Analysis of urban expansion and transportation characteristics

Urban expansion and transportation are actually interrelated. Shanghai’s rapid urban expansion was caused by the inflow of people and the relocation of employment, which increased people’s travel demand, particularly for long-distance and motorized travel, greatly from 1990s onward. Dynamic travel purposes increased non-commute trips as well as people’s travel rates. Thus, average daily trips rose sharply due to these combined effects. Based on results of statistical analyses, population and GDP are statistically significant factors that increase average daily trips, while the expansion of urban space is significantly related to the growth of private motorized car share in Shanghai. People are working to increase transportation supply to fulfill travel demand by constructing more roads and promoting a well-designed public transportation system. However, the growth in demand has outpaced the increase in supply, as indicated by more congested roads, trains, and buses despite the significant increase in subway ridership. The demand management strategy needs to be involved in the policy making process to manage not only the growth of motorization, but also the growth of urban spaces and population. More supply still induces new demand, and the demand will continue to grow unless it is managed

Extracting Product Features from Online Consumer Reviews

Along with the exponential growth of user-generated content online comes the need of making sense of such content. Online consumer review is one type of user-generated content that has been more important. Thus, there is a demand for uncovering hidden patterns, unknown relationships and other useful information. The focal problem of this research is product feature extraction. Few existing studies has looked into detailed categorization of review features and explored how to adjust extraction methods by taking account of the characteristics of different categories of features. This paper begins with the introduction of a new scheme of feature classification and then introduces new extraction methods for each type of features separately. These methods were design to not only recognize new features but also filter irrelevant features. The experimental results show that our proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art techniques

Recent Progress in Pharmaceutical Therapies for Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer

Since 2010, six drugs have been approved for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer, i.e., CYP17 inhibitor Abiraterone, androgen receptor antagonist Enzalutamide, cytotoxic agent Cabazitaxel, vaccine Sipuleucel-T, antibody Denosumab against receptor activator of nuclear factor kappa B ligand and radiopharmaceutical Alpharadin. All these drugs demonstrate improvement on overall survival, expect for Denosumab, which increases the bone mineral density of patients under androgen deprivation therapy and prolongs bone-metastasis-free survival. Besides further CYP17 inhibitors (Orteronel, Galeterone, VT-464 and CFG920), androgen receptor antagonists (ARN-509, ODM-201, AZD-3514 and EZN-4176) and vaccine Prostvac, more drug candidates with various mechanisms or new indications of launched drugs are currently under evaluation in different stages of clinical trials, including various kinase inhibitors and platinum complexes. Some novel strategies have also been proposed aimed at further potentiation of antitumor effects or reduction of side effects and complications related to treatments. Under these flourishing circumstances, more investigations should be performed on the optimal combination or the sequence of treatments needed to delay or reverse possible resistance and thus maximize the clinical benefits for the patients

Expression and subcellular localization of antiporter regulating protein OsARP in rice induced by submergence, salt and drought stresses

We examined the expression and subcellular localization of antiporter regulating protein OsARP in a submergence tolerant rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivar FR13A. In the public databases, this protein was designated as putative Os02g0465900 protein. The cDNA containing the full-length sequence of OsARP gene was present in Gene Bank Accession no. AK071205 and this encoded 216 amino acids which had molecular mass of 25 kD. The OsARP gene was first expressed into E. coli and antibody was produced by using purified recombinant protein. The expression of OsARP protein was detected under submergence, salt and drought stresses. This protein was widely expressed in roots, shoots and leaves of rice under salt stress. To get an insight into the functional role of OsARP protein, subcellular localization was done using cell fractionation of rice leaves. Immuno-blotting of 3-day submergence rice leaves cell fractions detected the presence of OsARP protein in plasma-membrane fraction only. This indicates that OsARP is a membrane bound protein of rice which is expressed under submergence, salt and drought stresses.Key words: Drought, antiporter regulating protein, immuno-localization, rice, salinity, submergence

Molecular cloning and expression analysis of adiponectin and its receptors (AdipoR1 and AdipoR2) in the hypothalamus of the Huoyan goose during different stages of the egg-laying cycle

Multiple amino acid sequence alignment of the Huoyan goose adiponectin protein with other vertebrate species. The colour black denotes 100 % conserved sequences, and the colour grey indicates non-conservative sequences. Gaps (−) were introduced to maximize the alignment. Sequences for the alignment were obtained from GenBank (accession numbers are in brackets): Anas platyrhynchos (ADA68839.1); Ovis aries (AHV91023.1); Canis lupus familiaris (BAD15362.1); Felis catus (BAF52934.1); Gallus (AAX40986.1); Homo sapiens (NP_004788.1); Meleagris gallopavo (XP_010714799.1); Mus musculus (NP_033735.3); and Sus scrofa (ABQ95350.1). (TIFF 3483 kb

Single nucleotide polymorphisms of one-carbon metabolism and cancers of the esophagus, stomach, and liver in a Chinese population.

One-carbon metabolism (folate metabolism) is considered important in carcinogenesis because of its involvement in DNA synthesis and biological methylation reactions. We investigated the associations of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in folate metabolic pathway and the risk of three GI cancers in a population-based case-control study in Taixing City, China, with 218 esophageal cancer cases, 206 stomach cancer cases, 204 liver cancer cases, and 415 healthy population controls. Study participants were interviewed with a standardized questionnaire, and blood samples were collected after the interviews. We genotyped SNPs of the MTHFR, MTR, MTRR, DNMT1, and ALDH2 genes, using PCR-RFLP, SNPlex, or TaqMan assays. To account for multiple comparisons and reduce the chances of false reports, we employed semi-Bayes (SB) shrinkage analysis. After shrinkage and adjusting for potential confounding factors, we found positive associations between MTHFR rs1801133 and stomach cancer (any T versus C/C, SB odds-ratio [SBOR]: 1.79, 95% posterior limits: 1.18, 2.71) and liver cancer (SBOR: 1.51, 95% posterior limits: 0.98, 2.32). There was an inverse association between DNMT1 rs2228612 and esophageal cancer (any G versus A/A, SBOR: 0.60, 95% posterior limits: 0.39, 0.94). In addition, we detected potential heterogeneity across alcohol drinking status for ORs relating MTRR rs1801394 to esophageal (posterior homogeneity P = 0.005) and stomach cancer (posterior homogeneity P = 0.004), and ORs relating MTR rs1805087 to liver cancer (posterior homogeneity P = 0.021). Among non-alcohol drinkers, the variant allele (allele G) of these two SNPs was inversely associated with the risk of these cancers; while a positive association was observed among ever-alcohol drinkers. Our results suggest that genetic polymorphisms related to one-carbon metabolism may be associated with cancers of the esophagus, stomach, and liver. Heterogeneity across alcohol consumption status of the associations between MTR/MTRR polymorphisms and these cancers indicates potential interactions between alcohol drinking and one-carbon metabolic pathway

Adaptive Geometry Images for Remeshing

Geometry images are a kind of completely regular remeshing methods for mesh representation. Traditional geometry images have difficulties in achieving optimal reconstruction errors and preserving manually selected geometric details, due to the limitations of parametrization methods. To solve two issues, we propose two adaptive geometry images for remeshing triangular meshes. The first scheme produces geometry images with the minimum Hausdorff error by finding the optimization direction for sampling points based on the Hausdorff distance between the original mesh and the reconstructed mesh. The second scheme produces geometry images with higher reconstruction precision over the manually selected region-of-interest of the input mesh, by increasing the number of sampling points over the region-of-interest. Experimental results show that both schemes give promising results compared with traditional parametrization-based geometry images