shell through simple electrostatic interaction, forming core-shell nanostructure PB@Au assemblies within the PVA film. The outer Au layer provided identical trends in enhancement for both the PB core and neighboring targets while PB cores served as an internal standard (IS) to correct signal fluctuations. The prevention of competitive adsorption on the metal surface between targets and ISs was achieved. The proposed PVA/PB@Au film exhibited enhanced stability of Raman signals after IS correction, resulting in improved spot-to-spot and batch-to-batch reproducibility with significantly reduced standard deviation (RSD) values from 11.42% and 25.02% to 4.43% and 9.39%, respectively. Simultaneously, a higher accuracy in the quantitative analysis of 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA) and malachite green (MG) was achieved with fitting coefficient (R2) values improving from 0.9675 and 0.9418 to 0.9974 and 0.9832, respectively. Moreover, the PVA/PB@Au film was successfully applied to detect residual MG in real fish samples. This work opens up an avenue to improve the reproducibility of Raman signals for flexible SERS substrates in the detection of residues under various complex conditions.

Optimal planning of technological options and productivity distribution dynamics

How does the distribution of productivity levels between firms change over time? What are the drivers of imitation and innovation? How much will production units invest in research and/or technology adoption? These are some of the questions often addressed by economists to enhance our understanding about technological progress and economic growth. This study contributes to the literature by examining the dynamics of an intertemporal utility maximization model in which agents’ choices on whether to innovate or imitate are endogenous. These choices determine the evolution, and systematic repositioning, of the distribution of productivity. Under plausible assumptions, the setup is flexible enough to allow for compression or expansion of the distribution (i.e., for convergence or divergence between technological capabilities). The normative implication is that the dynamics of productivity distribution is not the inevitable outcome of optimal decentralized choices in an uncontrollable environment. Instead, there are conditioning factors that public authorities can leverage (e.g., through patent policies) to achieve desired social goals (i.e., to improve welfare).

Locus of control: How the brain gives up when failure is taken for granted

After repeatedly failing to get out of a stressful, uncontrollable environment, mice switch from escape behavior to inactivity. In this issue of Neuron, Li etal. identify a circuit involving noradrenergic projections from the locus coeruleus to GABAergic projection neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex that participate in this adaptive behavior.

IRS Assisted NOMA Aided Mobile Edge Computing With Queue Stability: Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

By employing powerful edge servers for data processing, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been recognized as a promising technology to support emerging computation-intensive applications. Besides, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-aided MEC system can further enhance the spectral-efficiency with massive tasks offloading. However, with more dynamic devices brought online and the uncontrollable stochastic channel environment, it is even desirable to deploy appealing technique, i.e., intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), in the MEC system to flexibly tune the communication environment and improve the system energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the joint offloading, communication and computation resource allocation for the IRS-assisted NOMA MEC system. We first formulate a mixed integer energy efficiency maximization problem with system queue stability constraint. We then propose the Lyapunov-function-based Mixed Integer Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (LMIDDPG) algorithm which is based on the centralized reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To be specific, we design the mixed integer action space mapping which contains both continuous mapping and integer mapping. Moreover, the award function is defined as the upper-bound of the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty function. To enable end devices (EDs) to choose actions independently at the execution stage, we further propose the Heterogeneous Multi-agent LMIDDPG (HMA-LMIDDPG) algorithm based on distributed RL framework with homogeneous EDs and heterogeneous base station (BS) as heterogeneous multi-agent. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithms can achieve superior energy efficiency performance to the benchmark algorithms while maintaining the queue stability. Specially, the distributed structure HMA-LMIDDPG can acquire more energy efficiency gain than the centralized structure LMIDDPG.

