Agglomeration Effects and Japanese Food Industry Investment in China: Evidence from the Cities

This paper uses the data from Chugoku Shinshutsu Kigyou Ichiran 2003-2004 (A View of Japanese Enterprises Investments in China 2003-2004) to study 1ocation choice of Japanese food industry investment in 231 Chinese cities from 1992 to 2001, paying a particular attention to agglomeration effects. A negative binominal model indicates that labor cost (WAGE) is the most important factor that deters Japanese food industry investment. Market size (GDP), raw material (MATER), port (PORT) and policy incentives (POLICY), however, have positive effects in Japanese food industry investment location choice in China. As for the three-tier agglomeration effects' test, the agglomeration effects of Japanese manufactures agglomeration (AG2) and Japanese food manufactures agglomeration (AG3) are confirmed, but not for foreign investment agglomeration (AG1).food industry, agglomeration, Japan, China, FDI, Agribusiness, International Relations/Trade, F21, Q13, Q18,

The Tale of the Southern Tour

Title from PDF of title page viewed July 13, 2021Dissertation advisor: Chen YiVitaThesis (D.M.A.)--UMKC Conservatory. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2021The Tale of the Southern Tour for orchestra is commissioned by The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Shaoguan City in Guangdong province in 2019. The piece received its world premiere in December 2019 at the Guangzhou Opera House. The work is a musical sketch depicting ancient Chinese story of Emperor Shun’s southern tour which took place thousands of years ago. The piece consists four sections, with each section depicting a different scene. Different compositional techniques and materials are used to build the thematic materials. The first section, The Recall of The Era, recalls the history. This section contains ancient Chinese folk songs to take the listener back to ancient China. The second section, The Fancy Southern World, depicts the landscape of southern China. The composer incorporates minimalist compositional style in the melodic writing, the melody itself is based on the folk songs from southeastern and southwestern China. The third section, Peace and War, is the most lyrical section. It is an emotional music portrayal of “ peace ” and “ war ”. The last section, Sigh in millennia, despite its short duration, is a deliberate punctuation of the composition, using music to imitate the sound of people sighing, depicting the philosophical reflection on the saying “Sigh of the millennium”. The setting of the four sections is derived from “JI”, meaning “recorded while travel”. It is an ancient Chinese literature genre flourished in the Tang and Song dynasties. The writing style is mainly narrative with elements of discussion and lyricism. It can be used to express the author’s feelings and ideas by depicting people, events, objects and scenes. The four-section structure is also designed in accordance with the structure of the classic Chinese art. This piece is not only a blend of the musical style of Chinese and American, Eastern and Western techniques and ideas, but also a new state of original creation, in which the Different techniques and ideas find similarities or fusible points and are to be grafted together.Abstract -- Program note -- Instrumentation -- Music Score. The recall of the era ; The fancy southern world ; Peace and war ; sigh in millennia -- Vit

A Unified Model for Spatio-Temporal Prediction Queries with Arbitrary Modifiable Areal Units

Spatio-Temporal (ST) prediction is crucial for making informed decisions in urban location-based applications like ride-sharing. However, existing ST models often require region partition as a prerequisite, resulting in two main pitfalls. Firstly, location-based services necessitate ad-hoc regions for various purposes, requiring multiple ST models with varying scales and zones, which can be costly to support. Secondly, different ST models may produce conflicting outputs, resulting in confusing predictions. In this paper, we propose One4All-ST, a framework that can conduct ST prediction for arbitrary modifiable areal units using only one model. To reduce the cost of getting multi-scale predictions, we design an ST network with hierarchical spatial modeling and scale normalization modules to efficiently and equally learn multi-scale representations. To address prediction inconsistencies across scales, we propose a dynamic programming scheme to solve the formulated optimal combination problem, minimizing predicted error through theoretical analysis. Besides, we suggest using an extended quad-tree to index the optimal combinations for quick response to arbitrary modifiable areal units in practical online scenarios. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets verify the efficiency and effectiveness of One4All-ST in ST prediction for arbitrary modifiable areal units. The source codes and data of this work are available at https://github.com/uctb/One4All-ST.Comment: Accepted by ICDE 202

Learning Edge Representations via Low-Rank Asymmetric Projections

We propose a new method for embedding graphs while preserving directed edge information. Learning such continuous-space vector representations (or embeddings) of nodes in a graph is an important first step for using network information (from social networks, user-item graphs, knowledge bases, etc.) in many machine learning tasks. Unlike previous work, we (1) explicitly model an edge as a function of node embeddings, and we (2) propose a novel objective, the "graph likelihood", which contrasts information from sampled random walks with non-existent edges. Individually, both of these contributions improve the learned representations, especially when there are memory constraints on the total size of the embeddings. When combined, our contributions enable us to significantly improve the state-of-the-art by learning more concise representations that better preserve the graph structure. We evaluate our method on a variety of link-prediction task including social networks, collaboration networks, and protein interactions, showing that our proposed method learn representations with error reductions of up to 76% and 55%, on directed and undirected graphs. In addition, we show that the representations learned by our method are quite space efficient, producing embeddings which have higher structure-preserving accuracy but are 10 times smaller

OR-045 Comparative Study on Physical Fitness in Female College Students between Different BFP Grades

