The location of BRICS foreign direct investment in the European Union, 1997-2010

Ph. D. ThesisThe BRICS, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, accounts for 40 percent of global population and is predicted to be the largest economic group by 2050. Outward foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the BRICS has grown rapidly, from around US$7 billion in 2000 to US$126 billion in 2012 (UNCTAD, 2013). The European Union (EU) is traditionally a major beneficiary of FDI. However, there is few studies on the BRICS outward FDI, and there is relatively little evidence on how BRICS FDI differs in its characteristics between the BRICS countries and its location at a European level. The purpose of the thesis is to explore BRICS FDI location in the EU countries over the period 1997-2010. The thesis analyses data on over 35,000 FDI projects from the European Investment Monitor. The period covers the early stages of BRICS FDI and its growth, and the fifth EU enlargement to include the Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEEC). Conditional Logit, Multinomial Logit and count data methods are used, where the first two consider the dummy for a location as the dependent variable and the last one is used to control for the large number of zeros in the data. The thesis makes three main contributions. First, it describes BRICS FDI location in the EU countries (i.e. members in 2010), cross-tabulating this according to characteristics such as industry and function. Second, it finds many host country characteristics have an effect on global FDI location, but only a few of these are significant for the BRICS, of which the main factors are the GDP growth rate, higher education (i.e. tertiary education) rate, wage rate, exchange rate and political risk. Furthermore, Multinomial Logit model allows the project characteristics and sources to vary, such as the industry, function, investment type and global source region. The results reveal significant differences in BRICS FDI location between the old and new Member States, except the three main destination countries (i.e. France, Germany and the UK). Russian FDI tends to go to Central and Eastern Europe, Brazil FDI to Spain and Portugal, while there are differences in Chinese and Indian FDI location, both of which have grown strongly. The third contribution of the thesis is to examine the “follow-the-leader” behaviour, whereby FDI location in a country follows FDI from the same source in the preceding xiv year. This is explored using both the Conditional Logit and count data models. Statistical analysis shows that there is persistence in the country location whether it is considered over a one or two-year time horizon. The logit analysis shows that at the level of the BRICS group, BRICS FDI prefers the location of FDI from the same BRICS country but it tends to avoid the location of other BRICS FDI as a whole. At the individual BRICS level, China and India are the investment leaders of the five BRICS countries. The results are less clear for the count data methods. The exact reason for the ‘follow-the-leader’ behaviour is not known (e.g. it could be agglomeration economies, linkages or some unobserved heterogeneity, such as cultural factors), but it is worthy of further exploration. Overall, the thesis finds that outward FDI from the BRICS should not be treated as homogeneous. While there is evidence that BRICS FDI spreads out to other countries as it grows, and differences in BRICS FDI location at the European country level are likely to persistent over time

Social support and health behaviors of older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic in China: a moderated mediation model of loneliness and economic income

Background: The literature shows that social support is an important factor influencing health behaviors. This study aimed to explore the relationships and intrinsic pathways of social support, loneliness, economic income, and health behaviors among older adults during the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and to provide a theoretical basis for the implementation of health behaviors interventions for older adults. Methods: A cluster-random-sampling survey was adopted within two towns in Dongguan, China. Demographic characteristics, social support, loneliness, economic income and health behaviors were measured. The Social Support Appraisals scale (SS-A), the ULS-8 Loneliness Scale, and the Self-rated abilities for health practice scale (SRAHPS) were used to measure social support, loneliness, and health behaviors in older adults, respectively. A moderated mediation model was built to examine the relationships among social support, loneliness, economic income, and health behaviors using the SPSS PROCESS 4.0 macro. We conducted bootstrapping of regression estimates with 5000 samples and a 95% confidence interval. Results: 621 older adults completed the questionnaire. Most of the participants were female, accounting for 75.0%, and the average age was 81.11 years (SD = 8.11). The median (interquartile range) of the participants’ average monthly economic income was 800 (500–1000)RMB. The results of the mediation analysis showed that loneliness partly mediated the relationship between social support and health behaviors (B = 0.024, 95%CI: 0.007, 0.042), with the mediating effect accounting for 4.56% of the total effect. The moderation mediation analysis revealed a positive moderating role of economic income in the relationship between social support and loneliness (B = 0.114, 95%CI: 0.054, 0.174). Specifically, the relationship between social support and loneliness was found to be weaker for older adults with a high economic income compared to those with a lower economic income. Conclusion: The provision of enhanced social support and the alleviation of loneliness among older adults during an epidemic can facilitate the development of healthy behaviours, particularly among those who are economically disadvantaged

Masked Lip-Sync Prediction by Audio-Visual Contextual Exploitation in Transformers