What’s so Social about Facebook? Distant Reading of Swedish Local Government Facebook Pages, 2010-2017

ABSTRACT Social media, particularly its more social aspects, can be challenging for organizations. In this article local governments’ communication on Facebook is used as a case study and analyzed through a mixed methods approach, utilizing distant and close readings of 50,000 Facebook posts from 23 Swedish local governments. The aim is to investigate patterns in both content and style with a particular focus on social interaction, drawing on a neo-institutional approach and the idea that communication can play an explicit social function. The findings suggest that local governments used Facebook mainly to inform citizens, whereas dialogue and discussion were directed elsewhere. When local governments translate social media into practice, it seems to be done in line with established channels and ways of communicating. These findings underline the need to understand local governments’ use of social media in relation to concepts such as openness and control, where attempts are made to control an uncontrollable online environment. Another key finding is that local governments seemed to post when there was very little or nothing to say; they posted about the mundane, trivial, and ordinary. These findings indicate an adaptation of the language and discourse of social media which contrasts with bureaucratic language.

IRS-Aided Wireless Communication: From Physics to Channel Modeling and Characterization

Intelligent reflecting surface has recently emerged as a cost-effective solution to overcome the deep fading and uncontrollable wireless environment. This leads to a need for studies on the wireless channels of IRS-aided wireless communication (IRSaWC). This paper proposes a novel channel modelling method for the IRSaWC by exploiting the physics characteristic of the electromagnetic (EM) field on the IRS and the modified Saleh-Valenzuela (SV) model. Firstly, the reflection on a single reflecting tile (RT) of the IRS is investigated in the presence of a misalignment between the RT’s configured incident angle and the actual incident angle, and the RT’s phase distortion. Then, the path loss and phase shift models for the reflected field are developed. Extending our study to the multiple-RT scenario and utilizing the modified SV model, the channel characteristic for the IRSaWC is determined. Our analysis shows that the information signal at the receiver experiences a Rice fading with controllable parameters. Theoretical results for the path loss, the channel’s parameters, and the received distortion power are derived; moreover, an approximate distribution for the combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for IRS-aided multiple-antenna wireless systems (IRSaMAWSs) has been investigated with the aim of conducting further studies on theoretical performance for IRSaMAWSs

Organic Heterocyclic Strategy for Precisely Regulating Electronic State of Palladium Interface to Boost Alcohol Oxidation

AbstractExploring highly‐efficient palladium (Pd)‐based electrocatalysts for the alcohol oxidation reaction (AOR) is crucial yet challenging for chemists due to the vague Pd interface with an uncontrollable electronic environment. Herein, an organic heterocyclic strategy is used for the first time to modulate the electronic state of Pd electrocatalysts by anchoring Pd nanoparticles to conjugated microporous polymers (CMPs) with varied S‐, N‐, O‐, or S, N‐heterocycles. Among these CMPs, the S, N‐containing thiazole heterocyclic polymer SNC with Pd catalyst exhibits highly‐efficient current densities of 1575.0 mA mgPd−1 for methanol oxidation and 1071.0 mA mgPd−1 for ethanol oxidation, which are among the highest performance in the heterocyclic modulated Pd systems and surpass the commercial Pd black catalyst. Detailed theory calculations suggest that although the furan (O‐heterocycle) polymer OC has the strongest charge transfer (0.057 |e|) with the Pd cluster, the moderate electron transfer (0.041 |e|) of the Pd/SNC heterojunction with an S···N···Pd noncovalent interaction shows the best catalytic reaction kinetics. Moreover, the d‐band of the Pd/SNC system is closer to the volcano vertex than its counterparts. These results indicate that appropriate electron transfer intensity regulation of Pd electronic state by well‐defined heterocyclic structures may significantly improve AOR activity.

Multi-feature fusing local directional ternary pattern for facial expressions signal recognition based on video communication system

In the field of Automatic Facial Expression Signal Recognition (AFESR) at video communication system, the fusing feature extraction is playing an extremely important role in recognition accuracy. This paper presents a new feature extraction method, Multi-Feature Fusing Local Directional Ternary Pattern (MFF-LDTP) which keeps more feature information and improvs the robustness under the uncontrollable and wild environment for AFESR. Firstly, the MFF-LDTP operator obtains the global feature of facial expression by Principal Components Analysis (PCA). Secondly, the MFF-LDTP enhances traditional Local Directional Ternary Pattern （LDTP）by using a “kirsch mask” to replace the Frei-Chen masks and selects the threshold for facial expression signal recognition. To effectively avoid generating invalid features, the MFF-LDTP extracts the local feature of eye and mouth which are significant regions by ELDTP. Thirdly, The MFF-LDTP final feature vector includes the linear connection of global and local features. The recognition rate for the extended JAFFE database is 96.5%. And the extended JAFFE includes captured sample images under an uncontrollable and wild environment. The experimental results show that the proposed MFF-LDTP achieved significant improvement and outperformed some state-of-the-art methods.

