The influence of cultural exchange on international trade: an empirical test of Confucius Institutes based on China and the ‘Belt and Road’ areas

With the implementation of the Belt and Road initiative, the development of trade governance between China and countries along the line has expanded. Firstly, this paper analyzes the impact of cultural exchanges through Confucius Institutes on regional trade cooperation from three dimensions: improving cultural identity, reducing trade costs and sharing information. Secondly, we utilise data trade data from the 64 countries along the line from 2004 to 2015 to examine the effects of Confucius Institutes in regional trade cooperation with China. Overall, we found that Confucius Institutes have significantly promoted the trade growth of China and those countries. Compared to exports, Confucius Institutes promote greater growth imports to the Belt and Road countries from China. Compared to countries in the Road, Confucius Institutes better promoted trade growth between China and countries in the Belt. This empirical conclusion stands under various robustness tests. Forth, after the 12th five-yearplan, the promoting effects of the Confucius Institute has been strengthening. Fifth, the smaller the cultural distance, the stronger the promoting effects of the Confucius Institute on the trade in BRI countries. However, the effect of language similarity is not significant. This study indicates that the Chinese government should pay more attention to the economic effects of cultural factors, such as the Confucius Institute, in policy design

Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer the model, and most effective prompts have been handcrafted by humans. Inspired by classical program synthesis and the human approach to prompt engineering, we propose Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) for automatic instruction generation and selection. In our method, we treat the instruction as the "program," optimized by searching over a pool of instruction candidates proposed by an LLM in order to maximize a chosen score function. To evaluate the quality of the selected instruction, we evaluate the zero-shot performance of another LLM following the selected instruction. Experiments on 24 NLP tasks show that our automatically generated instructions outperform the prior LLM baseline by a large margin and achieve better or comparable performance to the instructions generated by human annotators on 19/24 tasks. We conduct extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses to explore the performance of APE. We show that APE-engineered prompts can be applied to steer models toward truthfulness and/or informativeness, as well as to improve few-shot learning performance by simply prepending them to standard in-context learning prompts. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer

Dysregulation in IFN-γ signaling and response: the barricade to tumor immunotherapy

Interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) has been identified as a crucial factor in determining the responsiveness to immunotherapy. Produced primarily by natural killer (NK) and T cells, IFN-γ promotes activation, maturation, proliferation, cytokine expression, and effector function in immune cells, while simultaneously inducing antigen presentation, growth arrest, and apoptosis in tumor cells. However, tumor cells can hijack the IFN-γ signaling pathway to mount IFN-γ resistance: rather than increasing antigenicity and succumbing to death, tumor cells acquire stemness characteristics and express immunosuppressive molecules to defend against antitumor immunity. In this review, we summarize the potential mechanisms of IFN-γ resistance occurring at two critical stages: disrupted signal transduction along the IFNG/IFNGR/JAK/STAT pathway, or preferential expression of specific interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs). Elucidating the molecular mechanisms through which tumor cells develop IFN-γ resistance help identify promising therapeutic targets to improve immunotherapy, with broad application value in conjugation with targeted, antibody or cellular therapies

Exploring Gender Differences through the Lens of Spatiotemporal Behavior Patterns in a Cultural Market: A Case Study of Panjiayuan Market in Beijing, China

Markets are more than commercial places with high mobility, greatly contributing to urban vitality, social inclusion, and even local identity, which have all been studied extensively. However, as one of the market types, the cultural market contains a highly gendered feature in our contemporary cities that has rarely been explored. Therefore, this article presents a survey that uses spatiotemporal behavior mapping (STBM) to collect gender-related behavior patterns across four sites, five activity layers, four age groups, and three time dimensions in Beijing Panjiayuan cultural market, China. Our results show that all sites are generally dominated by males. Although mobility is higher on weekends than weekdays, the number of women decreases and the number of men increases at the weekend, resulting in a higher gender ratio. The gender ratio in the 19–36 and 54+ year groups synchronized decline with mobility, whereas other age groups did not appear to be significantly affected. More specifically, in the buying and common activities layers, the ratio of men to women at the two sites with higher mobility increased, and vice versa. It is the first study to present the effect of spatial mobility on gender differences in a cultural market by using objective spatiotemporal data. Our findings provide a scientific basis for the optimization and design practice of culture-related spaces to create a more equal and inclusive urban environment

Study of the Effect of Drying on the Pore Structure and Rate of Oxygen Consumption and Heat Release of Immersed Lignite

To reveal the influence mechanism of the drying process of immersed coal on the spontaneous combustion characteristics, we measured the pore structure of coal with low-field nuclear magnetic resonance and conducted the temperature-programmed spontaneous combustion experiment. The results showed that the pore volume content of the pores with pore sizes of less than 100 nm was significantly reduced. The diameter range of 100–1000 nm was gradually generated after 8 h of coal drying, and the proportion of large pores and cracks larger than 1000 nm increased significantly during the drying process of the immersed coal. The oxygen consumption rate and the heat release rate were significantly affected by the degree of dryness and the temperature of coal samples in the temperature-programmed process. The turning point temperature was 140°C; below the turning point temperature, the raw coal had the fastest oxygen consumption and maximum heat release. When the coal temperature was higher than 140°C, the oxygen consumption rate and the heat release rate of the coal sample that was dried for 24 h were higher than those for the raw coal, followed by the samples that were dried for 8 h and dried for 48 h. The main reason is that the water content of the coal sample decreases to 11.4% and the porosity increases to 16.5% after drying for 24 h, while the proportion of pores or cracks larger than 1000 nm increases significantly to 87.17%, the largest increase range and the pore connectivity will reach the maximum

Cash flow statements : a study on Singapore incorporated companies listed on the Singapore stock exchange

SAS 7, Statement of Changes in Financial Position, which became effective for financial statements covering periods beginning on or after 1 January 1979, requires a statement summarizing the resources made available to finance the activities of an enterprise and the uses to which such resources have been put. However, SAS 7 does not specify the form of presentation nor the concept of funds of such a statement, leaving the entity to adopt the form of presentation which it sees as the most suitable.ACCOUNTANC

Flow shop scheduling of hybrid make-to-stock and make-to-order in a distributed precast concrete production system

Prefabrication is not only economically optimal but also environmentally sustainable; hence, it is the future of construction. Furthermore, mass customization is the future of prefabrication. In the mass customization era, the production paradigm in precast concrete (PC) factories will inevitably shift toward a blend of make-to-order (MTO) and make-to-stock (MTS) from the current MTO dominant model. Because PC factories have more motivation to fulfill MTO orders to secure profit, a hierarchical scheduling mechanism of MTO first and MTS second seems reasonable. Meanwhile, an emerging trend of expanding factories overseas is observed in the PC industry, especially in land-scarce countries like Singapore. Given additional resources, the new multiple-factory production network leads to relatively relaxed MTO due dates, which makes the proposed hierarchical scheduling mechanism more sensible. However, finding an optimal production plan for hybrid MTO and MTS on multiple production lines is not easy. There is an assignment problem in addition to the scheduling problem. Both the assignment problem and the scheduling problem are in the class of combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). Given that the use of meta-heuristics for solving complex COPs is a rapidly growing research topic, this paper employs meta-heuristic methods to solve the two problems simultaneously. Comparisons between the genetic algorithm and the whale optimization algorithm are made. Through the computational evaluation of a test case, the performance and effectiveness of the proposed methods are verified.Published versio