The Global Dissemination of China’s Poverty Alleviation Experience: Enhancing Human Rights through Poverty Reduction

China primarily utilizes the member state reporting system and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) to showcase its success in poverty alleviation. However, there is still room for improvement, such as incomplete statistical data and information, a lack of transparency and explanation regarding domestic policies, and the use of Chinese-style language in reports that can be challenging for foreign audiences to comprehend. Therefore, China should fully acknowledge and earnestly work towards improvement. Solutions include consolidating achievements in poverty alleviation, refining and enriching experiences in poverty reduction, enhancing understanding of the significance of both international human rights monitoring mechanisms, establishing a unified and efficient poverty reduction information and statistics system, and promoting a consensus to further advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the creation of a community with a shared future for all mankind

International Soft Law Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Advantages, Approaches, and Credibility

Given the transnational nature of data and algorithms associated with artificial intelligence, individual countries often face challenges in developing an effective governance system. Ensuring a healthy, stable, and sustainable AI ecosystem requires international communication, cooperation, and interaction. However, in the emerging and fast-changing interdisciplinary field of AI, internationally binding laws like treaties and agreements cannot be easily established overnight. Multilateral negotiations and local consultations are necessary, as each provision must be carefully considered and weighed, a process that is time-consuming and slow in yielding results. Therefore, it is clear that non-coercive soft law methods are necessary to achieve rapid international consensus and facilitate action. Soft law intervention provides practical space in the current landscape of Internet governance and is both necessary and feasible. At the very least, soft law can initiate the process of legalizing Internet governance. The application of soft law can encourage countries to reach some foundational and framework agreements, enabling practical and effective preparations for future, more comprehensive agreements that may be reached

Leveraging phone-level linguistic-acoustic similarity for utterance-level pronunciation scoring

Recent studies on pronunciation scoring have explored the effect of introducing phone embeddings as reference pronunciation, but mostly in an implicit manner, i.e., addition or concatenation of reference phone embedding and actual pronunciation of the target phone as the phone-level pronunciation quality representation. In this paper, we propose to use linguistic-acoustic similarity to explicitly measure the deviation of non-native production from its native reference for pronunciation assessment. Specifically, the deviation is first estimated by the cosine similarity between reference phone embedding and corresponding acoustic embedding. Next, a phone-level Goodness of pronunciation (GOP) pre-training stage is introduced to guide this similarity-based learning for better initialization of the aforementioned two embeddings. Finally, a transformer-based hierarchical pronunciation scorer is used to map a sequence of phone embeddings, acoustic embeddings along with their similarity measures to predict the final utterance-level score. Experimental results on the non-native databases suggest that the proposed system significantly outperforms the baselines, where the acoustic and phone embeddings are simply added or concatenated. A further examination shows that the phone embeddings learned in the proposed approach are able to capture linguistic-acoustic attributes of native pronunciation as reference.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202

An ASR-free Fluency Scoring Approach with Self-Supervised Learning

A typical fluency scoring system generally relies on an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to obtain time stamps in input speech for either the subsequent calculation of fluency-related features or directly modeling speech fluency with an end-to-end approach. This paper describes a novel ASR-free approach for automatic fluency assessment using self-supervised learning (SSL). Specifically, wav2vec2.0 is used to extract frame-level speech features, followed by K-means clustering to assign a pseudo label (cluster index) to each frame. A BLSTM-based model is trained to predict an utterance-level fluency score from frame-level SSL features and the corresponding cluster indexes. Neither speech transcription nor time stamp information is required in the proposed system. It is ASR-free and can potentially avoid the ASR errors effect in practice. Experimental results carried out on non-native English databases show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance in the "open response" scenario as compared to previous methods and matches the recently reported performance in the "read aloud" scenario.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202

Didymin improves UV irradiation resistance in C. elegans

Didymin, a type of flavono-o-glycoside compound naturally present in citrus fruits, has been reported to be an effective anticancer agent. However, its effects on stress resistance are unclear. In this study, we treated Caenorhabditis elegans with didymin at several concentrations. We found that didymin reduced the effects of UV stressor on nematodes by decreasing reactive oxygen species levels and increasing superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity. Furthermore, we found that specific didymin-treated mutant nematodes daf-16(mu86) & daf-2(e1370), daf-16(mu86), akt-1(ok525), akt-2(ok393), and age-1(hx546) were susceptible to UV irradiation, whereas daf-2(e1371) was resistant to UV irradiation. In addition, we found that didymin not only promoted DAF-16 to transfer from cytoplasm to nucleus, but also increased both protein and mRNA expression levels of SOD-3 and HSP-16.2 after UV irradiation. Our results show that didymin affects UV irradiation resistance and it may act on daf-2 to regulate downstream genes through the insulin/IGF-1-like signaling pathway

