Trade-offs between Shopping Bags Made of Non-degradable Plastics and Other Materials, Using Latent Class Analysis: The Case of Tianjin, China

white pollution, plastic bag ban, conjoint choice experiment, willingness to pay, latent class analysis, China, degradable plastics, cloth, paper, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q1,

Knuthian Drawings of Series-Parallel Flowcharts

Inspired by a classic paper by Knuth, we revisit the problem of drawing flowcharts of loop-free algorithms, that is, degree-three series-parallel digraphs. Our drawing algorithms show that it is possible to produce Knuthian drawings of degree-three series-parallel digraphs with good aspect ratios and small numbers of edge bends.Comment: Full versio

Simultaneous Embeddings with Few Bends and Crossings

A simultaneous embedding with fixed edges (SEFE) of two planar graphs $R$ and $B$ is a pair of plane drawings of $R$ and $B$ that coincide when restricted to the common vertices and edges of $R$ and $B$. We show that whenever $R$ and $B$ admit a SEFE, they also admit a SEFE in which every edge is a polygonal curve with few bends and every pair of edges has few crossings. Specifically: (1) if $R$ and $B$ are trees then one bend per edge and four crossings per edge pair suffice (and one bend per edge is sometimes necessary), (2) if $R$ is a planar graph and $B$ is a tree then six bends per edge and eight crossings per edge pair suffice, and (3) if $R$ and $B$ are planar graphs then six bends per edge and sixteen crossings per edge pair suffice. Our results improve on a paper by Grilli et al. (GD'14), which proves that nine bends per edge suffice, and on a paper by Chan et al. (GD'14), which proves that twenty-four crossings per edge pair suffice.Comment: Full version of the paper "Simultaneous Embeddings with Few Bends and Crossings" accepted at GD '1

Achieving the Way for Automated Segmentation of Nuclei in Cancer Tissue Images through Morphology-Based Approach: a Quantitative Evaluation

In this paper we address the problem of nuclear segmentation in cancer tissue images, that is critical for specific protein activity quantification and for cancer diagnosis and therapy. We present a fully automated morphology-based technique able to perform accurate nuclear segmentations in images with heterogeneous staining and multiple tissue layers and we compare it with an alternate semi-automated method based on a well established segmentation approach, namely active contours. We discuss active contours’ limitations in the segmentation of immunohistochemical images and we demonstrate and motivate through extensive experiments the better accuracy of our fully automated approach compared to various active contours implementations

Molecular pathogenesis and targeted therapy of sporadic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors

Over the past few years, knowledge regarding the molecular pathology of sporadic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) has increased substantially, and a number of targeted agents have been tested in clinical trials in this tumor type. For some of these agents there is a strong biological rationale. Among them, the mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor Everolimus and the antiangiogenic agent Sunitinib have both been approved for the treatment of PNETs. However, there is lack of knowledge regarding biomarkers able to predict their efficacy, and mechanisms of resistance. Other angiogenesis inhibitors, such as Pazopanib, inhibitors of Src, Hedgehog or of PI3K might all be useful in association or sequence with approved agents. On the other hand, the clinical significance, and potential for treatment of the most common mutations occurring in sporadic PNETs, in the MEN-1 gene and in ATRX and DAXX, remains uncertain. The present paper reviews the main molecular changes occurring in PNETs and how they might be linked with treatment options

Hierarchical Partial Planarity

In this paper we consider graphs whose edges are associated with a degree of {\em importance}, which may depend on the type of connections they represent or on how recently they appeared in the scene, in a streaming setting. The goal is to construct layouts of these graphs in which the readability of an edge is proportional to its importance, that is, more important edges have fewer crossings. We formalize this problem and study the case in which there exist three different degrees of importance. We give a polynomial-time testing algorithm when the graph induced by the two most important sets of edges is biconnected. We also discuss interesting relationships with other constrained-planarity problems.Comment: Conference version appeared in WG201

Probing nuclear symmetry energy with the sub-threshold pion production

Within the framework of semiclassical Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck (BUU) transport model, we investigated the effects of symmetry energy on the sub-threshold pion using the isospin MDI interaction with the stiff and soft symmetry energies in the central collision of $^{48}$Ca + $^{48}$Ca at the incident beam energies of 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300 MeV/nucleon, respectively. We find that the ratio of $\pi^{-}/\pi^{+}$ of sub-threshold charged pion production is greatly sensitive to the symmetry energy, particularly around 100 MeV/nucleon energies. Large sensitivity of sub-threshold charged pion production to nuclear symmetry energy may reduce uncertainties of probing nuclear symmetry energy via heavy-ion collision.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, typo corrections, submitted to Chinese Physics Letter