810 research outputs found
Witnessing the Pandemic with Foucault: Power, Politics, and COVID-19
Drawing heavily on the works of Michel Foucault, I examine the different political responses to the pandemic of COVID-19. In the first part of this article, I examine the Chinese government’s response to COVID-19 and expose the relationship between biopower and the political ideal of societies, arguing that technology also entered into the realm of biopolitics and helped society accomplish its political ideal of mobility, productivity, and security. In the second part of this article, I suggest that COVID-19 reshaped and rearranged the power mechanism in societies, arguing that new forms of power might emerge in the future. Synthesizing these two cases, I challenge the reader to reflect critically upon the relationship between the pandemic and the power architecture of societies and suggest that the pandemic might lead to the emergence of new power relations in societies.
Investigate the and polarization splitting effect with combined mechanisms
The significant splitting of and polarization
measured in STAR's Au+Au 7.7GeV collisions seems to be huge and unable to be
described satisfactorily by any single mechanism, thus we revisit and combine
there different mechanisms together on the basis of our PICR hydrodynamic
model, to explain the experimental data. The three mechanisms, i.e. the meson
field mechanism, the freeze-out space-time mechanism, and the QGP's magnetic
field mechanism, lie on different stage of high energy collisions, and thus are
not contradicted with each other. We find that the meson field mechanism is
dominat, while the QGP's magnetic field mechanism is rather trivial, and
freeze-out time effect is restricted by the small FZ time difference, leading
to a hierarchy of . Besides, the
combination of different mechanisms could promote the mean value of
polarization splitting from about 3\%-4\% to 4.5\%, which is more close to the
experimental measured mean value of 5.8\%
Improved Competitive Ratios for Online Bipartite Matching on Degree Bounded Graphs
We consider the online bipartite matching problem on -bounded graphs,
where each online vertex has at most neighbors, each offline vertex has at
least neighbors, and . The model of -bounded graphs
is proposed by Naor and Wajc (EC 2015 and TEAC 2018) to model the online
advertising applications in which offline advertisers are interested in a large
number of ad slots, while each online ad slot is interesting to a small number
of advertisers. They proposed deterministic and randomized algorithms with a
competitive ratio of for the problem, and show that the
competitive ratio is optimal for deterministic algorithms. They also raised the
open questions of whether strictly better competitive ratios can be achieved
using randomized algorithms, for both the adversarial and stochastic arrival
models. In this paper we answer both of their open problems affirmatively. For
the adversarial arrival model, we propose a randomized algorithm with
competitive ratio for
all . We also consider the stochastic model and show that even
better competitive ratios can be achieved. We show that for all , the competitive ratio is always at least . We further consider the
-matching problem when each offline vertex can be matched at most times,
and provide several competitive ratio lower bounds for the adversarial and
stochastic model.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure
Pro-angiogenic photo-crosslinked silk fibroin hydrogel: a potential candidate for repairing alveolar bone defects
Objective: This study aimed to develop a pro-angiogenic hydrogel with in situ gelation ability for alveolar bone defects repair. Methodology: Silk fibroin was chemically modified by Glycidyl Methacrylate (GMA), which was evaluated by proton nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR). Then, the photo-crosslinking ability of the modified silk fibroin was assessed. Scratch and transwell-based migration assays were conducted to investigate the effect of the photo-crosslinked silk fibroin hydrogel on the migration of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). In vitro angiogenesis was conducted to examine whether the photo-crosslinked silk fibroin hydrogel would affect the tube formation ability of HUVECs. Finally, subcutaneous implantation experiments were conducted to further examine the pro-angiogenic ability of the photo-crosslinked silk fibroin hydrogel, in which the CD31 and α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) were stained to assess neovascularization. The tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin-1β (IL-1β) were also stained to evaluate inflammatory responses after implantation. Results: GMA successfully modified the silk fibroin, which we verified by our 1H-NMR and in vitro photo-crosslinking experiment. Scratch and transwell-based migration assays proved that the photo-crosslinked silk fibroin hydrogel promoted HUVEC migration. The hydrogel also enhanced the tube formation of HUVECs in similar rates to Matrigel®. After subcutaneous implantation in rats for one week, the hydrogel enhanced neovascularization without triggering inflammatory responses. Conclusion: This study found that photo-crosslinked silk fibroin hydrogel showed pro-angiogenic and inflammation inhibitory abilities. Its photo-crosslinking ability makes it suitable for matching irregular alveolar bone defects. Thus, the photo-crosslinkable silk fibroin-derived hydrogel is a potential candidate for constructing scaffolds for alveolar bone regeneration
Serum Biochemical Reference Values for Adult and Non-adult Chinese Alligators during the Deep and Late Hibernation Periods
