Protecting the Giant Pandas: Newspaper Censorship of Negative News

We investigate newspaper censorship of firm-level negative news using a rare setting in which many companies were involved in similar tunneling scandals. We find that the Chinese censorship authorities restrict the dissemination of tunneling news on state-owned enterprises, firms with greater numbers of employees, and large taxpayers. An examination of the difference in censorship behaviors between the central and provincial authorities reveal three incentives that direct the censorship practices: strong local protectionism, cross-provincial competition, and the concern for the relative positions in the political power system. Finally, we show that the tunneling news that is reported leads to negative market reactions and greater trading volumes, indicating that the news that survives the censorship has information content

Advances in the Study of Magnesium Alloys and Their Use in Bone Implant Material

Magnesium and magnesium alloys have great application potential in the field of orthopaedics. Compared with traditional inorganic nonmetallic materials and medical polymer materials, magnesium alloys have many advantages, such as better strength, toughness, fatigue resistance, and easy processing. Its mechanical properties are suitable and controllable. It can meet the same elastic modulus, cell compatibility, and biodegradability as human cortical bone. There are also some drawbacks for biodegradability, as magnesium and its alloys, with their high degradation rate, can cause insufficient integrity of the mechanical properties. This paper summarises the research on magnesium and its magnesium alloy materials in the field of bone implantation, looking at what magnesium and its magnesium alloys are, the history of magnesium alloys in bone implant materials, the manufacturing of magnesium alloys, the mechanical properties of magnesium alloys, the bio-compatibility and clinical applications of magnesium alloys, the shortcomings, and the progress of research in recent years

Three-dimensional AlN microroses and their enhanced photoluminescence properties

Novel three-dimensional AlN microroses, for the first time, have been synthesized via direct reaction between Al and N2 in arc plasma without any catalyst and template.<br /

AlN nanostructures : tunable architectures and optical properties

Novel AlN nanostructures with tunable building units of the architectures have been successfully synthesized without any catalyst or template; the subsequent photoluminescence (PL) indicates that the optical properties of the AlN nanostructures can be adjusted by tuning the architectures.<br /

One-step synthesis of AlN branched nanostructures by an improved DC arc discharge plasma method

Aluminium nitride (AlN) branched nanostructures with tree shapes and sea urchin shapes are synthesized via a one-step improved DC arc discharge plasma method without any catalyst and template. The branched nanostructures with tree shapes and sea urchin shapes can be easily controlled by the location of collection. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies show that the branches of tree shaped nanostructures grow in a sequence of nanowires, nanomultipeds and nanocombs. The growth mechanisms of these branched nanostructures are discussed in detail. The optical properties of AlN branched nanostructures with tree shapes and sea urchin shapes are investigated

Comprehensive characterization of a time-course transcriptional response induced by autotoxins in Panax ginseng using RNA-Seq

The lists for all the differentially expressed genes. (XLS 1362 kb

A new characterization methodology for starch gelatinization

A gelatinization degree control system, with a combination of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and computer vision, was successfully developed. An intelligent measurement framework was purposely designed to achieve a precise investigation on phase transition and morphology change of starch in real time, as well as a process control during gelatinization. Base on a variation of birefringence number, the degree of gelatinization (DG) control system provided a direct and fast methodology without subjective uncertainty in studying starch gelatinization. In the course, the whole system was a cascade structure with the hot-stage temperature chosen as the inner-loop parameter, thus the granule morphology and birefringence at different DG could be easily observed and compared in real time, and the relative transition temperature was simultaneously calculated

Knowledge-Driven Semantic Segmentation for Waterway Scene Perception

Semantic segmentation as one of the most popular scene perception techniques has been studied for autonomous vehicles. However, deep learning-based solutions rely on the volume and quality of data and knowledge from specific scene might not be incorporated. A novel knowledge-driven semantic segmentation method is proposed for waterway scene perception. Based on the knowledge that water is irregular and dynamically changing, a Life Time of Feature (LToF) detector is designed to distinguish water region from surrounding scene. Using a Bayesian framework, the detector as the likelihood function is combined with U-Net based semantic segmentation to achieve an optimized solution. Finally, two public datasets and typical semantic segmentation networks, FlowNet, DeepLab and DVSNet are selected to evaluate the proposed method. Also, the sensitivity of these methods and ours to dataset is discussed