Crossing Lilium Orientals of different ploidy creates Fusarium-resistant hybrid

Oriental hybrid lily is of great commercial value, but it is susceptible to Fusarium disease that causes a significant loss to the production. A diploid Oriental hybrid resistant to Fusarium, Cai-74, was diploidized from triploid obtained from the offspring of tetraploid (from ‘Star Fighter’) and diploid (‘Con Amore’, ‘Acapulco’) by screening the hybrids of different cross combinations following inoculating Fusarium oxysporum to the tissue cultured plantlets in a greenhouse. By analyzing saponins content in bulbs of a number of lily genotypes with a known Fusarium resistance, it was found that the mutant Cai-74 had a much higher content of saponin than its parents. Highly resistant wild _L. dauricum_ had the highest level (4.59mg/g), followed by the resistant Cai-74 with 4.01mg/g. The resistant OT cultivars ‘Conca d’or’ and ‘Robina’ had a higher saponins content (3.70 mg/g) and 2.83 mg/g, than the susceptible Oriental lily cultivars ‘Sorbonne’, ‘Siberia’ and ‘Tiber’. The hybrid Cai-74 had a different karyotype compared with the normal Lilium Oriental hybrid cultivars. The results suggested that Cai-74 carries a chromosomal variation correlated to Fusarium resistance. Cai-74 might be used as a genetic resource for breeding of Fusarium resistant cultivars of Oriental hybrid lilies

Nantes vs Shenzhen: Comparison and reflection on the development characteristics of green cities in France and China

Under the background that all countries in the world are facing the environmental pollution brought by the industrial revolution, the concept of sustainable development provides a new direction for the economic development of all countries. For cities that are both the center of human activities and the source of environmental pollution, green reform has become a key measure for countries to practice the concept of sustainable development, so green cities came into being. Under the guidance of national policies and in combination with its own characteristics, Nantes of France has successfully completed the transformation of a green city in less than 20 years through the green art transformation of transportation and public space of Shenzhen. China also relies on high technology to continuously reform and innovate in industrial structure, greening, haze control and water control, so as to realize the transformation of green city. The successful green city construction experience of the two cities provides reference for the development of green cities all over the world

A critical review on the study of threatening in English

Despite the fact that threatening in languages is common in ordinary verbal communication, it has not received much attention from academic studies because of its “negative” nature. Muschalik’s monograph Threatening in English: A Mixed Method Approach, mainly based on the theory of Face Threatening Speech Act by Brown and Levinson (1987), takes 301 categories of threatening expressions in judicial proceedings as the corpus with qualitative and quantitative methods, brings a new perspective for pragmatic research, especially speech act research, and deepens people’s understanding of relevant issues. Initiated by Muschalik’s book Threatening in English: A Mixed Method Approach, the paper is to make a critical review on the studies of threatening in English and propose some new directions for the study of threatening in languages

Consensus-Based Group Task Assignment with Social Impact in Spatial Crowdsourcing

Abstract With the pervasiveness of GPS-enabled smart devices and increased wireless communication technologies, spatial crowdsourcing (SC) has drawn increasing attention in assigning location-sensitive tasks to moving workers. In real-world scenarios, for the complex tasks, SC is more likely to assign each task to more than one worker, called group task assignment (GTA), for the reason that an individual worker cannot complete the task well by herself. It is a challenging issue to assign worker groups the tasks that they are interested in and willing to perform. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for group task assignment based on worker groups’ preferences, which includes two components: social impact-based preference modeling (SIPM) and preference-aware group task assignment (PGTA). SIPM employs a bipartite graph embedding model and the attention mechanism to learn the social impact-based preferences of different worker groups on different task categories. PGTA utilizes an optimal task assignment algorithm based on the tree decomposition technique to maximize the overall task assignments, in which we give higher priorities to the worker groups showing more interests in the tasks. We further optimize the original framework by proposing strategies to improve the effectiveness of group task assignment, wherein a deep learning method and the group consensus are taken into consideration. Extensive empirical studies verify that the proposed techniques and optimization strategies can settle the problem nicely