Government Inspectors’ Penalties and Customer Loyalty of Investment: Empirical Research based on Data of Chinese Public Companies

This paper uses data of Chinese public companies from 2004-2015 to test the relationship between government inspectors’ penalties and customer loyalty of investment bank. The test results show that penalties from government inspectors would damage the reputation of investment bank and, thus, result to a decline in its market competitiveness. If the investment bank gets penalties, IPO customers would probably change the underwriters if they want to do Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO). This, therefore, result to a decline in the customer loyalty of investment bank. This negative impact of penalties on customer loyalty is more significant to the investment bank that has high reputation

Contrastive Prompt Learning-based Code Search based on Interaction Matrix

Code search aims to retrieve the code snippet that highly matches the given query described in natural language. Recently, many code pre-training approaches have demonstrated impressive performance on code search. However, existing code search methods still suffer from two performance constraints: inadequate semantic representation and the semantic gap between natural language (NL) and programming language (PL). In this paper, we propose CPLCS, a contrastive prompt learning-based code search method based on the cross-modal interaction mechanism. CPLCS comprises:(1) PL-NL contrastive learning, which learns the semantic matching relationship between PL and NL representations; (2) a prompt learning design for a dual-encoder structure that can alleviate the problem of inadequate semantic representation; (3) a cross-modal interaction mechanism to enhance the fine-grained mapping between NL and PL. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world dataset across six programming languages. The experiment results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in improving semantic representation quality and mapping ability between PL and NL

Quality of life of Chinese urban community residents: a psychometric study of the mainland Chinese version of the WHOQOL-BREF

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The short version of the World Health Organization's Quality of Life Instrument (WHOQOL-BREF) is widely validated and popularly used in assessing the subjective quality of life (QOL) of patients and the general public. We examined its psychometric properties in a large sample of community residents in mainland China.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The WHOQOL-BREF was administered to 1052 adult community residents in a major metropolitan city in southern China. The structural integrity of the 4-factor model in confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and the relationship of QOL with demographic variables were examined. Validity was assessed using the known-group comparison (229 with vs. 823 without chronic illness), item-domain correlations, and CFA using the ML estimation in LISREL.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Internal consistency reliability of the whole instrument (26 items) was 0.89, and the psychological, social, and environment domains had acceptable reliability (alpha = 0.76, 0.72, 0.78 respectively), while that of the physical domain was slightly lower (α = 0.67). The respective mean scores of these domains were 13.69, 14.11, 12.33 and 14.56. Item-domain correlations were much higher for corresponding domains than for non-corresponding domains, indicating good convergent validity. CFA provided a marginally acceptable fit to the a priori four-factor model when two matching content item pairs were allowed to be correlated; χ²(244) = 1836, RMSEA = 0.088, NNFI = 0.898, CFI = 0.909. This factorial structure was shown to be equivalent between the participants with and without chronic illness. The differences in means between these two groups were significant but small in some domains; effect size = 0.55, 0.15, 0.18 in the physical, psychological, and social relationship domains respectively. Furthermore, males had significantly higher QOL scores than females in the psychological domain, while individuals with a younger age, higher income, and higher education levels also had significantly higher QOL. Compared with the international data, the Chinese in this study had relatively low QOL scores with about 5% of males and 16% of females being at risk for poor QOL.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study has provided psychometric properties of the WHOQOL-BREF as used in China and should definitely be useful for researchers who would like to use or further refine the instrument.</p

Epidemiology and survival of patients with central nervous system solitary fibrous tumors: A population-based analysis

BackgroundThe objective of this study was to determine population-based estimates of the epidemiology and prognosis of central nervous system solitary fibrous tumors (cSFTs).MethodsWe extracted the data of patients diagnosed with cSFTs between 2004 and 2018 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. We analyzed the distribution of patients according to their demographic and clinical characteristics. Binary logistic regression analysis was performed to predict which patients would be diagnosed with malignant cSFT. Possible prognostic indicators were analyzed by multivariable Cox proportional hazards models.ResultsA total of 650 cases were included. The majority of patients were diagnosed at 50-59 years old, and the median age at diagnosis was 55 years. A total of 13.4% of the tumors were located in the spinal canal, and 24% of the tumors were benign. Most of the tumors were larger than 3 cm, but distant metastasis was rare. Tumor resection was the first choice of treatment for these patients, and total resection was achieved in 51.1%. Radiation therapy after surgery was also administered to 42.3% of the patients. The median survival was 57 months. Intracranial tumors and tumors with distant metastasis tended to be malignant. The results of the log-rank test showed that the patients who underwent total resection had better overall survival (OS), but the effect of radiation therapy after surgery was not significant.ConclusioncSFT is a rare and aggressive type of tumor. Tumor resection is the first choice for treatment, and radiation therapy after surgery does not improve OS. Patients older than 60 years of age who are diagnosed with intracranial tumors, malignant tumors and distant metastasis have worse OS outcomes than their counterparts

