Feasibility Study on the Nomination of "Cave Heavens and Blessed Lands: Cultural Landscape of Taoist Worldview"

Cave Heavens and Blessed Lands are a unique Taoist conceptual system of sacred places in China. These sacred spaces, located in spectacular and abundant landscapes where immortals dwell in legend, reflect the Taoist worldviews about the balance of nature, society, and belief in immortality. The system was first recorded in the 2nd century and came to maturity in the 7th century, during which 118 locations across China were established by 2 Taoist masters as the official components of the system. This system had a profound impact on rituals, literature, painting, and gardening art in China and other countries in East Asia. Taoists have kept these places as spiritual and natural sanctuaries for over 1,000 years. In the context of a Feasibility Study for the Nomination of "Cave Heavens and Blessed Lands: Cultural Landscape of Taoist Worldview" on to the World Heritage List, this article aims to give a brief introduction and analysis of the sacredness of the Cave Heavens and Blessed Lands

Examination of key factors influencing international franchisor's entry mode choice in China

Market entry strategies of international franchising firms have been extensively researched. However, most of the studies focus on the cases of developed countries rather than developing countries. Since China adopted the open policy in 1978, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has grown rapidly and played an increasingly important role in contributing to the 9 percent of economic growth in the last two decades in China. Franchising, as an important entry method, has been adopted by many foreign investors to expand their business in China. Although the Chinese franchising market is still in its infancy, it creates tremendous opportunities for international franchisors. This thesis attempts to determine the factors associated with the international franchising firms' entry modes choices when these international franchisors enter the Chinese market and to find the relationships between these factors and decision of entry mode choice. To achieve these objectives, the positivist has been chosen as the philosophical stance for this research. Consisting with this research paradigm, a structured survey was undertaken as the main research method underlying quantitative research methodology. After a pilot study, 400 questionnaires were conducted by sampling international franchisors in China in the main research. Based on the five developed hypotheses, the determinants of franchising entry mode choice have been tested by using a logit model. The findings of this research reveal five important factors which dramatically influence international franchisors' entry mode choices in the Chinese markets. They are: culture and geographic distance, market operation experience, risk spreading, franchising system development stage and mature of the franchising system. Firstly, this study indicates that the less the cultural and geographic distance between the host and home country, the more likely the international franchising firms is to adopt direct franchising entry mode into Chinese market. Secondly, the richer experience the international franchisor, the more likely the firms is to adopt direct franchising entry mode into China. Thirdly, the higher the rate of the expansion of the franchising system, the more likely the firms is to adopt direct franchising entry mode in China. Fourthly, the more mature the international franchising system, the more likely the firms is to adopt direct franchising entry mode in China. Finally, the more consideration of risk spreading, the more likely the firms is to adopt direct franchising entry mode in China. This study offers a number of distinctive contributions from both academic and practical perspectives. Theoretically, this study has advanced the current literature of international franchising by examining cases in the emerging market of China and added more insights to the mainstream of franchising theories. Most importantly, it provides a guide to assist practitioners deciding their franchising entry modes effectively and offers valuable suggestions for policy makers in their foreign policy development regarding international franchisors' business operations in China. Significantly, this study provides timely information for academics and practitioners concerning the current status of international franchisors' business in the Chinese market

A Study of Taxi Service Mode Choice Based on Evolutionary Game Theory

The emergence of online car-hailing service provides an innovative approach to vehicle booking but has negatively influenced the taxi industry in China. This paper modeled taxi service mode choice based on evolutionary game theory (EGT). The modes included the dispatching and online car-hailing modes. We constructed an EGT framework, including determining the strategies and the payoff matrix. We introduced different behaviors, including taxi company management, driver operation, and passenger choice. This allowed us to model the impact of these behaviors on the evolving process of service mode choice. The results show that adjustments in taxi company, driver, and passenger behaviors impact the evolutionary path and convergence speed of our evolutionary game model. However, it also reveals that, regardless of adjustments, the stable states in the game model remain unchanged. The conclusion provides a basis for studying taxi system operation and management. Document type: Articl

MRI-based prostate cancer detection with high-level representation and hierarchical classification

Extracting the high-level feature representation by using deep neural networks for detection of prostate cancer, and then based on high-level feature representation constructing hierarchical classification to refine the detection results

