Application of geostatistical analyst methods in discovering concealed gold and pathfinder elements as geochemical anomalies related to ore mineralisation

The study area in the West Junggar Basin is known to be rich in hydrothermal gold deposits and occurrences, even though there has been minimum exploration in the area. It is here hypothesised that this area could host more gold deposits if mineral exploration methods were to be reinforced. This research is aimed at identifying geochemical anomalies of Au, and determining possible factors and conditions which facilitate the formation of anomalies by referring to As and Hg as gold pathfinders. Geostatistical analyst techniques have been applied to 9,852 stream sediments and bedrock data collected on a total surface of 1,280 km 2 of West Junggar, Xinjiang (northwest China). The kriging interpolation and quantile-quantile plot methods, combined with statistical methods, successfully identified both Au and its pathfinders’ anomalies. In the present study, median was considered as background values (10.2 ppm for As, 9.13 ppb for Hg and 2.5 ppb for Au), whereas the 95 th percentile were threshold values (28.03 ppm for As, 16.71 ppb for Hg and 8.2 ppb for Au) and values greater than thresholds are geochemical anomalies. Moreover, the high concentrations of these three discovered elements are caused primarily by hydrothermal ore mineralisation and are found to be controlled mainly by the Hatu and Sartohay faults of a northeast-southwesterly direction as well as their related secondary faults of variable orientation, which facilitate the easy flow of hydrothermal fluids towards the surface resulting in the formation of geochemical anomalies. Most of anomalies concentration of Au are found near the mining sites, which indicates that the formation of new Au anomalies is influenced by current or previous mining sites through geological or weathering processes. In addition, the low concentration of gold and its pathfinders found far from active gold mine or faults indicates that those anomalies are formed due to primary dispersion of hosting rock

Unified Discrete Diffusion for Simultaneous Vision-Language Generation

The recently developed discrete diffusion models perform extraordinarily well in the text-to-image task, showing significant promise for handling the multi-modality signals. In this work, we harness these traits and present a unified multimodal generation model that can conduct both the "modality translation" and "multi-modality generation" tasks using a single model, performing text-based, image-based, and even vision-language simultaneous generation. Specifically, we unify the discrete diffusion process for multimodal signals by proposing a unified transition matrix. Moreover, we design a mutual attention module with fused embedding layer and a unified objective function to emphasise the inter-modal linkages, which are vital for multi-modality generation. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed method can perform comparably to the state-of-the-art solutions in various generation tasks

Methylprednisolone as Adjunct to Endovascular Thrombectomy for Large-Vessel Occlusion Stroke

Importance It is uncertain whether intravenous methylprednisolone improves outcomes for patients with acute ischemic stroke due to large-vessel occlusion (LVO) undergoing endovascular thrombectomy. Objective To assess the efficacy and adverse events of adjunctive intravenous low-dose methylprednisolone to endovascular thrombectomy for acute ischemic stroke secondary to LVO. Design, Setting, and Participants This investigator-initiated, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was implemented at 82 hospitals in China, enrolling 1680 patients with stroke and proximal intracranial LVO presenting within 24 hours of time last known to be well. Recruitment took place between February 9, 2022, and June 30, 2023, with a final follow-up on September 30, 2023.InterventionsEligible patients were randomly assigned to intravenous methylprednisolone (n = 839) at 2 mg/kg/d or placebo (n = 841) for 3 days adjunctive to endovascular thrombectomy. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary efficacy outcome was disability level at 90 days as measured by the overall distribution of the modified Rankin Scale scores (range, 0 [no symptoms] to 6 [death]). The primary safety outcomes included mortality at 90 days and the incidence of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage within 48 hours. Results Among 1680 patients randomized (median age, 69 years; 727 female [43.3%]), 1673 (99.6%) completed the trial. The median 90-day modified Rankin Scale score was 3 (IQR, 1-5) in the methylprednisolone group vs 3 (IQR, 1-6) in the placebo group (adjusted generalized odds ratio for a lower level of disability, 1.10 [95% CI, 0.96-1.25]; P = .17). In the methylprednisolone group, there was a lower mortality rate (23.2% vs 28.5%; adjusted risk ratio, 0.84 [95% CI, 0.71-0.98]; P = .03) and a lower rate of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (8.6% vs 11.7%; adjusted risk ratio, 0.74 [95% CI, 0.55-0.99]; P = .04) compared with placebo. Conclusions and Relevance Among patients with acute ischemic stroke due to LVO undergoing endovascular thrombectomy, adjunctive methylprednisolone added to endovascular thrombectomy did not significantly improve the degree of overall disability.Trial RegistrationChiCTR.org.cn Identifier: ChiCTR210005172

