Sustainable development for Chinese urban heritage tourism: Insights from travelers in Shanghai

As a widely-recognized destination for heritage tourism, China has attracted considerable amount of tourists from both domestically and internationally. Given the delicate nature of heritage in urban areas, this study paid special attention to the sustainable Chinese urban heritage tourism development from travelers’ perspectives based in Shanghai. Such perspectives are taken because their experiences perceived at popular urban heritage tourism attractions are the final tourism products. The authors explored the major factors that impact travelers’ experiences in urban heritage tourism, including visitation environment, economic impact, and community development. Considering the Chinese urban areas tend to be highly populated and undergoing constructions, such insights should facilitate decision makers to achieve the balance between heritage protection and tourism development in urban areas

Chain of Thought Prompting Elicits Knowledge Augmentation

The knowledge-augmented deep learning paradigm refers to a paradigm in which domain knowledge is identified and integrated into deep models. Conventional methods typically employ task-specific approaches to gather external knowledge from various sources. In contrast, large language models are extensively pre-trained and can serve as a comprehensive source of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose CoT-KA, a Chain-of-Thought-based method that augments knowledge for deep learning. CoT-KA avoids the need for additional knowledge retrieval or knowledge reasoning models, as required in conventional augmentation methods. Our results demonstrate that CoT-KA outperforms both pure CoT-based methods and the non-augmented method across the majority of eleven publicly available benchmarks for various reasoning tasks.Comment: Accepted by Findings of ACL 202

An Exploration of the Characteristic of Small Loan Companies in the Chinese Credit Market

Abstract: The small loan company is an emergent novelty for the Chinese credit market. The basic function of it is the financial intermediary which provides important services to some private sectors of the China economy. But as a new-born business, there are no systematic research on it and lack of effective supervision as well. This study investigates the features of financial service constitution, time distribution, risk management and earning capacity of small loan company. The results indicate it will continue to play an important role in China credit-system. Key words: Characteristic; Small loan companies; Chinese credit marke

Laser injury promotes migration and integration of retinal progenitor cells into host retina

PurposeThe migration and integration of grafted cells into diseased host tissue remains a critical challenge, particularly in the field of retinal progenitor cell (RPC) transplantation. It seems that natural physical barriers at the outer retina can impede the migration of grafted RPCs into the host retina. The purpose of this study was to investigate the integration and differentiation of murine RPCs transplanted into the subretinal space of mice with laser-induced damage to the outer retina.MethodsRPCs were harvested from the neural retinas of postnatal day 1 enhanced green fluorescent protein (GFP) mice. Retinal photocoagulation was performed using a diode laser. Two µl containing ~6×105 expanded RPCs in suspension were injected into the subretinal space of the recipient animals following laser treatment. Cell morphometry was performed to assess the integration of donor cells. Immunohistochemistry and western blot were performed on recipient retinas.ResultsThree weeks after transplantation, 1,158±320 cells per eye had migrated into the recipient outer nuclear layer (ONL). Most of these cells resided in the ONL around the retinal laser lesion. A subpopulation of these cells developed morphological features reminiscent of mature photoreceptors, expressed photoreceptor specific proteins including synaptic protein, and appeared to form synaptic connections with bipolar neurons. Retinal photocoagulation resulted in a significantly increased expression of matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2), MMP-9, and cluster differentiation 44 (CD44s), and a decreased expression of neurocan.ConclusionsTransplanted RPCs migrate and integrate into the laser-injured ONL where they differentiate into photoreceptors with morphological features reminiscent of mature photoreceptors, express synaptic protein, and appear to form synaptic connections with retinal bipolar neurons. Following retinal photocoagulation, the enhanced level of integration of grafted RPCs is partially associated with increased expression of MMP-2 and, to a lesser extent, MMP-9, together with decreased levels of inhibitory molecules

