43 research outputs found
Citizen Perspective on the Development of Sustainability Indicators—A Case Study based on the West Bund, Shanghai
Sustainability indicators are essential technical tools for monitoring and managing sustainable urban development. The challenge of developing sustainability indicators in the urban context lies in the lack of a participatory approach that integrates the bottom-up perspective of citizens. Therefore, taking the 14th Five-Year Plan development indicators in the West Bund of Shanghai as the case study, this paper provides policy recommendations for the readjustment and iteration of the local indicators for the Xuhui District Government by identifying the local citizens’ viewpoints and investigating its differences with the policymakers’ views. Totally ten local participants were involved in the structured interviews. Holistically, the perspective of local citizens presents the features of actively intervening in community governance, prioritising community benefits, and trusting the decision-making of local policymakers. This paper then argues that policymakers in a dominant position with preferences in economic indicators should take the initiative to provide an increase in facility-based indicators, effective feedback channels, and professional training in sustainability for local citizens in a secondary position who focus on the improvement of their living experience. The outcomes contribute to the materialisation of the West Bund’s governance goals and the further refinement of integrated solutions for sustainability indicator development
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The prophages of Citrobacter rodentium represent a conserved family of horizontally-acquired mobile genetic elements associated with enteric evolution towards pathogenicity
Prophage mediated horizontal gene transfer (HGT) plays a key role in the evolution of bacteria, enabling access to new environmental niches, including pathogenicity. Citrobacter rodentium is a host-adapted intestinal mouse pathogen and important model organism for attaching and effacing (A/E) pathogens including the clinically significant enterohaemorrhagic (EHEC) and enteropathogenic (EPEC) Escherichia coli. Despite containing ten prophage genomic regions, including an active temperate phage, ΦNP, little was known regarding the nature of C. rodentium prophages in the bacterium’s evolution towards pathogenicity. In this study, our characterization of ΦNP led to the discovery of a second, fully functional temperate phage, named ΦSM. We identify the bacterial host-receptor for both phages as lipopolysaccharide (LPS). ΦNP and ΦSM are likely important mediators of HGT in C. rodentium. Bioinformatic analysis of the ten prophage regions reveals cargo genes encoding known virulence factors, including several Type III secretion system (T3SS) effectors. C. rodentium prophages are conserved across a wide range of pathogenic enteric bacteria, including EPEC and EHEC as well as pathogenic strains of Salmonella enterica, Shigella boydii, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Phylogenetic analysis of core enteric backbone genes compared against prophage evolutionary models suggests that these prophages represent an important, conserved family of horizontally acquired enteric-associated pathogenicity determinants. In addition to highlighting the transformative role of bacteriophage mediated HGT in C. rodentium’s evolution towards pathogenicity, these data suggest that the examination of conserved families of prophages in other pathogenic bacteria and disease outbreaks might provide deeper evolutionary and pathological insights otherwise obscured by more classical analysis.BBSRC and China Scholarship Council and the Cambridge Commonwealth, European, and International Trust
TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Systems
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing
tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external
tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external
tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three
prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real
system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the
descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited;
(2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs
can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks;
(3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create
challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In
response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing
the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating
within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components
designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most
pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM
Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for
task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves
different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further
used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our
methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced
academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each
individual component as well as the integrated framework
Genetic dissection of the tissue‐specific roles of type III effectors and phytotoxins in the pathogenicity of Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae to cherry
When compared with other phylogroups (PGs) of the Pseudomonas syringae species complex, P. syringae pv. syringae (Pss) strains within PG2 have a reduced repertoire of type III effectors (T3Es) but produce several phytotoxins. Effectors within the cherry pathogen Pss 9644 were grouped based on their frequency in strains from Prunus as the conserved effector locus (CEL) common to most P. syringae pathogens; a core of effectors common to PG2; a set of PRUNUS effectors common to cherry pathogens; and a FLEXIBLE set of T3Es. Pss 9644 also contains gene clusters for biosynthesis of toxins syringomycin, syringopeptin and syringolin A. After confirmation of virulence gene expression, mutants with a sequential series of T3E and toxin deletions were pathogenicity tested on wood, leaves and fruits of sweet cherry (Prunus avium) and leaves of ornamental cherry (Prunus incisa). The toxins had a key role in disease development in fruits but were less important in leaves and wood. An effectorless mutant retained some pathogenicity to fruit but not wood or leaves. Striking redundancy was observed amongst effector groups. The CEL effectors have important roles during the early stages of leaf infection and possibly acted synergistically with toxins in all tissues. Deletion of separate groups of T3Es had more effect in P. incisa than in P. avium. Mixed inocula were used to complement the toxin mutations in trans and indicated that strain mixtures may be important in the field. Our results highlight the niche‐specific role of toxins in P. avium tissues and the complexity of effector redundancy in the pathogen Pss 9644
Beam test of a 180 nm CMOS Pixel Sensor for the CEPC vertex detector
The proposed Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) imposes new
challenges for the vertex detector in terms of pixel size and material budget.
A Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) prototype called TaichuPix, based on a
column drain readout architecture, has been developed to address the need for
high spatial resolution. In order to evaluate the performance of the
TaichuPix-3 chips, a beam test was carried out at DESY II TB21 in December
2022. Meanwhile, the Data Acquisition (DAQ) for a muti-plane configuration was
tested during the beam test. This work presents the characterization of the
TaichuPix-3 chips with two different processes, including cluster size, spatial
resolution, and detection efficiency. The analysis results indicate the spatial
resolution better than 5 and the detection efficiency exceeds 99.5 %
for both TaichuPix-3 chips with the two different processes
Standardized Assessment of Automatic Segmentation of White Matter Hyperintensities and Results of the WMH Segmentation Challenge
Quantification of cerebral white matter hyperintensities (WMH) of presumed vascular origin is of key importance in many neurological research studies. Currently, measurements are often still obtained from manual segmentations on brain MR images, which is a laborious procedure. The automatic WMH segmentation methods exist, but a standardized comparison of the performance of such methods is lacking. We organized a scientific challenge, in which developers could evaluate their methods on a standardized multi-center/-scanner image dataset, giving an objective comparison: the WMH Segmentation Challenge. Sixty T1 + FLAIR images from three MR scanners were released with the manual WMH segmentations for training. A test set of 110 images from five MR scanners was used for evaluation. The segmentation methods had to be containerized and submitted to the challenge organizers. Five evaluation metrics were used to rank the methods: 1) Dice similarity coefficient; 2) modified Hausdorff distance (95th percentile); 3) absolute log-transformed volume difference; 4) sensitivity for detecting individual lesions; and 5) F1-score for individual lesions. In addition, the methods were ranked on their inter-scanner robustness; 20 participants submitted their methods for evaluation. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the results. In brief, there is a cluster of four methods that rank significantly better than the other methods, with one clear winner. The inter-scanner robustness ranking shows that not all the methods generalize to unseen scanners. The challenge remains open for future submissions and provides a public platform for method evaluation
Implementation and performances of the IPbus protocol for the JUNO Large-PMT readout electronics
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is a large neutrino
detector currently under construction in China. Thanks to the tight
requirements on its optical and radio-purity properties, it will be able to
perform leading measurements detecting terrestrial and astrophysical neutrinos
in a wide energy range from tens of keV to hundreds of MeV. A key requirement
for the success of the experiment is an unprecedented 3% energy resolution,
guaranteed by its large active mass (20 kton) and the use of more than 20,000
20-inch photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) acquired by high-speed, high-resolution
sampling electronics located very close to the PMTs. As the Front-End and
Read-Out electronics is expected to continuously run underwater for 30 years, a
reliable readout acquisition system capable of handling the timestamped data
stream coming from the Large-PMTs and permitting to simultaneously monitor and
operate remotely the inaccessible electronics had to be developed. In this
contribution, the firmware and hardware implementation of the IPbus based
readout protocol will be presented, together with the performances measured on
final modules during the mass production of the electronics