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The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) involves four electron transfer processes and is of great significance in water electrolysis. The development of efficient and robust non-precious OER electrocatalysts remains a critical challenge for the production, storage and conversion of renewable energy. Herein, vertically NiCo2O4 nanosheets are grown on Ti mesh via a facile solvothermal method which is followed by low-temperature calcination. The NiCo2O4/Ti catalyst exhibits outstanding OER performance with a low overpotential of 353 mV to drive the current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a Tafel slope of 61 mV dec−1 in alkaline solution. Moreover, the stable electrocatalyst undergoes negligible degradation in alkaline media at least 20 h. The acceleration of the electrochemical OER likely stems from the facile electron transfer promoted by the NiCo2O4/Ti interface as revealed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. This work introduces a novel strategy for the establishment low-cost electrocatalysts for electrochemical water splitting.

Robustly tracking various objects within a video stream with complex objects and backgrounds is a useful technique in next generation computer vision systems. However, in practice, it is difficult to design a successful video-based object tracking system due to the varied light conditions, possible occlusions, and fast-moving objects. In this work, a novel weakly-supervised and quality-guided visual object tracking model is proposed, wherein the key is a bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network (BLSTM-RNN) that captures the feature sequence and predicts the quality score of each candidate window. More specifically, given a rich set of training videos annotated with the target objects, a weakly-supervised learning algorithm is first used to project all the candidate window features onto the semantic space. Next, we propose a two-stage algorithm to select the key frames from the video sequences, where both the shallow and deep filtering operations are conducted. Subsequently, the so-called BLSTM-RNN is proposed to characterize the feature sequence temporally, based on which the maximally possible object window can be calculated and finally output. In our experiment, a large video dataset containing 2045 NBA regular seasons and playoff basketball games was compiled. Based on this, a comparative study is conducted between the proposed algorithm and state-of-the-art video tracking methods. Extensive visualization results and comparative tracking precisions show the competitiveness of the proposed method.

Scarcity cues are ubiquitous in our everyday lives and thus attract great attention in consumer research. However, little attention has been devoted to examining whether exposure to scarcity cues influences consumers' trade-off between feasibility and desirability in product choices. The present research argues that the impact of scarcity cues on consumers' preference for products that offer more feasible or more desirable features depends on consumers' childhood socioeconomic status (childhood SES). The findings consistently show that consumers with low childhood SES who were reminded of resource scarcity seek more feasibility in product choices than consumers in other conditions. We trace this effect to the fact that scarcity cues cause consumers with low childhood SES to process information at a low construal level. By presenting this conceptualization and evidence, the present study contributes to research on childhood SES, resource scarcity, and construal level theory (CLT).

The adoption of performance measurements is becoming increasingly widespread and represents the key success factor for companies seeking to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Consequently, there is a need to develop a systematic method for companies to be more performance-measurement focused. This study presents an operating performance index (OPI) based on the concept of customers arriving at a store from a Poisson process and an exponential distribution. To support the efficient use of the proposed method, the statistical properties of OPI are given and a step-by-step operating procedure is constructed. The proposed method can not only evaluate and determine whether the current performance meets the level of Six Sigma, but also improve the precision when estimating a parameter. To validate the application and viability of the proposed method, it is applied to a realistic case study for operating performance measurement and improvement. The results reveal that the proposed method provides a more effective way to achieve Six Sigma, and that it can easily be implemented in practice for operations management and continuous improvement.

In this paper, we consider the following Kirchhoff-type problem { ( a + λ ∫ R 3 | ∇ u | 2 d x + λ b ∫ R 3 | u | 2 d x ) ( − Δ u + b u ) = f ( u ) , in R 3 , u ∈ H 1 ( R 3 ) , u > 0 , in R 3 , where λ ≥ 0 is a parameter, a, b are positive constants and f reaches the critical growth. Without the Ambrosetti–Rabinowitz condition, we prove the existence of positive solutions for the Kirchhoff-type problem with a general critical nonlinearity. We also study the asymptotics of solutions as λ → 0 . Numerical solutions for related problems will be discussed in the second part.

In this paper, we continue the study of the following Kirchhoff-type problem { ( a + λ ∫ R 3 | ∇ u | 2 d x + λ b ∫ R 3 | u | 2 d x ) ( − Δ u + b u ) = f ( u ) , in R 3 , u ∈ H 1 ( R 3 ) , u > 0 , in R 3 , where λ ≥ 0 is a parameter, a, b are positive constants and f reaches the critical growth. We use a scaling iterative algorithm to find numerical solutions to the problem on a large enough bounded domain with several particular nonlinearities f, including those with critical growth. We also study the behavior of the solutions as λ decreases to 0 in consonance with the theoretical study in Part I.

