THE DYNAMICS OF COMOVEMENTS AND CORRELATIONS IN PUBLIC PROPERTY MARKETS: EVIDENCE FROM GREATER CHINA AND INTERNATIONAL LINKAGES

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Volatility connectedness and market dependence across major financial markets in China economy

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Decision-making after continuous wins or losses in a randomized guessing task: implications for how the prior selection results affect subsequent decision-making

BACKGROUND: Human decision-making is often affected by prior selections and their outcomes, even in situations where decisions are independent and outcomes are unpredictable. METHODS: In this study, we created a task that simulated real-life non-strategic gambling to examine the effect of prior outcomes on subsequent decisions in a group of male college students. RESULTS: Behavioral performance showed that participants needed more time to react after continuous losses (LOSS) than continuous wins (WIN) and discontinuous outcomes (CONTROL). In addition, participants were more likely to repeat their selections in both WIN and LOSS conditions. Functional MRI data revealed that decisions in WINs were associated with increased activation in the mesolimbic pathway, but decreased activation in the inferior frontal gyrus relative to LOSS. Increased prefrontal cortical activation was observed during LOSS relative to WIN and CONTROL conditions. CONCLUSION: Taken together, the behavioral and neuroimaging findings suggest that participants tended to repeat previous selections during LOSS trials, a pattern resembling the gambler’s fallacy. However, during WIN trials, participants tended to follow their previous lucky decisions, like the ‘hot hand’ fallacy

Effects of turbulence on alkaline phosphatase activity of phytoplankton and bacterioplankton in Lake Taihu

Alkaline phosphatase (AP), an inducible and hydrolytic enzyme, plays a key role in the biogeochemical cycle of phosphorus (P) in lakes. Activity and regulation of AP has been suggested to be affected by hydrodynamic turbulence. However, many aspects of the coupling of the AP activity (APA) and turbulence are still to be investigated and understood. In this study, mesocosm experiments were carried out to further understand the effects of turbulence on APA and the relative contribution of the different microbial groups to the total APA (TAPA). Specifically, we focused on evaluating the APA of phytoplankton (2–112 µm) and bacterioplankton (0.2–2 µm) and its relationship with P fractions under four turbulence levels. Results showed that turbulent conditions enhanced planktonic APA (PAPA) which dominated TAPA by comprising 66–93% of the total fraction. In particular, PAPA was almost two times higher in the turbulence treatments than in still-water control. On the other hand, bacterioplanktonic APA (BAPA) decreased which could be associated with the competitive advantage of bacteria in nutrient-limited conditions due to surface-to-volume ratio. The results suggest that turbulence can accelerate the biogeochemical cycle of P and plays an important role in P strategies of plankton

Correlation between toll-like receptor 9 expression in peripheral blood dendritic cells and interferon-α antiviral sustained virological response in patients with chronic hepatitis B

Purpose: To investigate the link between dendritic cells (DC cells), toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TFN-α) expressions in peripheral blood of patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB).Methods: Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and CD cells were prepared from CHB patients and healthy volunteers, and the cell  proliferation was assessed. The surface expressions of CD83, CD86, CD40 and human leukocyte antigen DR (HLA-DR) on DC cells were assayed by flow cytometry, while the expressions of mRNAs of TLR9, MyD88 and NF-κB in each cell-group were determined by fluorescent quantitation PCR. Protein expressions of TLR9, MyD88 and NF-κB were analyzed by Western blot.Results: The rate of proliferation of DC cells in the CHB patients was slower than the rate in healthy volunteers (p < 0.05), and the expression of co-stimulatory molecules was significantly lower in CHB patients than in healthy volunteers (p < 0.05). The ability to stimulate T-lymphocyte proliferation of the CHB-DC group was much weaker than that of the D-NC group (p < 0.05). In fluorescent quantitation assays, the relative expressions of mRNAs of TLR9, MyD88 and NF-κB in cells of CpG-Stimulate ODN (CpG-S ODN) group were higher than those of the control group (p < 0.05), but the relative expressions of mRNAs of TLR9, MyD88 and NF-κB in the cells of the CpG-S ODN group were significantly lower (p < 0.05). Moreover, IFN-α level in the CpG-S ODN group was much higher than that in the control group (t = 6.633, p = 0.014 < 0.05). However, results from  Western blot showed that the relative expressions of TLR9, MyD88 and NF-κB in the CpG-S ODN group were lower than in the control group (p < 0.05).Conclusion: These results indicate that TLR9 on the surface of DC cells of CHB patients can eliminate HBV by generating IFN-α via regulation of MyD88 and NF-κB.Keywords: Chronic hepatitis B, Dendritic cells, TLR9, IFN-

