SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING IN CHINESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: DENIAL AND ENHANCEMENT?

This study examined the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) with one-, two-, three-, and four-dimensional models and tested the BIDR's discriminant validity with personality variables. A confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis of responses from 600 Chinese university students (314 men, 282 women, 4 missing; M age = 20.0 yr.) provided results indicating that the four-factor model fit the data best; i.e., self-deception and impression management split into denial and enhancement. The Denial and Enhancement subscales with personality variables show significant differences, confirming the four-factor model. The cultural differences as a possible reason for the split were discussed

Association between platelet count and the risk and progression of hand, foot, and mouth disease among children

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to evaluate the association between platelet (PLT) count and the risk and progression of hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD). METHODS: In total, 122 HFMD patients and 40 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. The differences between variables among the different subgroups were compared. Logistic regression analyses were performed to assess the relationship between various parameters and HFMD risk/progression. Sensitivity analysis was conducted by detecting the trend of the association between PLT count quartiles and HFMD risk/progression. A generalized additive model was used to identify the nonlinear relationship between PLT count and HFMD risk/ progression. The relationship between gender and PLT count as well as the risk/progression of HFMD was detected using a stratified logistic regression model. RESULTS: Significant differences were observed in terms of age, male/female ratio, white blood cell (WBC) count, and PLT count between patients with stage I-II, III-IV HFMD and healthy controls. Moreover, the alanine aminotransferase and magnesium levels between patients with stage I-II and III-IV HFMD significantly differed. Moreover, a significant difference was noted in the male/female ratio among the different PLT groups. The group with a low PLT count had a lower risk of HFMD progression than the group with a high PLT count (Q4) (p=0.039). Lower age, male gender, and WBC count were found to be associated with HFMD risk. Meanwhile, PLT count was correlated to HFMD progression. The sensitivity analysis yielded a similar result using the minimally adjusted model (p for trend=0.037), and minimal changes were observed using the crude and fully adjusted model (p for trend=0.054; 0.090). A significant nonlinear relationship was observed between PLT count and HFMD progression after adjusting for age, gender, and WBC (p=0.039). CONCLUSIONS: PLT was independently associated with HFMD progression in a nonlinear manner

Linear Extension Cube Attack on Stream Ciphers

Basing on the original Cube attack, this paper proposes an improved method of Cube attack on stream ciphers, which makes improvement on the pre-processing phase of the original attack. The new method can induce maxterms of higher-order from those of lower-order by the trade-off between time and space, thus recovering more key bits and reducing the search complexity on higher-dimension. In this paper, the improved attack is applied to Lili-128 algorithm and reduced variants of Trivium algorithm. We can recover 88 key bits of Lili-128 algorithm within time complexity of 2^14 and 48 key bits of Trivium algorithm can be recovered by cubes with dimension no larger than 8 when the initialization round is 576, the results are much better than those of the original attacks

Dietary supplementation of Chinese herbal medicines enhances the immune response and resistance of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) to infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus

Rainbow trout is a widely farmed economical cold-water fish worldwide, but the prevalence of infectious hematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV) presents a severe risk to the aquaculture industry, resulting in high mortality and huge economic losses. In this study, the impacts of different concentrations (0, 10, 20, and 30 g/kg) of Chinese herbal medicine mixture (CHMM) on the immune response and resistance of rainbow trout to IHNV infection were evaluated. The results show that CHMM noticeably increased (P < 0.05) T-SOD, CAT, AST, ALT, ACP, and AKP activities and decreased MDA content. NF-κB, TNF-α, IFN-β, IL-1β, JAK1, HSP70, and HSP90 expressions were significantly upregulated (P < 0.05) in all CHMMs, while SOCS2 expression was downregulated (P < 0.05). Following infection with IHNV, feeding rainbow trout with varying amounts of CHMM resulted in noticeably increased (P < 0.05) T-SOD, ACP, and AKP activities and significantly decreased (P < 0.05) MDA content and AST and ALT activities. TNF-α, IFN-β, IL-1β, HSP70, and HSP90 expressions were significantly upregulated (P < 0.05) in all CHMMs, while the expressions of JAK1 and SOCS2 were downregulated. The expression level of the IHNV G protein gene at a dosage of 20 g/kg was notably lower than that of the other CHMM feeding groups. This study provides a solid scientific basis for promoting CHMM as an immunostimulant for boosting antiviral immunity in rainbow trout

