The role of public sector reforms in consumer protection : China and the UK

Recent managerial and organisational changes through the new public management, organisational restructuring and consumerism are studied from the backgrounds of each country, for example, the significance, peculiarity and influence of public sector reforms in the UK or in China or elsewhere. Fewer articles have centred on a comparative perspective in public sector reforms, which have occurred recently in both the UK and China. The aim of this study was to provide readers with a better understanding of the major thrusts of administrative reforms, how they have affected those managing the services, and their restructuring, and how public sector reform ideas have integrated with the practice of public sector reforms. A comparative legal method was employed by which these changes were investigated and studied theoretically and practically, with a wide range of studies from government documents, both published openly and internally, a literature search from academic sources and interviews. The results indicated that similar objectives, namely streamlining governmental institutions, raising efficiency and effectiveness in administrative management, and the primacy of consumers, are pursued in both China and the UK although the developments varied in degree and scope. These findings suggest that a comparative approach might be the most suitable in seeking to provide an interpretative rationale rather than a purely abstract analysis of administrative reform agenda. No one should accept the ready-made blueprints of public sector reforms without considering their own economic circumstances, social culture and political manifesto

Identifying disease associations via genome-wide association studies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genome-wide association studies prove to be a powerful approach to identify the genetic basis of different human diseases. We studied the relationship between seven diseases characterized in a previous genome-wide association study by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. Instead of doing a horizontal association of SNPs to diseases, we did a vertical analysis of disease associations by comparing the genetic similarities of diseases. Our analysis was carried out at four levels – the nucleotide level (SNPs), the gene level, the protein level (through protein-protein interaction network), and the phenotype level.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our results show that Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes share evidence of genetic associations at all levels of analysis, offering strong molecular support for the current grouping of the diseases. On the other hand, coronary artery disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes, despite being considered as a natural group with potential aetiological overlap, do not show any evidence of shared genetic basis at all levels.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our study is a first attempt on mining of GWA data to examine genetic associations between different diseases. The positive result is apparently not a coincidence and hence demonstrates the promising use of our approach.</p

The Influence of Oxygen on the Development of Nanorana parkeri Tadpoles

Ectothermic animals are tolerant of variable oxygen availability, whether low-oxygen levels constrain the fitness of ectotherms remains unclear. Nanorana parkeri, an anuran endemic to the southern Tibetan plateau, is an excellent model with which to answer this question. In this study, we raised tadpoles of N. parkeri in oxygenated water (high-oxygen group) and deoxygenated unchlorinated tap water (low-oxygen group) and monitored their growth, mortality, and telomere length. The growth rate for body length and body weight was higher in the low-oxygen group than in the high-oxygen group. However, dissolved oxygen did not affect development time, mortality, and telomere length of the tadpoles. These results suggest that although the oxygen concentration influenced some phenotype traits of plateau tadpoles, but it didn’t influence the telomere length and survival rate, potential explanations are the local adaptation and N. parkeri tadpoles’ wide oxygen tolerance, and fluctuant toxic content that resulted in little oxidative stress on tadpoles. These results indicated that low oxygen was not a stress to N. parkeri tadpoles’ fitness and survival. This study is helpful in understanding the adaptation mechanisms of Tibetan plateau amphibians

