A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and Foreign Price Hearing System

The extent of public participation is an important criterion for the democratization and legalization level of a country. As as an important manifestation of public participation, the price hearing system is important for the protection of the vital interests of ordinary citizens and the supervision of administrative organs’ abidance by law. At present, China has established a price hearing system, but there are a number of problems in the actual execution process. In this paper, the Chinese and foreign price hearing system are compared and analyzed to explore the cause for the problems in China’s price hearing system and provide suggestions for the further improvement of China’s price hearing system

Porous Silicon-Based On-Demand Nanohybrids for Biomedical Applications

Considerable efforts have been made to fabricate nano-sized drug delivery systems (DDS) with unique and advanced features in comparison to conventional DDS. Yet, challenges still lay ahead requesting for more controllable, even on-demand drug release profiles from the DDS. Moreover, the emerging concept of personalized treatment further urges the combining of therapy and imaging regimes into a single nanocarrier. Among all the nanomaterials studied so far, porous silicon (PSi) draws increasing interest for constructing DDS due to its good biocompatibility, non-immunogenicity, large pore size/surface area and easily changeable surface properties. Herein, the aim of this thesis was to explore PSi-based DDS for multiple biomedical applications, which were designed and synthesized with specific on-demand features. Moreover, simultaneous incorporation of imaging modalities and drugs enables real-time visualization of drug release and/or cellular/tissue level disease condition, which are expected to be beneficial for personalized treatment regime. First, the potential of PSi nanoparticles for hydrophilic drug loading and on-demand release were evaluated by adapting a dynamic non-covalent bonding method. Different ligands were synthesized and applied for modifying the PSi, and the hydrophilic anti-cancer drug doxorubicin (DOX) was sequentially loaded into the fabricated DDS for pH-responsive release profiles. Meanwhile, the fluorescence spectrum of DOX can be dynamically shifted or quenched, depending on the loading and releasing process, thus facilitating the in situ visualization of the drug releasing process. For hydrophobic drugs, a physical encapsulation method was applied to seal the pores of the PSi by a polymeric matrix. Microfluidic-assisted nanoprecipitation method was applied to synthesize batches of nanohybrids with identical PSi-core/polymer-shell structures, and the release behavior was feasibly tailored by the degradation behavior of the outer polymeric matrix. The first trial was set to fabricate a core/shell nanohybrid, with PSi and gold nanoparticles co-encapsulated in a pH-responsive polymer to simultaneously deliver hydrophobic drug and increase the computed tomography signal for acute liver failure theranostics. The newly established single-step co-encapsulation of different particles endowed a system with multi-functionalities, and the polymeric shell precisely tailored the drug release behavior in a pH-dependent manner. Similarly, an acid/oxidation dual-responsive polymer was designed and further applied in encapsulating atorvastatin-loaded PSi nanoparticles. The meticulously designed system not only obtained a dynamic drug release behavior, but also showed an orchestrated cascade that facilitated bio-mimetic diabetic wound healing. To better elucidate the biocompatibility of PSi for DDS fabrication, the biological effects and immunogenicity of different PSi nanoparticles were evaluated at pre-existing lesion sites, which provided insights for further applications of PSi in DDS fabrication. In conclusion, multiple PSi-based nanohybrids with different on-demand responses were fabricated and applied as DDSs for different diseases. The newly developed nanosystems tailored drug release and obtained multiple modalities, ranging from real-time bio-imaging to bio-mimetic/bio-response alteration, as such, represent promising platforms for future therapy regimes.Nanokokoisilla lääkeainekuljettimilla on ainutlaatuisia ja kehittyneempiä ominaisuuksia perinteisiin lääkeaineen kuljetusmenetelmiin verrattuna. Niiden kehittämiseksi on tehty paljon, siitä huolimatta niillä on edessä vieläkin useita haasteita, jotka vaativat täsmällistä ja erityisen hyvin säädeltyä lääkeaineenvapautumista. Lisäksi kiinnostus potilaslähtöiseen hoitoon vaatii terapian ja kuvantamismahdollisuuksien yhdistämistä yksittäiseen lääkeaineen nanokantajaan. Yksi kiinnostavimmista tähän mennessä tutkituista materiaaleista on huokoinen pii (PSi), mikä johtuu sen bioyhteensopivuudesta, vähäisestä immunogeenisyydestä, suuresta huokosten koosta ja pinta-alasta sekä helposti muunnettavista pinnan ominaisuuksista. Tämän väitöstyön tavoite oli tutkia huokoiseen piihin pohjautuvien räätälöityjen lääkeainekuljettimien soveltuvuutta erilaisiin biolääketieteellisiin sovelluksiin. Lääkeaineiden ja kuvantamisen mahdollistavien aineiden kuormaaminen samoihin nanohiukkasiin mahdollistaa tosiaikaisen lääkeaineenvapautumisen kuvantamisen sekä taudinkuvan määrittämisen solu- ja/tai kudostasolla, joiden molempien voi odottaa olevan hyödyllisiä potilaslähtöiseen terapiaan. Ensimmäiseksi tutkittiin PSi-nanohiukkasten soveltuvuutta hydrofiilisten lääkeaineiden kantajina. Hallittua lääkeaineenvapautumista tutkittiin soveltamalla dynaamista ei-kovalenttista sidosmenetelmää. Erilaisia ligandeja syntetisoitiin ja niitä kiinnitettiin PSi-nanohiukkasten pintaan. Tämän jälkeen hiukkasiin kuormattiin syöpälääke doksorubisiinia, jonka pH-vasteellinen vapautuminen määritettiin. Doksorubisiinin fluoresenssispektri voidaan dynaamisesti siirtää tai sammuttaa eri kuormaamis- ja vapautumismenetelmillä, mikä mahdollistaa lääkeaineenvapautumis-prosessin in situ-kuvantamisen. Hydrofobisille lääkeaineille sovellettiin mikrofluidiikkaan perustuvaa kapselointia, jossa lääke ensin kuormattiin PSi:n huokosiin, jotka sitten suljettiin polymeeri-matriisilla. Lääkeaineenvapautuminen määräytyi polymeerin hajoamisnopeudesta. Ensimmäisessä kokeessa valmistettiin kuori/ydin-nanohybridejä, joissa PSi, kultananohiukkaset sekä hydrofobinen lääkeaine kapseloitiin pH-vasteelliseen polymeeriin. Näin voitiin akuutin maksan vajaatoiminnan yhteydessä säädellä lääkeaineenvapautumista pH:n avulla sekä samanaikaisesti tomografiakuvantaa. Yksivaiheisella kerakapseloinnilla, jossa yhdistetään erilaisia partikkeleita, saatiin aikaan monitoiminnallinen kuljetin, jonka polymeerikuori kykenee täsmällisesti säätelemään lääkeaineenvapautumista eri pH-olosuhteissa. Seuraavassa kokeessa pH- ja hapettumis-vasteellisella polymeerillä kapseloitiin atorvastatiinilla kuormattuja PSi-nanohiukkasia. Nämä huolellisesti suunnitellut nanohiukkaset kykenivät aktiivisesti muuttamaan lääkeaineen vapautumista mutta myös vaikuttivat aktiivisesti, muistuttaen luonnollista prosessia, diabeteksesta johtuvan haavan paranemiseen. PSi-hiukkasten biologinen yhteensopivuus lääkeaineenkuljettimeksi varmistettiin tutkimalla erilaisten PSi-nanohiukkasten biologisia vaikutuksia ja immunogeenisyyttä leesio (haavauma) kohdissa. Näin saatiin lisätietoa jatkokehittelyyn. Väitöstyössä kehitettiin useita piihiukkasiin pohjautuvia nanoyhdistelmiä lääkeainekuljetukseen erilaisten tautien hoitamiseksi. Perinteisiin lääkeaineenkuljetus-menetelmiin verrattuna uusien nanosysteemien etuja ovat tarpeenmukainen lääkeaineenvapautuminen ja monikäyttöisyys – tosiaikaisesta kuvantamisesta luonnollista prosessia muistuttavaan tai biologista vastetta muuttavaan vaikutukseen. Sellaisena ne edustavat lupaavaa menetelmää tulevaisuuden hoidoill

Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in deep learning, especially deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have led to significant improvement over previous semantic segmentation systems. Here we show how to improve pixel-wise semantic segmentation by manipulating convolution-related operations that are of both theoretical and practical value. First, we design dense upsampling convolution (DUC) to generate pixel-level prediction, which is able to capture and decode more detailed information that is generally missing in bilinear upsampling. Second, we propose a hybrid dilated convolution (HDC) framework in the encoding phase. This framework 1) effectively enlarges the receptive fields (RF) of the network to aggregate global information; 2) alleviates what we call the "gridding issue" caused by the standard dilated convolution operation. We evaluate our approaches thoroughly on the Cityscapes dataset, and achieve a state-of-art result of 80.1% mIOU in the test set at the time of submission. We also have achieved state-of-the-art overall on the KITTI road estimation benchmark and the PASCAL VOC2012 segmentation task. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/TuSimple/TuSimple-DUC .Comment: WACV 2018. Updated acknowledgements. Source code: https://github.com/TuSimple/TuSimple-DU

Service quality in education of International Department of Hebi Senior School from students' perspective

The purpose of the research was to analyze and improve the service quality in education in International Department of Hebi Senior School. The target organization can improve their image to existing and potential customers with this development work. The partial challenges of this study were: 1) to collect responds from three aspects: teachers, students and parents. 2) To clarify the principles of Total Quality School Model implement in the target organization. The deductive approach was used in this research and the empirical data was gathered with a qualitative method. Both primary and secondary data was used in order to fulfill the purpose of the research. The empirical findings represent the primary data which was gathered through both personal interviews and questionnaires; meanwhile the secondary data was gathered from literature, Hebi Senior School’s website and some articles. The topics discussed in the theoretical part of the thesis include the issues of service quality, measurements, and total quality management in education. This part of the thesis relies heavily on professional literature. Finally, the thesis offered two recommendations which are new evaluation system for teachers and psychological lessons for parents and students. But considering Chinese education background and current situation, the new evaluation system offered by International Department were difficult to implement in the whole school. According to the development of the education in China, and the report which is named , the thesis believes that this new evaluation system can meet the future development of education

How Does Suppliers’ Fairness Affect the Relationship Quality of Agricultural Product Supply Chains?

Although many studies have suggested that the relationship between different supply chain members significantly affects agricultural product quality, suppliers’ perceptions of fairness, which greatly influence their decisions on building the relationship quality, are often overlooked. Particularly, the empirical evidence to investigate the impacts of suppliers’ fairness on the relationship quality and the factors that affect the suppliers’ fairness is missing, and therefore this knowledge gap needs to be filled by new research. Herein, we conducted a survey of 450 agricultural product suppliers and systemically analyzed the impact of antecedents on fairness perception and the impact of fairness perception on relationship quality. In addition, we developed a structural equation model and found that information sharing and price satisfaction had significantly positive effects on procedural fairness and distributive fairness, respectively. Furthermore, our studies demonstrated that procedural fairness is more important in improving the relationship quality than distributive fairness. However, supplier dependence is another important impact factor, and it greatly decreases the positive effects of suppliers’ fairness on relationship quality. In summary, the study results provide several managerial implications and extend our understanding of the importance of suppliers’ fairness in the relationship quality, which involves product development with respect to the supplier’s performance