Ying Liu

Conservation agriculture is considered as an agro-ecological approach to the sustainable and resource-saving crop production system. Previous studies on the adoption of agricultural innovation often consider socio-economic characteristics and overlook underlying psychological factors influencing farmers' behavioral intention. This study adopted three socio-psychological constructs, Attitude, Subjective Norm (SN), and Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC), which originated from the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and proposed two new constructs, Knowledge (K) and Perceived Climatic Threats of Conventional Farming (PCTCV). Using the Extended Theory of Planned Behavior Model (ETPBM), this study analyzed factors affecting the intention of farmers to continue Conservation Agriculture (CA) for the following year (2020) in three districts located in the northern part of Bangladesh. This research found evidence from the hierarchical regression analysis that variables of ETPBM could explain 7% more variation (change in R2) in intention than variables of TPB, while the socio-economic characteristics of farmers can explain only 0.5% more than the variables of ETPBM. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to determine and examine the extended theory and indicated that farmers' knowledge (K) had the highest total impact, while attitude had the highest direct impact on intention. The results indicated that factors including Attitude, SN, PBC, Knowledge (K), and PCTCV are positively significant when attempting to understand farmers' intentions to adopt CA. This study presented evidence about the effectiveness of ETPBM when assessing the farmers' intentions towards conservation farming. Based on these findings, we concluded that the combination of extension services for upgrading the level of knowledge concerning the importance of CA could significantly affect farmers’ attitudes on intention towards the application of CA.

The economy of Bangladesh mainly depends on agriculture. Any development can’t be possible because females and males are equally distributed in the country. Women can play a vital role if they properly participated in farm activities as well as in other income-generating activities outside the home. Rice mills are very much dependent on human labour, and almost 5 millions of unorganised workers are working in different rice mills, and more than 60 per cent of them is a female worker. But the working environment suffers from different discrimination and harassment issues between male and female workers. The present study aimed to find out the socio-economic status of women labour at rice husking mill of Bangladesh. Discrimination between male and female workers and the factor affecting the standard of living of women’s household will be focused. The study was carried out in two districts namely Mymensingh and Sherpur. From each district, rice husking mill was selected by using a cluster sampling technique, and 70 male and 70 female labours were considered as a sample. The survey was conducted by direct interviews using a questionnaire. Data generated were analysed by using tabular and statistical techniques. The average family size of the respondents was 4.46, and 57.05% of the participants were females while 42.95% were males in the household and 65.71% of female had no education. 88% of the women’s main occupation was in the rice mill as a daily paid labour. Average wage rate of male and female worker was 184.31 Tk. And 135.95 Tk., respectively. Age, education, number of family member, total land, number of earning member, the wage of women labour and working time and experience were the factors influencing income and living standard of female labours. There were various social violence cases against female labours in the working environment of rice husking mills. In the study area, 93% of female workers get lower wages, 90% of them had no accommodation facility. Besides they did not have sanitation facility (80%), opportunity to take rest at the middle of work (64%) and meal support (71%).

Abnormal behaviour detection algorithm needs to conduct behaviour analysis on the basis of continuous video inclination tracking, and the robustness of the algorithm is reduced for the occlusion of moving targets, the occlusion of the environment, and the movement of targets with the same colour. For this reason, the optical flow information between RGB images and video frames is used as the input of the network in view of group behaviour. Then, the direction, velocity, acceleration, and energy of the crowd were weighted and fused into a global optical flow descriptor. At the same time, the crowd trajectory map is extracted from the original image of a single frame. Following, in order to realize the detection of large displacement moving target and solve the problem that the traditional optical flow algorithm is only suitable for the detection of displacement moving target, a video abnormal behaviour detection algorithm based on the double-flow convolutional neural network is proposed. The network uses two network branches to learn spatial dimension information and temporal dimension information, respectively, and uses short- and long-time neural network to model the dependency relationship between long-time video frames, so as to obtain the final behaviour classification results. Simulation test results show that the proposed method can achieve good recognition effect on multiple datasets, and the performance of abnormal behaviour detection can be significantly improved by using interframe motion information.

