Integration of Social Media News Mining and Text Mining Techniques to Determine a Corporate’s Competitive Edge

Market globalization have triggered much more severe challenges for corporates than ever before. Thus, how to survive in this highly fluctuating economic atmosphere is an attractive topic for corporate managers, especially when an economy goes into a severe recession. One of the most consensus conclusions is to highly integrate a corporate’s supply chain network, as it can facilitate knowledge circulation, reduce transportation cost, increase market share, and sustain customer loyalty. However, a corporate’s supply chain relations are unapparent and opaque. To solve such an obstacle, this study integrates text mining (TM) and social network analysis (SNA) techniques to exploit the latent relation among corporates from social media news. Sequentially, this study examines its impact on corporate operating performance forecasting. The empirical result shows that the proposed mechanism is a promising alternative for performance forecasting. Public authorities and decision makers can thus consider the potential implications when forming a future policy

Environment Diversification with Multi-head Neural Network for Invariant Learning

Neural networks are often trained with empirical risk minimization; however, it has been shown that a shift between training and testing distributions can cause unpredictable performance degradation. On this issue, a research direction, invariant learning, has been proposed to extract invariant features insensitive to the distributional changes. This work proposes EDNIL, an invariant learning framework containing a multi-head neural network to absorb data biases. We show that this framework does not require prior knowledge about environments or strong assumptions about the pre-trained model. We also reveal that the proposed algorithm has theoretical connections to recent studies discussing properties of variant and invariant features. Finally, we demonstrate that models trained with EDNIL are empirically more robust against distributional shifts.Comment: In Proceedings of 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022

An Immunomodulatory Protein (Ling Zhi-8) from a Ganoderma lucidum

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of an immunomodulatory protein (Ling Zhi-8, LZ-8) on wound healing in rat liver tissues after monopolar electrosurgery. Animals were sacrificed for evaluations at 0, 3, 7, and 28 days postoperatively. It was found that the wound with the LZ-8 treatment significantly increases wound healing. Western blot analysis clearly indicated that the expression of NF-κB was decreased at 3, 7, and 28 days when liver tissues were treated with LZ-8. Moreover, caspase-3 activity of the liver tissue also significantly decreases at 7 and 28 days, respectively. DAPI staining and TUNEL assays revealed that only a minimal dispersion of NF-κB was found on the liver tissue treated with LZ-8 at day 7 as compared with day 3 and tissues without LZ-8 treatment. Similarly, apoptosis was decreased on liver tissues treated with LZ-8 at 7 days when compared to the control (monopolar electrosurgery) tissues. Therefore, the analytical results demonstrated that LZ-8 induced acceleration of wound healing in rat liver tissues after monopolar electrosurgery

Modeling Ligand-Receptor Interaction for Some MHC Class II HLA-DR4 Peptide Mimetic Inhibitors Using Several Molecular Docking and 3D QSAR Techniques

The ligand-receptor interaction between some peptidomimetic inhibitors and a class II MHC peptide presenting molecule, the HLA-DR4 receptor, was modeled using some three-dimensional (3D) quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) methods such as the Comparative Molecular Field Analysis (CoMFA), Comparative Molecular Similarity Indices Analysis (CoMSIA), and a pharmacophore building method, the Catalyst program. The structures of these peptidomimetic inhibitors were generated theoretically, and the conformations used in the 3D QSAR studies were defined by docking them into the known structure of HLA-DR4 receptor through the GOLD, GLIDE Rigidly, GLIDE Flexible, and Xscore programs. Some of the parameters used in these docking programs were selected by docking an X-ray ligand into the receptor and comparing the root-means-square difference (RMSD) computed between the coordinates of the X-ray and docked structure. However, the goodness of a docking result for docking a series of peptidomimetic inhibitors into the HLA-DR4 receptor was judged by comparing the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient computed between each docking result and the activity data taken from the literature. The best CoMFA and CoMSIA models were constructed using the aligned structures of the best docking result. The CoMSIA was conducted in a stepwise manner to identify some important molecular features that were further employed in a pharmacophore building process by the Catalyst program. It was found that most inhibitors of the training set were accurately predicted by the best pharmacophore model, the Hypo1 hypothesis constructed. The deviation or conflict found between the actual and predicted activities of some inhibitors of both the training and the test sets were also investigated by mapping the Hypo1 hypothesis onto the corresponding structures of the inhibitors

