Determinants of the competitive advantage of dairy supply chains: Evidence from the Chinese dairy industry

In this study, we use an evidence-based approach to examine the factors that determine the competitive advantage of dairy supply chains using evidence from the Chinese dairy industry. We focus on the quality assurance of dairy products, which is considered one of the fundamental influential factors. We investigate interrelationships among the identified determinants, which include dairy production behavior, dairy cow culture model, government regulations, corporate social responsibility, and quality assurance, and examine how these determinants influence the competitive advantage of dairy supply chains. We employ the structural equation modeling approach in which grouped observable variables that represent the identified determinants are extrapolated from primary data collected through a questionnaire survey. Our key findings show that by mediating the effects of dairy production behavior and the dairy cow culture model, government regulation and corporate social responsibility significantly affect the quality assurance of dairy products. In turn, dairy production behavior and the dairy cow culture model significantly affect the competitive advantage of the dairy supply chain via the fully mediated effects of the quality assurance of dairy products. Specifically, the dairy cow culture model helps ensure the safety and quality of milk supply, allowing core dairy firms to control product quality throughout the dairy supply chain. Our empirical study shows that the identified determinants interact to assure the quality of dairy products and enhance the competitive advantage of the dairy supply chain in China

QTL mapping and transcriptomic analysis of fruit length in cucumber

A total of 151 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) were derived from the cross between ‘Cucumis sativus L. hardwickii’ (HW) and a cultivated Northern Chinese inbred line ‘XinTaiMiCi’ (XTMC). We used resequencing to construct the genetic map and analyze the genetic background of RIL population, and combined with the phenotypes of RIL population and the analysis of RNA-seq data, we located the major loci controlling the fruit length of cucumber and related analysis. A genetic map containing 600 bin markers was constructed via re-sequencing. Based on the phenotype data collected in two different seasons (spring 2021 and autumn 2022), the major quantitative trait loci (QTLs) controlling cucumber fruit length were located and their transcriptomic analysis carried out. The results revealed three QTLs (Fl2.1, Fl4.1, and Fl6.1) detected repeatedly in the two seasons, of which Fl4.1 was the dominant QTL. From the functional annotation of corresponding genes there, we discovered the gene Csa4G337340 encoding an auxin efflux carrier family protein. The expression of that gene was significantly lower in XTMC and the long-fruit RIL lines than in HW and the short-fruit RIL lines; hence, we speculated the gene could be negatively correlated with the fruit length of cucumber. Transcriptomic analysis showed that 259 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were enriched in the plant hormone signal transduction pathway. In addition, among those DEGs, 509 transcription factors were detected, these distributed in several transcription factor gene families, such as bHLH, AP2/ErF -ERF, C2H2, and NAC. Therefore, we concluded that the major gene controlling the fruit length of cucumber is located in the interval of Fl4.1, whose gene Csa4G337340 may be involved in the negative regulation of fruit length. Further, genes related to plant hormone signal transduction and several transcription factors were also found involved in the regulation of cucumber fruit length. Our results provide a reference for the fine mapping of major genes and analyzing the mechanism of cucumber fruit length

Analysis of water synergy benefits of coal de-capacity in China

The closure/withdrawal of mines, as one of the important measures to implement the State Council’s “Opinions on supporting the coal industries to resolve excess production capacity and achieve destructive development”, and is of great significance to the optimization of the regional energy structure, reduction of carbon emissions and environmental protection. In order to assess the synergistic benefits of water resources generated in the process of coal de-capacity and reveal the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of closure/withdrawal mines, the number and capacity of closure/withdrawal mines during 2016—2022 were investigated with coal de-capacity as the policy background. Based on the analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of the closure/withdrawal mines, the water resources synergy benefits brought about by coal de-capacity was quantified by combining the water resources-related mine water, water consumption and wastewater discharges coefficients in the coal mining and washing stages. The results show that a total of 4027 mines were closure/withdrawal from coal-related provinces in China during 2016—2022, with a de-capacity of 875 million t. The number of mines closure/withdrawal is concentrated in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and the areas with high density of coal de-capacity are concentrated in the "Ji" bays of the Yellow River. Meanwhile, the total of wasted water resources reduced by coal de-capacity is about 3 billion t, higher than the volume of China’s fourth largest freshwater Honghu lake, generating socio-economic benefits of about 46.165 billion yuan. The areas with positive benefits of water synergy are mainly located in the water shortage areas such as Southwest China, North China and the Yellow River basin. This research quantifies the synergistic benefits of water resources for coal de-capacity and discusses the future direction of mine water resources utilization, with a view to providing scientific basis and data support for sustainable development and “double carbon” target for coal de-capacity