Previous studies have explored generating accurately lip-synced talking faces for arbitrary targets given audio conditions. However, most of them deform or generate the whole facial area, leading to non-realistic results. In this work, we delve into the formulation of altering only the mouth shapes of the target person. This requires masking a large percentage of the original image and seamlessly inpainting it with the aid of audio and reference frames. To this end, we propose the Audio-Visual Context-Aware Transformer (AV-CAT) framework, which produces accurate lip-sync with photo-realistic quality by predicting the masked mouth shapes. Our key insight is to exploit desired contextual information provided in audio and visual modalities thoroughly with delicately designed Transformers. Specifically, we propose a convolution-Transformer hybrid backbone and design an attention-based fusion strategy for filling the masked parts. It uniformly attends to the textural information on the unmasked regions and the reference frame. Then the semantic audio information is involved in enhancing the self-attention computation. Additionally, a refinement network with audio injection improves both image and lip-sync quality. Extensive experiments validate that our model can generate high-fidelity lip-synced results for arbitrary subjects.Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 (Conference Proceedings). Project page: https://hangz-nju-cuhk.github.io/projects/AV-CA

Construction of acellular cartilage matrix/silk fibroin scaffold and its cartilage tissue engineering study

Objective·To construct a bioactivity tissue engineering scaffold with double network cross-linking for cartilage tissue regeneration using an acellular cartilage matrix (ACM) with a natural silk fibroin (SF) biomaterial.Methods·The cell-associated immunogenic components were removed by nuclease digestion, and the extracellular matrix-associated glycoproteins and collagen structures were retained, The efficiency of cartilage tissue decellularization was measured by spectrophotometry by using DNA, histoglycosaminoglycan and collagen quantification kits. ACM and SF were configured into a mixed solution, and the nucleophilic cross-linking reaction with the hydroxyl and carboxyl groups contained in both was carried out by adding ethylene glycol diglycidyl ether. Then it was freeze-dried to make porous bionic scaffolds (n=5). At the same time, porous scaffolds containing only ACM or SF were prepared by the same method (n=5). The microstructure of the scaffolds was observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and the mechanical strength, elastic modulus and resilience of different groups of scaffolds were evaluated by mechanical tests. The internal and external nutrient exchange capacity of the scaffolds was reacted by water absorption rate. Chondrocytes from rabbit ears were isolated, cultured, and seeded on ACM-SF scaffolds. After 1, 4, and 7 days of culture, the adhesion, distribution, and matrix secretion of the cells on the scaffolds were observed by SEM, and the viability status of the cells was determined by double-staining of live and dead cells. CCK-8 method was used to determine the cytotoxicity of the scaffolds. The cells were implanted subcutaneously in nude mice, cultured in vivo for 4 and 8 weeks, and finally removed for histological testing. Differences between groups were tested by One-Way ANOVA. Statistical significance was accepted at a value of P<0.05.Results·After enzymatic digestion, almost no cells remained in the acellular matrix, and the active components of the extracellular matrix were retained. The composite scaffold prepared by ACM-SF has interconnected microporous structure and good elasticity, and could recover its original shape after repeated compression in the wet state. The water absorption rate of ACM-SF reached nearly 20 times, which provided an effective material exchange condition for the cell adhesion environment. Histological tests showed that the ACM-SF scaffold regenerated homogeneous, typical cartilage tissue in vivo.Conclusion·ACM-SF composite porous scaffold has a good bionic microenvironment and can be applied to tissue engineering cartilage regeneration

Make Your Brief Stroke Real and Stereoscopic: 3D-Aware Simplified Sketch to Portrait Generation

Creating the photo-realistic version of people sketched portraits is useful to various entertainment purposes. Existing studies only generate portraits in the 2D plane with fixed views, making the results less vivid. In this paper, we present Stereoscopic Simplified Sketch-to-Portrait (SSSP), which explores the possibility of creating Stereoscopic 3D-aware portraits from simple contour sketches by involving 3D generative models. Our key insight is to design sketch-aware constraints that can fully exploit the prior knowledge of a tri-plane-based 3D-aware generative model. Specifically, our designed region-aware volume rendering strategy and global consistency constraint further enhance detail correspondences during sketch encoding. Moreover, in order to facilitate the usage of layman users, we propose a Contour-to-Sketch module with vector quantized representations, so that easily drawn contours can directly guide the generation of 3D portraits. Extensive comparisons show that our method generates high-quality results that match the sketch. Our usability study verifies that our system is greatly preferred by user.Comment: Project Page on https://hangz-nju-cuhk.github.io

“Seminal testosterone”, rising viewpoint of local spermatogenesis in nonobstructive azoospermia: One center long-term bidirectional cohort study

