Nef cones of fiber products and an application to the Cone Conjecture

We prove a decomposition theorem for the nef cone of smooth fiber products over curves, subject to the necessary condition that their N\'eron--Severi space decomposes. We apply it to describe the nef cone of so-called Schoen varieties, which are the higher dimensional analogues of the Calabi--Yau threefolds constructed by Schoen. Schoen varieties give rise to Calabi--Yau pairs, and in each dimension at least three, there exist Schoen varieties with non-polyhedral nef cone. We prove the Kawamata--Morrison--Totaro Cone Conjecture for the nef cones of Schoen varieties, which generalizes the work by Grassi and Morrison.Comment: v2. Accepted by Forum Math. Sigma. Besides minor changes, the assumption of Theorem 1.4 and the assumption in Subsection 4.2 were weakened, and Example 3.6 and Lemma 4.6 were newly adde

Membrane repair against H. pylori promotes cancer cell proliferation

Membrane repair is a universal response against physical and biological insults and enables cell survival. Helicobacter pylori is one of the most common human pathogens and the first formally recognized bacterial carcinogen associated with gastric cancer. However, little is known about host membrane repair in the context of H. pylori infection. Here we show that H. pylori disrupts the host plasma membrane and induces Ca2+ influx, which triggers the translocation of annexin family members A1 and A4 to the plasma membrane. This in turn activates a membrane repair response through the recruitment of lysosomal membranes and the induction of downstream signaling transduction pathways that promote cell survival and proliferation. Based on our data, we propose a new model by which H. pylori infection activates annexin A1 and A4 for membrane repair and how annexin A4 over-expression induced signaling promotes cell proliferation. Continual activation of this membrane repair response signaling cascade may cause abnormal cellular states leading to carcinogenesis. This study links H. pylori infection to membrane repair, providing insight into potential mechanisms of carcinogenesis resulting from membrane damage

Current Status of Antimicrobial Resistance in Taiwan

While some trends in antimicrobial resistance rates are universal, others appear to be unique for specific regions. In Taiwan, the strikingly high prevalence of resistance to macrolides and streptogramin in clinical isolates of gram-positive bacteria correlates with the widespread use of these agents in the medical and farming communities, respectively. The relatively low rate of enterococci that are resistant to glycopeptide does not parallel the high use of glycopeptides and extended-spectrum beta-lactams in hospitals. The evolving problem of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates is substantial, and some unique enzymes have been found. Recently, some gram-negative bacteria (e.g., Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii) that are resistant to all available antimicrobial agents including carbapenems have emerged

Negotiating The Maze: Confronting Dysphagia Together With My Stroke-Afflicted Family Member

Aim: To generate a descriptive theory grounded in the responses of family caregivers caring for their family stroke survivors with dysphagia during hospitalization. Design and Method: A qualitative study employing the grounded theory method was used. Fifteen family caregivers participated in comprehensive interviews. The interview data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Findings: ‘Negotiating the maze: Confronting dysphagia with my stroke-afflicted family member’ was the core category guiding the care process for dysphagia family members among caregivers. After surviving stroke, the caregivers felt ‘more confusion less rejoicing’ as the antecedent condition. The following three interaction categories were identified: (1) ‘being overwhelmed by nasogastric (NG) tube issues’; (2) ‘searching for the right helper and information’; and (3) ‘food culture conflicts with the formula diet administered through the NG tube’. Additionally, ‘Maintaining positivity’ described the consequence of this process. Conclusions: This study highlights the critical perspective of family members who care for dysphagia stroke survivors in the hospital. Participants were under tremendous pressure during the disease treatment process. However, all attempted to maintain a positive attitude and treasured the chance to accompany their family members. Clinical Relevance: These findings can assist health professionals in charting the effects of dysphagia and in understanding the problems and needs according to the subjective perspectives of family caregivers. They can also provide a necessary foundation for comprehensive care interventions for family caregivers of stroke survivors with dysphagia

Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts

Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng' 201

What do they eat? A survey of eat-out habit of university students in Taiwan

[EN] Main purpose of this research is trying to understand food likeliness of Taiwan college students, and probe whether these food are healthy. Three survey steps are taken as: step 1, market survey for what kind of foods are selling around the campuses; step 2, questionnaire investigation for students food preference; step 3, analyzing whether these favorite foods are healthy or not. The result shows: major consideration for students food selection are “taste” and “price”; 63% of students are taking food or snacks late at night at least once a week. Top three most favorite foods are: Taiwanese fries (yan su ji), carbon grilled chicken and fried fish steaks. Quantities of these foods are small, prices are low, and easy access from roadside food stands. Problems of them are high calories, easy to accumulate free radical in human body, plus insanitary food processing environment. They are harmful to student health. We suggest Taiwan government take it seriouslyShih, K.; Wang, M.; Shih, H.; Lee, S.; Lin, T. (2020). What do they eat? A survey of eat-out habit of university students in Taiwan. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 421-430. https://doi.org/10.4995/INN2019.2019.10562OCS42143

Smooth projective surfaces with infinitely many real forms

First of all, we confirm a few basic criteria of the finiteness of real forms of a given smooth complex projective variety, in terms of the Galois cohomology set of the discrete part of the automorphism group, the cone conjecture and the topological entropy. We then apply them to show that a smooth complex projective surface has at most finitely many mutually non-isomorphic real forms unless it is either rational or a non-minimal surface birational to either a K3 surface or an Enriques surface. We finally construct an Enriques surface whose blow-up at one point admits infinitely many mutually non-isomorphic real forms, which answers a question of Kondo to us and also shows the three exceptional cases really occur

Trends and characteristics of pethidine use in Taiwan: a six-year-long survey

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the trends and characteristics of pethidine prescriptions and users in Taiwan from 2002 to 2007. METHOD: All pethidine users (n = 3,301,136) in Taiwan from 2002 to 2007 were linked to National Health Insurance claims to identify pethidine prescriptions. We examined the trends in pethidine user prevalence and the proportion of pethidine prescriptions according to health care characteristics. A logistic regression model was used to compare patient demographics and health care characteristics associated with pethidine prescriptions between 2002 and 2007. RESULTS: Despite the decline in the number of pethidine users and prescriptions over the six-year period, more than half a million people were prescribed pethidine annually. In fact, an increasing proportion of pethidine prescriptions were observed in clinics, outpatient settings, and patients who had both operations and cancer diagnoses. Pethidine prescriptions were mostly associated with a non-operation status without a cancer diagnosis (>;60%). However, approximately 10% of the total pethidine prescriptions were found in patients with a cancer diagnosis but no operation. Compared to those in 2002, pethidine prescriptions in 2007 were more likely to be found in people 80 years or older, rural residents, patients from clinics, outpatient settings and operation patients with cancer diagnoses. CONCLUSIONS: A population-based survey in Taiwan demonstrated decreasing consumption of pethidine from 2002 to 2007; however, an increased proportion of prescriptions in certain health care settings was observed. In addition, 10% of the pethidine prescriptions were for cancer patients without operations. These cases need further evaluation for the determination of appropriate pethidine use

Sarm1, a negative regulator of innate immunity, interacts with syndecan-2 and regulates neuronal morphology

The syndecan Sds2 and the innate immunity inhibitor Sarm1 function together and in distinct pathways to promote proper neuronal morphogenesis