Resilience through Entrepreneurial Storytelling in Extreme Contexts: A Case Study of a Pharmaceutical Company in the Palestinian Territory

This case presents how entrepreneurial storytelling assists entrepreneurs in attracting new investors, pursuing innovation and developing resilience in the Palestinian Territory. It also examines the role of entrepreneurial storytelling in eluding political crises and supporting the CEO's vision to adapt changes in the political environment. Moreover, this case explains how entrepreneurs respond to local competitors who operate in the same uncontrollable and unpredictable environment. The case is written based on three semi-structured interviews (total seven hours) with the Chief Executive Officer 1 of Pharmacare Pharmaceuticals Public Limited Company (PCP) 2 : Mr Bassim Khoury (BK). PCP is the third Palestinian pharmaceutical company in terms of turnover in 2021, with more than 100 products and 330 employees, and is the first company in the Palestinian Territory to expand internationally in 22 countries.

Developing Crisis Management System for Construction Projects in Iraq

Construction is a complicated process that takes place in an almost uncontrollable environment. Although projects can be carefully planned in advance in principle, there is a chance that unforeseen events and crises can disrupt these plans, affecting project development. Because the initial investment expenditures in construction projects are so large, they may be quickly influenced by crises, resulting in significant financial losses. The 2014 financial crisis was one of the most prominent crises that Iraq faced, which significantly impacted various activities in general and the construction industry in particular. Despite the importance of crisis management systems, the researchers found a great lack of local studies looking at crisis management, specifically in the basic stages chosen for its development, which are before, during, and after a crisis. Therefore, an effective crisis management system has been developed consisting of 20 critical success factors with devising 59 actions that can be taken for each proposed criterion for each of the three stages of crisis.

Peer assessment after clinical exposure (PACE): an evaluation of structured peer support for staff in emergency care.

There is an increasing body of evidence that identifies psychological stressors associated with working in emergency medicine. Peer Assessment After Clinical Exposure (PACE) is a structured programme designed to support staff following traumatic or chronic work-related stressful exposure. The first author of this study created the PACE programme and implemented it in one emergency department (ED). A service evaluation designed to explore the thoughts and experiences of the staff who accessed the PACE support service. Participants were selected by a non-probability convenience strategy to represent the ED staff population. The study cohort ranged from junior staff nurse level to emergency consultant. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview and examined by the method of interpretative phenomenological analysis. This study confirmed the findings of previous research that current pressures within the ED include crowding, time pressure and working within an uncontrollable environment. Eight participants identified an absence of previous emotional support resulting in dissociation and avoidance behaviours following traumatic exposure. Overall, the PACE service was well received by the majority of staff (11/12). There was a positive association with the one-to-one element and the educational component helped to reduce the stigma associated with stress reactions after work-related exposure. PACE received a positive response from staff. This service presently does not exist elsewhere in the NHS so further research will be needed to evaluate its long-term impact and effectiveness on a wider scale.

Liquidity of Non-financial Corporations: Evidence from Bulgaria

The financial and economic crisis years ago put the development of enterprises in Bulgaria and around the world in an uncontrollable environment that is difficult to predict, and led to significant problems with their financial condition. As a result of a rare CoVid-19 pandemic in 2020, the economic situation has become more complicated and portends déjà vu in terms of negative effects on the economy and businesses. The numerous closures of businesses and entire sectors will undoubtedly lead to serious financial consequences related to liquidity problems and excessive indebtedness of Bulgarian enterprises. The main problem that provokes this study is the lack of summarized information on the state of corporate liquidity and the solvency levels of non-financial corporations in Bulgaria. The main purpose of the article is to examine the liquidity status of non-financial corporations in Bulgaria. This analysis is needed to prevent liquidity crises and to bring out early indicators to warn and counter the risks posed by deteriorating solvency. It will be essential for the liquidity assessment to derive average industry values of the indicators to guide the companies from the sectors regarding the recommended liquidity levels to which they should strive.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Doppler Effect and Multipath Fading Mitigation

