A Preliminary Study on Human Resources Management in International Construction

As construction companies continue to exploreforeign construction markets, variousinternational construction projects are beingundertaken in all corners of the world. In aninternational construction project with manyunique and complicated characteristics, humanresource management can playa significant rolein promoting the efficient use of complex humanresources. The aim of this paper is to establish avalid foundation for further research onmeasuring the impact of human resourcemanagement economically for internationalconstruction projects. The paper examineshuman resource management literature andidentifies the application of the relatedmanagement techniques to the constructionindustry. In addition, the paper uses the literatureanalysis to describe the nature of humanresource management with particular referenceto international construction projects. Inparticular, the research described in this paperidentifies economic performance factors in theimplementation human resource management ininternational construction projects. This paperalso identifies the social effects of humanresource management practices

Tumor treating fields in glioblastoma: long-term treatment and high compliance as favorable prognostic factors

IntroductionTumor treating fields (TTFields) have earned substantial attention in recent years as a novel therapeutic approach with the potential to improve the prognosis of glioblastoma (GBM) patients. However, the impact of TTFields remains a subject of ongoing debate. This study aimed to offer real-world evidence on TTFields therapy for GBM, and to investigate the clinical determinants affecting its efficacy.MethodsWe have reported a retrospective analysis of 81 newly diagnosed Chinese GBM patients who received TTFields/Stupp treatment in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University. Overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) were analyzed using Kaplan–Meier method. Cox regression models with time-dependent covariates were utilized to address non-proportional hazards and to assess the influence of clinical variables on PFS and OS.ResultsThe median PFS and OS following TTFields/STUPP treatment was 12.6 months (95% CI 11.0-14.1) and 21.3 months (95% CI 10.0–32.6) respectively. Long-term TTFields treatment (>2 months) exhibits significant improvements in PFS and OS compared to the short-term treatment group (≤2 months). Time-dependent covariate COX analysis revealed that longer TTFields treatment was correlated with enhanced PFS and OS for up to 12 and 13 months, respectively. Higher compliance to TTFields (≥ 0.8) significantly reduced the death risk (HR=0.297, 95%CI 0.108-0.819). Complete surgical resection and MGMT promoter methylation were associated with significantly lower risk of progression (HR=0.337, 95% CI 0.176-0.643; HR=0.156, 95% CI 0.065-0.378) and death (HR=0.276, 95% CI 0.105-0.727; HR=0.249, 95% CI 0.087-0.710).ConclusionThe TTFields/Stupp treatment may prolong median OS and PFS in GBM patients, with long-term TTFields treatment, higher TTFields compliance, complete surgical resection, and MGMT promoter methylation significantly improving prognosis

A Preliminary Study on Human Resources Management in International Construction

As construction companies continue to exploreforeign construction markets, variousinternational construction projects are beingundertaken in all corners of the world. In aninternational construction project with manyunique and complicated characteristics, humanresource management can playa significant rolein promoting the efficient use of complex humanresources. The aim of this paper is to establish avalid foundation for further research onmeasuring the impact of human resourcemanagement economically for internationalconstruction projects. The paper examineshuman resource management literature andidentifies the application of the relatedmanagement techniques to the constructionindustry. In addition, the paper uses the literatureanalysis to describe the nature of humanresource management with particular referenceto international construction projects. Inparticular, the research described in this paperidentifies economic performance factors in theimplementation human resource management ininternational construction projects. This paperalso identifies the social effects of humanresource management practices

A preliminary study on human resource management in international construction

As construction companies continue to explore foreign construction markets, various international construction projects are being undertaken in all corners of the world. In an international construction project with many unique and complicated characteristics, human resource management can play a significant role in promoting the efficient use of complex human resources. The aim of this paper is to establish a valid foundation for further research on measuring the impact of human resource management economically for international construction projects. The paper examines human resource management literature and identifies the application of the related management techniques to the construction industry. In addition, the paper uses the literature analysis to describe the nature of human resource management with particular reference to international construction projects. In particular, the research described in this paper identifies economic performance factors in the implementation human resource management in international construction projects. This paper also identifies the social effects of human resource management practices.<br /

CTFuseNet: A Multi-Scale CNN-Transformer Feature Fused Network for Crop Type Segmentation on UAV Remote Sensing Imagery

