China at the Crossroad:Creating the Asian Single Currency or Internationalizing RMB

I am going to concentrate my concern on the discussion of the diversification of the existing world currency system, because in the view of the majority of Chinese economists it is closely linked to the future directions and destinations of China’s domestic financial reform, to China’s policies regarding Asia’s financial collaborations, and to the positioning of RMB in the world in the coming years. It is almost commonly accepted among Chinese economists that China is on the way to form its international financial strategies that contain three objectives: properly re-visiting the Bretton Woods system in today’s context, actively pushing foreward the region-wide financial cooperation of an Asian single currency as a core, and gradually internalizing RMB.international financial crisis; financial system reform; RMB inter¬nationalization; exchange rate

Examining media convergence : does it also converge good journalism, economic synergies, and competitive advantages?

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on June 18, 2009)Vita.Thesis (Ph. D.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.This dissertation explores the "simple theory" (Murphy, 2002): Those most experienced in it expect that media convergence will create good journalism, generate the effects of scale and scope economies, and achieve competitive advantages for converged news organizations. Based on theories of scale and scope economies, quality journalism's generation of good business, and organizations' competitive advantages, this study achieved some dichotomous findings by using the qualitative technique of semistructured interviews to interview 37 people who have experience in media convergence, On the one hand, this qualitative study found media convergence's inevitability is rapidly emerging, and its influence is being demonstrated with a certain single medium's content magnified and diversified by convergent media platforms and such user generated content's avenues as OhmyNews and YouTube. With the linkage between good journalism and good business further advanced, this study bridged the links between convergence and good journalism. On the other, this study revealed that private media companies, especially of small or medium sizes, by enjoying some more freedom from the pressures from Wall Street, can demonstrate better balance in continuing with their original convergence strategies to achieve competitive advantages in an environment of weak media economy.Includes bibliographical reference

Altering nodes types in controlling complex networks

Controlling a complex network towards a desired state is of great importance in many applications. A network can be controlled by inputting suitable external signals into some selected nodes, which are called driver nodes. Previous works found there exist two control modes in dense networks: distributed and centralized modes. For networks with the distributed mode, most of the nodes can be act as driver nodes; and those with the centralized mode, most of the nodes never be the driver nodes. Here we present an efficient algorithm to change the control type of nodes, from input nodes to redundant nodes, which is done by reversing edges of the network. We conclude four possible cases when reversing an edge and show the control mode can be changed by reversing very few in-edges of driver nodes. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm on both synthetic and real networks. The experimental results show that the control mode of a network can be easily changed by reversing a few elaborately selected edges, and the number of possible driver nodes is dramatically decreased. Our methods provide the ability to design the desired control modes of the network for different control scenarios, which may be used in many application regions

Emotional Labor in China: Relationships with Burnout, Job Satisfaction, and Perceived Group Membership as Predictors

Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, University of Minnesota Dulut

Competitive Ensembling Teacher-Student Framework for Semi-Supervised Left Atrium MRI Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning has greatly advanced medical image segmentation since it effectively alleviates the need of acquiring abundant annotations from experts and utilizes unlabeled data which is much easier to acquire. Among existing perturbed consistency learning methods, mean-teacher model serves as a standard baseline for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient competitive ensembling teacher student framework for semi-supervised for left atrium segmentation from 3D MR images, in which two student models with different task-level disturbances are introduced to learn mutually, while a competitive ensembling strategy is performed to ensemble more reliable information to teacher model. Different from the one-way transfer between teacher and student models, our framework facilitates the collaborative learning procedure of different student models with the guidance of teacher model and motivates different training networks for a competitive learning and ensembling procedure to achieve better performance. We evaluate our proposed method on the public Left Atrium (LA) dataset and it obtains impressive performance gains by exploiting the unlabeled data effectively and outperforms several existing semi-supervised methods.Comment: Accepeted for BIBM 202