Owing to the envisioned new use-cases, such as immersive virtual reality and high-fidelity mobile hologram, and their potential challenging new requirements for future wireless networks, extensive research has already started on 6G and beyond wireless technologies. Despite the fact that several modern physical layer solutions have been introduced in the past decade, a level of saturation has been reached in terms of the available spectrum and adapted modulation/coding solutions, which accordingly limits the maximum capacity and reliability. Within this respective, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered communication appears as a potential candidate to overcome the inherent drawbacks of legacy wireless systems. The core idea of RIS-assisted communication is the transformation of the random and uncontrollable wireless propagation environment into a reconfigurable communication system entity that plays an active role in conveying information and improving system performance. In this paper, the well-known multipath fading phenomenon is revisited in mobile wireless communication systems, and novel and unique solutions are introduced from the perspective of RISs. The feasibility of eliminating or mitigating the multipath fading effect stemming from the movement of mobile receivers is also investigated by utilizing RISs. It is shown that rapid fluctuations in the received signal strength due to the Doppler effect can be effectively reduced by using real-time tunable RISs. It is also proven that for a hypothetical propagation environment where all reflectors are coated with RISs, the multipath fading effect can be totally eliminated. Furthermore, we show that for more general propagation environments with several interacting objects, even a few real-time tunable RISs can remarkably reduce the Doppler spread and the deep fades in the received signal.

Computation offloading optimization for UAV-assisted mobile edge computing: a deep deterministic policy gradient approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can play an important role in wireless systems as it can be deployed flexibly to help improve coverage and quality of communication. In this paper, we consider a UAV-assisted Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) system, in which a UAV equipped with computing resources can provide offloading services to nearby user equipments (UEs). The UE offloads a portion of the computing tasks to the UAV, while the remaining tasks are locally executed at this UE. Subject to constraints on discrete variables and energy consumption, we aim to minimize the maximum processing delay by jointly optimizing user scheduling, task offloading ratio, UAV flight angle and flight speed. Considering the non-convexity of this problem, the high-dimensional state space and the continuous action space, we propose a computation offloading algorithm based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) in Reinforcement Learning (RL). With this algorithm, we can obtain the optimal computation offloading policy in an uncontrollable dynamic environment. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results show that the proposed DDPG-based algorithm can quickly converge to the optimum. Meanwhile, our algorithm can achieve a significant improvement in processing delay as compared with baseline algorithms, e.g., Deep Q Network (DQN).

Cornish science, mine experiments and Robert Were Fox's Penjerrick letters

In 2019 a collection of letters from the nineteenth-century natural philosopher Robert Were Fox was discovered in his home at Penjerrick in Cornwall. Fox came to the attention of scientific audiences for experimentally establishing that temperature increases with depth beneath the Earth's surface, and later secured fame for his magnetic dipping needle, developed to measure terrestrial magnetic phenomena. The newly uncovered Penjerrick letters constitute a valuable archival discovery with important historical ramifications for our understanding of Fox's work and its place within nineteenth-century science. As well as highlighting the central role of networking in promoting provincial science, the letters reveal the prominence of the Cornish mine as a site of experiment within British scientific culture. These venues presented Fox with unique spaces in which to scrutinize nature, but such philosophical investigations were unverifiable within a laboratory and appeared susceptible to inaccuracies arising from the working conditions of this uncontrollable environment. Nevertheless, the Cornish mine was crucial to the development of Fox's dipping needle, which became the premier device for making magnetic observations at sea in the 1840s. In this article, I demonstrate the epistemologically problematic nature of the mine as an experimental space that was to take on a central role in the worldwide magnetic survey that historians have described as the ‘Magnetic Crusade’.

