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Resolving inventory and location problems is the most important and fundamental tactical decision in the initial stages of developing a distribution network design. This is especially true for a logistics system dealing with perishable food. To minimise both the total inventory transportation cost of fresh agri-products and also waste in the supply chain, the evolution of the food supply chain structure is analysed and an inventory location allocation model is presented describing the real-life problem. The key issues are to describe food demand distribution and to determine the balance of transportation and inventory cost. To improve the quality of the solution, a local search is embedded in the two-grade delayed particle swarm optimisation. Experimental results demonstrate the algorithm can effectively resolve conflict between different costs and improve development decisions regarding Beijing's perishable food distribution centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Few studies have assessed the role of individual plasma cholesterol levels in the association between egg consumption and the risk of cardiovascular diseases. This research aims to simultaneously explore the associations of self-reported egg consumption with plasma metabolic markers and these markers with the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Methods: Totally 4778 participants (3401 CVD cases subdivided into subtypes and 1377 controls) aged 30–79 were selected based on the China Kadoorie Biobank. Targeted nuclear magnetic resonance was used to quantify 225 metabolites in baseline plasma samples. Linear regression was conducted to assess associations between self-reported egg consumption and metabolic markers, which were further compared with associations between metabolic markers and CVD risk. Results: Egg consumption was associated with 24 out of 225 markers, including positive associations for apolipoprotein A1, acetate, mean HDL diameter, and lipid profiles of very large and large HDL, and inverse associations for total cholesterol and cholesterol esters in small VLDL. Among these 24 markers, 14 were associated with CVD risk. In general, the associations of egg consumption with metabolic markers and of these markers with CVD risk showed opposite patterns. Conclusions: In the Chinese population, egg consumption is associated with several metabolic markers, which may partially explain the protective effect of moderate egg consumption on CVD. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81973125, 81941018, 91846303, 91843302). The CKB baseline survey and the first re-survey were supported by a grant from the Kadoorie Charitable Foundation in Hong Kong. The long-term follow-up is supported by grants (2016YFC0900500, 2016YFC0900501, 2016YFC0900504, 2016YFC1303904) from the National Key R&D Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China (81390540, 81390541, 81390544), and Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (2011BAI09B01). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis and interpretation, writing of the report, or the decision to submit the article for publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major cause of death in China. Despite government efforts, the majority of hypertensive and diabetic patients in China do not receive proper treatment. Reducing CVD events requires long-term care that is proactive, patient-centred, community-based, and sustainable. We have designed a package of interventions for patients at high risk of CVD to be implemented by family doctors based in township hospitals (providers of primary care) in rural Zhejiang, China. This trial aims to determine whether the systematic CVD risk reduction package results in reduced CVD events among patients at risk of CVD compared with usual care, and whether the package is cost-effective and suitable for routine implementation and scale-up. Methods/Design This is a prospective, open-label, cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) with blinded data analysis. The trial will randomize 67 township hospitals with 31,708 participants in three counties in Zhejiang Province. Participants will be identified from existing health records and will comprise adults aged 50 to 74 years, with a calculated 10-year CVD risk of 20% or higher, or diabetes. In the intervention arm, participants will receive a package of interventions including: 1) healthy lifestyle counseling (smoking cessation, and salt, oil, and alcohol reduction); 2) prescription of a combination of drugs (antihypertensives, aspirin, and statin); and 3) adherence support for drug compliance and healthy lifestyle change. In the control arm, participants will receive usual care for hypertension and diabetes management at individual clinicians' discretion. The primary outcome is the incidence of severe CVD events over 24 months of follow-up. All CVD events will be defined according to the World Health Organization (WHO) monitoring of trends and determinants in cardiovascular disease (MONICA) definitions, diagnosed at the county hospital or higher level, and reported by the Zhejiang surveillance system. Secondary outcomes include: mean systolic and diastolic blood pressure, blood glucose, serum total cholesterol (TC), and adherence to appointments, and drugs and lifestyle changes. Discussion This trial focuses on risk reduction of CVD rather than specific diseases. It is not designed to compare therapeutic and healthy lifestyle interventions, but rather their combined effects in primary care settings. Through the trial, we intend to understand the effectiveness of the comprehensive CVD reduction package in routine practice. We also intend to understand the barriers and facilitators to implementing the