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Cooperative and self-enforceable water allocation is a key instrument to manage geopolitical conflict induced by water scarcity, which necessitates the cooperative willingness of the agents and considers their heterogeneity in geography, climate, hydrology, environment and social economy. Based on a multi-indicator system that contains asymmetric information on water volume contribution, current water consumption, water economic efficiency and efforts for eco-environmental protection, this study proposed a water allocation framework by combining the asymmetric power index approach with bankruptcy theory for solving the transboundary water allocation problem under scarcity. The proposed method was applied to the Yellow River Basin in northern China, which is mainly shared by nine provincial districts and frequently suffers from severe water shortages, and its results were compared with six alternative methods. The results highlight the necessity of quantifying agents' willingness to cooperate under the condition of asymmetric negotiation power when making decisions on transboundary water allocations. The proposed method allows for transboundary water allocations through simultaneous consideration of the agent's willingness to cooperate and asymmetric negotiation power, as well as disagreement allocation points, which ensure the stability, fairness and self-enforceability of allocation results. Therefore, it can offer practical and valuable decision-making insights for transboundary water management under water scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural integrity and continuity are prerequisites for exploiting the performance advantages of aerogels, while limitations in mechanical properties, such as low strength, high brittleness, and poor processability confine fully intact aerogels to laboratory settings. Here, a composite aerogel SPCCAM designed with hierarchical structuring into 1D building blocks at the nanoscale and honeycomb‐like anisotropic architecture at the microscale is presented. The inner carboxylated cellulose nanofiber core (CNFs‐C) exhibits much higher strength than the intermediate polybenzoxazine (PBOZ) shell, and the interface is highly reinforced by a crosslinked network of amino and hydrogen bonds, forming a highly stable 1D building block. Superhydrophobic SiO2 nanoparticle (hydrophobic‐260) is discretely distributed on the outer surface of the PBOZ shell, resulting in a nanoscale lotus leaf effect. Thus, the SPCCAM demonstrates outstanding properties including ultrahigh strength, excellent deformability and fatigue resistance, good machinability, ultralow thermal conductivity and coefficient of linear expansion, and superhydrophobicity from the inside out and long‐term hydrophobic stability along the radial direction of microscale channels, defining a novel method for designing aerogels with superior integrated mechanical, thermal insulation, and hydrophobic properties, and offering an attractive solution for high‐efficiency thermal insulators in high‐moisture extreme environments, such as deep‐sea and polar regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an all-optical vector magnetometer enhanced by a machine learning model. Using a dual probing beam setup, spin projections in both probe directions are simultaneously detected. Vector information is directly obtained from the measured phases of spin projection signals. To enhance the measurement accuracy and mitigate the dead zone effect, we introduce an artificial neural network (ANN) to link the phase signals to the field direction. With the addition of amplitude information to the ANN input, the average angle error is reduced to less than 0.3 ° within a hemisphere. Furthermore, this configuration demonstrates a field angle sensitivity of better than 30 μ rad / Hz 1 / 2 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several data analysis algorithms exist for detecting damages in bridges; however, such algorithms only approximately locate the damaged areas. To increase the accuracy and sensitivity, a new nondestructive, standing-wave, bridge-testing system as well as algorithm is proposed. The proposed system sends 3.8-5.8 GHz modulated sweeping waves to an object, the input and reflected waves form a standing wave, which is used to check and evaluate the state of the object under examination. In comparison with other systems, the proposed system is compact and less expensive, and offers higher sensitivity, higher resolution, and higher accuracy. Simulations and experiments verified its effectiveness. © 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]