Background and aims Renal dysfunction is a potent risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, including stroke. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of admission estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) levels on short-term (1-month) and long-term (1-year) mortality in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Methods From the Taiwan Stroke Registry data, we classified ischemic stroke patients, identified from April 2006 to December 2015, into 5 groups by eGFR at admission: ≥ 90, 60–89, 30–59, 15–29, and Results Among 52,732 ischemic stroke patients, 1480 died within one month. The 1-month mortality rate was over 5-fold greater in patients with eGFR Conclusions After acute ischemic stroke, patients with reduced eGFR are at elevated risks of short-term and long-term deaths in a graded relationship.

Outsourcing is a crucial strategy of the mechanical manufacturing industry. When outsourcing, it is necessary for companies to carefully inspect the performance of contract manufacturers (CMs) to ensure high-quality products and satisfactory services. This study presents an integrated methodology for the quality performance assessment and optimization of products with multiple quality characteristics for CM selection in the mechanical manufacturing industry. First, we present a novel process capability analysis chart (PCAC) using the 100(1–α)% upper confidence limits of Cpmh, Cpuh, and Cplh to gauge the process capabilities of products with multiple quality characteristics and reduce the influence of sampling errors. Second, we apply Pareto optimality to reexamine eligible CMs under the objectives of maximizing performance in individual quality characteristics and minimizing variance in overall performance. A feedback mechanism is included to advise ineligible CMs on means of improvement. Finally, we present a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

We investigated the impact of serum cholesterol levels on 30-day mortality after ischemic stroke in dialysis patients.From the Taiwan Stroke Registry data, we identified 46,770 ischemic stroke cases, including 1101 dialysis patients and 45,669 nondialysis patients from 2006 to 2013.Overall, the 30-day mortality was 1.46-fold greater in the dialysis group than in the nondialysis group (1.75 versus 1.20 per 1000 person-days). The mortality rates were 1.64, .62, 2.82, and 2.23 per 1000 person-days in dialysis patients with serum total cholesterol levels of 120 mg/dL, 120-159 mg/dL, 160-199 mg/dL, and ≥200 mg/dL, respectively. Compared to dialysis patients with serum total cholesterol levels of 120-159 mg/dL, the corresponding adjusted hazard ratios of mortality were 4.20 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.01-17.4), 8.06 (95% CI = 2.02-32.2), and 6.89 (95% CI = 1.59-29.8) for those with cholesterol levels of 120 mg/dL, 160-199 mg/dL, and ≥200 mg/dL, respectively.Dialysis patients with serum total cholesterol levels of ≥160 mg/dL or 120 mg/dL on admission are at an elevated hazard of 30-day mortality after ischemic stroke.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) starts with memory impairments that can be observed before the appearance of significant neuropathology; thus, identifying mechanisms to stop AD progression is an urgent priority. Epidemiological and clinical data show that the consequences of vitamin D deficiency are relevant to disease risk and can be observed in the progression of many diseases, especially AD, whereas higher serum levels of vitamin D are associated with better cognitive test performance. However, the potential therapeutic strategy and underlying mechanisms of vitamin D supplementation against AD still need to be further investigated. In the present study, we found that 3xTg-AD mice with vitamin D supplementation exhibited an increase in serum vitamin D concentrations and improved cognition. We measured serum vitamin D binding protein (VDBP) concentrations and found that serum VDBP levels were increased in 3xTg-AD mice compared to B6129S control mice, but there was no significant difference between control- and vitamin D-treated 3xTg-AD groups. The vitamin D-mediated memory improvement may be accompanied by the suppression of increased hippocampal collapsin response mediator protein-2 (CRMP2) phosphorylation, and the restoration of CRMP2 phosphorylation by okadaic acid (OA) could abolish the beneficial effects of vitamin D. In addition, we found that CRMP2 was associated with NR2B and PSD-95 in 3xTg-AD mice with vitamin D supplementation. This CRMP2-NR2B interaction could be disrupted by a TAT-CBD3 peptide or OA, leading to attenuated memory protection in vitamin D-treated 3xTg-AD mice. Therefore, CRMP2 may be involved in vitamin D-mediated memory improvement in AD.

We have successfully fabricated large sized amorphous indium–gallium–zinc-oxide based active-matrix liquid-crystal displays, which uses Molybdenum/Aluminum/Titanium as source/drain electrode. In this study, an oxygen-rich etch stop layer acts as the oxygen atom supplier and converts the titanium layer into titanium oxide layer, which is found to induce instability of the device. Sample without titanium oxide has an initial threshold voltage shift is less than ±0.1 V after the repeatedly measuring over a period of two weeks. In addition, the IGZO based device demonstrated superior transfer characteristic. This paper established that the stability of the amorphous indium–gallium–zinc-oxide based active-matrix liquid-crystal display can be predicted by Stretched-Exponential model.