The concept of brain death as equivalent to cardiopulmonary death was initially conceived following developments in neuroscience, critical care, and transplant technology. It is now a routine part of medicine in Western countries, including the United States. In contrast, Eastern countries have been reluctant to incorporate brain death into legislation and medical practice. Several countries, most notably China, still lack laws recognizing brain death and national medical standards for making the diagnosis. The perception is that Asians are less likely to (...) approve of brain death or organ transplant from brain dead donors. Cultural and religious traditions have been referenced to explain this apparent difference. In the West, the status of the brain as home to the soul in Enlightenment philosophy, combined with pragmatism and utilitarianism, supports the concept of brain death. In the East, the integration of body with spirit and nature in Buddhist and folk beliefs, along with the Confucian social structure that builds upon interpersonal relationships, argues against brain death. However, it is unclear whether these reasoning strategies are explicitly used when families and medical providers are faced with acknowledging brain death. Their decisions are more likely to involve a prioritization of values and a rationalization of intuitive responses. Why and whether there might be differences between East and West in the acceptance of the brain death concept requires further empirical testing, which would help inform policy-making and facilitate communication between providers and patients from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. (shrink)

We present a quantitative prediction of total organic carbon content for shale-gas development in the Chang Ning gas field of the Sichuan Basin. We have used the rock-physics analysis method to define the geophysical characteristics of the reservoir and the most sensitive elastic parameter to TOC content. We established a quantitative prediction template of the TOC content by rock-physics modeling. Well data and 3D seismic data were combined for prestack simultaneous inversion to obtain the most sensitive elastic parameter data volume. (...) According to the prediction template, we transformed the sensitive elastic parameter data volume to the TOC content volume. The rock-physics analysis indicates that the reservoir with a high TOC content in the Lower Silurian Longmaxi Formation of the Chang Ning gas field is characterized by low density, low P-wave velocity, low S-wave velocity, low Poisson’s ratio, and low ratio of P-wave velocity to S-wave velocity. Density is the most sensitive elastic parameter to TOC content. The rock-physics model suggests that density is negatively correlated with TOC content, and the relationship between them changes under different porosities. The reservoir with high TOC content is mainly distributed at the bottom of the Longmaxi Fm and in the central and east central area of the study field. The quantitative prediction results are in good agreement with the log interpretation and production test. Therefore, it has important implications for the efficient development of the shale-gas reservoir in the basin. (shrink)

BackgroundThe brain death standard allowing a declaration of death based on neurological criteria is legally endorsed and routinely practiced in the West but not in Asia. In China, attempts to legalize the brain death standard have occurred several times without success. Cultural, religious, and philosophical factors have been proposed to explain this difference, but there is a lack of empirical studies to support this hypothesis.Methods476 medical providers from three academic hospitals in Hunan, China, completed a selfadministered survey including a 12-question (...) brain death clinical knowledge assessment and hypothetical vignettes describing brain dead patients.ResultsThe response rate was 95.2 %. Almost all of the providers had heard of the term “brain death.” More than half have encountered presumed brain dead patients. Two-thirds accepted brain death as an ethical standard to determine human death. The mean knowledge score was 8.50 ± 1.83 out of 12. When given the description of a brain dead patient, 50.7 % considered the patient dead, 51.9 % would withdraw life support, and 40.6 % would allow organ procurement. Both provider and patient characteristics contributed to the providers’ decisions. Ethical acceptance was the most important independent predictor for brain death acknowledgement, followed by high knowledge scores, and the belief that the soul lives in the brain. Religious faith and associated beliefs did not have a significant effect.ConclusionsNotwithstanding scarce official accounts, recognition of the brain death standard is not uncommon in China. Chinese medical providers can adequately define the medical characteristics of brain death and accept it in theory, but hesitate to apply it to practice in the vignettes. Legalization is paramount in providing the protection providers need to comfortably declare brain death. However the medical decision-making surrounding brain death is complex and the provider's past experiences and emotions may also influence the process. (shrink)

The existence of the Dao 道(the Way), according to the Yizhuan 易传 (the Commentary), is something intangible. The connotation of the Dao is the law of change caused by the interaction between yin and yang. The main functions of the Dao are "to change" and "to generate". The intangible refers to the law of change caused by the interaction between yin and yang, and the law is expressed by the divinatory symbolic system (卦爻符号, the trigrams or hexagrams). It is through (...) the unique permutation of yin and yang lines of a trigram or hexagram that the law of change is explained as a universal model uniting celestial, terrestrial and human laws. The symbolic system is used to express the universal nature of continual generation of life. (shrink)

