Exploratory Research: The Effects of Electronic Books on College Students

In recent years, the e-book has become more and more popular among college students, and it is much easier to be installed and set up in electronic equipment, such as laptop, Kindle, or IPad. A random sample (N=80) of undergraduate (n=25) and graduate (n=55) students not only use the e-book to read in class and library, but also at public places and at home. Of the respondents, 46% have a part-time job, 32% have a full-time job, and 22% are not employed. Fifty-five percent of the sample was male and 45% were female. The results of the survey questionnaire indicate that 55% sample claimed to spend hours on learning every week by using electronic tools, especially reading articles. Twenty-eight percent of the participants would take their electronic equipment to class instead of traditional textbooks; and 17% of them own at least two pieces of electronic equipment. Although most students rely on traditional paper print books, the population of college students applying e-book in their study life is increasing rapidly because many more “smart” and inexpensive electronic equipment (hardware) are displayed in markets in which an e-book can be installed. As everyone knows, textbooks in the United States are very expensive to be afforded by all college students. Consequently, the e-book offers a far less expensive alternative than paper print books

UniNeXt: Exploring A Unified Architecture for Vision Recognition

Vision Transformers have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. Most recent works have focused on elaborating the spatial token mixer for performance gains. However, we observe that a well-designed general architecture can significantly improve the performance of the entire backbone, regardless of which spatial token mixer is equipped. In this paper, we propose UniNeXt, an improved general architecture for the vision backbone. To verify its effectiveness, we instantiate the spatial token mixer with various typical and modern designs, including both convolution and attention modules. Compared with the architecture in which they are first proposed, our UniNeXt architecture can steadily boost the performance of all the spatial token mixers, and narrows the performance gap among them. Surprisingly, our UniNeXt equipped with naive local window attention even outperforms the previous state-of-the-art. Interestingly, the ranking of these spatial token mixers also changes under our UniNeXt, suggesting that an excellent spatial token mixer may be stifled due to a suboptimal general architecture, which further shows the importance of the study on the general architecture of vision backbone. All models and codes will be publicly available

RegionBLIP: A Unified Multi-modal Pre-training Framework for Holistic and Regional Comprehension

In this work, we investigate extending the comprehension of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to regional objects. To this end, we propose to extract features corresponding to regional objects as soft prompts for LLM, which provides a straightforward and scalable approach and eliminates the need for LLM fine-tuning. To effectively extract regional features from regular image features and irregular point cloud features, we present a novel and unified position-assisted feature extraction module. Furthermore, training an MLLM from scratch is highly time-consuming. Thus, we propose incrementally extending existing pre-trained MLLMs to comprehend more modalities and the regional objects of those modalities. Specifically, we freeze the Q-Former from BLIP-2, an impressive MLLM, and optimize the modality-specific Lora parameters in Q-Former and LLM for each newly introduced modality. The freezing of the Q-Former eliminates the need for extensive pre-training on massive image-text data. The freezed Q-Former pre-trained from massive image-text data is also beneficial for the pre-training on image-region-text data. We name our framework RegionBLIP. We pre-train RegionBLIP on image-region-text, point-cloud-text, and point-cloud-region-text data. Experimental results verify that \Ours{} can preserve the image comprehension capability of BILP-2 and further gain a comprehension of the newly introduced point cloud modality and regional objects. The Data, Code, and Pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/mightyzau/RegionBLIP

The relationship between BSP mRNA expression and 25(OH)D/OPG in peripheral blood of newly diagnosed T2DM patients with different bone mass

Introduction: The objective of the study was to detect the levels of osteoprotegerin (OPG) and 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], as well as the expression of bone sialoprotein (BSP) mRNA, in the peripheral blood of patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) under different bone mass conditions, and to explore its role and significance in the development process of T2DM combined with osteoporosis (OP). Material and methods: A total of 225 patients hospitalised in the Endocrinology Department and General Department from May 2017 to May 2018 were enrolled and categorised into five groups: the pure T2DM group (group A, 45 patients), the bone mass reduction group (group B, 45 patients), the T2DM + bone mass reduction group (group C, 45 patients), the OP group (group D, 45 patients), and the T2DM + OP group (group E, 45 patients); meanwhile, age-matched healthy subjects undergoing physical examination in our hospital were collected as the normal control group (group NC, 45 cases). Logistic regression analysis was used to analyse the influencing factors of bone mass in patients with T2DM. Results: Compared with group B, the expression levels of glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c), 25(OH)D, N-terminal propeptide of type I procollagen (PINP), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), fasting plasma insulin (FINS), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), and BSP mRNA were significantly increased while OPG and b-collagen degradation products (b-CTX) were significantly decreased in group A. Conclusion: The expression of BSP mRNA and the decrease of 25(OH)D and OPG in peripheral blood may participate in the development of diabetes and osteoporosis

Data Pruning via Moving-one-Sample-out

In this paper, we propose a novel data-pruning approach called moving-one-sample-out (MoSo), which aims to identify and remove the least informative samples from the training set. The core insight behind MoSo is to determine the importance of each sample by assessing its impact on the optimal empirical risk. This is achieved by measuring the extent to which the empirical risk changes when a particular sample is excluded from the training set. Instead of using the computationally expensive leaving-one-out-retraining procedure, we propose an efficient first-order approximator that only requires gradient information from different training stages. The key idea behind our approximation is that samples with gradients that are consistently aligned with the average gradient of the training set are more informative and should receive higher scores, which could be intuitively understood as follows: if the gradient from a specific sample is consistent with the average gradient vector, it implies that optimizing the network using the sample will yield a similar effect on all remaining samples. Experimental results demonstrate that MoSo effectively mitigates severe performance degradation at high pruning ratios and achieves satisfactory performance across various settings.Comment: Accepted by the Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023

