How does tourism industry dependence affect economic growth in western China? --Based on the inspection and interpretation of the Resource Curse transmission mechanism

The relationship between tourism industry dependence and economic growth is still controversial, and there are few quantitative studies on its transmission mechanism. Based on the Resource Curse hypothesis, the panel data of 46 excellent tourism cities in the western region from 2000 to 2017 was used to examine the existence and transmission mechanism of the Resource Curse. The results show that: tourism industry dependence in the western region of China appears as a curse rather than a gospel for economic growth, and the transmission route of the curse effect is mainly that the tourism industry has a negative impact on the regional economy by squeezing out the manufacturing industry. The findings of the paper provide a theoretical proof for the existence and transmission mechanism of the tourism resource curse in western China, and have certain enlightenment for similar regions to avoid falling into the tourism resources curse trap

Pd0-Catalyzed Formal 1,3-Diaza-Claisen Rearrangement. Design And Development Of Cationic 1,3-Diaza-Claisen Rearrangement.

The dissertation describes Pd0-catalyzed formal 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement and the design and development of cationic 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement. Our previous work has shown that isocyanates react with azanorbornenes and azabicyclo[2.2.2]octenes under thermal conditions to afford zwitterionic intermediates that undergo a thermal 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement to give both ureas and isoureas. However, some azanorbornenes and azabicyclooctenes failed to rearrange or proceeded in low yields. To address these challenging substrates for the thermal 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement, we have developed a Pd0-catalyzed formal 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement. Interestingly, under Pd0-catalyzed condition, both isocyanates with electron-withdrawing groups and isocyanates without electron-withdrawing groups react with azanorbornenes and azabicyclo[2.2.2]octenes to provide ureas as the only products in high yields. More importantly, the reactions that failed under thermal conditions were all successful under Pd0-catalysis. In addition to azanorbornenes and azabicyclo[2.2.2]octenes, other ring systems were also investigated. Pd0 catalysis has broadened the scope of tertiary allylic amines that react with isocyanates to afford 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement products. In the presence of p-TsCl and NEt3, allylaminopropyl benzyl ureas were initially dehydrated to form protonated carbodiimides whose presence was confirmed by the infrared absorption frequency at 2100 cm-1 which is the characteristic band of -N=C=N-; then the in situ generated protonated carbodiimides were poised for further cationic 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement to afford synthetically challenging guanidines. The effect of acid on the rearrangement was ascertained by the fact that no rearrangement product was observed by simply heating free base carbodiimide 3.10 in benzene at reflux. Other dehydration reagents, such as Tf2O, Ts2O, MsCl were also investigated, and none of them provide satisfactory results. A selection of allyamino benzyl ureas with different tether length, substituents, or in varied ring systems, were synthesized to explore the scope of this methodology. This methodology works best at allylaminopropyl benzyl ureas, and the substituents on the benzyl group does not seem to affect the reaction rate in a significant way

Fatty acids liberated from lipoproteins by lipoprotein lipase negatively influences cholesterol efflux from THP-1 macrophages

Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) is an extracellular lipase that primarily hydrolyses triglycerides within circulating lipoproteins. Macrophage LPL contributes to atherogenesis, but the mechanisms behind it are poorly understood. I hypothesized that the free fatty acid (FFA) component of the products of lipoprotein hydrolysis generated by LPL promotes atherogenesis by inhibiting the cholesterol efflux ability by macrophages. To test my hypothesis, THP-1 macrophages were incubated overnight with lipoprotein hydrolysis products generated by LPL. Results showed that the hydrolysis products negatively modulated the transcripts encoding nuclear receptors, cholesterol transporters, and enzymes involved in FFA synthesis. A mixture of only purified FFA that matches those liberated by LPL yielded comparable results to those for lipoprotein hydrolysis products. Furthermore, the FFA mixture significantly attenuated apolipoprotein A-I-mediated cholesterol efflux. Overall, these data show that lipoprotein hydrolysis products generated by LPL may promote atherogenesis by inhibiting cholesterol efflux, which partially explains the pro-atherogenic role of macrophage LPL

Study on the Effect of Cuisine Tourism Resource on Tourists’ Willingness to Visit

This article aims at examining if tourists’ evaluation of cuisine tourism resource has a positive effect on their willingness to visit (WTV) the destination (H1). In Study 1, the content analysis of travelogues of 60 Chinese major tourist cities shows that the scenic spots have a significant effect on WTV, while the effect of cuisine tourism resource on WTV is not supported. Moreover, the tourist city Chengdu with both abundant scenic spots and cuisine resources is chosen for further research of how cuisine resources influence tourist’ decisions. In term of 276 questionnaires (Study 2) and 30 interviewee (Study 3), the results show that the impact of the cuisine resource on WTV is moderated by the tourists’ evaluation on the scenic spots. Only when tourists have a high evaluation on scenic spots, the cuisine resource plays a positive impact on WTV, showing the auxiliary attraction of cuisine resource to tourists

Act As You Wish: Fine-Grained Control of Motion Diffusion Model with Hierarchical Semantic Graphs

Most text-driven human motion generation methods employ sequential modeling approaches, e.g., transformer, to extract sentence-level text representations automatically and implicitly for human motion synthesis. However, these compact text representations may overemphasize the action names at the expense of other important properties and lack fine-grained details to guide the synthesis of subtly distinct motion. In this paper, we propose hierarchical semantic graphs for fine-grained control over motion generation. Specifically, we disentangle motion descriptions into hierarchical semantic graphs including three levels of motions, actions, and specifics. Such global-to-local structures facilitate a comprehensive understanding of motion description and fine-grained control of motion generation. Correspondingly, to leverage the coarse-to-fine topology of hierarchical semantic graphs, we decompose the text-to-motion diffusion process into three semantic levels, which correspond to capturing the overall motion, local actions, and action specifics. Extensive experiments on two benchmark human motion datasets, including HumanML3D and KIT, with superior performances, justify the efficacy of our method. More encouragingly, by modifying the edge weights of hierarchical semantic graphs, our method can continuously refine the generated motion, which may have a far-reaching impact on the community. Code and pre-training weights are available at https://github.com/jpthu17/GraphMotion.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

A Spreadsheet-like Construct for Streamlining and Reusing Mashups

It is challenging to provide end users an easy-to-use problem-solving tool to combine data from different sources and reuse the results. Inspired by spreadsheets, we argue that spreadsheet-like programming paradigm can help to reduce the complexity and to improve user experience in building mashups. In this paper, we propose a spreadsheet-like construct as the basis of this mashup building paradigm. The construct includes a data model, a “nested table ” view structure and a set of carefully chosen mashup operators. Data from a variety of sources is structured like a spreadsheet, and end-users are not necessarily aware of the underlining data flow. SpiderCharlotte, a tool to help end users to build situational applications for their daily uses, was developed to demonstrate the characteristics of this construct