Timely and accurate acquisition of crop type information is significant for irrigation scheduling, yield estimation, harvesting arrangement, etc. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has emerged as an effective way to obtain high resolution remote sensing images for crop type mapping. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods have been widely used to predict crop types according to UAV remote sensing imagery, which has excellent local feature extraction capabilities. However, its receptive field limits the capture of global contextual information. To solve this issue, this study introduced the self-attention-based transformer that obtained long-term feature dependencies of remote sensing imagery as supplementary to local details for accurate crop-type segmentation in UAV remote sensing imagery and proposed an end-to-end CNN–transformer feature-fused network (CTFuseNet). The proposed CTFuseNet first provided a parallel structure of CNN and transformer branches in the encoder to extract both local and global semantic features from the imagery. A new feature-fusion module was designed to flexibly aggregate the multi-scale global and local features from the two branches. Finally, the FPNHead of feature pyramid network served as the decoder for the improved adaptation to the multi-scale fused features and output the crop-type segmentation results. Our comprehensive experiments indicated that the proposed CTFuseNet achieved a higher crop-type-segmentation accuracy, with a mean intersection over union of 85.33% and a pixel accuracy of 92.46% on the benchmark remote sensing dataset and outperformed the state-of-the-art networks, including U-Net, PSPNet, DeepLabV3+, DANet, OCRNet, SETR, and SegFormer. Therefore, the proposed CTFuseNet was beneficial for crop-type segmentation, revealing the advantage of fusing the features found by the CNN and the transformer. Further work is needed to promote accuracy and efficiency of this approach, as well as to assess the model transferability

Functions of 1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D3, vitamin D3 receptor and interleukin-22 involved in pathogenesis of gout arthritis through altering metabolic pattern and inflammatory responses

Background Gouty arthritis (GA) is a common type of inflammatory arthritis. Recent studies demonstrated that 1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D3 (1,25(OH) 2 VD3) and vitamin D3 receptor (VD-R) play a protective role in acute inflammation, but interleukin-22(IL-22) promotes inflammation, especially for arthritis. However, our understanding of the responses of 1,25(OH) 2VD3 and IL-22 to gout was still unclear. Presently, in-depth metabolomics, bioinformatics and clinical characteristics analyses were performed to elucidate the pathogenesis and valuable clinical indicators of gouty arthritis. Methods Peripheral venous blood was taken for investigation. The levels of IL-22 and 1,25(OH)2VD3 were determined in patient’s plasma via ELISA, and the mRNA levels of IL-22 and VD-R were measured via qRT-PCR. The interaction network of VD-R and IL22 were constructed by the Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes/Proteins (STRING), and the biological function of the related proteins were analyzed by Clusterprofiler Metabolomics were performed to decipher the metabolic variations of GA. Results The levels of VD-R and 1,25(OH) 2 VD3 were identified to be low. What,s more, GA patients were reported to have high expression of IL-22. And IL-22 levels positively correlated with C-reactiveprotein (CRP) serum levels in the bivariate correlation analysis, whereas the level of 1,25(OH) 2VD3 negatively correlated with that of CRP. GO and KEGG analyses revealed that IL-22 and 1,25(OH) 2 VD3 were involved in stress immunity and inflammatory responses. These pathways are known to play a role in GA pathogenesis. Meanwhile, the metabolic profiles of GA serum showed that the increase in various amino acids and uric acid are involved in GA pathogenesis. Importantly, VD-R and IL22 closely correlated with the level of key metabolites uric acid, whose increase promoted the occurrence of GA. Conclusion GA patients have low levels of VD-R and 1,25(OH) 2 VD3, and high levels of IL-22 together with various amino acids and uric acid. The levels of IL-22 and 1,25(OH) 2VD3 were positively and negatively correlated with C-reactive protein (CRP) serum levels, respectively. Both IL-22 and 1,25(OH) 2 VD3 functioned in GA-related immune and inflammatory responses, and closely correlated with the level of GA-related uric acid. Overall, IL-22, VD-R and 1,25(OH) 2 VD3 play functionally important roles in inflammatory responses and are relevant to gout pathogenesis

Characterization and antitumor efficacy of poly(L-lactid acid)-based etoposide-loaded implants

Etoposide is widely used in the chemotherapy of a variety of malignancies. But the strong lipophilicity, poor bioavailability, and severe side effects of etoposide limit its clinical application. The aim of this study was to develop sustained-release etoposide-loaded implants and evaluate antitumor activity of the implants after intratumoral implantation. We prepared the implants containing etoposide, poly(L-lactid acid) and polyethylene glycol 4000 by the direct compression method. The implants were characterized regarding drug-excipient compatibility, content uniformity, morphology, sterility, in vitro, and in vivo release profiles. Then the antitumor activity of the implants was tested in xenograft model of A549 human non-small cell lung cancer. SEM images displayed smooth surface of the implant and indicated that etoposide was homogeneously dispersed in the polymeric matrix. The results of content uniformity met the requirements of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Both in vitro and in vivo release profiles of the implants were characterized by high burst release followed by sustained release of etoposide. Intratumoral implantation of etoposide-loaded implants could efficiently delay the tumor growth. Furthermore, increasing the dose of implants led to higher tumor suppression rate without adding systemic toxicity. These results indicated that etoposide-loaded implants have significant antitumor efficacy in xenograft model without dose-limiting side effects and they possess a strong potential to be used as an intratumoral chemotherapy option for lung cancer treatment