Evaluation of lead, cadmium, copper and zinc levels and studying their toxic effect in sera of private electrical generator workers

According to the electricity crisis in Iraq since 1991, private electrical generators have installed randomly in nearly every neighbourhoods of all Iraqi cities. This represents a dangerous and uncontrollable environment that may lead to an environmental disaster. The aim of this work is to assess the serum levels of certain elements including lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), Zinc (Zn) and Copper (Cu) and their health effect. This study included individuals working with electrical generators (n=60) and healthy (n=60) as control group, their ages ranged from 18 to 45 years. The obtained results indicate a significant increase (p <0.01) in the Pb, Cd, Cu levels and Cu/Zn ratio, in contrast to the significant decrease in the Zn level of the workers who exposed to the generator’s diesel exhaust fumes compared to the control group. A number of health issues such as allergies, shortness of breath, eye irritation, colds and some other respiratory problems were also recorded for exposed workers. From these results it can be concluded that direct exposure to the exhaust fumes of private generators could lead to heavy metals poisoning, especially Pb and Cd, which can lead to serious health consequences in particularly, the workers with long-term exposure. In addition, it can lead to an increased oxidative stress disorders that caused by disturbances in Cu and Zn levels.

RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD: IMPLICATIONS OF COVID-19 FOR NEW CONSTRUCTION AND FOR ADAPTING HERITAGE BUILDINGS

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has highlighted the disruptive, cross-sectorial effects a sudden-onset pandemic has on a globally interconnected world. A particularly insidious component is the high percentage of asymptomatic cases allowing the virus to seed undetected. The design of residential architecture will need to adapt to the new reality that COVID-19 will not be the last coronavirus epidemic. This paper discusses the implications of COVID-19 for new residential construction. It argues for a containment space, separating the largely uncontrollable external environment from the internal threat-reduced residential space, for a separation of visitor entertainment areas and private sleeping areas, as well as the design of a spatially separated master bedroom that can double as a self-isolation space if the need arises. The implications of this new design on existing housing stock are also discussed. The advocated concepts are novel and advance the design considerations for future residential developments.

The Research on Face Recognition and Segmentation Based on Intelligent Background

Affected by factors such as attitude, light, expression, etc., it is impossible to accurately identify the identity in a wireless visual sensor network in an uncontrollable environment. In traditional visual identity recognition, it is necessary to convert uncontrollable factors into controllable and stable feature factors for identity recognition in a relatively uncontrollable environment where the node distribution is relatively complicated. The conversion process leads to long recognition time and low efficiency. An adaptive recognition method for identity features in wireless visual sensing networks based on LBP face recognition is proposed. A strong classifier is obtained for cascading, and the underlying features are extracted. The final Harr face cascade classifier is applied to the face Check it out. The PCA dimensionality reduction processing of the facial area feature vector is performed to obtain the low-dimensional feature vector, the dimensionality reduction coefficient, and the average face of the person. For the face image in the wireless local area, its LBP operation is given. Perform histogram statistics on face feature information, obtain face LBP histograms, and perform feature matching on the face feature database to complete recognition. The improved algorithm has improved the cumulative matching score of traditional algorithms by 17.8%; the accuracy rate has improved It is 32.7%, and the recognition time is shortened by 3.9s. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has high accuracy and recognition efficiency.

Navigation of autonomous vehicle for rubber tree orchard

This research has studied the navigation of autonomous vehicles in rubber tree orchards. It was emphasised on the rubber tree plantation in Thailand. Due to the high labour costs in the rubber industry and the demand for natural rubber has continued to decline over the past several years. The farmer were struggled to reduce the labour costs in production. The development of autonomous vehicle technology in rubber plantation can be a way to ease the production costs, such as reducing the amount of labour in fresh latex harvesting. This work was aimed to develop algorithm of a vision system for replacement of expensive sensors used in typical autonomous vehicles. The vision system model was implemented using only one camera installed on the vehicle to search for calibrated targets which were put on the rubber tree trunk. There were two important parameters, tree row offset and target distance, which were concerned when determining the performance of the autonomous vehicle in the rubber tree orchards. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the system, a set of experiments was conducted at a distance of 1-5 meters between the target and the camera. The results were compared between the controlled environment in the laboratory and the uncontrollable environment in the real rubber plantation.