The Transcription Factor SALL4 Regulates Stemness of EpCAM-positive Hepatocellular Carcinoma

13301甲第3999号博士（医学）金沢大学博士論文要旨Abstract 以下に掲載：JOURNAL OF HEPATOLOGY 60(1) pp.127-134 2014. ELSEVIER. 共著者：Sha Sha Zeng, Taro Yamashita, Mitsumasa Kondo, Kouki Nio, Takehiro Hayashi, Yasumasa Hara, Yoshimoto Nomura, Mariko Yoshida, Tomoyuki Hayashi, Naoki Oishi, Hiroko Ikeda, Masao Honda, Shuichi Kaneko

How does digital technology affect total factor productivity in manufacturing industries? Empirical evidence from China

Extensive studies have discussed the relationship between digital technology and total factor productivity (T.F.P.) in manufacturing industries, but far less attention is paid to the nonlinear relationship. Based on the panel data of China’s manufacturing industries and matching data of National Intellectual Property Public Service Network from 2000 to 2019, this article aims to explore how digital technology affects T.F.P. in manufacturing industries. The result demonstrates that a significant inverted U-shaped relationship is between digital technology and T.F.P. The threshold in high technology manufacturing industries is larger than that in low and middle technology manufacturing industries. With the progress of digital technology, the expenditure of technology and equipment upgrading is increasing. However, the marginal return of technology and equipment is decreasing, besides technology innovation. The case of China perhaps provides new insights into manufacturing industries in developing country to gain sustainable development

Towards Automatic Boundary Detection for Human-AI Hybrid Essay in Education

Human-AI collaborative writing has been greatly facilitated with the help of modern large language models (LLM), e.g., ChatGPT. While admitting the convenience brought by technology advancement, educators also have concerns that students might leverage LLM to partially complete their writing assignment and pass off the human-AI hybrid text as their original work. Driven by such concerns, in this study, we investigated the automatic detection of Human-AI hybrid text in education, where we formalized the hybrid text detection as a boundary detection problem, i.e., identifying the transition points between human-written content and AI-generated content. We constructed a hybrid essay dataset by partially removing sentences from the original student-written essays and then instructing ChatGPT to fill in for the incomplete essays. Then we proposed a two-step detection approach where we (1) Separated AI-generated content from human-written content during the embedding learning process; and (2) Calculated the distances between every two adjacent prototypes (a prototype is the mean of a set of consecutive sentences from the hybrid text in the embedding space) and assumed that the boundaries exist between the two prototypes that have the furthest distance from each other. Through extensive experiments, we summarized the following main findings: (1) The proposed approach consistently outperformed the baseline methods across different experiment settings; (2) The embedding learning process (i.e., step 1) can significantly boost the performance of the proposed approach; (3) When detecting boundaries for single-boundary hybrid essays, the performance of the proposed approach could be enhanced by adopting a relatively large prototype size, leading to a $22$\% improvement (against the second-best baseline method) in the in-domain setting and an $18$\% improvement in the out-of-domain setting.Comment: 9 pages including references, 2 figure

A unified 4/8/16/32-point integer IDCT architecture for multiple video coding standards

(4096x2048) 30fps video sequence at 191MHz working frequency, with 93K gate count and 18944-bit SRAM. We suggest a normalized criterion called design efficiency to compare with previous works. It shows that this design is 31% more efficient than previous work