Toward Real-world Single Image Deraining: A New Benchmark and Beyond

Single image deraining (SID) in real scenarios attracts increasing attention in recent years. Due to the difficulty in obtaining real-world rainy/clean image pairs, previous real datasets suffer from low-resolution images, homogeneous rain streaks, limited background variation, and even misalignment of image pairs, resulting in incomprehensive evaluation of SID methods. To address these issues, we establish a new high-quality dataset named RealRain-1k, consisting of $1,120$ high-resolution paired clean and rainy images with low- and high-density rain streaks, respectively. Images in RealRain-1k are automatically generated from a large number of real-world rainy video clips through a simple yet effective rain density-controllable filtering method, and have good properties of high image resolution, background diversity, rain streaks variety, and strict spatial alignment. RealRain-1k also provides abundant rain streak layers as a byproduct, enabling us to build a large-scale synthetic dataset named SynRain-13k by pasting the rain streak layers on abundant natural images. Based on them and existing datasets, we benchmark more than 10 representative SID methods on three tracks: (1) fully supervised learning on RealRain-1k, (2) domain generalization to real datasets, and (3) syn-to-real transfer learning. The experimental results (1) show the difference of representative methods in image restoration performance and model complexity, (2) validate the significance of the proposed datasets for model generalization, and (3) provide useful insights on the superiority of learning from diverse domains and shed lights on the future research on real-world SID. The datasets will be released at https://github.com/hiker-lw/RealRain-1

Effect of a combination of Tuina therapy and budesonide inhalation on asthma in children, and its influence on lung function and pro inflammatory f actors

Purpose: To determine the effect of a combination of Tuina therapy and budesonide inhalation on pediatric asthma, and its influence on lung function and levels of inflammatory factors. Methods: Eligible 100 asthmatic children admitted to Provincial Maternity and Child-care Hospital, Lanzhou, Gansu Province, from January 2019 to January 2021 were randomized either to a control group or study group (1:1). The patients in control group were treated with budesonide inhalation, while the study group was given Tuina therapy in combination with budesonide inhalation. Treatment effectiveness, levels of inflammatory factors, immune functions and number of infections were evaluated in the patients. Results: The study group exhibited higher effectiveness profile versus the control group (96 vs 82 %; p < 0.05). After treatment, decreases were observed in the frequency of asthmatic attacks and number of respiratory infections in the two groups, with lower results in the study group than in the control group (p < 0.05). There were marked decreases in the levels of IgG, TNF-α and IL-8 in both groups, with the study group showing higher reductions (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Combined treatment with Tuina and budesonide inhalation decreases the levels of inflammatory factors, regulates immune function, and improves lung function of asthmatic children. Further investigation in a larger population would be required to establish the mechanism and clinical value of this therapy

Spore Powder of Ganoderma lucidum Improves Cancer-Related Fatigue in Breast Cancer Patients Undergoing Endocrine Therapy: A Pilot Clinical Trial

The fatigue prevalence in breast cancer survivors is high during the endocrine treatment. However, there are few evidence-based interventions to manage this symptom. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of spore powder of Ganoderma lucidum for cancer-related fatigue in breast cancer patients undergoing endocrine therapy. Spore powder of Ganoderma lucidum is a kind of Basidiomycete which is a widely used traditional medicine in China. 48 breast cancer patients with cancer-related fatigue undergoing endocrine therapy were randomized into the experimental or control group. FACT-F, HADS, and EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaires data were collected at baseline and 4 weeks after treatment. The concentrations of TNF-α, IL-6, and liver-kidney functions were measured before and after intervention. The experimental group showed statistically significant improvements in the domains of physical well-being and fatigue subscale after intervention. These patients also reported less anxiety and depression and better quality of life. Immune markers of CRF were significantly lower and no serious adverse effects occurred during the study. This pilot study suggests that spore powder of Ganoderma lucidum may have beneficial effects on cancer-related fatigue and quality of life in breast cancer patients undergoing endocrine therapy without any significant adverse effect