Agricultural Economic Resilience in the Context of International Food Price Fluctuation—An Empirical Analysis on the Main Grain–Producing Areas in Northeast China

In the context of international food price fluctuations, agricultural economic development is usually subject to large shocks, which also leads to clear spatial–temporal differentiation in regional agricultural economic resilience. However, there is a paucity of retrievable studies on the evolutionary process of agricultural economic resilience and its impact mechanisms. Taking the impact of and disturbance caused by international food price fluctuations on the agricultural economy from 2005 to 2021 as the research background, this paper adopts the economic resilience analysis framework and selects gross agricultural output value indicators to measure the agricultural economic resilience of 12 cities in the main grain-producing areas in Northeast China–Sanjiang Plain and Songnen Plain. At the same time, the regression model is used to further analyze the spatial and temporal changes of agricultural economic resilience and the main influencing factors. Based on the results of the research, it can be concluded that: ① international food prices exert different degrees of influence on agricultural economic resilience at different stages. From 2005 to 2013, the agricultural economic resilience of the two plains changed less, and the resilience capacity performed better in both the period of falling and rising international food prices, while from 2014 to 2021, the agricultural economic resilience of the two plains changed more due to the great impact of international food price fluctuations, with a steep decline in resilience capacity in the period of falling international food prices from 2014 to 2017, followed by a rapid rebound between 2018 and 2021. ② There are differences in the resilience capacity of the agricultural economy in the main maize- and rice-producing areas. Although it is a fact that agricultural economic development in the two major plains is faster than the national average in most periods, the comparison reveals that the main corn-producing area (Songnen Plain) is more volatile and its resilience capacity is relatively weak in both periods of falling and rising food prices, while the main rice-producing area (Sanjiang Plain) is less volatile, indicating its relatively strong agricultural economic resilience capacity. ③ Factors affecting agricultural economic resilience behave differently over the three cycles. During the period of rising international food prices, indicators reflecting agricultural production capacity have a greater impact on agricultural economic resilience, while during the period of falling international food prices, indicators reflecting agricultural input intensity and agricultural support capacity have a greater impact on agricultural economic resilience

Application of geostatistical analyst methods in discovering concealed gold and pathfinder elements as geochemical anomalies related to ore mineralisation

The study area in the West Junggar Basin is known to be rich in hydrothermal gold deposits and occurrences, even though there has been minimum exploration in the area. It is here hypothesised that this area could host more gold deposits if mineral exploration methods were to be reinforced. This research is aimed at identifying geochemical anomalies of Au, and determining possible factors and conditions which facilitate the formation of anomalies by referring to As and Hg as gold pathfinders. Geostatistical analyst techniques have been applied to 9,852 stream sediments and bedrock data collected on a total surface of 1,280 km2 of West Junggar, Xinjiang (northwest China). The kriging interpolation and quantile-quantile plot methods, combined with statistical methods, successfully identified both Au and its pathfinders’ anomalies. In the present study, median was considered as background values (10.2 ppm for As, 9.13 ppb for Hg and 2.5 ppb for Au), whereas the 95th percentile were threshold values (28.03 ppm for As, 16.71 ppb for Hg and 8.2 ppb for Au) and values greater than thresholds are geochemical anomalies. Moreover, the high concentrations of these three discovered elements are caused primarily by hydrothermal ore mineralisation and are found to be controlled mainly by the Hatu and Sartohay faults of a northeast-southwesterly direction as well as their related secondary faults of variable orientation, which facilitate the easy flow of hydrothermal fluids towards the surface resulting in the formation of geochemical anomalies. Most of anomalies concentration of Au are found near the mining sites, which indicates that the formation of new Au anomalies is influenced by current or previous mining sites through geological or weathering processes. In addition, the low concentration of gold and its pathfinders found far from active gold mine or faults indicates that those anomalies are formed due to primary dispersion of hosting rock

Sentiment analysis for online reviews using conditional random fields and support vector machines

Sentiment analysis of online reviews is an important way of mining useful information from the Internet. Despite several advantages, the accuracy of sentiment analysis based on a domain dictionary relies on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the dictionary. Instead of creating a domain dictionary, we propose an approach for online review sentiment classification, which uses a conditional random field algorithm to extract the emotional characteristics from fragments of the review. The characteristic (feature) words are then weighted asymmetrically before a support vector machine classifier is used to obtain the sentiment orientation of the review. In our experiments, the average accuracy reached 90%, showing that using sentiment feature fragments instead of whole reviews and weighting the characteristic words asymmetrically can improve the sentiment classification accuracy