Music Trademark: New Development of Intellectual Property in Digital Economy

With the vigorous development of digital economy, the enterprise must pay more attention to the Internet instead of totally the traditional way, and new types of trademarks, especially music trademark, can attract the attention of consumers more than traditional trademarks. But situation is different in different countries and international organization. This paper takes China and the European Union as the research objects, and observes the specific standards in the practical operation of registering new trademarks such as music trademarks both in China and in the European Union through studying a large number of cases and analyzing local laws in comparative study. In China, a music that wants to be registered as a trademark needs to have at least three requirements: legitimacy, distinctive and long-term and heavy use. EU and its member states have different requirements for whether a music is allowed to be registered as a trademark. When member states want to make their own trademark law according to the EU law, they have their own domestic practices and customs of the member states so they finally formed the different trademark legal system from each other. However, music is now generally accepted as a registered trademark in the European Union

Ingredients in Zijuan Pu’er Tea Extract Alleviate β-Amyloid Peptide Toxicity in a <i>Caenorhabditis elegans</i> Model of Alzheimer’s Disease Likely through DAF-16

Amyloid-&#946;, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer&#8217;s disease (AD), is toxic to neurons and can also cause brain cell death. Oxidative stress is known to play an important role in AD, and there is strong evidence that oxidative stress is associated with amyloid-&#946;. In the present study we report the protective effect of Zijuan Pu&#8217;er tea water extract (ZTWE) and the mixture of main ingredients (+)-catechins, caffeine and procyanidin (MCCP) in ZTWE on &#946;-amyloid-induced toxicity in transgenic Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) CL4176 expressing the human A&#946;1&#8315;42 gene. ZTWE, (+)-catechins, caffeine, procyanidin and MCCP delayed the &#946;-amyloid-induced paralysis to different degrees. The MCCP treatment did not affect the transcript abundance of amyloid-&#946; transgene (amy-1); however, Thioflavin T staining showed a significant decrease in A&#946; accumulation compared to untreated worms. Further research using transgenic worms found that MCCP promoted the translocation of DAF-16 from cytoplasm to nucleus and increased the expression of superoxide dismutase 3 (SOD-3). In addition, MCCP decreased the reactive oxygen species (ROS) content and increased the SOD activity in CL4176 worms. In conclusion, the results suggested that MCCP had a significant protective effect on &#946;-amyloid-induced toxicity in C. elegans by reducing &#946;-amyloid aggregation and inducing DAF-16 nuclear translocation that could activate the downstream signal pathway and enhance resistance to oxidative stress

Ellagic Acid Increases Stress Resistance via Insulin/IGF-1 Signaling Pathway in Caenorhabditis elegans

Ellagic acid is a natural polyphenol found in various fruits and vegetables. Numerous studies have shown that ellagic acid has beneficial effects on human health. In this study, we investigated the stress resistant action of ellagic acid in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Notably, 50 &mu;M ellagic acid prolonged the lifespan of C. elegans by 36.25%, 36.22%, 155.1%, and 79.07% under ultraviolet radiation stress, heat stress, oxidative stress, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection stress, respectively. Furthermore, the mechanism by which ellagic acid reduces the damage caused by ultraviolet radiation in C. elegans was explored. Ellagic acid could significantly induce the nucleus translocation of DAF-16 and, thereby, activate a series of target genes to resist ultraviolet radiation stress. Moreover, ellagic acid also significantly increased the expression of SOD-3 by 3.61 times and the activity of superoxide dismutase by 3.70 times to clean out harmful reactive oxygen species in C. elegans exposed to ultraviolet radiation stress. In both daf-16 mutant and daf-2; daf-16 double-mutant worms exposed to ultraviolet radiation, ellagic acid could no longer prolong their lifespan. These results indicate that ellagic acid plays an important role in resisting ultraviolet radiation stress in C. elegans, probably in an insulin/IGF-1 signaling pathway-dependent way

Arbutin increases Caenorhabditis elegans longevity and stress resistance

Arbutin (p-hydroxyphenyl-β-D-glucopyranoside), a well-known tyrosinase inhibitor, has been widely used as a cosmetic whitening agent. Although its natural role is to scavenge free radicals within cells, it has also exhibited useful activities for the treatment of diuresis, bacterial infections and cancer, as well as anti-inflammatory and anti-tussive activities. Because function of free radical scavenging is also related to antioxidant and the effects of arbutin on longevity and stress resistance in animals have not yet been confirmed, here the effects of arbutin on Caenorhabditis elegans were investigated. The results demonstrated that optimal concentrations of arbutin could extend lifespan and enhance resistance to oxidative stress. The underlying molecular mechanism for these effects involves decreased levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), improvement of daf-16 nuclear localization, and up-regulated expression of daf-16 and its downstream targets, including sod-3 and hsp16.2. In this work the roles of arbutin in lifespan and health are studied and the results support that arbutin is an antioxidant for maintaining overall health