French direct investment in China: A survey report

This paper attempts to explain the economic effects of French direct investment in China on the French economy, based on our survey results using the relative data and case study. The paper begins with a brief description of the scale, location, industries, firms and forms of French direct investment in China, and then explains the economic effects of French FDI in China on both nations, such as the employment and income, import and export, balance of payments, industry hollowing, technological improvement, and others. Finally, the paper provides a case study about the success of Qingdao Hairun Water Supply Corp. Ltd, one of EJV of Sino French Water Development Company Ltd.

Using Volatile Organic Compounds In Exhaled Breath As A Biomarker For Early Lung Cancer Detection: A Systematic Review

Lung cancer has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths globally. The major problem of the high mortality rate is the late diagnosis. Conventional methods utilized for clinical detection of lung cancer have employed expensive and invasive medical procedures that cause stress, discomfort, and pain to patients, and have demonstrated low sensitivity, substantial false negatives, and risk of radiation exposure. The drawbacks obviate their applicability to large-scale, population-wide screening efforts. This paper reviews the applications of using volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath as a potential approach for early lung cancer detection. An electronic search was conducted in PubMed and Scopus. A total of 41 studies were included in this review. The sampling method of exhaled breath employed in most of the included studies were leak-proof Tedlar bags. Mass spectrometry and electronic noses were two main techniques used in breath sample detection. In the recent years, electronic noses gained more popularity due to their portability and cost-effectiveness. In this review, a total of 40 VOCs, originated from both endogenous and exogenous sources, were found to be significant in discriminating between lung cancer patients and healthy controls in two or more of the included studies. The included studies demonstrated substantial sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the method. Overall, the results showed that VOCs in exhaled breath is a promising biomarker for early detection of lung cancer. However, the large-scale practice of this method is constrained by the lack of standardized breath collection and analysis system and putative exhaled VOC biomarkers. Further studies with consistent sampling protocols should be used to demonstrate the reproducibility and repeatability of the detection tool before they are applied in clinical practice

Molecular Dynamics Simulation Studies of Interaction of Amphiphilic Molecules with Lipid Bilayers

We use molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the behavior of various amphiphilic molecules in aqueous solutions in the presence of vitamin E or lipid bilayers. Our research studies focus on two molecular systems. First, we investigate the effect of DMSO on structural properties of DMPC bilayers and calculate bilayers permeability coefficients for both water and DMSO molecules at low DMSO concentration. The simulations show that the increase of DMSO concentration in solution leads to an increase of the permeability of water through the bilayers. The permeability increase might explain the unusual ability of DMSO, even at relatively low concentrations, to allow fast relaxation of osmotic pressure imbalance present during cryopreservation protocols. The second part of our research aims at the development of a molecular-level understanding of solubilization of vitamin E by bile salts and its adsorption and positioning into cell membranes. Specifically, in a sequence of MD simulations, we investigate the aggregation behavior and interaction of cholate (CHD) and glycocholate (GCH) with oleic acid and vitamin E and adsorption, positioning, and aggregation of vitamin E molecules inside a DMPC lipid bilayer. The simulations show that at concentrations above critical micelle concentration the bile salt molecules aggregate spontaneously into small ablate micelles in just a few nanoseconds. The oblate shape is favored by bile salts unique molecular structure. The study of interaction of bile salts with oleic acid show that oleic acid molecules are solubilized spontaneously into preformed bile salt micelles. The MD study of interaction of bile salts with vitamin E show that preformed bile salt micelles are spontaneously adsorbed at the vitamin E-water interface; adsorption process that leads to important changes of interfacial energy, surface tension, and interface structure. In addition, our MD simulations demonstrate that a-tocopherol incorporates spontaneously into DMPC lipid bilayers and accumulates in a relatively narrow region, just below the membrane-water interface. This is of great significance because even if its concentration in membranes is relatively low, the spatial confinement of a-tocopherol inside the bilayer greatly enhances its concentration in this vital region, thus increasing their importance for in vivo biological activities including oxidative stress defense

