Pleural Photodynamic Therapy and Surgery in Thoracic Cancer Patients with Pleural Spread

Pleural spread from non-small cell lung cancer is a difficult situation. The average survival in the situation is about 6–9 months. We investigate the current management of this challenging condition. Although, there is no much evidence found in the literature, we do see the pleural photodynamic therapy giving some promising light in the dark night. However, the patients still require complete neoadjuvant and adjuvant therapies, as well as radical tumor resection. Pleural PDT is one of the multi-modality treatments, which combined can achieve satisfactory oncological results. The long-term survival can be achieved in more than half the patients. However, the side effects of pleural PDT include skin hypersensitivity, trachea and esophageal perforation, and ARDS, which we should keep in mind

IT Investment: The Unexpected Effects on Entrepreneurial Spawning

Despite the growing interests in entrepreneurial spawning, whereby employees leave an incumbent to become entrepreneurs, there is a lack of studies examining the impact of firm strategies on the process. However, IS literature has documented various influences of IT on firms. This study attempts to bridge these two streams of research by investigating the impact of IT investment (as a form of firm strategy) on entrepreneurial spawning. Drawing upon the IT-agility theoretical lens, we propose that IT investment may impede firms’ entrepreneurial spawning. In addition, firms with higher IT investment are less adversely affected by spawns. We devise thorough empirical strategies to analyze Fortune 500 manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2006. Our study potentially contributes to the current research in entrepreneurship and business value of IT, and sheds novel insights on the retention of talents, exploitation of internal innovations and deterrence of potential competition

microRNA-33a-5p increases radiosensitivity by inhibiting glycolysis in melanoma.

Glycolysis was reported to have a positive correlation with radioresistance. Our previous study found that the miR-33a functioned as a tumor suppressor in malignant melanoma by targeting hypoxia-inducible factor1-alpha (HIF-1α), a gene known to promote glycolysis. However, the role of miR-33a-5p in radiosensitivity remains to be elucidated. We found that miR-33a-5p was downregulated in melanoma tissues and cells. Cell proliferation was downregulated after overexpression of miR-33a-5p in WM451 cells, accompanied by a decreased level of glycolysis. In contrast, cell proliferation was upregulated after inhibition of miR-33a-5p in WM35 cells, accompanied by increased glycolysis. Overexpression of miR-33a-5p enhanced the sensitivity of melanoma cells to X-radiation by MTT assay, while downregulation of miR-33a-5p had the opposite effects. Finally, in vivo experiments with xenografts in nude mice confirmed that high expression of miR-33a-5p in tumor cells increased radiosensitivity via inhibiting glycolysis. In conclusions, miR-33a-5p promotes radiosensitivity by negatively regulating glycolysis in melanoma

Music SketchNet: Controllable Music Generation via Factorized Representations of Pitch and Rhythm

Drawing an analogy with automatic image completion systems, we propose Music SketchNet, a neural network framework that allows users to specify partial musical ideas guiding automatic music generation. We focus on generating the missing measures in incomplete monophonic musical pieces, conditioned on surrounding context, and optionally guided by user-specified pitch and rhythm snippets. First, we introduce SketchVAE, a novel variational autoencoder that explicitly factorizes rhythm and pitch contour to form the basis of our proposed model. Then we introduce two discriminative architectures, SketchInpainter and SketchConnector, that in conjunction perform the guided music completion, filling in representations for the missing measures conditioned on surrounding context and user-specified snippets. We evaluate SketchNet on a standard dataset of Irish folk music and compare with models from recent works. When used for music completion, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art both in terms of objective metrics and subjective listening tests. Finally, we demonstrate that our model can successfully incorporate user-specified snippets during the generation process.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, Proceedings of the 21st International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 202

ANALYSIS AND COUNTERMEASURE OF VOCS SOURCE IN AUTOMOBILE PRODUCTION PROCESS IN CHINA

This article describes the hazards and causes of VOCs as well as the state of VOCs. It is the main culprit in the production of VOCs, which is the main culprit of the production of VOCs source materials in automobile, and analyzes the production of VOCs in the raw material production process from the source. Finally, proposed reduction measures from three aspects of the raw materials, production, management