In the field of natural language processing, the task of sensitive information detection refers to the procedure of identifying sensitive words for given documents. The majority of existing detection methods are based on the sensitive-word tree, which is usually constructed via the common prefixes of different sensitive words from the given corpus. Yet, these traditional methods suffer from a couple of drawbacks, such as poor generalization and low efficiency. For improvement purposes, this paper proposes a novel self-attention-based detection algorithm using the implementation of graph convolutional network. The main contribution is twofold. Firstly, we consider a weighted GCN to better encode word pairs from the given documents and corpus. Secondly, a simple, yet effective, attention mechanism is introduced to further integrate the interaction among candidate words and corpus. Experimental results from the benchmarking dataset of THUC news demonstrate a promising detection performance, compared to existing work.

This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugural issue in February 1982 until December 2016—a dataset that comprises 6308 articles and 42 million words. Our key method is a computational algorithm known as probabilistic topic modeling, which we use to examine objectively the field’s latent thematic landscape based on the vast volume of scholarly texts. This “big-data” approach allows us not only to provide time-specific snapshots of various research topics, but also to track the dynamic evolution of each topic over time. We further examine the pattern of individual papers’ topic diversity and the influence of individual papers’ topic diversity on their impact over time. We conclude this study with our recommendation for future studies in business ethics research.

Tempo is an important musical element that affects human’s emotional processes during music listening. However, it remains unclear how tempo and musical training affect individuals’ emotional experience. To explore the neural underpinnings of the effects of tempo on music-evoked emotion, music with fast tempo, medium tempo, and slow tempo were collected to compare differences in the emotional responses and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) neural activity between musicians and non-musicians. Behaviorally, musicians perceived higher valence in fast music than non-musicians did. The main effects of group and tempo were significant, and a significant interaction between group and tempo was found. In the arousal dimension, the scores presented as Mmedium > Mfast and Mmedium > Mslow; in the valence dimension, the scores presented as Mfast > Mslow > Mmedium. Functional analyses revealed that the neural activation of musicians was stronger than non-musicians’ in the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL). A comparison of tempi showed that activation by fast music was stronger than slow music in bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG), which provided the neural evidence for the highest valence in fast music. Activation by medium music was stronger than slow music in the right Heschl’s gyrus(HG), right middle temporal gyrus(MTG), right posterior cingulate gyrus(PCC), right precuneus, right IPL and left STG, which provided neural evidence of the medium music having the highest arousal and lowest valence. Importantly, the current study confirmed and explained the connection between music tempo and emotional experiences and their interaction with individuals’ musical training.

A pulsed-laser microbeam at 532 nm wavelength and a laser-induced optical trap at 1064 nm wavelength have been successively combined to dissect and manipulate chromosomes in live newt lung epithelial cells. These preliminary experimental results demonstrated that chromosome fragments dissected by laser microbeam surgery, regardless of their size, could be easily pulled or rotated by optical forces when positioned at the periphery of the mitotic spindle. In addition, chromosome arms which were not subjected to laser microsurgery also could be moved with the optical tweezers at the spindle periphery. In our previous study on rat kangaroo kidney cells, this degree of facility in manipulating chromosome movement was not possible, most likely due to the close proximity of the intermediate filament 'cage' to the spindle. It is concluded herein that optical scissors and tweezers can be used in combination to study the interaction of chromosomes with the mitotic spindle in cells where the peripheral regions of the spindle are unobstructed by intermediate filaments. This can be performed on newt cells, where the diameter of the cage can be substantially larger than the diameter of the spindle.

