Economic Policy Uncertainty and Corporate Mergers and Acquisitions

In recent years, the frequent adjustment of the government’s economic policies and the uncertainty of foreign economic situations have made the degree of uncertainty of China’s economic policies rise continuously. The increasing degree of policy uncertainty will inevitably affect the investment and financing decisions of micro enterprises. Then, how does economic policy uncertainty (EPU) affect mergers and acquisitions (M&A) behavior? What’s the mechanism? Based on the above questions, this paper uses the data of non-financial listed companies in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2008 to 2018 as a sample to explore the relationship between EPU and M&A. The study shows that rising EPU will promote corporate M&A behavior, and this effect is more significant in slow-growth companies. The relationship between EPU and M&A is affected by corporate governance, stock price volatility and financing constraints. Specifically, the company’s M&A size is more sensitive to EPU with higher level of corporate governance, higher level of stock price volatility, and lesser financing constraints. Further research shows that the rise of EPU will significantly promote the improvement of M&A performance in the short-term, but this effect does not exist in the long-term. Various robustness checks do not change the empirical results of this paper

Lifelong Embedding Learning and Transfer for Growing Knowledge Graphs

Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.Comment: Accepted in the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023

Animal resource exploitation in the northern Guanzhong region during the mid-to-late Holocene: A zooarchaeological case study of the Xitou site

Zooarchaeological approach has been effective in providing insights into human subsistence practices, which laid essential economic foundation for social, cultural, and political developments in the past. The Guanzhong region in northern China played a crucial role in the origins and evolution of ancient Chinese civilization. Previous research on subsistence economies of ancient societies in the Guanzhong region, human exploitation of animal resources in particular, has largely focused on the late Neolithic period or the Bronze Age. Insufficient work has been done for historical periods post-dating the end of the first millennium BCE. There is also a dearth of research on the long-term chronological changes. Here, we present a preliminary analysis of animal remains from the Nantou Locale of the Xitou site, a large settlement located in the northern Guanzhong region. Results show that pigs played a dominant role in the site’s animal economy during the Neolithic Yangshao and Longshan periods (ca. 5000–2000 BCE). The growing importance of cattle and caprines was documented for the Bronze Age Western Zhou period (ca. 11th-8th centuries BCE). In the Han-Tang periods (ca. second century BCE-tenth century CE), pigs regained their significance in local subsistence practices. Differences in the strategies for animal resource exploitation were possibly associated with changing social and environmental factors. Alongside other relevant archaeological evidence, our zooarchaeological data demonstrate the contribution of diversified animal use strategies to sustained development of subsistence economy in the northern Guanzhong region across millennia. The examination of long-term human-animal interactions in the Guanzhong region allows for a better understanding of changing economic, social, and political landscapes in ancient China

Structure and Properties of Gallic Acid Epoxy Modified Gelatin

In this study, gallic acid (GA) was used to synthesize the gallic acid epoxy (GAE) for the chemical modification of gelatin. The chemical structure, hydration properties, thermal stability, and mechanical properties of GAE modified gelatin (GAEG) were evaluated. It was found that the epoxy group of GAE reacted with the primary amine group of gelatin to form C-N bond and covalent cross-linking. The swelling ratio of GAEG in water was increased by about 5 times. With the cross-linking degree increased from 41.13% to 72.68%, the swelling ratio decreased from 7831% to 6448%. While the gelatin dissolved completely in water within 24 h, the GAEG film remained intact for 7 days, and the disintegration rate decreased significantly with the increase of cross-linking degree. The water contact angle decreased from 88.01° to 59.87° after the modification, indicating increased hydrophilicity. The reduction of dehydration rate and the increase in total dehydration ratio suggested that the water retention capacity has been improved after the modification. The denaturation temperature increased from 55.0 ℃ to 61.7 ℃, and the thermal decomposition temperature increased from 240 ℃ to 274 ℃, with a relative decrease in thermal weight loss. The modification treatment led to a slight decrease in mechanical properties. This study demonstrated that GAE improved the hydration properties and thermal stability of gelatin, contributed to the application of gelatin as water retaining agent and stabilizer in food industry

