DETERMINANTS OF GRASSLAND USE RIGHT TRANSFER IN INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: EVIDENCE FROM PASTORAL CHINA

This paper focuses on factors influencing grassland lease, which will contribute to the heated debate about land use in China by extending to more extensive and vulnerable grassland regions. Based on review of grassland institutional change and analysis of data from 12 villages, this paper examines the impact of variables such as grassland property rights, grazing policies and physical attributes of actors on grassland lease. This paper also draws attention to widely existed illegal grazing and the implementation of grazing quota, as well as their impact on grassland lease and governance.Land Use, Land Ownership and Tenure, Grassland lease, China, Landnutzen, Landbesitz, Graslandleasing, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, Land Economics/Use,

Interaction Analysis of Repeated Measure Data

Extensive penalized variable selection methods have been developed in the past two decades for analyzing high dimensional omics data, such as gene expressions, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), copy number variations (CNVs) and others. However, lipidomics data have been rarely investigated by using high dimensional variable selection methods. This package incorporates our recently developed penalization procedures to conduct interaction analysis for high dimensional lipidomics data with repeated measurements. The core module of this package is developed in C++. The development of this software package and the associated statistical methods have been partially supported by an Innovative Research Award from Johnson Cancer Research Center, Kansas State University

Adaptive Speech Quality Aware Complex Neural Network for Acoustic Echo Cancellation with Supervised Contrastive Learning

Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) is designed to remove echoes, reverberation, and unwanted added sounds from the microphone signal while maintaining the quality of the near-end speaker's speech. This paper proposes adaptive speech quality complex neural networks to focus on specific tasks for real-time acoustic echo cancellation. In specific, we propose a complex modularize neural network with different stages to focus on feature extraction, acoustic separation, and mask optimization receptively. Furthermore, we adopt the contrastive learning framework and novel speech quality aware loss functions to further improve the performance. The model is trained with 72 hours for pre-training and then 72 hours for fine-tuning. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art performance.Comment: Submitted to International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023. Under revie

The Window in Virginia Woolf's Early Novels

This thesis focuses on the window and the visual in Virginia Woolf's first three novels The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). It examines how the window enables Woolf to experiment with modes of literary representation by drawing analogies with the visual arts. In proposing this argument, I aim to establish the relation between the way Woolf uses the window in these early works and in her later modernist style. Chapter One provides the background for this study. It introduces Woolf's relationship to the visual arts - painting, photography and the cinema, in particular. It also addresses key historical accounts of the window as a figurative device in literature and the arts, as well as in Woolf's literary criticism. Chapters Two and Three analyze the window in The Voyage Out and Night and Day as a metaphorical boundary between the real and imagined worlds of the protagonists. By exploring the visual possibilities of the window as a way to represent the protagonists' inner life, Woolf points to the limitations of the novels' conventional form, which conforms to Victorian realist traditions. Chapter Four treats the window as an analogue to Woolf's experimental form in Jacob's Room. Throughout the novel, Woolf represents the protagonist mostly through the narrator's external observation and other characters' impressions of him. In this respect, the window provides a model for the modes of seeing through which Woolf constructs the protagonist from the outside, and thus posits the same opposition between internal and external realities as in the earlier two novels. By tracing the window's role in these early works, I argue the window - as an important connection between the literary texts and modes of visual art - charts the shift in Woolf's engagement with realism. As such, it also marks her transition from Victorian to Modernist literary conventions

A network‐based variable selection approach for identification of modules and biomarker genes associated with end‐stage kidney disease

AimsIntervention for end‐stage kidney disease (ESKD), which is associated with adverse prognoses and major economic burdens, is challenging due to its complex pathogenesis. The study was performed to identify biomarker genes and molecular mechanisms for ESKD by bioinformatics approach.MethodsUsing the Gene Expression Omnibus dataset GSE37171, this study identified pathways and genomic biomarkers associated with ESKD via a multi‐stage knowledge discovery process, including identification of modules of genes by weighted gene co‐expression network analysis, discovery of important involved pathways by Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes enrichment analyses, selection of differentially expressed genes by the empirical Bayes method, and screening biomarker genes by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) logistic regression. The results were validated using GSE70528, an independent testing dataset.ResultsThree clinically important gene modules associated with ESKD, were identified by weighted gene co‐expression network analysis. Within these modules, Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes enrichment analyses revealed important biological pathways involved in ESKD, including transforming growth factor‐β and Wnt signalling, RNA‐splicing, autophagy and chromatin and histone modification. Furthermore, Lasso logistic regression was conducted to identify five final genes, namely, CNOT8, MST4, PPP2CB, PCSK7 and RBBP4 that are differentially expressed and associated with ESKD. The accuracy of the final model in distinguishing the ESKD cases and controls was 96.8% and 91.7% in the training and validation datasets, respectively.ConclusionNetwork‐based variable selection approaches can identify biological pathways and biomarker genes associated with ESKD. The findings may inform more in‐depth follow‐up research and effective therapy.SUMMARY AT A GLANCEThis gene–gene network analysis to identify genes associated with end‐stage renal disease is an important step, albeit early, towards the discovery of biomarkers using peripheral blood cells. The findings also provide insight on disease pathophysiology at the molecular level, and hence therapeutic targets for future research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162799/2/nep13655.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162799/1/nep13655_am.pd