BMP7 Gene involved in nonsyndromic orofacial clefts in Western han Chinese

Background: Nonsyndromic orofacial clefts (NSOCs) are the most common craniofacial birth defects with complex etiology in which multiple genes and environmental exposures are involved. Bone morphogenetic protein 7 (BMP7), as a member of the transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) superfamily, has been shown to play crucial roles in palate and other orofacial ectodermal appendages development in animal models. Material and Methods: This study was designed to investigate the possible associations between BMP7 gene and the NSOCs (221 case-parent trios) in Western Han Chinese. Five tagSNPs at BMP7, rs12438, rs6099486, rs6127973, rs230188 and rs6025469 were picked and tried to cover the entire gene. In order to identify the contribution of BMP7 gene to the etiology of NSOCs, we performed several statistical analysis from different aspects including transmission disequilibrium test (TDT), pairwise linkage disequilibrium (LD), parent-of-origin effect and Chi-squared/Fisher’s exact tests. Results: Rs6127973 G allele and G/G homozygotes were over-transmitted for both NSOCs ( P =0.005 and P =0.011, respectively) and NSCL/P ( P =0.0061 and P =0.011, respectively), rs6127973 G allele was also paternally over- transmitted for both NSOCs ( P =0.0061) and NSCL/P ( P =0.011). Conclusions: This study suggested that rs6127973 may be a risk factor of being NSOCs and confirmed the role of BMP7 gene in orofacial deformity from Western Han Chinese, which will also supply scientific evidence for future research and genetic counseling

Exploring the first-time transition to parenthood in mainland China: a qualitative study on the experiences of fathers and mothers using the transition shock model

BackgroundThe transition to parenthood, which is influenced a lot by local parenting culture, is a dramatic stress for both men and women. Chinese social and cultural contexts form specific parental culture, shaping the unique experience of transition to parenthood. However, the understanding of the transition to parenthood in mainland China is limited. Additionally, few qualitative studies explored the transition to parenthood from both dyadic perspectives.AimTo explore the first-time transition to parenthood experience among mothers and fathers in mainland China during pregnancy, and compare the similarities and differences between their experiences in this transition period.MethodsA descriptive qualitative study was conducted with 36 parents, including 18 primiparous women and their husbands. Data were analyzed by directed content analysis guided by the Transition Shock Model. The interview texts were first analyzed at individual levels and subsequently at the couple level to identify dyadic themes.ResultsFive themes and thirteen sub-themes emerged from the data analysis, including role integration, health risk, dilemma of preparation, protective isolation, and multi-dimensional expectation. Unexpectedly, the experiences and perspectives of mothers and fathers regarding the transition to parenthood were found to be similar, with the exception of the sub-theme extra-care requirement.ConclusionThe findings shed light on the complex emotional journey and expectations of parents, as well as the challenges they face in terms of physical well-being, limited coping resources, and restricted social connections. Notably, fathers in China often shared the stress of the whole process during the transition period alongside mothers but often lacked accessible avenues for seeking and receiving support. These findings underscore the importance of actively involving fathers as a key support population in perinatal care, as well as the need for comprehensive support systems and tailored interventions to enhance the well-being and adaptation of parents

FHPM: Fine-grained Huge Page Management For Virtualization

As more data-intensive tasks with large footprints are deployed in virtual machines (VMs), huge pages are widely used to eliminate the increasing address translation overhead. However, once the huge page mapping is established, all the base page regions in the huge page share a single extended page table (EPT) entry, so that the hypervisor loses awareness of accesses to base page regions. None of the state-of-the-art solutions can obtain access information at base page granularity for huge pages. We observe that this can lead to incorrect decisions by the hypervisor, such as incorrect data placement in a tiered memory system and unshared base page regions when sharing pages. This paper proposes FHPM, a fine-grained huge page management for virtualization without hardware and guest OS modification. FHPM can identify access information at base page granularity, and dynamically promote and demote pages. A key insight of FHPM is to redirect the EPT huge page directory entries (PDEs) to new companion pages so that the MMU can track access information within huge pages. Then, FHPM can promote and demote pages according to the current hot page pressure to balance address translation overhead and memory usage. At the same time, FHPM proposes a VM-friendly page splitting and collapsing mechanism to avoid extra VM-exits. In combination, FHPM minimizes the monitoring and management overhead and ensures that the hypervisor gets fine-grained VM memory accesses to make the proper decision. We apply FHPM to improve tiered memory management (FHPM-TMM) and to promote page sharing (FHPM-Share). FHPM-TMM achieves a performance improvement of up to 33% and 61% over the pure huge page and base page management. FHPM-Share can save 41% more memory than Ingens, a state-of-the-art page sharing solution, with comparable performance