Study of Interior Public Spaces for the Promotion of Social Interaction in High-rise Residential Buildings

Urbanization is progressing rapidly in China. To accommodate the increasing population, high-rise residential buildings are becoming more prevalent in urban areas. But residents of high-rise buildings have little opportunity to socially interact with their neighbors, and this lack of social interaction may generate community-relevant negative outcomes, such as loneliness, reduced helpfulness, and insecurity, all of which have an adverse effect on the overall satisfaction level of the community. To address this issue, there is a need to develop strategies for community-oriented high-rise residential building designs that take into consideration China’s specific realities. Due to the high-density living environment that is prevalent in China, it is difficult to create living environments that promote social interaction and the formation of good relationships between neighbors because the public space is typically limited to ground-floor areas. Although interior public spaces represent an important element of the space available in high-rise residential buildings and can provide useful areas in which residents can communicate with their neighbors, they are generally limited in function to traffic/circulation areas. Furthermore, in most cases, the design of these spaces is not conducive to social interaction. As such, the goal of this paper is to explore how the interior public spaces of high-rise residential buildings can be better used to promote social interaction between the occupants of the building

Financial Comprehensive Appraisal Empirical Research on Grey Relational Model ——Testing in Listed Companies in Real Estate Industry in China

The financial comprehensive appraisal method plays an essential role in decision-making for investors and reflecting real company’s financial comprehensive situation. Because of the grey characteristics of financial information, this paper constructs a grey relational model with a index system of financial comprehensive appraisal by grey relation theory. It is applied to listed companies in real estate industry in China and tested in the both dynamic and static state, and then the result is that the ranking of financial comprehensive evaluation of the listed companies in the real estate industry is almost as same as the real ranking. It shows that the financial comprehensive appraisal method on the grey relational analysis is a kind of effective and good method of evaluating company’s financial comprehensive situation

Interpretable Sequence Clustering

Categorical sequence clustering plays a crucial role in various fields, but the lack of interpretability in cluster assignments poses significant challenges. Sequences inherently lack explicit features, and existing sequence clustering algorithms heavily rely on complex representations, making it difficult to explain their results. To address this issue, we propose a method called Interpretable Sequence Clustering Tree (ISCT), which combines sequential patterns with a concise and interpretable tree structure. ISCT leverages k-1 patterns to generate k leaf nodes, corresponding to k clusters, which provides an intuitive explanation on how each cluster is formed. More precisely, ISCT first projects sequences into random subspaces and then utilizes the k-means algorithm to obtain high-quality initial cluster assignments. Subsequently, it constructs a pattern-based decision tree using a boosting-based construction strategy in which sequences are re-projected and re-clustered at each node before mining the top-1 discriminative splitting pattern. Experimental results on 14 real-world data sets demonstrate that our proposed method provides an interpretable tree structure while delivering fast and accurate cluster assignments.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Literary destination familiarity and inbound tourism: evidence from mainland China

Destination familiarity is an important non-economic determinant of tourists’ destination choice that has not been adequately studied. This study posits a literary dimension to the concept of destination familiarity —that is, the extent to which tourists have gained familiarity with a given destination through literature—and seeks to investigate the impact of this form of familiarity on inbound tourism to Mainland China. Employing the English fiction dataset of the Google Books corpus, the New York Times annotated corpus, and the Time magazine corpus, we construct two types of destination familiarity based on literary texts: affection-based destination familiarity and knowledge-based destination familiarity. The results from dynamic panel estimation (1994–2004) demonstrate that the higher the degree of affection-based destination familiarity with a province in the previous year, the larger the number of inbound tourists the following year. Examining the influence of literature and its consumption on tourism activities sheds light on the dynamics of sustainable tourism development in emerging markets

Hypoglycemic agents and incidence of pancreatic cancer in diabetic patients: a meta-analysis

Background and aims: Hypoglycemic agents are the primary therapeutic approach for the treatment of diabetes and have been postulated to impact pancreatic cancer (PC) incidence in diabetic patients. We conducted a meta-analysis to further evaluate and establish the associations between four common types of hypoglycemic agents [metformin, sulfonylureas, thiazolidinediones (TZDs), and insulin] and PC incidence in individuals with diabetes mellitus (DM).Methods: A comprehensive literature search of PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library identified studies that analyzed the relationship between hypoglycemic agents and PC published between January 2012 and September 2022. Randomized control trials (RCTs), cohorts, and case–control studies were included if there was clear and evaluated defined exposure to the involved hypoglycemic agents and reported PC outcomes in patients with DM. Furthermore, reported relative risks or odds ratios (ORs) or other provided data were required for the calculation of odds ratios. Summary odds ratio estimates with a 95% confidence interval (CI) were estimated using the random-effects model. Additionally, subgroup analysis was performed to figure out the source of heterogeneity. Sensitivity analysis and publication bias detection were also performed.Results: A total of 11 studies were identified that evaluated one or more of the hypoglycemic agents, including three case–control studies and eight cohort studies. Among these, nine focused on metformin, six on sulfonylureas, seven on TZDs, and seven on insulin. Meta-analysis of the 11 observational studies reported no significant association between metformin (OR = 1.04, 95% CI 0.73–1.46) or TZDs (OR = 1.13, 95% CI 0.73–1.75) and PC incidence, while the risk of PC increased by 79% and 185% with sulfonylureas (OR = 1.79, 95% CI 1.29–2.49) and insulin (OR = 2.85, 95% CI 1.75–4.64), respectively. Considerable heterogeneity was observed among the studies and could not be fully accounted for by study design, region, or adjustment for other hypoglycemic agents.Conclusion: Sulfonylureas and insulin may increase the incidence of pancreatic cancer in diabetic patients, with varying effects observed among different ethnicities (Asian and Western). Due to significant heterogeneity across studies, further interpretation of the relationship between hypoglycemic agents and pancreatic cancer incidence in diabetic patients requires well-adjusted data and better-organized clinical trials

DNA modification by sulfur: analysis of the sequence recognition specificity surrounding the modification sites

The Dnd (DNA degradation) phenotype, reflecting a novel DNA modification by sulfur in Streptomyces lividans 1326, was strongly aggravated when one (dndB) of the five genes (dndABCDE) controlling it was mutated. Electrophoretic banding patterns of a plasmid (pHZ209), reflecting DNA degradation, displayed a clear change from a preferential modification site in strain 1326 to more random modifications in the mutant. Fourteen randomly modifiable sites on pHZ209 were localized, and each seemed to be able to be modified only once. Residues in a region (5′-c–cGGCCgccg-3′) including a highly conserved 4-bp central core (5′-GGCC-3′) in a well-documented preferential modification site were assessed for their necessity by site-directed mutagenesis. While the central core (GGCC) was found to be stringently required in 1326 and in the mutant, ‘gccg’ flanking its right could either abolish or reduce the modification frequency only in the mutant, and two separate nucleotides to the left had no dramatic effect. The lack of essentiality of DndB for S-modification suggests that it might only be required for enhancing or stabilizing the activity of a protein complex at the required preferential modification site, or resolving secondary structures flanking the modifiable site(s), known to constitute an obstacle for efficient modification