Rural idylls and urban economies: the making of metropolitan wine regions

In our quest to understand wine industries and their location and development worldwide, much emphasis has been given to key environmental, cultural and economic factors. The concept of terroir is used widely to describe, delimit and promote favoured wine regions. In this, we see constructions of rurality that tend to render invisible important connections between wine regions and urban places. However, many if not most wine regions owe much to their urban neighbours. Cities are sources of labour, capital and customers. Indeed, many wine regions are, in effect, metropolitan wine regions that owe as much to their proximity to cities than they do to any putative environmental distinctiveness and advantages. Wineries in such places develop strategies to survive and prosper not by producing bottles of wine that are widely sold on global markets – and compete on the basis on price or global reputation – but rather because they develop strong and loyal local markets tied to urban economies and because they appeal to the rural idylls held by urban consumers. This paper explores the way urban places have been critical in the development of certain wine regions in New Zealand.     

Translation speed measurements of hydrogen,helium, and argon field-reversed configurations in the central cell of a KMAX mirror device

A series of experimental results of field-reversed configurations (FRCs) on a KMAX (Keda Mirror with AXisymmetricity) tandem mirror machine are reported. Single-side FRC translation processes with three different gas species were measured by avalanche photodiodes. Consistent with the theoretical prediction, the measured FRC speeds were inversely proportional to the square root of the ion mass. However, the speeds of the hydrogen FRC increased even in a uniform magnetic field region while the speeds of the helium and argon FRCs decreased. Possible mechanisms are discussed. The speed of the second pass due to the reflection of the mirror fields was found to be ∼1/3 of the first pass speed. The internal magnetic fields were measured for a colliding-merging argon FRC, and the results show that, even for very slowmoving FRCs, merging can occur.     

结合位图切割和区域合并的彩色图像分割

就经典分水岭图像分割算法中存在的过分割问题，提出一种结合位图切割和区域合并的彩色图像分割算法。对原始彩色图像通过空域梯度算子求其梯度图像，并利用位图切割重建梯度图像；对新梯度图像进行分水岭预分割；对预分割图像基于异质性最小原则进行区域合并，并获得最终分割结果。相比于现有的同类方法，该算法引入位图切割，抑制噪声对分割结果的影响，在边缘模糊处分割准确，得到符合人类视觉的较小分割区域数目，同时在运行效率上提高。     

Energy‐efficient design of greenhouse for Canadian Prairies using a heating simulation model

Greenhouses in northern climates require a large amount of supplemental heating for growing crops in winter seasons, so energy‐efficient design of greenhouses based on local climate is important to minimize the heating demand. In this study, greenhouse design parameters including shape, orientation, the angle of the roof, and width of the span have been studied for the conceptual design of conventional greenhouses for Canadian Prairies using a heating simulation model. Five different shapes of greenhouses including even‐span, uneven‐span, modified arch, vinery, and quonset shape have been selected for the study. The simulation results proved that the uneven‐span gable roof shape receives the highest solar radiation, whereas the quonset shape receives the lowest solar radiation. However, the quonset shape greenhouse requires about 7.6% less annual heating as compared to the gable roof greenhouse, but the quonset would not be adopted as multispan greenhouses. Therefore, the gable roof greenhouse is considered as energy efficient for the multispan gutter connected greenhouses whereas quonset shape as a free‐standing single‐span greenhouses. In high northern latitudes, the greenhouse with east‐west orientation is more energy efficient from heating and cooling point of view when the length‐width ratio of the greenhouse is more than 1. The heating energy saving potential of the large span width in single‐span greenhouses is relatively higher as compared to the multispan greenhouses.     

Alterations in the Genomic Distribution of 5hmC in In Vivo Aged Human Skin Fibroblasts

5-Hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) is a functionally active epigenetic modification. We analyzed whether changes in DNA 5-hydroxymethylation are an element of age-related epigenetic drift. We tested primary fibroblast cultures originating from individuals aged 22–35 years and 74–94 years. Global quantities of methylation-related DNA modifications were estimated by the dot blot and colorimetric methods. Regions of the genome differentially hydroxymethylated with age (DHMRs) were identified by hMeDIP-seq and the MEDIPS and DiffBind algorithms. Global levels of DNA modifications were not associated with age. We identified numerous DHMRs that were enriched within introns and intergenic regions and most commonly associated with the H3K4me1 histone mark, promoter-flanking regions, and CCCTC-binding factor (CTCF) binding sites. However, only seven DHMRs were identified by both algorithms and all of their settings. Among them, hypo-hydroxymethylated DHMR in the intron of Rab Escort Protein 1 (CHM) coexisted with increased expression in old cells, while increased 5-hydroxymethylation in the bodies of Arginine and Serine Rich Protein 1 (RSRP1) and Mitochondrial Poly(A) Polymerase (MTPAP) did not change their expression. These age-related differences were not associated with changes in the expression of any of the ten-eleven translocation (TET) enzymes or their activity. In conclusion, the distribution of 5hmC in DNA of in vivo aged human fibroblasts underwent age-associated modifications. The identified DHMRs are, likely, marker changes.     