Objective  Through testing the body fat percentage (BFP) and physical fitness by laboratory methods in female college students, the relationship between physical fitness and body morphology of female college students was revealed.  Methods BFP and fat free mass were measured among 633 healthy female college students randomly selected. All subjects were divided into five groups by their BFP: low, normal, high body fat, grade I obesity and grade II/III obesity. Grip Strength, Leg Strength, Back Strength, Vital Capacity, Maximal Oxygen Uptake, Reaction Time, Sit And Reach, Back Scratch and Standing On One Foot With Closed Eyes were tested.  Results There were significant differences between all groups in Grip Strength, Back Strength, Vital Capacity, the absolute and relative value of VO2max, Back Scratch on both sides and Standing on One Foot with Closed Eyes. The difference in Grip Strength and Back Strength showed significantly (P < 0.05), and the others showed very significant difference (P < 0.01). There was no significant difference in Resting Heart Rate, Reaction Time, Sit And Reach and Leg Strength. The results of multiple comparison showed that compared with 4 group,there were significant differences in Vital Capacity, relative value of Maximum Oxygen Uptake, Back Scratch in both sides in 2 group and 3 group. Moreover, compared with 5 group, there were significant differences in all the indicators in 2 group and 3 group. And there were significant differences in all the indicators except Back Strength and the relative value of Maximum Oxygen Uptake between 5 group and 4 group. Conclusions The results showed that the physical fitness of female college students with normal BFP was significantly better than that of obese ones. The major influence of exceeding 30 percent in BFP was the cardiopulmonary endurance fitness and upper limb flexibility fitness. In the group of BFP higher than 35%, these influences were more significant, meanwhile, balance fitness declined

Based on the improved installation gap identification algorithm of the DeepLabV3+ spacer rod replacement robot

This paper proposes an improved DeepLabV3+ lightweight algorithm for the identification of installation gaps in spacer replacement robots. By using lightweight MobileNetV3 to extract semantic features of spacer installation gaps, parameters and computational complexity are reduced; Perform dimensionality reduction and dimensionality increase operations on the ASPP module to reduce the number of model parameters; Introduce ECA module to restore the clarity of target boundaries; Use a loss function combining Focal Loss and Dice Loss to enhance segmentation performance. The experimental results show that the improved DeepLabV3+ algorithm improves MIoU, MPA, and prediction speed, while balancing segmentation accuracy and speed, and can effectively segment the installation gap of the spacer

PO-250 Exercise and dietary intervention reduce myocardial oxidative stress in male rats with metabolic syndrome

Objective Both aerobic exercise and alimentary control relieve oxidative stress (OS). However, there may be different modes. The objective of this study is to identify the effects of OS in metabolic syndrome (MS) rats and explore the mechanisms involved in aerobic exercise and alimentary control. Methods Seventy rats were used. Eight rats were randomly chosen for the control group, while the remaining rats were subjected to MS using a high-fat diet for 18 wk. The MS model rats were subsequently divided into the MHC (model control with high-fat diet), MRC (model control with routine diet), MHE (model training with high-fat diet) and MRE (model training routine diet) groups for 12 wk. The chemotactic factor macrophage chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), the adherence factor plasminogen activator inhibitor I (PAI-1), the oxidative stressor oxidized low density lipoprotein (ox-LDL), and the antioxidative factor endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) were tested in the serum; moreover, the expressions of MCP-1, PAI-1, and eNOS and the regulatory factor of OS Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-alpha (PPARα) were detected in the myocardium. Results OS related markers in serum had changes following the interventions of aerobic exercise and/or diet control. Compared with C, the ox-LDL, MCP-1 and PAI-1 in the MS rats exhibited significant decreases (P＜0.05/0.01), and the eNOS had a significant increase (P＜0.05). Compared with MHC, the diet intervention alone significantly increased eNOS; when interventions of aerobic exercise but not diet control (MHE) were applied, they significantly decreased ox-LDL, MCP-1 and PAI-1 (P＜0.01); the applied interventions of both aerobic exercise and diet control (MRE) decreased ox-LDL, MCP-1 and PAI-1 and significantly decreased eNOS (P＜0.01). The MRE compared to MHE exhibited significant changes in MCP-1 and eNOS (P＜0.01). The mRNA levels of the processing markers of OS in the myocardium. Compared with C, the MS rats had significant increases in the chemotactic factor MPC-1 (P＜0.05) and the adhesion factor PAI-1 (P＜0.01), which indicated that MS rats exhibited enhanced OS. Moreover, the MS rats had an increased antioxidant marker of eNOS, which was not significant, and the regulatory factor of PPARα decreased (P＜0.01). Compared to MHC, the MRC rats exhibited decreased MPC-1 (P＞0.05) and PAI-1 (P＜0.05) and increased eNOS (P＜0.01) and PPARα (P＞0.05); moreover, the MHE and MRE rats decreased more in MPC-1 and PAI-1 (P＜0.01) with increased eNOS and PPARα (P＜0.01). Compared to MHE, the MRE rats had a further decrease in MPC-1 (P＜0.01) and PAI-1 (P＞0.05) with increased eNOS (P＜0.05) and PPARα (P＞0.05). Conclusions OS increased in MS rats. Moreover, aerobic exercise and alimentary control could decrease OS to reduce the damage in MS rats. The OS regulatory factor PPARα, which could mediate the expression of OS-related genes, such as MCP-1, PAI-1, and eNOS in cardiovascular tissues, was only enhanced by aerobic exercise and not by diet control