We report the results of microfluorometric measurements of physiological changes in optically trapped immotile Chinese hamster ovary cells and motile human sperm cells under continuous-wave and pulsed-mode trapping conditions at 1064 nm. The fluorescence spectra derived from the exogenous fluorescent probes laurdan, acridine orange, propidium iodide, and Snarf are used to assess the effects of optical confinement with respect to temperature, DNA structure, cell viability, and intracellular pH, respectively. In the latter three cases, fluorescence is excited via a two- photon process, using a CW laser trap as the fluorescence excitation source. An average temperature increase of < 1.0 ± 0.30°C/100 mW is measured for cells when held stationary with CW optical tweezers at powers of up to 400 mW. The same trapping conditions do not appear to alter DNA structure or cellular pH. In contrast, a pulsed 1064-nm laser trap produced significant fluorescence spectral alterations in acridine orange, perhaps because of thermally induced DNA structural changes or laser-induced multiphoton processes. The techniques and results presented herein demonstrate the ability to perform in situ monitoring of cellular physiology during CW and pulsed laser trapping, and should prove useful in studying mechanisms by which optical tweezers and microbeams perturb metabolic function and cellular viability.

The confinement of liposomes and Chinese hamster ovary cells by infrared optical tweezers is shown to result in sample heating and temperature increases by several degrees centigrade, as measured by a noninvasive, spatially resolved fluorescence detection technique. For micron- sized spherical liposome vesicles having bilayer membranes composed of the phospholipid 1,2-diacyl-pentadecanoyl-glycero-phosphocholine, a temperature rise of ~1.45 ± 0.15°C/100 mW is observed when the vesicles are held stationary with a 1.064 μm optical tweezers having a power density of ~10 7 W/cm 2 and a focused spot size of ~0.8 μm. The increase in sample temperature is found to scale linearly with applied optical power in the 40 to 250 mW range. Under the same trapping conditions, CHO cells exhibit an average temperature rise of nearly 1.15 ± 0.25°C/100 mW. The extent of cell heating induced by infrared tweezers confinement can be described by a heat conduction model that accounts for the absorption of infrared laser radiation in the aqueous cell core and membrane regions, respectively. The observed results are relevant to the assessment of the noninvasive nature of infrared trapping beams in micromanipulation applications and cell physiological studies.

We describe a novel microfluorometric technique, based on the temperature-dependent fluorescence emission from single dye-labeled phospholipid vesicles, for the determination of localized heating effects. An increase in sample temperature results in a red shifting of the probe fluorescence spectrum. As individually calibrated microthermometers, fluorescent liposomes exhibit a temperature sensitivity of ∼0.1°C in the vicinity of the bilayer phase transition temperature. Through modification of the bilayer components, both the sensitivity and operating temperature range of these microthermometers can be controlled. Micron spatial resolution is achieved at a signal-to-noise ratio in excess of 103:1. We use the above technique, for the first time, to determine localized heating effects induced by a laser beam focused to its near-diffraction limited spot size. At the laser wavelength of λ=1.064 μm, a temperature change of 1.1°C/100mW in 10-μm-diam organic liposomes is reported. Implications for the real-time optical monitoring of temperature in biological systems are discussed.

In the 1990s, have long been into the "limbo" of literary criticism and ethics scholars quietly occupied the United States. In the post-modern context, the literary criticism of the ethical shift is not a simple return to tradition, but was given a new meaning and carry a new mission. Engaged in literary criticism of the construction of ethical theorists because of their different starting points and strategies basically two camps: the new humanism and deconstruction were sent, who together constitute a post-modern context of the ethical criticism of American literature the landscape. Ethic criticism dominated American literary criticism once again in 1990's, though for a long time it was marginized. However, the ethics turn of literary criticism in the post modern context is not simply a returning to tradition, instead, it was endowed with new connotation therefore equipped with new missions. Varied in starting points and strategies, critics devoted to ethic criticism could roughly be divided into two parts: that of ness humanism and of deconstruction. The work together and form a postmodern brilliant ethic landscape in American criticism