Banks and enterprises constitute a multilayered, multiattribute, multicriteria credit-related super network due to financial transaction behaviors, such as credit, wealth management, savings, and derivatives. Such a network has become an important channel for credit risk cross-contagion. This study constructs a two-layer network model of credit risk contagion between the bank and corporate counterparties from the perspective that banks do not withdraw loans from enterprises by considering the influence of corporate credit defaults on their counterparties under the credit linkage. This study (...) analyzes the mechanism of influencing the evolution of bank-enterprise counterparty credit risk contagion in the two-tier network through theoretical analysis, including the following: the enterprises’ coping ability, risk preference, influence, level of interenterprise credit risk contagion and its network heterogeneity in the interenterprise credit association network, the risk prevention and control ability, business correlation degree, interbank credit risk contagion and its network heterogeneity in the interbank credit association network, the level of credit risk contagion between bank-enterprise counterparty credit association networks, and other factors in the case that banks do not withdraw loans from enterprises. In addition, this study performs a calculation experiment to analyze the characteristics of the evolution of counterparty credit risk contagion of bank and corporate counterparties under the double-layer network. The following four major conclusions can be drawn from the results. First, in the interenterprise credit-related network, the threshold of credit risk contagion rate is positively correlated with the marginal increase in risk perception and risk leveling ability of the enterprise. By contrast, such threshold is negatively correlated with the marginal decrease in the initial economic impact, leverage level, and influence of the enterprise. Moreover, the scale of corporate counterparty credit risk contagion is negatively correlated with the enterprise’s risk perception level and risk spillover ability but positively correlated with the enterprise’s initial economic shock level, the enterprise’s leverage level, and influence. Second, in the interbank credit association network, the threshold of the rate of credit risk contagion is negatively correlated with the marginal decrease in the degree of interbank business association but positively correlated with the marginal increase in the bank’s risk resistance ability and risk information processing ability. Furthermore, the scale of credit risk contagion of bank counterparties is positively correlated with the degree of interbank business association but negatively correlated with the bank’s ability to resist risks and process risk information. Third, if the heterogeneity of the credit-related network of bank-enterprise counterparties is high, then the rate threshold of credit risk contagion is high and the scale of credit risk diffusion is low. Moreover, the scale of credit risk contagion of bank counterparties is positively correlated with the marginal decrease in the degree of corporate and bank counterparties. Finally, the scale of bank counterparty credit risk contagion is a monotonically increasing convex function of the credit risk contagion rate in the enterprise credit association network and among the bank-enterprise networks. (shrink)

Due to the NP-hard nature, the permutation flowshop scheduling problem is a fundamental issue for Industry 4.0, especially under higher productivity, efficiency, and self-managing systems. This paper proposes an improved genetic-shuffled frog-leaping algorithm to solve the permutation flowshop scheduling problem. In the proposed IGSFLA, the optimal initial frog in the initialized group is generated according to the heuristic optimal-insert method with fitness constrain. The crossover mechanism is applied to both the subgroup and the global group to avoid the local optimal (...) solutions and accelerate the evolution. To evolve the frogs with the same optimal fitness more outstanding, the disturbance mechanism is applied to obtain the optimal frog of the whole group at the initialization step and the optimal frog of the subgroup at the searching step. The mathematical model of PFSSP is established with the minimum production cycle as the objective function, the fitness of frog is given, and the IGSFLA-based PFSSP is proposed. Experimental results have been given and analyzed, showing that IGSFLA not only provides the optimal scheduling performance but also converges effectively. (shrink)

Coal texture is important for predicting coal seam permeability and selecting favorable blocks for coalbed methane exploration. Drilled cores and mining seam observations are the most direct and effective methods of identifying coal texture; however, they are expensive and cannot be used in unexplored coal seams. Geophysical logging has become a common method of coal texture identification, particularly during the CBM mining stage. However, quantitative methods for identifying coal texture based on geophysical logging data require further study. The support vector (...) machine, a machine-learning method, has received great interest due to its remarkable generalization performance, and it has been used to quantitatively identify hard and soft coal using geophysical logging data. In this study, four well-logging curves, the acoustic time difference, caliper log, density, and natural gamma, were used for coal texture analysis. Hard coal exhibited higher DEN, GR, lower CAL, and lower AC than soft coal. The accuracy rate of coal texture identification was highest when the linear kernel function was applied, and the maximum training accuracy rate was achieved when the penalty parameter value of the linear kernel increased to 1. The results of verification with a newly cored CBM exploration well indicated that the SVM-based identification method was effective for coal texture analysis. With the increasing availability of data, this method can be used to distinguish hard and soft coal in a coal-bearing basin under numerous sample learning conditions. (shrink)

The frequent occurrence of urban waterlogging constantly affects resident living and urban construction. Improved adaptive prevention and control strategies are highly requested due to huge economic losses and casualties caused by flood and waterlogging in China. The urban waterlogging may evolve into a serious emergency, generally characterized by high complexity, uncertainty, and time pressure. Coupled with the asymmetric information, waterlogging often exacerbates the impact of urban rainstorm disasters. Through the multi-agent system simulation with given geographic information, government and residents interact (...) under dynamic risk distribution in rainstorm disaster. The results show that the proactive attitude of residents and the government towards disaster relief could have a promoting effect for both, thereby increasing the disaster relief efficiency. Obviously, rapid accurate information collection and analysis facilitate disaster relief to a large extent. Meanwhile, appropriate supply rather than excessive supply may mobilize residents’ self-help and balance replenishment of relief supplies. (shrink)