Examining Stakeholder Perspectives: Process, Performance and Progress of the Age-Friendly Taiwan Program.

Since Taiwans age-friendly city (AFC) program was launched in 2012, the central government has provided various resources to the countrys 22 local authorities, including budgetary support, policy advocacy, and consultation from a team of experts. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on the process, performance, and outcome of the AFC program. A 53-item questionnaire was developed based on the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline, including mechanisms and processes (20 items), outcome evaluations (23 items), and resource integration (10 items). There was a great difference found among scores between facilitators and experts for inter-exchange experience with local and international cities (40%) and monitor and revise indicators (37%) in mechanisms and processes, evaluate performance of indicators and action plans (37%) in outcome evaluations, and interaction between government and community (46%) and interaction between civil organization and senior society (39%) in resource integration. Clearly, facilitators showed overly optimistic assessments in AFC mechanisms and processes, outcome evaluation, and resource integration. The results showed disconnect between experts expectations versus actual practice conducted by facilitators. Implications of these findings are to integrate top down expectations with the realities of bottom up practice to design more realistic evaluations; continue to educate stakeholders about design, implementation and evaluation; and further integrate resources from government, civil organizations, and community

Pentacene-Based Thin-Film Transistors With a Solution-Process Hafnium Oxide Insulator

Abstract—Pentacene-based organic thin-film transistors with solution-process hafnium oxide (HfOx) as gate insulating layer have been demonstrated. The solution-process HfOx could not only exhibit a high-permittivity (κ = 11) dielectric constant but also has good dielectric strength. Moreover, the root-mean-square surface roughness and surface energy (γs) on the surface of the HfOx layer were 1.304 nm and 34.24 mJ/cm2, respectively. The smooth, as well as hydrophobic, surface of HfOx could facilitate the direct deposition of the pentacene film without an additional polymer treatment layer, leading to a high field-effect mobility of 3.8 cm2/(V · s). Index Terms—Hafnium oxide, high permittivity, organic thinfilm transistor (OTFT), solution process, surface energy

Tyrosine phosphorylation of HPK1 by activated Src promotes ischemic brain injury in rat hippocampal CA1 region

AbstractHematopoietic progenitor kinase 1 (HPK1) is a hematopoietic cell-restricted member of the Ste20 serine/threonine kinase super family. We recently reported that HPK1 is involved in c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) signaling pathway by sequential activation of MLK3–MKK7–JNK3 after cerebral ischemia. Here, we used 4-amino-5-(4-chlorophenyl)-7-(t-butyl) pyrazolo [3,4-d] pyrimidine (PP2) and MK801 to investigate the events upstream of HPK1 in ischemic brain injury. Immunoprecipitation and immunoblot results showed that PP2 and MK801 significantly decreased the activation of Src, HPK1, MLK3, JNK3 and c-Jun, respectively, during ischemia/reperfusion. Histology and TUNEL staining showed PP2 or MK801 protects against neuron death after brain ischemia. We speculate that this unique signaling pathway through the tyrosine phosphorylation of HPK1 promotes ischemic brain injury by activated Src via N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor and, ultimately, the activation of the MLK3–MKK7–JNK3 pathway after cerebral ischemia

Geometric and Electronic Structure of Graphene Bilayer Edges

We present a computational investigation of free-standing graphene bilayer edge (BLE) structures, aka “fractional nanotubes.” We demonstrate that these curved carbon nanostructures possess a number of interesting properties, electronic in origin. The BLEs, quite atypical of elemental carbon, have large permanent electric dipoles of 0.87 and 1.14 debye/Å for zigzag and armchair inclinations, respectively. An unusual, weak AA interlayer coupling leads to a twinned double-cone dispersion of the electronic states near the Dirac points. This entails a type of quantum Hall behavior markedly different from what has been observed in graphenebased materials, characterized by a magnetic field-dependent resonance in the Hall conductivity

The Space-Jump Model of the Movement of Tumor Cells and Healthy Cells

We establish the interaction model of two cell populations following the concept of the random-walk, and assume the cell movement is constrained by space limitation primarily. Furthermore, we analyze the model to obtain the behavior of two cell populations as time is closed to initial state and far into the future

Perception Imitation: Towards Synthesis-free Simulator for Autonomous Vehicles

We propose a perception imitation method to simulate results of a certain perception model, and discuss a new heuristic route of autonomous driving simulator without data synthesis. The motivation is that original sensor data is not always necessary for tasks such as planning and control when semantic perception results are ready, so that simulating perception directly is more economic and efficient. In this work, a series of evaluation methods such as matching metric and performance of downstream task are exploited to examine the simulation quality. Experiments show that our method is effective to model the behavior of learning-based perception model, and can be further applied in the proposed simulation route smoothly

DiffRoom: Diffusion-based High-Quality 3D Room Reconstruction and Generation

We present DiffRoom, a novel framework for tackling the problem of high-quality 3D indoor room reconstruction and generation, both of which are challenging due to the complexity and diversity of the room geometry. Although diffusion-based generative models have previously demonstrated impressive performance in image generation and object-level 3D generation, they have not yet been applied to room-level 3D generation due to their computationally intensive costs. In DiffRoom, we propose a sparse 3D diffusion network that is efficient and possesses strong generative performance for Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF), based on a rough occupancy prior. Inspired by KinectFusion's incremental alignment and fusion of local SDFs, we propose a diffusion-based TSDF fusion approach that iteratively diffuses and fuses TSDFs, facilitating the reconstruction and generation of an entire room environment. Additionally, to ease training, we introduce a curriculum diffusion learning paradigm that speeds up the training convergence process and enables high-quality reconstruction. According to the user study, the mesh quality generated by our DiffRoom can even outperform the ground truth mesh provided by ScanNet