Food-delivery behavior under crowd sourcing mobility services

The rapid development of the online food-delivery industry, has led to not only increases in the number of the crowd-sourced shared food-delivery service drivers on our roads, but also growing urban traffic safety management concerns. This study investigates the decision-making behaviors that exist between delivery drivers, their food-delivery platform and their potential impact on traffic safety. Using the evolutionary game theory, stakeholder decision-making behaviors involving traffic safety within the food-delivery industry were analyzed. From our analysis, several behavioral influencers were identified, including penalties for traffic violations, the opportunity cost of delivery drivers complying with traffic rules, the costs associated with risk and strict management approaches, reputation incentives, costs related to the delivery platform being punished, the probability of compliance with traffic rules, and the probability of adopting a strict management approach by the delivery platform. Our study demonstrates that stabilization strategies used by the food service industry differ when the types of government control measures also differ. When the government takes a more aggressive approach to regulation and control, compliance with the traffic rules and the adoption of strict enforcement measures by management are the only evolutionary stability strategies available to food-delivery platforms. As part of a strict management strategy, appropriate compensation or incentive measures should be provided by the distribution platform. Furthermore, the fines given for traffic violations should be increased to create a safer road environment that has fewer traffic accidents involving food-delivery drivers

Effects of Glyphosate-Resistant Genetically Modified Soybean on Blood Biochemical Indexes, Hepatopancreatic Antioxidant Capacity and Tissue Morphology of Cyprinus carpio

The juvenile carps (Cyprinus carpio) were fed diets with four protein sources (15% and 30% glyphosate-resistant genetically modified (GM) named GM 15 and GM 30, respectively, and 15% and 30% non-genetically modified (NGM) soybean named NGM 15 and NGM 30) for 180 days. Results showed that alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity for the GM30 group was significantly lower than that of the NGM30 group. The activity of glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) in the hepatopancreas of carp for the GM30 group was significantly higher than that of the NGM15 group (P0.05). This study indicates that it may aggravate the damage degree of intestinal epithelial cells of carp and more easily cause liver cell damage in the short term when the amount of GM soybean in the feeds was 30%. Therefore, higher glyphosate-resistant GM soybean may have adverse effects on the carp's serum, intestinal, and hepatopancreas and considerably reduce the hepatopancreatic carp's antioxidant capacity

Conflict-Based Cross-View Consistency for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) has recently gained increasing research interest as it can reduce the requirement for large-scale fully-annotated training data. The current methods often suffer from the confirmation bias from the pseudo-labelling process, which can be alleviated by the co-training framework. The current co-training-based SSS methods rely on hand-crafted perturbations to prevent the different sub-nets from collapsing into each other, but these artificial perturbations cannot lead to the optimal solution. In this work, we propose a new conflict-based cross-view consistency (CCVC) method based on a two-branch co-training framework which aims at enforcing the two sub-nets to learn informative features from irrelevant views. In particular, we first propose a new cross-view consistency (CVC) strategy that encourages the two sub-nets to learn distinct features from the same input by introducing a feature discrepancy loss, while these distinct features are expected to generate consistent prediction scores of the input. The CVC strategy helps to prevent the two sub-nets from stepping into the collapse. In addition, we further propose a conflict-based pseudo-labelling (CPL) method to guarantee the model will learn more useful information from conflicting predictions, which will lead to a stable training process. We validate our new CCVC approach on the SSS benchmark datasets where our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/CCVC.Comment: accepted by CVPR202

MULTI-PORT ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERFERENCE IMPROVEMENT USING HETEROGENEOUS PORTS

Techniques are provided herein for using different profiles on different ports for different radiation directions in multi-port projects. Because the superposition effect is weakened, the maximum radiation of a project is about 3dB smaller than those with uniform ports