The Role of the Real Exchange Rate Adjustment in Expanding Service Employment in China

It is widely accepted that China needs to shift from its past mode of export-led growth and start to rely more on domestic demand. What role could the real appreciation of the Chinese yuan play in this regard? We attempt to quantify the impact on the structure of the Chinese economy of the real appreciation of the Chinese yuan. We argue that the potential of the service sector to generate income and jobs may be significantly under-estimated by official statistics, as a result of the under-estimation of household consumption of services. While there is no evidence of large under-valuation for the Chinese yuan, we do find that a real appreciation in the order of 20% would bring the Chinese price level in line with the world average level, after the Balassa-Samuelson effect is factored in. In turn, such a real appreciation could increase the service share of employment by 7%.China; real exchange rate; service sector

Catch and Contain Novel Pathogens Early!—Assessing U.S. Medical Isolation Laws as Applied to a Future Pandemic Detection and Prevention Model

As of July 2, 2021, there have been 196,553,009 confirmed cases of the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), including 4,200,412 deaths, globally. Unfortunately, infectious diseases have been an “unavoidable fact of life” throughout history. While the global community looks forward to a gradual return to normalcy from COVID-19 with an increasing number of individuals getting vaccinated on a daily basis, the COVID-19 public health crisis has exposed significant inadequacies in many countries’ pandemic responses—the United States included. Governing authorities must actively consider more effective solutions to quickly detect and prevent the spread of future pandemics. One proposed model that offers promising potential, but is not yet developed in greater detail, is a future pandemic detection and monitoring architecture. This Comment will refer to this architecture as the “test-and-isolate model.” In his May 2020 Scientific American article, biochemist Dr. David J. Ecker recommends strategically placing modern high-speed metagenomic sequencing technology in urban hospitals across the United States to flag previously-unknown pathogens before the infectious agents have the opportunity to spread widely and pose threats of a new pandemic. Under this model, during a time period without any apparent pandemics (peacetime), the 200 biggest metropolitan hospitals in the U.S. would automatically run diagnostic tests upfront for novel causative agents for patients who visit the emergency room with severe respiratory symptoms that are possibly infectious. If such a system detects a sufficiently serious pathogen, public health agencies would send out diagnostic tests to all residents in the affected geographical area(s) within weeks and isolate those who test positive. This system could be integrated with contact tracing and more standard outbreak response

Experimental Study on Variation Strategies for Complex Social Pedestrian Groups in Conflict Conditions

The paper concentrates on an experimental study of the variation strategies of complex social pedestrian groups in conflict conditions. We tracked the trajectories of group members and analysed the configuration of both the complex group and its subgroups when the groups walked through a narrowing passage, passed by an obstacle or faced counter flows. We summarized the variation strategies of complex groups when they faced these conflict conditions. The effect of groups on the crowd was also studied. It was found that groups could have significant effect on self-organization of the crowd. The results in the paper could be applied in modelling pedestrian group decision and behaviour and analysing crowd dynamics

Schisandra chinensis extract ameliorates myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury via TLR4/NF-κB/MyD88 signaling pathway

Purpose: To investigate the effects of Schisandra chinensis extract (SCE) on myocardial ischemiareperfusion (I/R) injury and to elucidate its underlying mechanism of action. Methods: A rat model of myocardial I/R injury was used. Ischemia was induced by occluding the left anterior descending artery for 30 min and the myocardium was then reperfused for 2 h in Sprague-Dawley rats. Triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) staining was used to measure myocardial infarct size, while the levels of inflammatory cytokines were evaluated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Western blot assay was conducted to determine protein levels. Results: TTC staining showed that myocardial I/R injury was ameliorated after SCE treatment. Serum creatine kinase (CK), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), and malondialdehyde (MDA) levels decreased, whereas superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity increased after SCE treatment. Moreover, seruminterleukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) expression levels were reduced after SCE treatment. Furthermore, SCE treatment remarkably downregulated the protein expression levels of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB), and myeloid differentiation factor 88 (MyD88). Conclusion: SCE may exert protective effects against myocardial I/R injury by downregulating TLR4-mediated NF-κB/MyD88 signaling pathway. However, this needs to confirmed in clinical studies. Keywords: Schisandra chinensis, TLR4/NF-κB/MyD88, Inflammasome, Myocardial ischemiareperfusion injur

Changes in three tumor markers in patients with advanced lung adenocarcinoma after combination therapy with pemetrexed and platinum: Short-term treatment efficacy

Purpose: To study changes in three tumor markers before and after combination treatment with pemetrexed and platinum, and evaluate the short-term therapeutic effectiveness of the treatment in advanced lung adenocarcinoma (ALA) subjects. Method: Patients with ALA (n =120) admitted to JinHua Municipal Central Hospital from January 2017 to May 2018 were selected as the research subjects. According to the results of chemotherapy, they were divided into two groups: significantly-reduced tumor volume group (90 cases), and nonsignificantly-reduced tumor volume group (21 cases). The two groups were treated with chemotherapy using a combination of pemetrexed and cisplatin. The levels of CEA, CA125 and CYFRA21-1 before and after chemotherapy were assayed to determine their relationship with short-term therapy effectiveness. Result: Overall analysis of tumor markers in the 120 patients with ALA showed statistically significant reduction in overall tumor marker levels before and after chemotherapy (p < 0.05). At the end of chemotherapy, the tumor markers were markedly reduced in subjects with significant tumor volume, and there was statistical difference between the two groups before chemotherapy (p < 0.05). Changes in CEA, CA125 and CYFRA21-1 were positively correlated with the chemotherapeutic effects on patients with ALA. Conclusion: In ALA patients treated with pemetrexed and platinum, changes in serum CEA, CA125 and CYFRA21-1 profiles before and after treatment depend on the effect of chemotherapy, and they are reliable for prediction of short-term therapeutic efficacy

Semantic Synchronization for Enhanced Reliability in Communication Systems

As a new communication paradigm, semantic communication has received widespread attention in communication fields. However, since the decoding of semantic signals relies on contextual knowledge, misalignment between the starting position of the semantic signal and the AI-based semantic decoder would prevent source signal recovery and reconstruction. To achieve more precise semantic communication, this study proposes an image-based semantic synchronization method leveraging intrinsic semantic features of image content. Specifically, a shared synchronized image (SyncImg) is encoded into a synchronization vector header at the transmitter and sent to the receiver. The receiver adopts a sliding window semantic decoder combined with classification and template matching methods to locate the synchronization point. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with traditional methods, the proposed method achieves a lower miss detected ratio (MDR) and root-mean-square error (RMSE) under low signal-to-noise ratios, realizing accurate synchronization of semantic signals across different devices

The DKU-OPPO System for the 2022 Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification Challenge

This paper describes our DKU-OPPO system for the 2022 Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification (SASV) Challenge. First, we split the joint task into speaker verification (SV) and spoofing countermeasure (CM), these two tasks which are optimized separately. For ASV systems, four state-of-the-art methods are employed. For CM systems, we propose two methods on top of the challenge baseline to further improve the performance, namely Embedding Random Sampling Augmentation (ERSA) and One-Class Confusion Loss(OCCL). Second, we also explore whether SV embedding could help improve CM system performance. We observe a dramatic performance degradation of existing CM systems on the domain-mismatched Voxceleb2 dataset. Third, we compare different fusion strategies, including parallel score fusion and sequential cascaded systems. Compared to the 1.71% SASV-EER baseline, our submitted cascaded system obtains a 0.21% SASV-EER on the challenge official evaluation set.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech202