Market Strategy from Microsoft Acquiring Nokia

Discusses the reason why Microsoft wants to acquire Nokia and the business strategy the company will use to expand its international market

Function of Several Variable

This Parkland A with Honors project discusses the function of several variables, it\u27s limits and partial derivatives

A development potential assessment method for clean energy stations

Clean energy is expected to enter a new stage of large-scale development along with the growing demand for building regional clean energy stations. However, as many regional clean energy stations comprise multiple stations with different output characteristics and complementary coupling, the development potential of these stations cannot be simply based on the superposition of outputs, as this method lacks reasonable assessment results. This study proposes a method of combining Grey relational analysis (GRA), artificial neural network (ANN), and XGBoost algorithm for the potential assessment of clean energy stations. First, GRA and ANN are used for the relational analysis between the output of clean energy stations and meteorological factors. Second, the meteorological factors with high correlation and the existing historical data are used to predict the future outputs of new clean energy stations via XGBoost. Finally, according to the predicted output, an assessment method that includes available capacity coefficient (AOC) and other evaluation indicators is proposed. The case studies in this research prove the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method

Antagonistic Actions of Juvenile Hormone and 20-Hydroxyecdysone Within the Ring Gland Determine Developmental Transitions in \u3cem\u3eDrosophila\u3c/em\u3e

In both vertebrates and insects, developmental transition from the juvenile stage to adulthood is regulated by steroid hormones. In insects, the steroid hormone, 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), elicits metamorphosis, thus promoting this transition, while the sesquiterpenoid juvenile hormone (JH) antagonizes 20E signaling to prevent precocious metamorphosis during the larval stages. However, not much is known about the mechanisms involved in cross-talk between these two hormones. In this study, we discovered that in the ring gland (RG) of Drosophila larvae, JH and 20E control each other’s biosynthesis. JH induces expression of a Krüppel-like transcription factor gene Kr-h1 in the prothoracic gland (PG), a portion of the RG that produces the 20E precursor ecdysone. By reducing both steroidogenesis autoregulation and PG size, high levels of Kr-h1 in the PG inhibit ecdysteriod biosynthesis, thus maintaining juvenile status. JH biosynthesis is prevented by 20E in the corpus allatum, the other portion of the RG that produces JH, to ensure the occurrence of metamorphosis. Hence, antagonistic actions of JH and 20E within the RG determine developmental transitions in Drosophila. Our study proposes a mechanism of cross-talk between the two major hormones in the regulation of insect metamorphosis

Condensing Multilingual Knowledge with Lightweight Language-Specific Modules

Incorporating language-specific (LS) modules is a proven method to boost performance in multilingual machine translation. This approach bears similarity to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) because it does not inflate FLOPs. However, the scalability of this approach to hundreds of languages (experts) tends to be unmanageable due to the prohibitive number of parameters introduced by full-rank matrices in fully-connected layers. In this work, we introduce the Language-Specific Matrix Synthesis (LMS) method. This approach constructs LS modules by generating low-rank matrices from two significantly smaller matrices to approximate the full-rank matrix. Furthermore, we condense multilingual knowledge from multiple LS modules into a single shared module with the Fuse Distillation (FD) technique to improve the efficiency of inference and model serialization. We show that our LMS method significantly outperforms previous LS methods and MoE methods with the same amount of extra parameters, e.g., 1.73 BLEU points over the Switch Transformer on many-to-many multilingual machine translation. Importantly, LMS is able to have comparable translation performance with much fewer parameters.Comment: Accepted at the main conference of EMNLP 202

Inverse Correlation Between Plasma Adropin and ET-1 Levels in Essential Hypertension: A Cross-Sectional Study