AdaBrowse: Adaptive Video Browser for Efficient Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Raw videos have been proven to own considerable feature redundancy where in many cases only a portion of frames can already meet the requirements for accurate recognition. In this paper, we are interested in whether such redundancy can be effectively leveraged to facilitate efficient inference in continuous sign language recognition (CSLR). We propose a novel adaptive model (AdaBrowse) to dynamically select a most informative subsequence from input video sequences by modelling this problem as a sequential decision task. In specific, we first utilize a lightweight network to quickly scan input videos to extract coarse features. Then these features are fed into a policy network to intelligently select a subsequence to process. The corresponding subsequence is finally inferred by a normal CSLR model for sentence prediction. As only a portion of frames are processed in this procedure, the total computations can be considerably saved. Besides temporal redundancy, we are also interested in whether the inherent spatial redundancy can be seamlessly integrated together to achieve further efficiency, i.e., dynamically selecting a lowest input resolution for each sample, whose model is referred to as AdaBrowse+. Extensive experimental results on four large-scale CSLR datasets, i.e., PHOENIX14, PHOENIX14-T, CSL-Daily and CSL, demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaBrowse and AdaBrowse+ by achieving comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art methods with 1.44$\times$ throughput and 2.12$\times$ fewer FLOPs. Comparisons with other commonly-used 2D CNNs and adaptive efficient methods verify the effectiveness of AdaBrowse. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/hulianyuyy/AdaBrowse}.Comment: ACMMM202

The compensation incentive effect of athletes: A structural equation model

This study explores the compensation incentive effect of athletes. Based on the related literature, we proposed theoretical hypotheses on the compensation incentive effect and established an assessment index system of the compensation incentive effect for athletes. A structural equation model was used to test the survey data of 352 athletes in six provinces to discover the truth of the compensation incentive effect. The results suggested that direct economic compensation satisfaction, direct non-economic compensation satisfaction, and indirect non-economic compensation satisfaction had significant positive effects on the compensation incentive effect of athletes, while indirect economic compensation satisfaction showed no significant effect. Moreover, the evaluation results of athletes’ compensation incentive effect showed that direct economic compensation satisfaction contributed the most to the influence factor of the compensation incentive effect. Therefore, the evaluation of athletes’ compensation incentive effect should focus on variables of direct economic compensation satisfaction, i.e., basic compensation satisfaction, bonus income satisfaction, and subsidy satisfaction. Finally, some strategies and recommendations were suggested to improve the compensation design for athletes

The Use of Fuzzy BackPropagation Neural Networks for the Early Diagnosis of Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy in Newborns

Objective. To establish an early diagnostic system for hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) in newborns based on artificial neural networks and to determine its feasibility. Methods. Based on published research as well as preliminary studies in our laboratory, multiple noninvasive indicators with high sensitivity and specificity were selected for the early diagnosis of HIE and employed in the present study, which incorporates fuzzy logic with artificial neural networks. Results. The analysis of the diagnostic results from the fuzzy neural network experiments with 140 cases of HIE showed a correct recognition rate of 100% in all training samples and a correct recognition rate of 95% in all the test samples, indicating a misdiagnosis rate of 5%. Conclusion. A preliminary model using fuzzy backpropagation neural networks based on a composite index of clinical indicators was established and its accuracy for the early diagnosis of HIE was validated. Therefore, this method provides a convenient tool for the early clinical diagnosis of HIE

Structure, morphology and magnetic properties of flowerlike gamma-Fe2O3@NiO core/shell nanocomposites synthesized from different precursor concentrations

The flowerlike gamma-Fe2O3@NiO core/shell nanocomposites are synthesized by the two-step method. Their structure and morphology can be controlled by tuning the precursor concentration. Microstructural analysis reveals that all the samples have distinct core/shell structure without impurities, and the NiO shells are built of many irregular nanosheets which enclose the surface of gamma-Fe2O3 core. As the precursor concentration decreases (i.e., more NiO content), the NiO grain grows significantly, and the thickness of NiO shells increases. Magnetic experiments are performed to analyze the influences of different microstructures on magnetic properties of samples and we have the following two results. First, at 5 K, along with increasing thickness of NiO shell, the saturation magnetization increases, while the residual magnetization decreases slightly. Second, the hysteresis loops under cooling field demonstrate that the value of exchange bias effect fluctuates between 13 Oe and 17 Oe. This is mainly because of the NiO shell that (i) is composed of irregular nanosheets with disordered orientations, and (ii) does not form a complete coating around gamma-Fe2O3 core