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Based on background concentrations of elements in soils and the sixth population census data of China, this study discussed the distribution characteristics of soil elements and longevity population at province level in China. Percentages of the aging population are high in Southwest China and the eastern coastal region but low in western and northwestern regions. Provinces in South and Southwest China gain a high level of longevity, while the northern part of China has a low level of longevity. The background concentration of Se in soil has a significant positive correlation with longevity index, while Ba and Ni have a significant negative correlation with longevity indexes. By regression analysis, longevity index C/100,000 can be expressed as C/100,000 = 1.679-0.205 Ni + 0.413 Co + 0.006 Se (with R (2) = 0.402 and p < 0.01), C/65+ can be expressed as C/65+=3.425-0.262 Ni + 0.435 Co + 0.006 Se (with R (2) = 0.369 and p < 0.01).

Bamboo with the outstanding properties, such as good mechanical strength, fast growth rate and low growth cost, is considered as one of utilitarian structural nature materials. But bamboo is easy to get mildewed resulting in disfiguration and fungi corrosion. In this work, a facile method was developed to improve the mildew-proofing capability of bamboo. Mussel-inspired polydopamine (PDA) with biomimetic adhesion function and highly active functional groups was employed to immobilize highly-dispersed Ag and TiO2 nanoparticles on the surface of bamboo via an in-situ growth method. Integrating the uniform PDA coating, photocatalytic function of TiO2 nanoparticles and bactericidal role of Ag nanoparticles, the mildew-proofing capability of bamboo is enhanced significantly. The results show a non-covalent interaction is more likely to account for the binding mechanism of PDA to bamboo. And the prepared bamboo samples show good photocatalytic performance and have excellent resistance leachability. Meanwhile, the mildew-proofing property of prepared bamboo sample was greatly improved.

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The Momoge National Nature Reserve (MNNR) is located at the intersection of Nenjiang and Taoer Rivers in Baicheng City, Jilin Province, where the Taoer River is the main source of water for the nature reserve. However, due to the construction of the water control project in the upper reaches of the Taoer River, the MNNR has been in a state of water shortage for a long time. To guarantee the wetland function of the nature reserve, the government planned to carry out normal and flood water supply from Nenjiang River through the West Water Supply Project of Jilin Province. Therefore, how to improve the utilization of flood resources effectively has become one of the key issues of ecological compensation for the MNNR. In this paper, a flood resources optimal allocation model that is based on the interval two-stage stochastic programming method was constructed, and the corresponding flood resource availability in different flow scenarios of Nenjiang River were included in the total water resources to improve their utilization. The results showed that the proportion of flood resources that were used in the MNNR after optimization was more than 70% under different flow scenarios, among which the proportion of flood resources under a low-flow scenario reached 77%, which was 23% higher than the proposed increase. In addition, the ecological benefits of low, medium, and high flow levels reached the range of 26.30 (106 CNY) to 32.14(106 CNY), 28.21(106 CNY) to 34.49(106 CNY) and 29.41(106 CNY) to 35.94(106 CNY), respectively. According to the results, flood resources significantly reduce the utilization of normal water resources, which can be an effective supplement to the ecological compensation of nature reserves and provide a basis for the distribution of transit flood resources in other regions.

Controlled tile drainage (CTD) is an agricultural beneficial management practice that can boost crop yields and reduce water and nutrient export from fields to surface water systems. This study examined on-farm incremental net benefits resulting from retrofitting existing tile drainage systems with inline water level control structures that control tile drainage. Corn and soybean yields (2005–2009) were respectively about 3 and 4% higher from CTD fields relative to conventionally drained fields at an experimental watershed associated with the Watershed Evaluation of Beneficial Management Practices (WEBs) program located in the South Nation river basin in eastern Ontario. The marginal cost of CTD employed in this experimental watershed was ∼Can (2006) $30 ha−1. The benefit–cost ratio was 2.6 for corn and 1.6 for soybean. A crude estimate of a payback period (without cost share) was from 3 to 4 years. Assuming all cropland in the entire South Nation river watershed where CTD is suitable, will be under CTD, the net present value of this practice is estimated to yield on farm annually about $(2006) 4 million for both crops. A crude estimate of non-user off-farm benefits of implementing CTD in this manner was ∼$0.4 million per year.

Multilingual and code-switching speech recognition are two challenging tasks that are studied separately in many previous works. In this work, we jointly study multilingual and codeswitching problems, and present a language-universal bilingual system for Mandarin-English speech recognition. Specifically, we propose a novel bilingual acoustic model, which consists of two monolingual system initialized subnets and a shared output layer corresponding to the Character-Subword acoustic modeling units. The bilingual acoustic model is trained using a large Mandarin-English corpus with CTC and sMBR criteria. We find that this model, which is not given any information about language identity, can achieve comparable performance in monolingual Mandarin and English test sets compared to the well-trained language-specific Mandarin and English ASR systems, respectively. More importantly, the proposed bilingual model can automatically learn the language switching. Experimental results on a Mandarin-English code-switching test set show that it can achieve 11.8% and 17.9% relative error reduction on Mandarin and English parts, respectively.