Food Factors: The Role of Nutritional Clarity in Enhancing Public Health Outcomes

In the milieu of modern food consumption, public health is beleaguered by the prevalence of processed foods and a dearth of clear nutritional information, factors that are intimately linked to the surge of global health issues. Our exploration into the interplay between food labeling, dietary education, regulatory policies, and community interventions reveals a complex landscape where each element is critical to steering public health toward a more nutritious future. Through a synthesis of multi-disciplinary research and pragmatic case studies, we dissect the efficacy of current nutritional transparency practices and propose a suite of actionable strategies aimed at catalyzing improvement. We argue for the necessity of a robust, unified approach where policy reform, comprehensive education, and grassroots empowerment converge to enact substantive change. This article posits that such a collaborative and systemic endeavor is not merely beneficial but imperative for engendering informed dietary choices, mitigating the tide of nutrition-related diseases, and ultimately sculpting a framework for sustained public health advancement. Our findings illuminate the potential for significant public health outcomes through concerted action and suggest that the path to a healthier society is paved by the collective efforts of policymakers, educators, and community advocates working in tandem to combat the complexities of the contemporary food environment

GhostVec: A New Threat to Speaker Privacy of End-to-End Speech Recognition System

Speaker adaptation systems face privacy concerns, for such systems are trained on private datasets and often overfitting. This paper demonstrates that an attacker can extract speaker information by querying speaker-adapted speech recognition (ASR) systems. We focus on the speaker information of a transformer-based ASR and propose GhostVec, a simple and efficient attack method to extract the speaker information from an encoder-decoder-based ASR system without any external speaker verification system or natural human voice as a reference. To make our results quantitative, we pre-process GhostVec using singular value decomposition (SVD) and synthesize it into waveform. Experiment results show that the synthesized audio of GhostVec reaches 10.83\% EER and 0.47 minDCF with target speakers, which suggests the effectiveness of the proposed method. We hope the preliminary discovery in this study to catalyze future speech recognition research on privacy-preserving topics.Comment: accepted in ACM Multimedia Asia 202

Development and characterization of microsatellite loci for Fenneropenaeus penicillatus Alcock

Eight novel microsatellite loci from the genome of Fenneropenaeus penicillatus Alcock were developed using the protocol of fast isolation by amplified fragment length polymorphism of sequences containing repeats (FIASCO). Thirty (30) wild individuals were used to analyze the polymorphism of these eight microsatellite markers. The results show that the number of alleles per locus and the polymorphism information content ranged from 2 to 7 and from 0.2076 to 0.7484, respectively. The observed and expected heterozygosity were 0.1724 to 0.9130 and 0.1639 to 0.7314, respectively. These microsatellite primers will be used for further population genetic studies, constructing genetic linkage maps or locating quantitative trait locus (QTL) of F. penicillatus Alcock.Keywords: Genetic markers, Fenneropenaeus penicillatus Alcock, microsatellite

Reprogramming Self-supervised Learning-based Speech Representations for Speaker Anonymization

Current speaker anonymization methods, especially with self-supervised learning (SSL) models, require massive computational resources when hiding speaker identity. This paper proposes an effective and parameter-efficient speaker anonymization method based on recent End-to-End model reprogramming technology. To improve the anonymization performance, we first extract speaker representation from large SSL models as the speaker identifies. To hide the speaker's identity, we reprogram the speaker representation by adapting the speaker to a pseudo domain. Extensive experiments are carried out on the VoicePrivacy Challenge (VPC) 2022 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed parameter-efficient learning anonymization methods. Additionally, while achieving comparable performance with the VPC 2022 strong baseline 1.b, our approach consumes less computational resources during anonymization.Comment: accepted in ACM Multimedia Asia202

The isolation and characterization of twelve novel microsatellite loci from Haliotis ovina

Twelve (12) microsatellite loci were developed from Haliotis ovina by magnetic bead hybridization method. Genetic variability was assessed using 30 individuals from three wild populations. The number of alleles per locus was from 2 to 5 and polymorphism information content was from 0.1228 to 0.6542. The observed and expected heterozygosities ranged from 0.0000 to 0.7778 and 0.1288 to 0.6310, respectively. These loci should provide useful information for genetic studies such as genetic diversity, pedigree analysis, construction of genetic linkage maps and marker-assisted selection breeding in H. ovina.Key words: Genetic markers, Haliotis ovina, microsatellites

trans-Bis(5,5-diphenyl­hydantoinato-κN 3)bis­(propane-1,2-diamine-κ2 N,N′)nickel(II)

The asymmetric unit of the title complex, [Ni(pht)2(pn)2] (pht is 5,5-diphenyl­hydantoinate and pn is propane-1,2-diamine) or [Ni(C15H11N2O2)2(C3H10N2)2], contains one-half [Ni(pht)2(pn)2] mol­ecule. The NiII atom is situated on a crystallographic center of inversion and shows a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry. A three-dimensional network structure is assembled by inter- and intra­molecular N—H⋯O=C inter­actions

Stemness And Chemotherapeutic Drug Resistance Induced By Eif5a2 Overexpression In Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most lethal malignancies of the digestive tract in East Asian countries. Multimodal therapies, including adjuvant chemotherapy and neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, have become more often used for patients with advanced ESCC. However, the chemotherapy effect is often limited by patients' drug resistance. This study demonstrated that EIF5A2 (eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A2) overexpression induced stemness and chemoresistance in ESCC cells. We showed that EIF5A2 overexpression in ESCC cells resulted in increased chemoresistance to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), docetaxel and taxol. In contrast, shRNAs suppressing eIF5A2 increased tumor sensitivity to these chemotherapeutic drugs. In addition, EIF5A2 overexpression was correlated with a poorer overall survival in patients with ESCC who underwent taxane-based chemotherapy after esophagectomy (P > 0.05). Based on these results, we suggest that EIF5A2 could be a predictive biomarker for selecting appropriate chemo-treatment for ESCC patients and EIF5A2 inhibitors might be considered as combination therapy to enhance chemosensitivity in patients with ESCC.published_or_final_versio

Management of Hepatic Encephalopathy by Traditional Chinese Medicine

In spite of the impressive progress in the investigation of hepatic encephalopathy (HE), the complex mechanisms underlying the onset and deterioration of HE are still not fully understood. Currently, none of the existing theories provide conclusive explanations on the symptoms that link liver dysfunction to nervous system disorders and clinical manifestations. This paper summarized the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches used for HE in modern medicine and traditional Chinese medicine and provided future perspective in HE therapies from the viewpoint of holistic and personalized Chinese medicine