Around the Mt. Wuzhishan in Hainan Island, China, tourism development has been rapidly progressed by the government and private companies since the 1980s, especially since the late 1990s, and consequently the living conditions of the Li ethnic minority people in Shuiman village, located in its center, have been drastically changing. As expected by the government, the villagers' income has incre...

Nowadays, many manufacturing companies have decided to use other companies’ competencies and outsource part of their manufacturing processes and business to suppliers globally in order to reduce costs, improve quality of products, explore or expand new markets, and offer better services to customers, etc. The decisions have rendered manufacturing organizations with new challenges. Organizations...

Sensor Web is a revolutionary concept towards achieving a collaborative, coherent, consistent, and consolidated sensor data collection, fusion and distribution system. Sensor Webs can perform as an extensive monitoring and sensing system that provides timely, comprehensive, continuous and multi-mode observations. This new earth-observation system opens up a new avenue to fast assimilation of da...

By using the GIS technologies, we interpolate the site-based meteorological data into climatic surface data, which are the main input parameters for the CropWat model, used to estimate the reference evapotranspiration (ET0). And then by combining the ET0 with the information on share of cultivated land decoded from the Landsat TM/ETM digital imagines covering the entire case study area, the Hua...

In the past two decades, epidemiological studies have shown that air pollution is one of the causes of morbidity and mortality. In this study the effect of PM10, PM2.5, NO2, SO2 and O3 pollutants on human health among the inhabitants of Mashhad has been evaluated. To evaluate the health effects due to air pollution, the AirQ model software 3.3.2, developed by WHO European Centre for Environment...

BACKGROUND Esophageal cancer is one of the worst malignant digestive neoplasms with poor treatment outcomes. Esophagectomy plays an important role and offers a potential curable chance to these patients. However, esophagectomy with radical lymphadenectomy is known as one of the most invasive digestive surgeries which are associated with high morbidity and mortality. The enhanced recovery after ...

This paper derives the optimal production-shipment policy for a vendor-buyer integrated system with imperfect quality and an amending product delivery plan using an algebraic method. It is assumed that the system may randomly produce certain portion of nonconforming products during each production run. Quality assurance in terms of inspection and rework has been given effect to the defective it...

The emerging Bicycle Sharing System (BSS) provides a new social microscope that allows us to "photograph" the main aspects of the society and to create a comprehensive picture of human mobility behavior in this new medium. BSS has been deployed in many major cities around the world as a short-distance trip supplement for public transportations and private vehicles. A unique value of the bike fl...

This work reports on the use of cognitive agents to support the activity-based analysis of demand generation in urban traffic networks. Albeit motorists show reactive behaviour in many situations, for instance when they are effectively driving, interacting with others and with the traffic environment, in this work demand is regarded as the result of the cognitive process carried out by each ind...