Respiratory Fluoroquinolones Monotherapy vs. β-Lactams With or Without Macrolides for Hospitalized Community-Acquired Pneumonia Patients: A Meta-Analysis

Background: The choice of empirical antibiotic treatment for patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) who are admitted to non-intensive care unit (ICU) hospital wards is complicated by the limited availability of evidence. We systematically reviewed the efficacy and safety of strategies of empirical treatment with respiratory fluoroquinolone monotherapy and β-lactam with or without macrolide for non-ICU hospitalized CAP patients.Methods: We searched databases including PubMed, the Cochrane Library (Issue11, 2018), EMbase, China National Knowledge Internet (CNKI), WanFang Data, VIP, and China Biology Medicine disc (CBMdisc) to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving the comparison of respiratory fluoroquinolone monotherapy and β-lactam with or without macrolide for the non-ICU hospitalized patients with CAP up to November 2018. Two reviewers independently screened literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, extracted data, and assessed the risk of bias of the included studies. A meta-analysis was performed with the outcomes.Results: A total of 22 studies involving 6,235 patients were included. The results of the meta-analysis showed a non-significant trend toward an advantage to the respiratory fluoroquinolone in overall mortality (RR 0.82, 95% CI 0.65–1.02). No significant difference was found between the two strategies in clinical success (the intention-to-treat population: RR 1.03, 95% CI 0.99–1.08; the clinically evaluable population: RR 1.03, 95% CI 0.999–1.055; the population in which it was unclear whether intention-to-treat or per-protocol analysis was used: RR 1.04, 95% CI 0.99–1.09), microbiological treatment success (RR 1.04, 95% CI 0.997–1.092), and length of stay (SMD −0.06, 95% CI −0.16 to 0.04). The advantage of respiratory fluoroquinolone was statistically significant on the drug-related adverse events (RR 0.87, 95% CI 0.77–0.97).Conclusions: Current evidence shows that fluoroquinolone monotherapy has similar efficacy and favorable safety compared with β-lactam with or without macrolide for non-ICU hospitalized CAP patients. Since the limitation of region, quantity and quality of included studies, more RCTs with large scale and high quality are needed to verify the above conclusion

South College District Redevelopment Plan, Bryan, TX

The site, South College Corridor District, is located between the boarder of the city of Bryan and College Station where Texas A&M University is placed. South College Corridor has been served as a major throughfare to connect Texas A&M University and Downtown Bryan. In 1910, the City built a trolley system along South College Avenue.Along with the growth of Texas A&M University and its expansion toward Texas Avenue, TX6, and University Avenue, South College Avenue has lost much of its glory as a destination point. The district has been mainly developed for single family housing units, mobile homes, and few restaurants and bars. However, recent private development projects with mixed-use buildings and apartment complexes nearby will change the topography of this area. To provide a big picture and guide future development in this area, students were created redevelopment plans for several parts of the whole community.Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities, Yunmi Par

Prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in healthy Chinese population: A system review and meta-analysis.

OBJECTIVE:To comprehensively determine the prevalence of MRSA in healthy Chinese population, the influencing factors of MRSA colonization and its antibiotic resistance. METHODS:Articles that studied prevalence or influencing factors of MRSA carriage in healthy Chinese population were retrieved from PubMed, Ovid database, three Chinese electronic databases. The pooled prevalence of MRSA, its antibiotic resistance and influencing factors were analyzed by STATA12.0. RESULTS:37 studies were included. The pooled prevalence of MRSA was 21.2% (95% CI: 18.5%-23.9%), and the prevalence of S.aureus was 15% (95% CI: 10%-19%), with a significant heterogeneity (MRSA: I2 = 97.6%, P<0.001; S.aureus: I2 = 98.4%, P < 0.001). In subgroup analysis, the pooled prevalence of MRSA was 28% (95%CI: 10%-51%) for Livestock-related workers, 18% (95%CI: 11%-26%) for children, 20% (95%CI: 12%-29%) for healthcare workers, 7% (95%CI: 3%-13%) for community residents. The prevalence of MRSA in studies with oxacillin disk diffusion method (28%, 95%CI: 21%-35%) seemed higher than that with the mecA gene method(12%, 95%CI: 7%-19%). MRSA in studies conducted in Taiwan was more common than in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Similar results were found in meta-regression. Influencing factors for MRSA colonization were noted in seven eligible studies, they included younger age (OR: 3.54, 95% CI: 2.38-5.26; OR: 2.24, 95% CI: 1.73-2.9), attending day care centers (DCCs) (OR: 1.95, 95% CI: 1.4-2.72; OR: 1.53, 95% CI: 1.2-1.95), flu vaccination (OR:1.73, 95% CI: 1.28-2.35), using antibiotics within the past year (OR: 2.05, 95% CI:1.35-3.11), residing in northern Taiwan (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: 1.19-1.77), regular visits to health care facility (OR: 23.83, 95% CI: 2.72-209.01), household member working in health care facility (OR: 8.98, 95% CI:1.4-55.63), and contact with livestock (OR: 6.31, 95% CI: 3.44-11.57). Moreover, MRSA was found to be highly resistant to penicillin, ampicillin, erythromycin, and clindamycin, with a pooled resistance ratio of 100, 93, 88, and 75%, respectively. However, no resistance were noted to vancomycin. CONCLUSION:The pooled prevalence of MRSA was considerably high in health Chinese population. Additionally, these strains showed extreme resistance to penicillin, ampicillin, erythromycin and clindamycin. Public MRSA protection measures and the surveillance of MRSA should be strengthened to reduce the spread of MRSA among hospitals, communities, and livestock