Point-Bind & Point-LLM: Aligning Point Cloud with Multi-modality for 3D Understanding, Generation, and Instruction Following

We introduce Point-Bind, a 3D multi-modality model aligning point clouds with 2D image, language, audio, and video. Guided by ImageBind, we construct a joint embedding space between 3D and multi-modalities, enabling many promising applications, e.g., any-to-3D generation, 3D embedding arithmetic, and 3D open-world understanding. On top of this, we further present Point-LLM, the first 3D large language model (LLM) following 3D multi-modal instructions. By parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, Point-LLM injects the semantics of Point-Bind into pre-trained LLMs, e.g., LLaMA, which requires no 3D instruction data, but exhibits superior 3D and multi-modal question-answering capacity. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for extending 3D point clouds to multi-modality applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LLM.Comment: Work in progress. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LL

Eco-physiological response mechanism of Tamarix chinensis to soil water changes in coastal wetlands of the Yellow River Delta

Elucidating the effect of soil moisture on the adaptation of dominant plants in coastal wetlands is important for predicting the evolution of vegetation in the region. In this paper, Tamarix chinensis, a dominant species in the Yellow River Delta, was used as the object to study the changes of its growth and physiological parameters with increasing soil salinity under different moisture conditions (normal watering, persistent drought and persistent waterlogging). Different salt stress (2‰, 5‰, 8‰, 12‰, 16‰, and 20‰) using pot experiments was also used to reveal the mechanism of soil moisture on its salt tolerance. The results showed that the relative growth rate between 5‰-8‰ soil salinity was the largest, and growth was significantly inhibited above 20‰. Among different moisture conditions, the difference in relative growth rate under normal watering and persistent drought were nonsignificant, while both were significantly lower than those under persistent waterlogging. With increasing soil salinity, relative water content and total chlorophyll content significantly decreased, and cell membrane permeability (malondialdehyde), sodium ion, osmoregulatory substances (proline, soluble protein), and protective enzyme activity (SOD) significantly increased, while changes in non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) were not significant. Compared with normal watering and persistent waterlogging, persistent drought had the lowest leaf relative water content, total chlorophyll content, and sodium ions, and the highest cell membrane permeability, osmoregulatory substances and protective enzyme activity. With increasing treatment time, the relative leaf water content and total chlorophyll content significantly decreased, and cell membrane permeability, osmoregulatory substances and protective enzyme activity increased more significantly than normal watering and persistent waterlogging. NSC increased under normal watering and persistent waterlogging, while significantly decreased under persistent drought. Correlation analysis showed that the relationships between sodium ions, total chlorophyll content and malondialdehyde were various under different moisture conditions. Under persistent drough, malondialdehyde was significantly positively correlated with relative conductivity, superoxide dismutase, proline, soluble protein and soluble sugar. Total chlorophyll content was the key indicator reflecting the salt and waterlogging tolerance of T. chinensis under normal watering and persistent waterlogging, while cell membrane damage was under persistent drought. In summary, T. chinensis has strong salt and waterlogging tolerance, but persistent drought with salt stress can have serious impacts on its growth and survival

Association of the gut microbiome with fecal short-chain fatty acids, lipopolysaccharides, and obesity in young Chinese college students

IntroductionObesity is a growing health problem among young people worldwide and is associated with gut conditions. This study aimed to explore the relationship between obesity, intestinal microbiota, fecal short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), and lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in young college students.Methods16S rRNA gene sequences, SCFA and LPS contents, and obesity status were analyzed in 68 young college students (20-25 years old).ResultsThere were significant differences in intestinal microbial beta diversity among students with different body mass index (BMI). The abundance and proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroides had no significant correlation with BMI. The contents of butyric acid and valeric acid in the feces of obese students were low, and the content of SCFAs had no significant correlation with BMI and LPS. The content of LPS in the feces of obese people was significantly higher than that in healthy people, and there was a significant positive correlation between LPS content and BMI.ConclusionIn general, there was a correlation between intestinal microbiota, SCFA, LPS, and BMI in young college students. Our results may enrich the understanding of the relationship between intestinal conditions and obesity and contribute to the study of obesity in young college student