Adropin is a recently identified bioactive protein that promotes energy homeostasis by affecting glucose and lipid metabolism. Recently, adropin has also been reported to be associated with endothelial dysfunction. Also, ET-1, as a biomarker for endothelial dysfunction, is a key regulator in hypertension. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to detect the relationship between plasma adropin and ET-1 levels in hypertension. A total of 123 participants, diagnosed with primary hypertension on the basis of World Health Organization criteria (systolic blood pressure [SBP] ≥ 140 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure (DBP) ≥ 90 mmHg), and 58 normotensive subjects were enrolled in the cross-sectional study from October 2011 to December 2013. All study participants were older than 18 years of age. Adropin and ET-1 levels were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). We found that plasma adropin levels were significantly lower in hypertensives compared with controls (3.18 ± 1.00 vs 4.21 ± 1.14 ng/mL, P \u3c 0.001). Plasma ET-1 levels were higher in hypertensives than controls (2.60 ± 1.14 vs 1.54 ± 0.66 pg/mL, P \u3c 0.001). Adropin had a negative correlation with DBP (r = -0.40, P \u3c 0.001), SBP (r = -0.49, P \u3c 0.001), and adjusted for age, body mass index, SBP, DBP, glucose, TC, TG, LDL, and Cr, there was a negative correlation between ET-1 and adropin (r = -0.20, P = 0.04). In multivariate logistic regression analysis of the variables, ET-1 (odds ratio [OR], 3.84; 95% CI, 2.16-6.81; P \u3c 0.001) and adropin (OR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.99 -1.0; P \u3c  .001) were found to be independent predictors for hypertension.In conclusion, decreased plasma adropin levels are associated with increased blood pressure in hypertension. Adropin is an independent predictor for hypertension, and may influence blood pressure by protecting endothelial function

The influence of delirium on mortality and length of ICU stay and analysis of risk factors for delirium after liver transplantation

ObjectiveTo analyze the incidence, timing, risk factors and prognosis of delirium after liver transplantation (LT).MethodsThe clinical data of 321 patients undergoing LT in the Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University from January 2018 to December 2022 were collected to investigate the incidence, onset, and risk factors for post-LT delirium and the impact of delirium on LT recipients’ prognosis by statistical analysis.ResultsThe incidence of post-LT delirium was 19.3% (62/321), and the median interval between LT and onset of delirium was 20.1 h. Univariate analysis showed that pre-LT variables (Model for End Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score, hospital stay, hepatic encephalopathy, infection, white blood cell (WBC) count, lymphocyte count, abnormal potassium, lactulose use), intraoperative variables (red blood cell transfusion, remimazolam use, dexmedetomidine use) and post-LT variables (hypernatraemia, acute rejection, reoperation, basiliximab use, tacrolimus concentration) were associated with post-LT delirium. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that MELD score at LT ≥22 [OR = 3.400, 95% CI:1.468–7.876, p = 0.004], pre-LT hepatic encephalopathy [OR = 3.224, 95% CI:1.664–6.244, p = 0.001], infection within 2 months prior to LT [OR = 2.238, 95% CI:1.151–4.351, p = 0.018], acute rejection [OR = 2.974, 95% CI:1.322–6.690, p = 0.008], and reoperation [OR = 11.919, 95% CI:2.938–48.350, p = 0.001] were independent risk factors for post-LT delirium. Post-LT delirium was reduced in LT recipients exposing to intraoperative remimazolam [OR = 0.287, 95% CI: 0.113–0.733, p = 0.009] or ≥ 25 μg of intraoperative dexmedetomidine [OR = 0.441, 95% CI 0.225–0.867, p = 0.018]. As for clinical outcomes, patients with delirium had a higher percentage of staying at the (ICU) ≥7 d after LT than those without delirium [OR = 2.559, 95% CI 1.418–4.617, p = 0.002].ConclusionThe incidence of delirium was high and the onset of delirium was early after LT. Risk factors for post-LT delirium included high MELD score at LT, pre-LT hepatic encephalopathy and infections, acute rejection and reoperation. Intraoperative use of remimazolam or dexmedetomidine reduced post-LT delirium. Delirium had a negative impact on the length of ICU stay