Rebels Lead to the Doctrine of the Mean: Opinion Dynamic in a Heterogeneous DeGroot Model

We study an extension of the DeGroot model where part of the players may be rebels. The updating rule for rebels is quite different with that of normal players (which are referred to as conformists): at each step a rebel first takes the opposite value of the weighted average of her neighbors' opinions, i.e. 1 minus that average (the opinion space is assumed to be [0,1] as usual), and then updates her opinion by taking another weighted average between that value and her own opinion in the last round. We find that the effect of rebels is rather significant: as long as there is at least one rebel in every closed and strongly connected group, under very weak conditions, the opinion of each player in the whole society will eventually tend to 0.5.Comment: 7 pages, Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Knowledge, Information and Creativity Support Systems, Beijing, 201

Identification of the Related Substances in Ampicillin Capsule by Rapid Resolution Liquid Chromatography Coupled with Electrospray Ionization Tandem Mass Spectrometry

Rapid Resolution Liquid Chromatography coupled with Electrospray Ionization Tandem Mass Spectrometry (RRLC-ESI-MSn) was used to separate and identify related substances in ampicillin capsule. The fragmentation behaviors of related substances were used to identify their chemical structures. Finally, a total of 13 related substances in ampicillin capsule were identified, including four identified components for the first time and three groups of isomers on the basis of the exact mass, fragmentation behaviors, retention time, and chemical structures in the literature. This study avoided time-consuming and complex chemosynthesis of related substances of ampicillin and the results could be useful for the quality control of ampicillin capsule to guarantee its safety in clinic. In the meantime, it provided a good example for the rapid identification of chemical structures of related substances of drugs

HM_ADET: a hybrid model for automatic detection of eyelid tumors based on photographic images.

BACKGROUND: The accurate detection of eyelid tumors is essential for effective treatment, but it can be challenging due to small and unevenly distributed lesions surrounded by irrelevant noise. Moreover, early symptoms of eyelid tumors are atypical, and some categories of eyelid tumors exhibit similar color and texture features, making it difficult to distinguish between benign and malignant eyelid tumors, particularly for ophthalmologists with limited clinical experience. METHODS: We propose a hybrid model, HM_ADET, for automatic detection of eyelid tumors, including YOLOv7_CNFG to locate eyelid tumors and vision transformer (ViT) to classify benign and malignant eyelid tumors. First, the ConvNeXt module with an inverted bottleneck layer in the backbone of YOLOv7_CNFG is employed to prevent information loss of small eyelid tumors. Then, the flexible rectified linear unit (FReLU) is applied to capture multi-scale features such as texture, edge, and shape, thereby improving the localization accuracy of eyelid tumors. In addition, considering the geometric center and area difference between the predicted box (PB) and the ground truth box (GT), the GIoU_loss was utilized to handle cases of eyelid tumors with varying shapes and irregular boundaries. Finally, the multi-head attention (MHA) module is applied in ViT to extract discriminative features of eyelid tumors for benign and malignant classification. RESULTS: Experimental results demonstrate that the HM_ADET model achieves excellent performance in the detection of eyelid tumors. In specific, YOLOv7_CNFG outperforms YOLOv7, with AP increasing from 0.763 to 0.893 on the internal test set and from 0.647 to 0.765 on the external test set. ViT achieves AUCs of 0.945 (95% CI 0.894-0.981) and 0.915 (95% CI 0.860-0.955) for the classification of benign and malignant tumors on the internal and external test sets, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our study provides a promising strategy for the automatic diagnosis of eyelid tumors, which could potentially improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs

3'UTR of tobacco vein mottling virus regulates downstream GFP expression and changes in host gene expression

IntroductionTobacco vein mottling virus (TVMV) is a member of the family Potyviridae. The 3’ untranslated region (3’UTR) of viral genomic RNA has been reported to significantly impact viral infection. Nevertheless, the role of the TVMV 3’UTR during viral infection remains unknown.MethodsHere, a 3’UTR-GFP expression vector was transiently expressed in Nicotiana benthamiana, in which the 3’UTR of TVMV was introduced upstream of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene. Transcriptome sequencing was performed to analyze the genes associated with plant resistance. The effect of the TVMV 3’UTR on GFP expression was studied using an Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression assay, revealing that the TVMV 3’UTR significantly inhibited GFP expression. Transcriptome analysis of differentially expressed genes in 3’UTR-GFP in N. benthamiana was performed to elucidate the why the TVMV 3’UTR inhibited GFP expression.ResultsEighty genes related to plant disease resistance were differentially expressed, including 29 upregulated and 51 downregulated genes. Significantly upregulated genes included those encoding the calcium-binding protein CML24, leucine-rich repeat receptor-like tyrosine-protein kinase, and respiratory burst oxidase homolog protein E. The significantly downregulated genes included calcium-binding protein 7, ethylene-responsive transcription factor 10, endoglucanase 5, and receptor-like protein kinase.DiscussionThese findings indicate that the 3’UTR of TVMV may inhibit the expression of GFP gene by inducing the expression of plant resistance genes. This study provides a theoretical basis for further research on the function and mechanism of the TVMV 3’UTR