Outcomes and prognostic factors of simple partial cystectomy for localized bladder urothelial cell carcinoma

AbstractRadical cystectomy has remained the gold standard for recurrent superficial or muscle invasive bladder tumor. However, partial cystectomy still has a role in those who reject or have contraindications for radical cystectomy. In this study, we sought to identify predictors of bladder recurrence and overall survival after simple partial cystectomy. We included 27 patients with bladder tumor who received simple partial cystectomy without pelvic lymph node dissection between March 2000 and September 2013. Adjuvant chemotherapy or radiation therapy was prescribed according to the pathological results. Parameters were compared on the basis of bladder recurrence and overall survival. During a mean follow-up time of 39 months, five patients (18.5%) experienced bladder recurrence. An older age, a higher pathological stage, positive surgical margins, and distant metastases were significant predictors of overall survival (p = 0.031, p = 0.001, p = 0.001, and p = 0.011, respectively). Meanwhile, previous bladder instillation and positive surgical margins were significant predictors of bladder recurrence (p = 0.026 and p = 0.027, respectively). The rate of consecutive distant metastases (33.3%) was almost twice the rate of bladder recurrence (18.5%), and six patients developed consecutive distant metastases without first experiencing bladder recurrence. In patients who received a simple partial cystectomy as an alternative treatment, previous bladder instillation and positive surgical margins were significant predictors of bladder recurrence. Patients with an older age, positive surgical margins, and consecutive distant metastases had worse overall survival. Partial cystectomy with routine lymph node dissection may be a better option for achieving favorable long-term outcomes

Shallow Subsurface Structure in the Hualien Basin and Relevance to the Damage Pattern and Fault Rupture during the 2018 Hualien Earthquake

The 2018 M[w] 6.4 Hualien earthquake generated a large peak-to-peak velocity of over 2  m/s, with a period of 3 s at the south end of the Milun fault, which resulted in the collapse of five buildings. To investigate the shallow subsurface soil structure and evaluate possible effects on the ground motion and building damage, we performed microtremor measurements in the Hualien basin. Based on the velocity structure jointly inverted from both Rayleigh-wave dispersion curves and microtremor horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio data, we found that the shallow subsurface structure generally deepens from west to east. Close to the Milun fault, the structure becomes shallower, which is consistent with faulting during the 2018 earthquake and the long-term tectonic displacement. There is no significant variation for the site conditions in the north–south direction that can explain the large peak ground velocity in the south. As a result of the dense measurements in the heavily damaged area, where three high-rise buildings totally collapsed, these locations have the average S-wave velocity of the upper 30 m (AVs₃₀) values and are relatively high compared to the more distant area from the Meilun River. This is somewhat unusual, because lower AVs₃₀ values indicating softer ground conditions are expected close to the river. We did not find any characteristic subsurface soil structure that may contribute to the building collapses. The large 3 s pulse was probably generated by source effects, rather than subsurface soil amplification

A new era for studies on cross-Strait relations: introduction

After more than half a century’s separation, interaction between China and Taiwan has increased and has progressively changed from a politico-economic interaction to a more civic interaction. Scholars working on cross-Strait relations have recently begun to pay attention to the civic influence of Taiwanese businesses on the relationship. Some emphasize the importance of sub-governmental interactions in the process of cross-Strait integration. Others assert that Taiwanese businesses can exercise economic leverage to constrain the Chinese government in cross-Strait policymaking. These scholars stress bottom–up processes by observing current phenomena, then deducing the emerging pattern of cross-Strait relations that may be influenced by business activities. Taking account of changing trends in scholarly discussions of the cross-Strait relationship, this special issue of China Information presents current research in this field. Unlike studies on top–down processes that affect political and economic interactions between China and Taiwan, several contributions in the special issue highlight bottom–up mechanisms affecting such interactions by examining the identity of Taiwanese businesspeople and migrants, as well as the activities and implications of Taiwanese charitable organizations operating in China. This issue focuses not only on the impact of China on Taiwan, but also the impact of Taiwanese investments, migrants, and exports on Chinese society