Validation of the GALAD model and establishment of a new model for HCC detection in Chinese patients

BackgroundGALAD model is a statistical model used to estimate the possibility of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in patients with chronic liver disease. Many studies with other ethnic populations have shown that it has high sensitivity and specificity. However, whether this model can be used for Chinese patients remains to be determined. Our study was conducted to verify the performance of GALAD model in a Chinese cohort and construct a new model that is more appropriately for Chinese populations.MethodsThere are total 512 patients enrolled in the study, which can be divided into training set and validation set. 80 patients with primary liver cancer, 139 patients with chronic liver disease and 87 healthy people were included in the training set. Through the ROC(receiver operating characteristic) curve analysis, the recognition performance of GALAD model for liver cancer was evaluated, and the GAADPB model was established by logistic regression, including gender, age, AFP, DCP, total protein, and total bilirubin. The validation set (75 HCC patients and 130 CLD patients) was used to evaluate the performance of the GAADPB model.ResultThe GALAD and GAADPB achieved excellent performance (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC], 0.925, 0.945), and were better than GAAP, Doylestown, BALAD-2, aMAP, AFP, AFP-L3%, DCP and combined detection of AFP, AFP-L3 and DCP (AUCs: 0.894, 0.870, 0.648, 0.545, 0.879, 0.782, 0.820 and 0.911) for detecting HCC from CLD in the training set. As for early stage of HCC (BCLC 0/A), GAADPB had the best sensitivity compared to GALAD, ADP and DCP (56.3%, 53.1%, 40.6%, 50.0%). GAADPB had better performance than GALAD in the test set, AUC (0.896 vs 0.888).ConclusionsThe new GAADPB model was powerful and stable, with better performance than the GALAD and other models, and it also was promising in the area of HCC prognosis prediction. Further study on the real-world HCC patients in China are needed

Biocompatibility and Toxicity of Nanoparticles and Nanotubes

In recent years, nanoparticles (NPs) have increasingly found practical applications in technology, research, and medicine. The small particle size coupled with their unique chemical and physical properties is thought to underline their exploitable biomedical activities. Its form may be latex body, polymer, ceramic particle, metal particles, and the carbon particles. Due to their small size and physical resemblance to physiological molecules such as proteins, NPs possess the capacity to revolutionise medical imaging, diagnostics, therapeutics, as well as carry out functional biological processes. But these features may also underline their toxicity. Indeed, a detailed assessment of the factors that influence the biocompatibility and toxicity of NPs is crucial for the safe and sustainable development of the emerging NPs. Due to the unique structure, size, and shape, much effort has been dedicated to analyzing biomedical applications of nanotubes.This paper focuses on the current understanding of the biocompatibility and toxicity of NPs with an emphasis on nanotubes

A Survey on Fundamental Limits of Integrated Sensing and Communication

The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the sensing and communication share the same frequency band and hardware, has emerged as a key technology in future wireless systems due to two main reasons. First, many important application scenarios in fifth generation (5G) and beyond, such as autonomous vehicles, Wi-Fi sensing and extended reality, requires both high-performance sensing and wireless communications. Second, with millimeter wave and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies widely employed in 5G and beyond, the future communication signals tend to have high-resolution in both time and angular domain, opening up the possibility for ISAC. As such, ISAC has attracted tremendous research interest and attentions in both academia and industry. Early works on ISAC have been focused on the design, analysis and optimization of practical ISAC technologies for various ISAC systems. While this line of works are necessary, it is equally important to study the fundamental limits of ISAC in order to understand the gap between the current state-of-the-art technologies and the performance limits, and provide useful insights and guidance for the development of better ISAC technologies that can approach the performance limits. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey for the current research progress on the fundamental limits of ISAC. Particularly, we first propose a systematic classification method for both traditional radio sensing (such as radar sensing and wireless localization) and ISAC so that they can be naturally incorporated into a unified framework. Then we summarize the major performance metrics and bounds used in sensing, communications and ISAC, respectively. After that, we present the current research progresses on fundamental limits of each class of the traditional sensing and ISAC systems. Finally, the open problems and future research directions are discussed