Background: The Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis) is a critically endangered species. Due to the rapid growth of the captive population, the susceptibility to disease during the recovery period after winter hibernation, especially in young alligators, have detrimentally affected Chinese alligator populations. Serum biochemistry, which relates to metabolism, nutritional status and disease, is enormously helpful in evaluating physical conditions in reptile. Many studies have reported the serum biochemical reference values of various reptilian species, including several crocodilians. However, reference values for Chinese alligators have not yet been reported. For captive Chinese alligators, hibernation is a crucial period because winter management has a direct influence on the survival rate of juveniles and the reproduction rate of adults. The main object of the present study refore was to measure the serum biochemical values of captive Chinese alligators during hibernation.Materials, Methods & Results: As such, this study investigates the serum biochemistry as a factor of age and hibernation stage. During the deep and late hibernation periods blood samples were drawn from 30 healthy captive Chinese alligators (adults, sub-adults, and juveniles) at the Anhui Research Center of Chinese Alligator Reproduction (ARCCAR). Serum biochemical measurements were performed using an automated biochemical analyzer and compared based on the age group and hibernation stage via two-way ANOVA. During late hibernation, serum lactate dehydrogenase, alkaline phosphatase, and aspartate aminotransferase activity increased in all age groups in comparison to that in deep hibernation, while the concentration of calcium decreased. Meanwhile, the concentration of serum phosphorus, uric acid, total protein, and globulin in sub-adults and juveniles considerably increased in comparison to that in deep hibernation, while cholesterol and albumin declined. However, in adults only slight changes were noted. Based on comprehensive statistical analysis, our results indicate that sub-adults and juveniles are at risk of developing renal disease during artificial hibernation.Discussion: Chinese alligators, especially sub-adults and juveniles, are particularly vulnerable to disease when they wake from hibernation. They often display symptoms such as depression, anorexia, lethargy, sluggish movement, slow, incremental weight gain, progressive muscle wasting, and even death. The high rate of morbidity in non-adult Chinese alligators may be associated with the high density of UA and other changes in multiple biochemical markers that occur during late hibernation. These altered serum biochemical profiles may indicate kidney damage. One of the most common diseases among reptiles is nephropathy, the symptoms of which are non-specific and tend to agree with those observed post-hibernation. In summary, this study has reported the serum biochemical values of Chinese alligators of varying ages in the deep and late hibernation phases. Based on statistical analyses, interesting differences between the serum biochemical values of adults and non-adults during the deep and late hibernation have been found. The observed changes suggest that, under an artificial hibernation environment, the kidneys of sub-adults and juveniles may become impaired. We believe that the data reported in this study will provide clinical guidance to facilitate more appropriate artificial wintering conditions for Chinese alligators, and assist the breeding and management of these reptiles, as well as disease prevention, during hibernation and recovery
Improved Competitive Ratio for Edge-Weighted Online Stochastic Matching
We consider the edge-weighted online stochastic matching problem, in which an
edge-weighted bipartite graph G=(I\cup J, E) with offline vertices J and online
vertex types I is given. The online vertices have types sampled from I with
probability proportional to the arrival rates of online vertex types. The
online algorithm must make immediate and irrevocable matching decisions with
the objective of maximizing the total weight of the matching. For the problem
with general arrival rates, Feldman et al. (FOCS 2009) proposed the Suggested
Matching algorithm and showed that it achieves a competitive ratio of 1-1/e
\approx 0.632. The ratio has recently been improved to 0.645 by Yan (2022), who
proposed the Multistage Suggested Matching (MSM) algorithm. In this paper, we
propose the Evolving Suggested Matching (ESM) algorithm, and show that it
achieves a competitive ratio of 0.650.Comment: To appear in WINE202
DiffAIL: Diffusion Adversarial Imitation Learning
Imitation learning aims to solve the problem of defining reward functions in
real-world decision-making tasks. The current popular approach is the
Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) framework, which matches expert
state-action occupancy measures to obtain a surrogate reward for forward
reinforcement learning. However, the traditional discriminator is a simple
binary classifier and doesn't learn an accurate distribution, which may result
in failing to identify expert-level state-action pairs induced by the policy
interacting with the environment. To address this issue, we propose a method
named diffusion adversarial imitation learning (DiffAIL), which introduces the
diffusion model into the AIL framework. Specifically, DiffAIL models the
state-action pairs as unconditional diffusion models and uses diffusion loss as
part of the discriminator's learning objective, which enables the discriminator
to capture better expert demonstrations and improve generalization.