Agricultural Economic Resilience in the Context of International Food Price Fluctuation—An Empirical Analysis on the Main Grain–Producing Areas in Northeast China

In the context of international food price fluctuations, agricultural economic development is usually subject to large shocks, which also leads to clear spatial–temporal differentiation in regional agricultural economic resilience. However, there is a paucity of retrievable studies on the evolutionary process of agricultural economic resilience and its impact mechanisms. Taking the impact of and disturbance caused by international food price fluctuations on the agricultural economy from 2005 to 2021 as the research background, this paper adopts the economic resilience analysis framework and selects gross agricultural output value indicators to measure the agricultural economic resilience of 12 cities in the main grain-producing areas in Northeast China–Sanjiang Plain and Songnen Plain. At the same time, the regression model is used to further analyze the spatial and temporal changes of agricultural economic resilience and the main influencing factors. Based on the results of the research, it can be concluded that: ① international food prices exert different degrees of influence on agricultural economic resilience at different stages. From 2005 to 2013, the agricultural economic resilience of the two plains changed less, and the resilience capacity performed better in both the period of falling and rising international food prices, while from 2014 to 2021, the agricultural economic resilience of the two plains changed more due to the great impact of international food price fluctuations, with a steep decline in resilience capacity in the period of falling international food prices from 2014 to 2017, followed by a rapid rebound between 2018 and 2021. ② There are differences in the resilience capacity of the agricultural economy in the main maize- and rice-producing areas. Although it is a fact that agricultural economic development in the two major plains is faster than the national average in most periods, the comparison reveals that the main corn-producing area (Songnen Plain) is more volatile and its resilience capacity is relatively weak in both periods of falling and rising food prices, while the main rice-producing area (Sanjiang Plain) is less volatile, indicating its relatively strong agricultural economic resilience capacity. ③ Factors affecting agricultural economic resilience behave differently over the three cycles. During the period of rising international food prices, indicators reflecting agricultural production capacity have a greater impact on agricultural economic resilience, while during the period of falling international food prices, indicators reflecting agricultural input intensity and agricultural support capacity have a greater impact on agricultural economic resilience

MMoT: Mixture-of-Modality-Tokens Transformer for Composed Multimodal Conditional Image Synthesis

Existing multimodal conditional image synthesis (MCIS) methods generate images conditioned on any combinations of various modalities that require all of them must be exactly conformed, hindering the synthesis controllability and leaving the potential of cross-modality under-exploited. To this end, we propose to generate images conditioned on the compositions of multimodal control signals, where modalities are imperfectly complementary, i.e., composed multimodal conditional image synthesis (CMCIS). Specifically, we observe two challenging issues of the proposed CMCIS task, i.e., the modality coordination problem and the modality imbalance problem. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Mixture-of-Modality-Tokens Transformer (MMoT) that adaptively fuses fine-grained multimodal control signals, a multimodal balanced training loss to stabilize the optimization of each modality, and a multimodal sampling guidance to balance the strength of each modality control signal. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that MMoT achieves superior performance on both unimodal conditional image synthesis (UCIS) and MCIS tasks with high-quality and faithful image synthesis on complex multimodal conditions. The project website is available at https://jabir-zheng.github.io/MMoT

Prone versus Supine Position Ventilation in Adult Patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to compare the efficacy and safety of prone versus supine position ventilation for adult acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients. The electronic databases of PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library were systematically searched from their inception up to September 2020. The relative risks (RRs) and weighted mean differences (WMDs) with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were employed to calculate pooled outcomes using the random-effects models. Twelve randomized controlled trials that had recruited a total of 2264 adults with ARDS were selected for the final meta-analysis. The risk of mortality in patients who received prone position ventilation was 13% lower than for those who received supine ventilation, but this effect was not statistically significant (RR: 0.87; 95% CI: 0.75–1.00; P = 0.055). There were no significant differences between prone and supine position ventilation on the duration of mechanical ventilation (WMD: −0.22; P = 0.883) or ICU stays (WMD: –0.39; P = 0.738). The pooled RRs indicate that patients who received prone position ventilation had increased incidence of pressure scores (RR: 1.23; P = 0.003), displacement of a thoracotomy tube (RR: 3.14; P = 0.047), and endotracheal tube obstruction (RR: 2.45; P = 0.001). The results indicated that prone positioning during ventilation might have a beneficial effect on mortality, though incidence of several adverse events was significantly increased for these patients