Kovové nanočástice v zeolitech

Zeolity se zapouzdřenými kovovými nanočásticemi vzbudily v heterogenní katalýze velkou pozornost díky své vysoké katalytické aktivitě, selektivitě a stabilitě. Tato diplomová práce byla zaměřena na syntézu zeolitových katalyzátorů s malými a rovnoměrně distribuovanými kovovými nanočásticemi. Hlavními cíly bylo zapouzdření kovových nanočástic do zeolitu pomocí kokrystalizační strategie a 2D-3D transformce zeolitu. Doktorská práce byla provedena na oddělení syntézy a katalýzy J. Heyrovského Ústav fyzikální chemie a Katedře fyzikální a makromolekulární chemie na Přírodovědecké fakultě Univerzity Karlovy pod dohledem Prof. Jiřího Čejky. Zeolity jsou anorganické krystalické hlinitokřemičitany s mikroporézní strukturou. Mikropóry zeolitů poskytují ideální prostředí pro umístění kovových nanočástic. Kovových nanočástice vznikající v mikropórech zeolitu mohou být omezeny jeho krystalickou mříží, zabraňující agregaci a vyplavování kovu během reakčního procesu. Průměry mikropórů zeolitu se obvykle pohybujív rozmezí0,3-1,5 nm, což může sloužit k oddělení molekul v závislosti na jejich velikosti a tvaru, čímž se katalyzátory zeolite s kovovými nanočásticemi obohatí o tvarovou selektivitu. Zapouzdření kovových nanočástic do zeolitů může navíc ovlivnit distribuci kovových a kyselých center a vytvořit tak...Zeolites with encapsulated metal nanoparticles have attracted a wide attention in heterogeneous catalysis due to their high catalytic activity, selectivity, and stability. The PhD thesis was focused on design and synthesis of metal@zeolite catalysts with small and uniformly distributed metal nanoparticles. The main interests were encapsulation of metal nanoparticles into zeolites by co-crystallization strategy and 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional zeolite transformation approach. The PhD work was performed at the Department of Synthesis and Catalysis at J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry and Department of Physical and Macromolecular Chemistry, Faculty of Science at Charles University under the supervision of Prof. Jiří Čejka. Zeolites are inorganic crystalline aluminosilicates with microporous framework structures. The micropores of zeolites provide the ideal microenvironment to accommodate metal nanoparticles. During metal nanoparticles formation in zeolite micropores, they can be limited by a rigid framework, preventing the aggregation and leaching of metal during the reaction process. Furthermore, the diameters of zeolite micropores are usually in the range of 0.3-1.5 nm, which can be used to discriminate molecules depending on their size and shape, thus endowing the [email protected] of Physical and Macromolecular ChemistryKatedra fyzikální a makromol. chemieFaculty of SciencePřírodovědecká fakult

Nanosecond pulsed electric field inhibits malignant melanoma growth by inducing the change of systemic immunity

Nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) showed an inhibitory effect on proliferation of malignant melanoma. In this study, the growth of melanoma were inhibited by changing the systemic immunity. C57BL/6 mice with B16 malignant were exposed to 200 pulses of 100 ns duration, 30kV/cm. The mice were executed four days later. T lymphocyte has been extracted from spleen. Cell viability was evaluated by CCK-8 assay. CD3+CD4+ T cells, CD3+CD8+ T cells, regulatory T cells (Treg) and myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) were analyzed by flow cytometry. TNF-?, IL-2, IL-10, TGF-?, IFN? ? levels in supernatants were assessed by ELISA. C57 malignant melanoma model were established successfully. After the treatment of nsPEFs(30 kV/cm 100 ns 200p), the numbers of T lymphocytes were increased.CD3+ CD4+ T cells changed from 48% to 51.2%;CD3+CD8+T lymphocytes increased from 39.6% to 40.4%.Treg cells reduced from 4.3% to 2.4%,MDSC decreased by 39.0% to 19.7% . In addition, the level of TNF-?, IL-2 were increased (P0.05). Tumor growth can be effectively inhibited by nsPEFs in vivo, which activate targets of immune respones, accumulation of inflammatory cells and immune cytokines