ObjectiveReproductive hormones are a traditional good method to evaluate spermatogenesis but might not accurately represent local spermatogenesis. To find a more accurate method, seminal reproductive hormones were studied.MethodsA bidirectional cohort study was performed. A total of 126 infertile men from 2018 to 2019 were retrospectively analyzed. They were divided into nonobstructive azoospermia (NOA), oligozoospermia (OLZ) and normal (NOR) groups. A prospective study was conducted on patients in the NOA and OLZ groups for 2 years. Microscopic testicular sperm extraction was performed for NOA patients, who were divided into a focal spermatogenesis group (FS) and an idiopathic azoospermia group (IA). Drug treatment was for OLZ patients, who were divided into a valid group (VA) and an invalid group (IN). The differences in sperm parameters and reproductive hormones were compared. ANOSIM analysis was used between and within groups. Pearson correlation analysis, CO inertia analysis and Proctor’s analysis were for relationships. ROC curve for the specificity and sensitivity. Time series analysis was for the trends between hormones and time.ResultsThe b-FSH, b-LH, s-T and ΔT in the NOA group were significantly higher than those in the OLZ and NOR groups. However, the s-FSH, s-E2, s-P, ΔFSH, ΔLH, ΔP and ΔE2 were lower. Thirty-one NOA patients underwent MTSE, of whom 12 had sperm (FS) and 19 had no sperm (IA). The s-FSH and s-E2 of the FS group were higher than those of the IA group. Twenty-six OLZ patients completed 30 days of treatment, of which 11 had an improved sperm count (VA) and 15 had no (IN). The ΔT of the VA group was higher than that of the IN group. After follow-up for 2 years, 18 patients’ results showed that b-FSH, b-LH and s-T were different over time, with delays of 19, 3 and -19 days. SC is closely related to pH, s-FSH, s-LH, s-E2, s-P, s-T, b-FSH, b-LH, ΔFSH, ΔLH, ΔP, ΔE2 and ΔT. There were complex common trends and relationships between different kinds of hormones. s-FSH, s-LH, s-E2, s-P, s-T, b-FSH and b-LH were useful to judge spermatogenesis, of which s-T, b-FSH and b-LH were more sensitive. If s-T, b-FSH and b-LH reached 64.4, 9.4 and 4.7, respectively, their prediction performance was the strongest.ConclusionSeminal testosterone is sensitive for judging local spermatogenesis in nonobstructive azoospermia patients, which may be the direction of local spermatogenesis in nonobstructive azoospermia.Clinical trial registrationhttp://www.chictr.org.cn/index.aspx, identifier ChiCTR2200060463

Leaf anatomy and ultrastructure in senescing ancient tree, Platycladus orientalis L. (Cupressaceae)

Platycladus orientalis L. (Cupressaceae) has a lifespan of thousands of years. Ancient trees have very high scientific, economic and cultural values. The senescence of ancient trees is a new research area but is poorly understood. Leaves are the primary and the most sensitive organ of a tree. To understand leaf structural response to tree senescence in ancient trees, experiments investigating the morphology, anatomy and ultrastructure were conducted with one-year leaves of ancient P. orientalis (ancient tree >2,000 years) at three different tree senescent levels (healthy, sub-healthy and senescent) at the world’s largest planted pure forest in the Mausoleum of Yellow Emperor, Shaanxi Province, China. Observations showed that leaf structure significantly changed with the senescence of trees. The chloroplast, mitochondria, vacuole and cell wall of mesophyll cells were the most significant markers of cellular ultrastructure during tree senescence. Leaf ultrastructure clearly reflected the senescence degree of ancient trees, confirming the visual evaluation from above-ground parts of trees. Understanding the relationships between leaf structure and tree senescence can support decision makers in planning the protection of ancient trees more promptly and effectively by adopting the timely rejuvenation techniques before the whole tree irreversibly recesses

Mapping and functional characterization of structural variation in 1060 pig genomes

BACKGROUND: Structural variations (SVs) have significant impacts on complex phenotypes by rearranging large amounts of DNA sequence.RESULTS: We present a comprehensive SV catalog based on the whole-genome sequence of 1060 pigs (Sus scrofa) representing 101 breeds, covering 9.6% of the pig genome. This catalog includes 42,487 deletions, 37,913 mobile element insertions, 3308 duplications, 1664 inversions, and 45,184 break ends. Estimates of breed ancestry and hybridization using genotyped SVs align well with those from single nucleotide polymorphisms. Geographically stratified deletions are observed, along with known duplications of the KIT gene, responsible for white coat color in European pigs. Additionally, we identify a recent SINE element insertion in MYO5A transcripts of European pigs, potentially influencing alternative splicing patterns and coat color alterations. Furthermore, a Yorkshire-specific copy number gain within ABCG2 is found, impacting chromatin interactions and gene expression across multiple tissues over a stretch of genomic region of ~200 kb. Preliminary investigations into SV's impact on gene expression and traits using the Pig Genotype-Tissue Expression (PigGTEx) data reveal SV associations with regulatory variants and gene-trait pairs. For instance, a 51-bp deletion is linked to the lead eQTL of the lipid metabolism regulating gene FADS3, whose expression in embryo may affect loin muscle area, as revealed by our transcriptome-wide association studies.CONCLUSIONS: This SV catalog serves as a valuable resource for studying diversity, evolutionary history, and functional shaping of the pig genome by processes like domestication, trait-based breeding, and adaptive evolution.</p