Efficient Framework for Genetic-Algorithm-Based Correlation Power Analysis

Various Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are combined with classic side-channel methods to improve the efficiency of attacks. Among them, Genetic Algorithms based Correlation Power Analysis (GA-CPA) is proposed to launch attacks on hardware cryptosystems to extract the secret key efficiently. However, the convergence rate is unsatisfactory due to two problems: individuals of the initial population generally have low fitnesses, and the mutation operation is hard to generate high-quality components. In this paper, we give an analysis framework to solve them. Firstly, we employ lists of sorted candidate key bytes obtained with CPA to initialize the population with high quality candidates. Secondly, we guide the mutation operation with lists of candidate keys sorted according to fitnesses, which are obtained by exhausting the values of a certain key byte and calculating the corresponding correlation coefficients with the whole key. Thirdly, key enumeration algorithms are utilized to deal with ranked candidates obtained by the last generation of GA-CPA to improve the success rate further. Simulation experimental results show that our method reduces the number of traces by 33.3\% and 43.9\% compared to CPA with key enumeration and GA-CPA respectively when the success rate is fixed to 90\%. Real experiments performed on SAKURA-G confirm that the number of traces required in our method is much less than the numbers of traces required in CPA and GA-CPA. Besides, we adjust our method to deal with DPA contest v1 dataset, and achieve a better result of 40.76 traces than the winning proposal of 42.42 traces. The computation cost of our proposal is nearly 16.7\% of the winner

Secreted frizzled-related protein disrupts PCP in eye lens fiber cells that have polarised primary cilia

AbstractPlanar cell polarity (PCP) signaling polarises cells along tissue axes. Although pathways involved are becoming better understood, outstanding issues include; (i) existence/identity of cues that orchestrate global polarisation in tissues, and (ii) the generality of the link between polarisation of primary cilia and asymmetric localisation of PCP proteins. Mammalian lenses are mainly comprised of epithelial-derived fiber cells. Concentrically arranged fibers are precisely aligned as they elongate along the anterior–posterior axis and orientate towards lens poles where they meet fibers from other segments to form characteristic sutures. We show that lens exhibits PCP, with each fiber cell having an apically situated cilium and in most cases this is polarised towards the anterior pole. Frizzled and other PCP proteins are also asymmetrically localised along the equatorial–anterior axis. Mutations in core PCP genes Van Gogh-like 2 and Celsr1 perturb oriented fiber alignment and suture formation. Suppression of the PCP pathway by overexpressing Sfrp2 shows that whilst local groups of fibers are often similarly oriented, they lack global orientation; consequently when local groups of fibers with different orientations meet they form multiple, small, ectopic suture-like configurations. This indicates that this extracellular inhibitor disrupts a global polarising signal that utilises a PCP-mediated mechanism to coordinate the global alignment and orientation of fibers to lens poles

Visible-Light Degradation of Dyes and Phenols over Mesoporous Titania Prepared by Using Anthocyanin from Red Radish as Template

Heterogeneous photocatalysis is able to operate effectively to eliminate organic compounds from wastewater in the presence of semiconductor photocatalyst and a light source. Although photosensitization of titania by organic dyes is one of the conventional ways for visible-light utilization of titania, previous studies have not yet addressed the use of natural food coloring agents as templates in the synthesis of mesostructured materials, let alone the simultaneous achievement of highly crystalline mesoscopic framework and visible-light photocatalytic activity. In this work, anthocyanin, a natural pigment from red radish was directly used as template in synthesis of highly crystalline mesoporous titania. The synthesized mesoporous titania samples were characterized by a combination of various physicochemical techniques, such as XRD, SEM, HRTEM, nitrogen adsorption/desorption, and diffuse reflectance UV-Vis. The prepared mesoporous titania photocatalyst exhibited significant activity under visible-light irradiation for the degradation of dyes and phenols due to its red shift of band-gap-absorption onset and visible-light response as a result of the incorporation of surface carbon species

Case report: Conversion therapy for advanced intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma using PD-1 inhibitor plus S-1 and nab-paclitaxel

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCCA) is a highly malignant hepatobiliary tumor with a high rate of advanced disease at initial presentation. Conversion into resectable iCCA is important for improving the prognosis. Immunotherapy-based regimens are being increasingly used for treating advanced iCCA in recent years. However, the use of combined chemotherapy and immunotherapy for conversion has rarely been reported. The aim of this report was to present the outcomes of a 52-year-old female patient with IIIB iCCA. The patient was treated with a programmed cell death protein-1 inhibitor plus S-1 and nab-paclitaxel. The postoperative histopathological results indicated pathologic complete response after six cycles of systematic treatment. The patient is currently disease-free for one year