The future of Airbnb in China: industry perspective from hospitality leaders

This study aims to investigate the development of Airbnb in China from the perspective of hospitality leaders by identifying the positive and negative effects of Airbnb development in the country. A qualitative approach was adopted to explore the current development of theaccommodation sharing service in China. Focus group discussions were conducted with the managers and top executives of hotels in China. Most of the participants affirmed that the experience of local culture and authenticity are the advantages of staying in this type of informal accommodation. From the viewpoint of hoteliers, traditional accommodation types must rethink their strategies by providing desired authentic experiences. By contrast, Airbnb may not seamlessly fit into Chinese culture. The result urges the government to regulate the informal accommodation platforms. The study provides views on Airbnb from the traditional accommodation sector in Mainland China, which can contribute to the future regulation of informal accommodation services

Topic Shift Detection in Chinese Dialogues: Corpus and Benchmark

Dialogue topic shift detection is to detect whether an ongoing topic has shifted or should shift in a dialogue, which can be divided into two categories, i.e., response-known task and response-unknown task. Currently, only a few investigated the latter, because it is still a challenge to predict the topic shift without the response information. In this paper, we first annotate a Chinese Natural Topic Dialogue (CNTD) corpus consisting of 1308 dialogues to fill the gap in the Chinese natural conversation topic corpus. And then we focus on the response-unknown task and propose a teacher-student framework based on hierarchical contrastive learning to predict the topic shift without the response. Specifically, the response at high-level teacher-student is introduced to build the contrastive learning between the response and the context, while the label contrastive learning is constructed at low-level student. The experimental results on our Chinese CNTD and English TIAGE show the effectiveness of our proposed model

The preparation and properties of novel structural carbon foams derived from different mesophase pitches

As a novel porous multi-functional carbon material, carbon foams have high bulk thermal conductivity and low density, making them as excellent materials for thermal management systems applications, such as heat exchangers, space radiators, and thermal protection systems. In this paper, the carbon foams with high thermal conductivity, derived from three kinds of mesophase pitches, were fabricated by the process of foaming, carbonization and graphitization. The microstructures of the foams were examined by scanning electron microscopy. It was found that the pores were uniformly distributed, and the pore wall thickened with increasing foams’ density. The properties of the foams were studied, including compressive strength and thermal conductivity. The results showed that lower density and higher thermal conductivity were achieved for the foams using the two kinds of pitches with higher volatile components. The bulk thermal conductivity of carbon foams were up to 179 W/(m·K) and 201 W/(m·K), for the densities of 0.66 g/cm3 and 0.83 g/cm3, respectively. The foams’ compressive strength was in the range of 1.6 MPa to 3.4 MPa

Motivating and Sustaining Women\u27s Digital Literacy through ICT Learning

Digital literacy is one of the most important issues that women confront today. Lacking of digital literacy excludes women from lifelong learning and development. Our two-phase, multi-method study attempted to examine how ICT literacy affects women and identifies the key factors that motivate adult females to acquire ICT skills. The first phase identified important theoretical constructs that affect and sustain ICT learning and usage among women, using a qualitative approach based on Social Cognitive and Social Capital Theories. In the second phase, a quantitative study was conducted to validate the research model. Our findings suggest that social capital and learning satisfaction contribute significantly to ICT usage, and that this in turn has a positive impact on the level of well-being

CAPIH: A Web interface for comparative analyses and visualization of host-HIV protein-protein interactions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Human Immunodeficiency Virus type one (HIV-1) is the major causing pathogen of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). A large number of HIV-1-related studies are based on three non-human model animals: chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, and mouse. However, the differences in host-HIV-1 interactions between human and these model organisms have remained unexplored.</p> <p>Description</p> <p>Here we present CAPIH (Comparative Analysis of Protein Interactions for HIV-1), the first web-based interface to provide comparative information between human and the three model organisms in the context of host-HIV-1 protein interactions. CAPIH identifies genetic changes that occur in HIV-1-interacting host proteins. In a total of 1,370 orthologous protein sets, CAPIH identifies ~86,000 amino acid substitutions, ~21,000 insertions/deletions, and ~33,000 potential post-translational modifications that occur only in one of the four compared species. CAPIH also provides an interactive interface to display the host-HIV-1 protein interaction networks, the presence/absence of orthologous proteins in the model organisms in the networks, the genetic changes that occur in the protein nodes, and the functional domains and potential protein interaction hot sites that may be affected by the genetic changes. The CAPIH interface is freely accessible at <url>http://bioinfo-dbb.nhri.org.tw/capih</url>.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>CAPIH exemplifies that large divergences exist in disease-associated proteins between human and the model animals. Since all of the newly developed medications must be tested in model animals before entering clinical trials, it is advisable that comparative analyses be performed to ensure proper translations of animal-based studies. In the case of AIDS, the host-HIV-1 protein interactions apparently have differed to a great extent among the compared species. An integrated protein network comparison among the four species will probably shed new lights on AIDS studies.</p

A compatible exon-exon junction database for the identification of exon skipping events using tandem mass spectrum data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Alternative splicing is an important gene regulation mechanism. It is estimated that about 74% of multi-exon human genes have alternative splicing. High throughput tandem (MS/MS) mass spectrometry provides valuable information for rapidly identifying potentially novel alternatively-spliced protein products from experimental datasets. However, the ability to identify alternative splicing events through tandem mass spectrometry depends on the database against which the spectra are searched.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We wrote scripts in perl, Bioperl, mysql and Ensembl API and built a theoretical exon-exon junction protein database to account for all possible combinations of exons for a gene while keeping the frame of translation (i.e., keeping only in-phase exon-exon combinations) from the Ensembl Core Database. Using our liver cancer MS/MS dataset, we identified a total of 488 non-redundant peptides that represent putative exon skipping events.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our exon-exon junction database provides the scientific community with an efficient means to identify novel alternatively spliced (exon skipping) protein isoforms using mass spectrometry data. This database will be useful in annotating genome structures using rapidly accumulating proteomics data.</p