Experimentally, the results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art
performance and significantly surpasses expert demonstration on two benchmark
tasks, including the standard state-action setting and state-only settings. Our
code can be available at the link https://github.com/ML-Group-SDU/DiffAIL.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 202
The Impact of Smoking Status on the Efficacy of Erlotinib in Patients with Advanced Non-small Cell Lung Cancer
Background and objective Erlotinib is a targeted treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Smoking status may be one of influencing factors of the efficacy of erlotinib. The aim of this study is to explore the impact of smoking status on the efficacy of erlotinib in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Methods Patients with nonsmall cell lung cancer who had been previously treated with at least one course of platinum based chemotherapy received 150 mg oral doses of erlotinib once daily until disease progression. Response rate, progression-free survival, overall survival were analyzed in the different smoking status groups. Kaplan-Meier method was used to analyze the survival rate. Results Fortyeight patients were enrolled into the study from December 2005 to September 2006. We followed up these patients until 28th December, 2008. Median follow up time was 30 months. The compliance rate was 100%. The response rate was 32.1% in the smoking group and 35% in the never smoking group (P=0.836); The median progression-free survival was 3 months and 9 months, respectively (P=0.033). The median overall survival was 5 months and 17 months, respectively (P=0.162). Conclusion Erlotinib is an effective drug for advanced non-small cell lung cancer patients with different smoking status. Progressionfree survival is better in the never smoking patients than the smoking patients
Two-dose-level confirmatory study of the pharmacokinetics and tolerability of everolimus in Chinese patients with advanced solid tumors
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This phase I, randomized, multicenter, open-label study investigated the pharmacokinetics, safety, and efficacy of the oral mammalian target of rapamycin inhibitor everolimus in Chinese patients with advanced solid tumors.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A total of 24 patients with advanced breast cancer (n = 6), gastric cancer (n = 6), non-small cell lung cancer (n = 6), or renal cell carcinoma (n = 6) who were refractory to/unsuitable for standard therapy were randomized 1:1 to oral everolimus 5 or 10 mg/day. Primary end points were pharmacokinetic parameters and safety and tolerability. Pharmacokinetic 24-h profiles were measured on day 15; trough level was measured on days 2, 8, 15, 16, and 22. Tolerability was assessed continuously. This final analysis was performed after all patients had received 6 months of study drug or had discontinued.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Everolimus was absorbed rapidly; median T<sub>max </sub>was 3 h (range, 1-4) and 2 h (range, 0.9-6) in the 5 and 10 mg/day groups, respectively. Pharmacokinetic parameters increased dose proportionally from the 5 and 10 mg/day doses. Steady-state levels were achieved by day 8 or earlier. The most common adverse events suspected to be related to everolimus therapy were increased blood glucose (16.7% and 41.7%) and fatigue (16.7% and 33.3%) in the everolimus 5 and 10 mg/day dose cohorts, respectively. Best tumor response was stable disease in 10 (83%) and 6 (50%) patients in the 5 and 10 mg/day groups, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Everolimus 5 or 10 mg/day was well tolerated in Chinese patients with advanced solid tumors. The observed safety and pharmacokinetic profile of everolimus from this study were consistent with previous studies.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Chinese Health Authorities 2008L09346</p
Chiral Active Particles are Sensitive Reporter to Environmental Geometry
Chiral active particles (CAPs) are self-propelling particles that break
time-reversal symmetry by orbiting or spinning, leading to intriguing
behaviors. Here, we examined the dynamics of CAPs moving in 2D lattices of disk
obstacles through active Brownian dynamics simulations and granular experiments
with grass seeds. We find that the effective diffusivity of the CAPs is
sensitive to the structure of the obstacle lattice, a feature absent in achiral
active particles. We further studied the transport of CAPs in obstacle arrays
under an external field and found a reentrant directional locking effect, which
can be used to sort CAPs with different activities. Finally, we demonstrated
that the parallelogram lattice of obstacles without mirror symmetry can
separate clockwise and counter-clockwise CAPs. The mechanisms of the above
three novel phenomena are qualitatively explained. As such, our work provides a
basis for designing chirality-based tools for single-cell diagnosis and
separation, and active particle-based environmental sensors
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