Efficient estimation of extreme quantiles using adaptive kriging and importance sampling

This study considers an efficient method for the estimation of quantiles associated to very small levels of probability (up to O(10⁻⁹)), where the scalar performance function J is complex (eg, output of an expensive-to-run finite element model), under a probability measure that can be recast as a multivariate standard Gaussian law using an isoprobabilistic transformation. A surrogate-based approach (Gaussian Processes) combined with adaptive experimental designs allows to iteratively increase the accuracy of the surrogate while keeping the overall number of J evaluations low. Direct use of Monte-Carlo simulation even on the surrogate model being too expensive, the key idea consists in using an importance sampling method based on an isotropic-centered Gaussian with large standard deviation permitting a cheap estimation of small quantiles based on the surrogate model. Similar to AK-MCS as presented in the work of Schöbi et al., (2016), the surrogate is adaptively refined using a parallel infill criterion of an algorithm suitable for very small failure probability estimation. Additionally, a multi-quantile selection approach is developed, allowing to further exploit high-performance computing architectures. We illustrate the performances of the proposed method on several two to eight-dimensional cases. Accurate results are obtained with less than 100 evaluations of J on the considered benchmark cases.     

Improved multi-recessed 4H–SiC MESFETs with double-recessed p-buffer layer

An improved multi-recessed 4H–SiC metal semiconductor field effect transistor (MRD-MESFET) with double-recessed p-buffer layer (DRB-MESFET) is proposed in this paper. By introducing a double-recessed p-buffer layer, the gate depletion layer is further modulated, and higher drain saturation current and DC transconductance are obtained compared with the MRD-MESFET. The simulations show that the drain saturation current of the DRB-MESFET is about 42.4% larger than that of the MRD-MESFET. The DC transconductance of the DRB-MESFET is almost 15% higher than that of the MRD-MESFET and very close to that of double-recessed structure (DR-MESFET) at the bias conditions of V_gs=0 V and V_ds=40 V. The proposed structure has an improvement of 26.1% and 74.2% in the output maximum power density compared with that of the MRD-MESFET and DR-MESFET, respectively. In the meanwhile, the proposed structure possesses smaller gate-source capacitance, which results in better RF characteristics.     

Automated coronal hole segmentation from Solar EUV Images using the watershed transform

Region of interest segmentation in solar images is the subject of frequent research in solar physics. This study outlines watershed by immersion segmentation to identify coronal hole areas in solar images acquired using the Extreme UV Imaging Telescope (EIT). Solutions presented here produce highly accurate segmentation results of coronal holes of irregular shape, and what is more, they do so for images representing varied solar activity, recorded in different years and months. In addition, the solutions presented here make all the methods used operate very quickly. These methods include: the preprocessing step before the watershed segmentation, the watershed segmentation itself, and also the postprocessing of solar images after the watershed segmentation. The mean duration of the entire segmentation process of solar images amounts to 342 ms for a single coronal hole, without the parallel implementation of the methods used. The experiments were carried out on a computer with an Intel Core i7 CPU @ 2 GHz and 4 GB RAM. After the seed point is identified inside the coronal hole, the segmentation runs automatically.     

我国矿业海外直接投资区位分布与空间经济效应研究——以世界主要经济体为例

以我国矿业对世界主要经济体直接投资为例, 基于2009~2018年投资存量数据, 在多区域结构分析框架下, 运用投资多样性指数、动态时空模型、灰色系统预测模型分别对投资区位分布特征、空间经济效应以及未来分布趋势进行了研究。结果显示: ① 2009~2018年, 我国矿业对世界主要经济体直接投资区位分布呈现出“由高度集中转向渐进扩散”“高者仍高、低者仍低”的集团俱乐部式时空分布特征;② 投资区位分布受到了来自于其他国家(地区)全局效应和相邻效应的影响;③ 2019~2020年, 在空间经济效应作用下, 投资渐进扩散趋势仍将持续, 集团俱乐部式分布有所减弱;我国矿业对欧盟、俄罗斯联邦、东盟、美国的投资机会及热度将有所增加。依据研究结果, 提出了我国矿业海外直接投资的启示及建议。