package, and thus to advise on policy and practice change. Trial registration Current Controlled Trials: ISRCTN58988083 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Existing studies which regarding to the association between individual socioeconomic status (SES) and obesity are still scarce in developing countries. The major aim of this study is to estimate such association in an adult population which was drawn from an economically prosperous province of China. Methods: Study population was determined by multilevel randomized sampling. Education and income were chosen as indicators of individual SES, general obesity and abdominal obesity were measured by body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC). Descriptive statistical methods were used to depict overall and factor-specific distributions of general and abdominal obesity among 16,013 respondents. Two-step logistic regression models were fitted on gender basis. Results: The age-and-sex adjusted rates of general overweight, general obesity, abdominal overweight and abdominal obesity in study population were 28.9% (95%CI: 27.9%-29.9%), 7.5% (95%CI: 7.0%-8.1%), 32.2% (95%CI: 31.2%-33.3%) and 12.3% (95%CI: 11.6%-13.1%), respectively. Based on model fitting results, a significant inverse association between education and obesity only existed in women, while in men, income rather than education was positively related to obesity. Conclusions: The atypical SES-obesity relationship we found reflected the on-going social economy transformation in affluent regions of China. High-income men and poorly-educated women were at higher risk of obesity in Zhejiang province, thus merit intense focuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The propagation behavior of atmospheric-pressure plasma plumes has recently attracted lots of attention. In this paper, five different methods are used to measure the propagation velocity of an atmospheric-pressure plasma plume. The first method, named the "current method," obtains the propagation velocity of the plasma plume by measuring the currents carried by the plasma plume at different positions. The second method, named the "voltage method," obtains the plume propagation velocity by measuring the plasma plume voltage potential at different positions along the plasma jet with a voltage divider. The third method, called the "charge method," which significantly interferes with the plume propagation, estimates the plume propagation velocity by measuring the charges deposited on the surface of a quartz tube. The fourth method, which is the noninterference method, obtains the plume propagation velocity by capturing the dynamics of the plasma plume with an intensified charge-coupled device camera. Finally, the fifth method estimates the plume propagation velocity based on the temporal optical-emission intensity measurement of the selected species by using a spectrometer. The advantage and disadvantage of each method are discussed. The experimental results show that plasma plume velocities obtained from the five methods have reasonable agreement with each other. They are all in the range of 104 m/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has recently been demonstrated that pulsed direct-current (dc) voltages show better performance in generating diffuse plasmas under various conditions. However, it still remains unclear whether the pulsewidth or the rising and falling times of the voltage pulse play the essential role in the improvement of the performance of the dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs). In this paper, we focus on the effect of pulsewidth. Pulsed dc voltages with pulsewidth varying from 0.2 μs to about 1 ms are used to drive the DBDs. High-speed photographs show that diffuse Ar plasmas can be generated by pulsed dc voltages with pulsewidths covering the entire investigated range. It is found that the pulsewidths of the applied voltages affect the discharge current durations significantly when the pulsewidth is shorter than 600 ns or the break between the two consecutive pulses is shorter than 600 ns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain concepts acquisition is a key step of knowledge acquisition. In this paper we propose a new method for computing the relationship of domain concepts of China's vegetable supply chain using WordNet and Locally Linear Embedding (LEE) Arithmetic. WordNet is used to construct the high dimension description of the domain concepts and LLE is used to compute the relationship of concepts in low dimension space. The concepts description in the high dimension is in accord with human cognition and the low dimension relationship can reflect the degree of correlation of domain concepts clearly. A computer can deal with domain concepts directly after dimensional transformation. The experiment proves the efficiency of this method. The method can be expanded to deal with other examples of domain concepts acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the traditional FTP search engines usually adopt centralised spiders to collect data, insufficient temporal effectiveness is their major demerit. For solving this problem, this paper presents an efficient hierarchical FTP search engine model that deploys the spider agent on the node host of some specific network for collecting file data of FTP servers. The key technologies involve a regional responsibility mechanism, a search mechanism based on the asynchronous retrieval technology and a PAT Tree storage mechanism. The simulation shows that the responding time is less than that of the traditional system and the temporal effectiveness arrives at the application level. In addition, the test results show that the architecture has a good scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]