NLH: A Blind Pixel-level Non-local Method for Real-world Image Denoising

Non-local self similarity (NSS) is a powerful prior of natural images for image denoising. Most of existing denoising methods employ similar patches, which is a patch-level NSS prior. In this paper, we take one step forward by introducing a pixel-level NSS prior, i.e., searching similar pixels across a non-local region. This is motivated by the fact that finding closely similar pixels is more feasible than similar patches in natural images, which can be used to enhance image denoising performance. With the introduced pixel-level NSS prior, we propose an accurate noise level estimation method, and then develop a blind image denoising method based on the lifting Haar transform and Wiener filtering techniques. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that, the proposed method achieves much better performance than previous non-deep methods, and is still competitive with existing state-of-the-art deep learning based methods on real-world image denoising. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/njusthyk1972/NLH.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 10 tables, accept by IEEE TI

Editorial: Weakly supervised deep learning-based methods for brain image analysis

In recent years, deep learning-based methods have been widely used in the fields of brain image analysis and achieved excellent performance in many tasks, including image segmentation, image reconstruction, and disease classification (Shen et al., 2017). Most of the existing deep learning-based methods rely on large-scale datasets with highquality full annotations. However, it is usually time-consuming and requires rich expert experience to acquire such data. Moreover, because of individual differences in observer experience and understanding, large-scale and full annotated datasets may suffer from large intra- and inter-observer variability, which could hinder their application in brain image analysis. In contrast, weak yet low-cost annotations (such as coarse annotations, partial annotations, or small sample annotations) are much easier to collect than high-quality full detailed annotations. As a result, there is a strong desire for innovative deep learning-based methodologies that can efficiently learn from weakly-annotated data and achieve competitive performance compared with using full annotation data (Campanella et al., 2019)

Home or hospital as the place of end-of-life care and death: A survey among Chinese residents of Macao

ObjectivesThe study was the first to explore Chinese residents' preferred place of care at the end of life and preferred place of death in Macao.MethodsA cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted online and face-to-face. The questionnaire was designed in Chinese, and both online and face-to-face surveys were conducted in Chinese. The study was conducted in Macao. Macao residents aged 18 years and older were recruited.ResultsA total of 737 responses were valid, 65% were female, aged between 19 and 101 years; 43.4% of respondents preferred to be cared for at home in the last 6 months; however, less than one-fifth preferred to die at home. One-third of respondents chose to die in the hospice, and over a quarter of them preferred to die in hospitals. Compared with people aged between 18 and 39 years, people aged between 40 and 64 years did not want to be cared for at home in the last 6 months, and they did not want to die at home either.ConclusionThe results of the study suggested that there is a need for palliative home care in Macao, and the government should consider developing such a service and review current laws and regulations in supporting the service. Education is equally important for healthcare professionals, enabling them to support palliative care development in the community

Effects of Physical Synergistic Enzymatic Treatment on Structural Characteristics of Highland Barley Starch

In order to study the effect of physical synergistic enzymatic treatment on the structural characteristics of highland barley starch, ultrasonic and pressure heat were combined with pullulanase to treat highland barley starch. The particle morphology, crystal structure, functional group structure and particle size of treated samples were determined. The results showed that the contents of resistant starch and amylose were increased while amylopectin was decreased. The original structure of starch granules of highland barley was seriously damaged by the modification, showing a clumped structure, rough surface, full of wrinkles, cracks and holes, and the polarized cross disappeared. It was also found that the average particles size of highland barley starch and the number of large particles increased. Meanwhile, the crystallinity of highland barley starch changed from A-type crystal to B-, C- and V-type which lead to the crystallinity increased. The modified treatment did not produce new chemical groups and chemical bonds, but changed the internal structure of barley starch rearrangement. In addition, compared to untreated, the order degree (DO) of the modified barley starch increased, and the value of DO treated with pullulanase was the largest. The modification treatment made the starch molecules into smaller particles then formed more denser and larger starch crystals

System-level biological effects of extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields: an in vivo experimental review

During the past decades, the potential effects of extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMFs) on human health have gained great interest all around the world. Though the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection recommended a 100 μT, and then a 200 μT magnetic field limit, the long-term effects of ELF-EMFs on organisms and systems need to be further investigated. It was reported that both electrotherapy and possible effects on human health could be induced under ELF-EM radiation with varied EM frequencies and fields. This present article intends to systematically review the in vivo experimental outcome and the corresponding mechanisms to shed some light on the safety considerations of ELF-EMFs. This will further advance the subsequent application of electrotherapy in human health