Smoking behavior and associated factors among the residents aged between 15 and 69 years in Fengxian District, Shanghai

ObjectiveTo explore the relationship between smoking behavior and related factors among the adult residents in Fengxian District,so as to provide an evidence for carrying out tobacco control and other health promotion work.MethodsA multi-stage stratified cluster random sampling method was used to select 2 272 community residents aged between 15 and 69 yeas to carry out the questionnaire survey.ResultsIn 2020, the smoking rate of adult residents in Fengxian District was 23.50%. Smoking behavior was statistically correlated with age, gender, household registration, chronic disease, occupation and educational level. Smoking behavior was inversely correlated with educational level. Smoking rate of male residents was significantly higher than that of female residents, smoking rate of residents with chronic diseases was significantly higher than that of those without suffering from chronic diseases, and smoking rate of permanent registered residents was significantly higher than that of those non-locals. The highest smoking prevalence was among retired and freelancers, followed by staff of government agencies and public institutes, while the lowest was among students, followed by intellectuals. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that gender, age and education level were the main factors affecting the smoking prevalence level.ConclusionThe general smoking rate of adult residents in Fengxian District was higher than the average level in Shanghai but lower than the national level. Male residents aged ≥25 years and with lower education level are the key invention targets for tobacco control

Optimization sealing and cooling to control gas intrusion in a floating-wall combustion chamber

In response to the problems of high-temperature gas intrusion and ablation in the expansion slit between ceramic tiles under complex flow conditions in the floating-wall combustion chamber, as well as the issue of hooks exceeding their service temperature, numerical simulations and analysis were conducted for this paper. The study revealed the mechanisms of gas intrusion and sealing and proposed two evaluation metrics for evaluating the cooling effect: the maximum temperature of the hook and the proportion of high-temperature area on the sidewall of the tile. Furthermore, the CRITIC weighting method was used to analyze the weight of these metrics. Based on this, the spacing, radius, and length effects on sealing and cooling effectiveness were studied, and multi-parameter calculations and optimization were performed. The results showed that the degree of gas intrusion in the transverse slit was significantly higher than that in the longitudinal slit. In addition, the sealing method of the jet impingement could effectively cool the downstream of both the transverse and longitudinal slit. The spacing of the jet impingement holes had the greatest impact on the cooling effect, followed by the radius and length. Finally, when the spacing of the holes is 10 mm, the length is 18.125 mm, and the radius is 1.6 mm, the cooling effect is optimal, with the proportion of high-temperature area on the side wall of the tile being 20.86% and the highest temperature of the hook reaching 836.02 K

Fashion, Cooperation, and Social Interactions

Fashion plays such a crucial rule in the evolution of culture and society that it is regarded as a second nature to the human being. Also, its impact on economy is quite nontrivial. On what is fashionable, interestingly, there are two viewpoints that are both extremely widespread but almost opposite: conformists think that what is popular is fashionable, while rebels believe that being different is the essence. Fashion color is fashionable in the first sense, and Lady Gaga in the second. We investigate a model where the population consists of the afore-mentioned two groups of people that are located on social networks (a spatial cellular automata network and small-world networks). This model captures two fundamental kinds of social interactions (coordination and anti-coordination) simultaneously, and also has its own interest to game theory: it is a hybrid model of pure competition and pure cooperation. This is true because when a conformist meets a rebel, they play the zero sum matching pennies game, which is pure competition. When two conformists (rebels) meet, they play the (anti-) coordination game, which is pure cooperation. Simulation shows that simple social interactions greatly promote cooperation: in most cases people can reach an extraordinarily high level of cooperation, through a selfish, myopic, naive, and local interacting dynamic (the best response dynamic). We find that degree of synchronization also plays a critical role, but mostly on the negative side. Four indices, namely cooperation degree, average satisfaction degree, equilibrium ratio and complete ratio, are defined and applied to measure people's cooperation levels from various angles. Phase transition, as well as emergence of many interesting geographic patterns in the cellular automata network, is also observed.Comment: 21 pages, 12 figure