Cooperative vehicular networks for intelligent transportation systems

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Transportation systems are fundamental for the human society as they allow people and goods to move from one location to another. With an increasing volume of population and vehicles, current transportation systems are now facing a number of disruptive challenges such as congestion, crashes, air pollution and noise throughout the world. However, traditional solutions like expanding the present transportation systems by increasing the number of roads are recognized to be expensive, disruptive and involve protracted effort. Instead, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), with the goal of building a safer, more efficient and environmentally sustainable transportation system by incorporating state-of-the-art sensing, computing and communication technologies, is expected to be a better solution. ITS are complex systems and they function in a broad range of areas through smartly sensing, analysing and disseminating different kinds of traffic information. Vehicular networks, which incorporate advanced communication technology with intelligent vehicles equipped with on-board units (OBUs) and intelligent roadside infrastructure, realise the function of large scale traffic information dissemination for ITS through vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and infrastructure to infrastructure (I2I) communications. Therefore, as one of the most enabling tools to support ITS, vehicular networks play a crucial role in improving road safety, relieving traffic congestion, enhancing driving experience and reducing pollution. Considering the critical impact information exchange poses on the transportation systems, vehicular network applications require particularly fast, reliable and secure message dissemination in the network. However, depending only on V2V or V2I communications may fail to meet these requirements. On one hand, the frequently changing topology of vehicular networks caused by the highly dynamic nature of vehicles and the lossy vehicular wireless channels resulting from fading, path loss and the fast movement of vehicles, would result in unreliable and intermittent V2V communications. On the other hand, V2I communications may have limited availability, especially in rural areas and in the initial deployment phase of vehicular networks due to the high cost of implementation and maintenance of infrastructure. These make research on employing cooperative communications within vehicular networks both interesting and important. In this thesis, we focus on the design of cooperative vehicular networks for ITS to satisfy the requirement of disseminating data quickly, reliably and securely, in the conditions of sparse roadside infrastructure, high mobility, and intermittent connectivity. Firstly, we propose a cooperative communication strategy that explores the combined use of V2I communications, V2V communications, mobility of vehicles, and cooperation among vehicles and infrastructure, to facilitate data dissemination in vehicular networks. The network performance, measured by the achievable throughput when there exists only one vehicle with a download request in the network, and the achievable capacity when there exist multiple vehicles with download requests in the network respectively, are analysed. The results show that the proposed cooperative communication strategy significantly boosts the throughput (or capacity) of vehicular networks. Secondly, to protect secure message dissemination, we investigate topological approaches to keep the message dissemination in vehicular networks robust against insider attackers who may tamper with the message content. As a novel approach, we take the network topology into consideration when designing algorithms to check the integrity and consistency of messages. Overall, our work provides guidance on the optimum design of cooperative vehicular networks for ITS to achieve fast, reliable and secure message dissemination

Identifying the Main Path Based on Influence Flow in Citation Network

With the rapid increase of knowledge as the time goes on, the citation network has evolved into a huge network system. Find the key documents from the huge citation network has become an important issue for analyzing the changes in specific fields. The main path analysis method can better describe the path development process in a target field and effectively avoids the problem that only high-cited nodes will be selected but ignore the fact that the "key documents" may not be connected strongly. The traditional main path weighting algorithms SPX are based on the traversal counts have been applied in various field research nowadays, but these appoaches will also cause some shortcomings. According to the core idea of eigenvector centrality, the concept of influence flow in citation network is summarized at the first and the algorithms to weight the path based on equally- distributed and unequally-distributed influence flow are proposed in this thesis. Firstly, main paths in desalination field and information security field through traditional traversal counts SPLC algorithm are obtained as a comparative experiment compared to that used equally-distributed influenced flow algorithms. Secondly, this thesis proposes the influence flow algorithms based on PageRank and single traversal from to perspective to divide influence equally. The main paths obtained by the two algorithms are compared with the paths used SPLC to draw the similarities and differences from the aspects of shape, node content, cited times of node and theme evolution. Comparisons show that the proposed two algorithms supplement some key nodes and overcome part of shortcomings to some extent. Thirdly, the thesis proposes another influence flow algorithm based on the coupling strength. It is because different knowledge diffusion effect that citing nodes transmit unequal influence to their cited nodes. Therefore, the influence of the transmis- sion is different according to the closeness between nodes. This algorithm is applied to the existing DNA network and compared the forms and content of the main path with the traditional traversal counts algorithm. Finally, this thesis summarizes the main conclusions of the new proposed algorithms applied in the main path analysis. Also, we discuss the limitations of the research which are not considered and prospects for future research directions on main path analysis

An Overview of Researches on Biolinguistics

In 1997 in memory of the 40th anniversary of transformational-generative grammar, Jenkins wrote the article “Biolinguistics: structure development and evolution of language”, which helped produce large number of scholarly monographs and papers with respect to biolinguistics. Simultaneously, a series of relevant international academic seminars were successfully held. This paper, based on the summarization of research status quo on biolinguistics, looks forward to the future development of biolinguistics so as to help predict the tendency of biolinguistic researches

Quantifying nuclear wide chromatin compaction by phasor analysis of histone Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) in frequency domain fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) data.

The nanometer spacing between nucleosomes throughout global chromatin organisation modulates local DNA template access, and through continuous dynamic rearrangements, regulates genome function [1]. However, given that nucleosome packaging occurs on a spatial scale well below the diffraction limit, real time observation of chromatin structure in live cells by optical microscopy has proved technically difficult, despite recent advances in live cell super resolution imaging [2]. One alternative solution to quantify chromatin structure in a living cell at the level of nucleosome proximity is to measure and spatially map Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between fluorescently labelled histones - the core protein of a nucleosome [3]. In recent work we established that the phasor approach to fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a robust method for the detection of histone FRET which can quantify nuclear wide chromatin compaction in the presence of cellular autofluorescence [4]. Here we share FLIM data recording histone FRET in live cells co-expressing H2B-eGFP and H2B-mCherry. The data was acquired in the frequency domain [5] and processed by the phasor approach to lifetime analysis [6]. The data can be valuable to researchers interested in using the histone FRET assay since it highlights the impact of cellular autofluorescence and acceptor-donor ratio on quantifying chromatin compaction. The data is related to the research article "Phasor histone FLIM-FRET microscopy quantifies spatiotemporal rearrangement of chromatin architecture during the DNA damage response" [4]