95 research outputs found
Differences in perception of dysentery and enteric fever and willingness to receive vaccines among rural residents in China.
BACKGROUND: Enteric diseases including dysentery and enteric fever remain significant public health problems in China. While vaccines offer great potential in controlling these diseases, greater understanding of factors influencing acceptance of vaccines is needed to create effective enteric disease control programs in rural China. DESIGN: Cross-sectional quantitative study with randomly sampled households from two sites in China, one experiencing high rates of shigellosis (Zengding) and the other of typhoid/paratyphoid (Lingchuan). METHODS: Sociobehavioral survey data were collected through face-to-face interviews from 501 respondents (56% female) in Zhengding regarding dysentery and 624 in Lingchuan (51% female) regarding enteric fever. Vaccine acceptability was measured by expressed need for vaccination and willingness to pay. Comparative and associative analyses were conducted to assess disease perception, vaccination service satisfaction, likelihood of improvements in water and sanitation, and vaccine acceptability. RESULTS: Nearly all respondents in Lingchuan considered enteric fever to be prevalent in the community, while only one half of the respondents in Zhengding considered dysentery to be problematic (p < 0.01). Nevertheless, more respondents in Zhengding were fearful that a household member would acquire dysentery than were Lingchuan respondents worried that a household member would acquire enteric fever (p < 0.01). Perceived vulnerability of specific subgroups (odds ratios ranging from 1.6 to 8.1), knowing someone who died of the disease (odds ratio reached infinity) and satisfaction with past vaccination services (odds ratios reached infinity) were consistently associated with perceived need for vaccines of target populations of all age groups while the association between perception of sanitary improvement and vaccine need was limited. Perceived need for a vaccine was associated with willingness to pay for the vaccine. CONCLUSIONS: Perceptions of enhanced vulnerability of specific subgroups to a disease and satisfactory experiences with vaccination services may increase the perceived need for a vaccine, leading to increased willingness to pay for vaccine. Vaccines are not perceived as important for the elderly
OpenGSL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Structure Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the de facto standard for
representation learning on graphs, owing to their ability to effectively
integrate graph topology and node attributes. However, the inherent suboptimal
nature of node connections, resulting from the complex and contingent formation
process of graphs, presents significant challenges in modeling them
effectively. To tackle this issue, Graph Structure Learning (GSL), a family of
data-centric learning approaches, has garnered substantial attention in recent
years. The core concept behind GSL is to jointly optimize the graph structure
and the corresponding GNN models. Despite the proposal of numerous GSL methods,
the progress in this field remains unclear due to inconsistent experimental
protocols, including variations in datasets, data processing techniques, and
splitting strategies. In this paper, we introduce OpenGSL, the first
comprehensive benchmark for GSL, aimed at addressing this gap. OpenGSL enables
a fair comparison among state-of-the-art GSL methods by evaluating them across
various popular datasets using uniform data processing and splitting
strategies. Through extensive experiments, we observe that existing GSL methods
do not consistently outperform vanilla GNN counterparts. However, we do observe
that the learned graph structure demonstrates a strong generalization ability
across different GNN backbones, despite its high computational and space
requirements. We hope that our open-sourced library will facilitate rapid and
equitable evaluation and inspire further innovative research in the field of
GSL. The code of the benchmark can be found in
https://github.com/OpenGSL/OpenGSL.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
Fabrication of nanowire network AAO and its application in SERS
In this paper, nanowire network anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) was fabricated by just adding a simple film-eroding process after the production of porous AAO. After depositing 50 nm of Au onto the surface, nanowire network AAO can be used as ultrasensitive and high reproducibility surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate. The average Raman enhancement factor of the nanowire network AAO SERS substrate can reach 5.93 × 10(6), which is about 14% larger than that of commercial Klarite® substrates. Simultaneously, the relative standard deviations in the SERS intensities are limited to approximately 7%. All of the results indicate that our large-area low-cost high-performance nanowire structure AAO SERS substrates have a great advantage in chemical/biological sensing applications
Symbolic Discovery of Optimization Algorithms
We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and
apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training.
We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse
program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and target
tasks, we also introduce program selection and simplification strategies. Our
method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm,
(\textit{Evo\textbf{L}\textbf{i}\textbf{o}\textbf{n}tum}).
It is more memory-efficient than Adam as it only keeps track of the momentum.
Different from adaptive optimizers, its update has the same magnitude for each
parameter calculated through the sign operation. We compare Lion with widely
used optimizers, such as Adam and Adafactor, for training a variety of models
on different tasks. On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by
up to 2% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT. On
vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3% and
91.1% accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best
results by 2% and 0.1%, respectively. On diffusion models, Lion outperforms
Adam by achieving a better FID score and reducing the training compute by up to
2.3x. For autoregressive, masked language modeling, and fine-tuning, Lion
exhibits a similar or better performance compared to Adam. Our analysis of Lion
reveals that its performance gain grows with the training batch size. It also
requires a smaller learning rate than Adam due to the larger norm of the update
produced by the sign function. Additionally, we examine the limitations of Lion
and identify scenarios where its improvements are small or not statistically
significant. The implementation of Lion is publicly available.Comment: 30 pages, update the tuning instruction
Thermally enhanced photoluminescence and temperature sensing properties of ScWO:Eu phosphors
Currently,lanthanide ions doped luminescence materials applying as optical
thermometers have arose much concern. Basing on the different responses of two
emissions to temperature, the fluorescence intensity ratio (FIR) technique can
be executed and further estimate the sensitivities to assess the optical
thermometry performances. In this study, we introduce different doping
concentrations of Eu ions into negative expansion material
ScWO:Eu, accessing to the thermal enhanced luminescence
from 373 to 548 K, and investigate the temperature sensing properties in
detail. All samples exhibit good thermally enhanced luminescence behavior. The
emission intensity of ScWO: 6 mol% Eu phosphors reaches
at 147.81% of initial intensity at 473 K. As the Eu doping concentration
increases, the resistance of the samples to thermal quenching decreases. The
FIR technique based on the transitions 5D0-7F1 (592 nm) and 5D0-7F2 (613 nm) of
Eu ions demonstrate a maximum relative temperature sensitivity of 3.063%
K-1 at 298 K for ScWO:Eu: 6 mol% Eu phosphors. The
sensitivity of sample decreases with the increase of Eu concentration.
Benefiting from the thermal enhanced luminescence performance and good
temperature sensing properties, the ScWO:Eu: Eu
phosphors can be applies as optical thermometers
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