Digital piracy, creative productivity, and customer care effort: evidence from the digital publishing industry

We empirically investigate how writers’ output is affected by copyright piracy using data from a Chinese digital publishing platform. We identify two measurements of writers’ output—creative productivity and customer care—which are also affected by readers’ feedback through purchasing, tipping, and commenting. We take advantage of an exogenous event—the termination of a free personal storage service and search function by a leading Chinese cloud storage provider in June 2016—to causally identify the effects of the resulting reduced copyright piracy on writers’ efforts. Using a difference-in-differences modeling approach, we compare the changes in average writer behavior before and after the event across two groups of writers: (1) writers who have profit-sharing contracts with the platform and (2) those who do not. We find that after the termination, contracted writers increased their creative productivity efforts in terms of quantity without sac-rificing quality but reduced their customer care efforts. However, these effects are absent for noncontracted writers. Our study is among the first to provide empirical support for the positive effect of digital intellectual property rights infringement re-duction on creative productivity

Video Background Music Generation: Dataset, Method and Evaluation

Music is essential when editing videos, but selecting music manually is difficult and time-consuming. Thus, we seek to automatically generate background music tracks given video input. This is a challenging task since it requires plenty of paired videos and music to learn their correspondence. Unfortunately, there exist no such datasets. To close this gap, we introduce a dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric for video background music generation. We introduce SymMV, a video and symbolic music dataset, along with chord, rhythm, melody, and accompaniment annotations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first video-music dataset with high-quality symbolic music and detailed annotations. We also propose a benchmark video background music generation framework named V-MusProd, which utilizes music priors of chords, melody, and accompaniment along with video-music relations of semantic, color, and motion features. To address the lack of objective metrics for video-music correspondence, we propose a retrieval-based metric VMCP built upon a powerful video-music representation learning model. Experiments show that with our dataset, V-MusProd outperforms the state-of-the-art method in both music quality and correspondence with videos. We believe our dataset, benchmark model, and evaluation metric will boost the development of video background music generation

Co-sensitization and cross-reactivity of Blomia tropicalis with two Dermatophagoides species in Guangzhou, China

Around 85.50% of patients were sensitized to Der p, 85.37% of patients were sensitized to Der f, and 71.54% of patients were sensitized to Blo t. Further, 70.14% of patients were co-sensitized to Blo t, Der p, and Der f, and only seven patients were sensitized solely to Blo t. With increasing sIgE levels for Blo t, the positive rates of severe-level (class 5-6) co-sensitization to Der p or Der f significantly increased. Blo t was moderately associated with Der p and Der f, with correlation coefficients of 0.6998 and 0.6782, respectively. Der p and Der f inhibited IgE binding to Blo t more strongly than Blo t inhibited IgE binding to Der p or Der f in the patient groups CBlo t  < CDer p and CBlo t  < CDer f .Open Project of State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease [SKLRD-OP-201803, SKLRD-OP-201809]; Science and Technology Innovation Committee Project of Guangzhou [201831802]; Bureau of traditional Chinese Medicine Scientific Research Project of Guangdong [20192048]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [81601394, 81802076, 81871736]Open access articleThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals &lt;1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data