Adsorbate-Induced Structural Evolution of Pd Catalyst for Selective Hydrogenation of Acetylene

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (21908002), project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M660416, 2020T130045) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (buctrc201921, JD2004, XK1802-6). We would like to thank the UK catalysis Hub for help collecting the XAS.Peer reviewedPostprin

Highly Selective and Stable Isolated Non-Noble Metal Atom Catalysts for Selective Hydrogenation of Acetylene

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (21908002) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (buctrc201921, JD2108).Peer reviewedPostprin

Language Prior Is Not the Only Shortcut: A Benchmark for Shortcut Learning in VQA

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are prone to learn the shortcut solution formed by dataset biases rather than the intended solution. To evaluate the VQA models' reasoning ability beyond shortcut learning, the VQA-CP v2 dataset introduces a distribution shift between the training and test set given a question type. In this way, the model cannot use the training set shortcut (from question type to answer) to perform well on the test set. However, VQA-CP v2 only considers one type of shortcut and thus still cannot guarantee that the model relies on the intended solution rather than a solution specific to this shortcut. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new dataset that considers varying types of shortcuts by constructing different distribution shifts in multiple OOD test sets. In addition, we overcome the three troubling practices in the use of VQA-CP v2, e.g., selecting models using OOD test sets, and further standardize OOD evaluation procedure. Our benchmark provides a more rigorous and comprehensive testbed for shortcut learning in VQA. We benchmark recent methods and find that methods specifically designed for particular shortcuts fail to simultaneously generalize to our varying OOD test sets. We also systematically study the varying shortcuts and provide several valuable findings, which may promote the exploration of shortcut learning in VQA.Comment: Fingdings of EMNLP-202

Mitigating catalyst deactivation in selective hydrogenation by enhancing dispersion and utilizing reaction heat effect

ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was financially supported by National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFB3801600), National Natural Science Foundation of China (21908002), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (buctrc201921, JD2223).Peer reviewedPostprin

Metropolitan Segment Traffic Speeds from Massive Floating Car Data in 10 Cities

Traffic analysis is crucial for urban operations and planning, while the availability of dense urban traffic data beyond loop detectors is still scarce. We present a large-scale floating vehicle dataset of per-street segment traffic information, Metropolitan Segment Traffic Speeds from Massive Floating Car Data in 10 Cities (MeTS-10), available for 10 global cities with a 15-minute resolution for collection periods ranging between 108 and 361 days in 2019-2021 and covering more than 1500 square kilometers per metropolitan area. MeTS-10 features traffic speed information at all street levels from main arterials to local streets for Antwerp, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Madrid, Melbourne and Moscow. The dataset leverages the industrial-scale floating vehicle Traffic4cast data with speeds and vehicle counts provided in a privacy-preserving spatio-temporal aggregation. We detail the efficient matching approach mapping the data to the OpenStreetMap road graph. We evaluate the dataset by comparing it with publicly available stationary vehicle detector data (for Berlin, London, and Madrid) and the Uber traffic speed dataset (for Barcelona, Berlin, and London). The comparison highlights the differences across datasets in spatio-temporal coverage and variations in the reported traffic caused by the binning method. MeTS-10 enables novel, city-wide analysis of mobility and traffic patterns for ten major world cities, overcoming current limitations of spatially sparse vehicle detector data. The large spatial and temporal coverage offers an opportunity for joining the MeTS-10 with other datasets, such as traffic surveys in traffic planning studies or vehicle detector data in traffic control settings.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2023.329173

Prognostic value of HMGN family expression in acute myeloid leukemia

Aim: The objective of this work was to investigate the prognostic role of the HMGN family in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Methods: A total of 155 AML patients with HMGN1-5 expression data from the Cancer Genome Atlas database were enrolled in this study. Results: In the chemotherapy-only group, patients with high HMGN2 expression had significantly longer event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS) than those with low expression (all p < 0.05), whereas high HMGN5 expressers had shorter EFS and OS than the low expressers (all p < 0.05). Multivariate analysis identified that high HMGN2 expression was an independent favorable prognostic factor for patients who only received chemotherapy (all p < 0.05). HMGN family expression had no impact on EFS and OS in AML patients receiving allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Conclusion: High HMGN2/5 expression is a potential prognostic indicator for AML