Aspiration and Integration Infrastructure: a Study on Chinese Students' Integration in Finland and Germany

European countries such as Germany and Finland are increasingly interested in attracting and retaining international tertiary students to supply their workforces with highly skilled labor. However, the retention rate among international tertiary graduates is relatively low despite the favourable policy incentives. Drawing on field research on mainland Chinese tertiary-level students in Finland and Germany, this article unravels this “mystery” by pinpointing a trend towards a "weak integration trap" among Chinese students. Weak integration trap refers to the situation in which the students can ensure their survival, but lack the capability to pursue their aspirations, to gain access to valuable resources in the host society, or to become full members of that society. They may in consequence fail to complete their studies and remain in the host society after graduation as they desired, and may also lack a sense of belonging, or experience low levels of well-being. This weak integration trap may be caused by a lack of aspiration for further integration, or insufficient, unevenly distributed and conflictual integration infrastructure. This article conceptualizes and examines the crucial nexus between integration aspiration and integration infrastructure that leads to the weak integration trap, and outlines implications for future research

Academic Integration of Mainland Chinese Students in Germany

Li H. Academic Integration of Mainland Chinese Students in Germany. SOCIAL INCLUSION. 2017;5(1):80-92.This article presents an analysis of the academic integration experiences of mainland Chinese tertiary-level students in Germany. Using Tinto's model, the article explores the challenges that Chinese students face during their academic integration, the strategies they employ, and the relationship between academic and social integration. The data were collected in spring 2016 by interviewing 26 mainland Chinese students studying either in German universities or universities of applied sciences. Four major challenges were identified and analyzed: language barrier, knowledge gap, pedagogical differences, and cultural differences. An important outcome of the study presented is that social integration serves as a facilitator for enhancing academic integration, but is not a prerequisite for academic success. Group learning with peers was found to enhance learning outcomes. Overall, Chinese students have exploited their own advantages in academic integration by exploring feasible strategies and benefiting from their past learning experiences. It is suggested that academic integration as a long and challenging process for international students should be acknowledged by the German HEIs, and that more institutional support and guidance are needed

Evaluation einer geeigneten kalkulierten antibiotischen Therapie bei Patienten mit Leberzirrhose und spontan bakterieller Peritonitis

Einleitung Die SBP ist eine schwere Komplikation bei Patienten mit Leberzirrhose. Die 30-Tages-Mortalität liegt bei 20-40%. Es gibt Hinweise, dass sich zunehmend Resistenzen gegen häufig eingesetzte Antibiotika ausgebildet haben. Ziele Ziel war es deshalb, 17 relevante Antibiotika bzgl. einer geeigneten kalkulierten Therapie zu untersuchen. Methodik 184 Patienten mit Leberzirrhose und Keimnachweis im Aszites (Jahre 2007-2017) wurden aus der Datenbank der Mikrobiologie des MvP Instituts (LMU) identifiziert. Insgesamt 228 Keime wurden hinsichtlich 17 Antibiotika wie folgt an Hand der vorliegenden Resistenztestungen klassifiziert: empfindlich, resistent oder intrinsisch resistent. Die laborchemischen und klinischen Ergebnisse wurden mit logistischer oder linearer Regression und Fischer-Test analysiert. Ergebnis Unter den Monotherapien wies Piperacillin/Tazobactam die höchste antibiotische Empfindlichkeit auf (73,4%). Bei den Kombinationstherapien zeigten Meropenem/Daptomycin und Meropenem/Linezolid die höchsten antimikrobiellen Sensitivitäten (96.6% vs. 95.8%). War ein Keim auf die kalkuliert begonnene antibiotische Therapie in der später vorliegenden Testung empfindlich, so korrelierte dies mit einer deutlich niedrigeren stationären Mortalität (18.9% vs. 37.5%, p=0.008), kürzeren intensivmedizinischen Behandlung (2±4.5 vs. 8±15 Tage, p<0.001), sowie Dauer der invasiven Beatmung (1.1±3.5 vs 5.6±14.9 Tage, p=0.005). Besonders interessant ist dabei, dass die höchste Mortalität in der Gruppe der Patienten beobachtet wurde die gleichzeitg ein ACLF (acute on chronic liver failure) Grad 3 und eine Resistenz auf die initiale kalkulierte Therapie aufwiesen (54.5% vs. 74.1% [wirksame vs. unwirksame Initialtherapie]); ohne ACLF war die stationäre Mortalität dagegen 0%. Schlussfolgerung Für Patienten mit Leberzirrhose, SBP und ACLF Grad 3 scheint eine Kombination aus Meropenem/Linezolid als kalkulierte antimikrobielle Therapie sinnvoll, da hierdurch möglicherweise die Mortalität gesenkt werden kann. Nach Vorliegen des Antibiogramms sollte die empirische Therapie durch eine gezielte Therapie mit engerem Wirkspektrum ersetzt werden

Towards Good Practices in Evaluating Transfer Adversarial Attacks

Transfer adversarial attacks raise critical security concerns in real-world, black-box scenarios. However, the actual progress of this field is difficult to assess due to two common limitations in existing evaluations. First, different methods are often not systematically and fairly evaluated in a one-to-one comparison. Second, only transferability is evaluated but another key attack property, stealthiness, is largely overlooked. In this work, we design good practices to address these limitations, and we present the first comprehensive evaluation of transfer attacks, covering 23 representative attacks against 9 defenses on ImageNet. In particular, we propose to categorize existing attacks into five categories, which enables our systematic category-wise analyses. These analyses lead to new findings that even challenge existing knowledge and also help determine the optimal attack hyperparameters for our attack-wise comprehensive evaluation. We also pay particular attention to stealthiness, by adopting diverse imperceptibility metrics and looking into new, finer-grained characteristics. Overall, our new insights into transferability and stealthiness lead to actionable good practices for future evaluations.Comment: An extended version can be found at arXiv:2310.11850. Code and a list of categorized attacks are available at https://github.com/ZhengyuZhao/TransferAttackEva

Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement Using the Normalized Convolution and Noise Removing

Retinal fundus image plays an important role in the diagnosis of retinal related diseases. The detailed information of the retinal fundus image such as small vessels, microaneurysms, and exudates may be in low contrast, and retinal image enhancement usually gives help to analyze diseases related to retinal fundus image. Current image enhancement methods may lead to artificial boundaries, abrupt changes in color levels, and the loss of image detail. In order to avoid these side effects, a new retinal fundus image enhancement method is proposed. First, the original retinal fundus image was processed by the normalized convolution algorithm with a domain transform to obtain an image with the basic information of the background. Then, the image with the basic information of the background was fused with the original retinal fundus image to obtain an enhanced fundus image. Lastly, the fused image was denoised by a two-stage denoising method including the fourth order PDEs and the relaxed median filter. The retinal image databases, including the DRIVE database, the STARE database, and the DIARETDB1 database, were used to evaluate image enhancement effects. The results show that the method can enhance the retinal fundus image prominently. And, different from some other fundus image enhancement methods, the proposed method can directly enhance color images

Revisiting Transferable Adversarial Image Examples: Attack Categorization, Evaluation Guidelines, and New Insights

Transferable adversarial examples raise critical security concerns in real-world, black-box attack scenarios. However, in this work, we identify two main problems in common evaluation practices: (1) For attack transferability, lack of systematic, one-to-one attack comparison and fair hyperparameter settings. (2) For attack stealthiness, simply no comparisons. To address these problems, we establish new evaluation guidelines by (1) proposing a novel attack categorization strategy and conducting systematic and fair intra-category analyses on transferability, and (2) considering diverse imperceptibility metrics and finer-grained stealthiness characteristics from the perspective of attack traceback. To this end, we provide the first large-scale evaluation of transferable adversarial examples on ImageNet, involving 23 representative attacks against 9 representative defenses. Our evaluation leads to a number of new insights, including consensus-challenging ones: (1) Under a fair attack hyperparameter setting, one early attack method, DI, actually outperforms all the follow-up methods. (2) A state-of-the-art defense, DiffPure, actually gives a false sense of (white-box) security since it is indeed largely bypassed by our (black-box) transferable attacks. (3) Even when all attacks are bounded by the same $L_p$ norm, they lead to dramatically different stealthiness performance, which negatively correlates with their transferability performance. Overall, our work demonstrates that existing problematic evaluations have indeed caused misleading conclusions and missing points, and as a result, hindered the assessment of the actual progress in this field.Comment: Code is available at https://github.com/ZhengyuZhao/TransferAttackEva

Tackling an accurate description of molecular reactivity with double-hybrid density functionals

In this communication, we assess a panel of 18 double-hybrid (DH) density functionals for the modeling of the thermochemistry and kinetics properties of an extended dataset of 449 organic chemistry reactions belonging to the BH9 database. We show that most of DHs provide a statistically robust performance to model barrier height and reaction energies in reaching the `chemical accuracy'. In particular, we show that nonempirical DHs like PBE0-DH and PBE-QIDH, or minimally parameterized alternatives like $\omega$B2PLYP and B2K-PLYP succeed to model accurately both properties in a balanced fashion. We demonstrate however that parameterized approaches like $\omega$B97X-2 or DSD-like DHs are more biased to only one of both properties.E.B. thanks ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and CGI (Commissariat à l’Investissement d’Avenir) for their financial support of this work through Labex SEAM (Science and Engineering for Advanced Materials and devices) ANR-10-LABX-096 and ANR-18-IDEX-0001. The authors acknowledge the GENCI-CINES for HPC resources (Projects A0100810359) just like the local P3MB HPC platform of Université de Paris (ANR-18-IDEX-0001). H.L. acknowledges the financial support from the China Scholarship Council (Grant 201908310062). A.J.P.J. and J.C.S.G. thank the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities of Spain (PID2019-106114GB-I00)