Perspectives of Social-Ecological Transformation

The emphasis of Socialist Ecological Civilization in the 18th congress of CPC and the proposal of "Green Development" in the "Thirteen Five Year" Plan both indicate that Ecological Civilization Construction has been raised to an unprecedented height in China. Based on the theory of Social-Ecological Transformation, this article elaborates if or to what extent China’s Ecological Civilization Construction goes beyond the logic of capitalist imperative, if environmental benefits still succumbs to the current political and economic structures. It concludes that as the newest sustainable discourse, Ecological Civilization has great influence on the formation and enforcement of environmental policy in China. As a comprehensive and systematic experiment concerning the change of mode of living and production, divergent interpretations of Ecological Civilization Construction still exist among officials in multi-level governance, which leads to different preferences when implementing Ecological Civilization goals.The orientation of growth in multilevel governments should be weakened and pioneer of change with emancipatory horizon or ecological forms of production and living should be encouraged

Coping with low data availability for social media crisis message categorisation

During crisis situations, social media allows people to quickly share information, including messages requesting help. This can be valuable to emergency responders, who need to categorise and prioritise these messages based on the type of assistance being requested. However, the high volume of messages makes it difficult to filter and prioritise them without the use of computational techniques. Fully supervised filtering techniques for crisis message categorisation typically require a large amount of annotated training data, but this can be difficult to obtain during an ongoing crisis and is expensive in terms of time and labour to create. This thesis focuses on addressing the challenge of low data availability when categorising crisis messages for emergency response. It first presents domain adaptation as a solution for this problem, which involves learning a categorisation model from annotated data from past crisis events (source domain) and adapting it to categorise messages from an ongoing crisis event (target domain). In many-to-many adaptation, where the model is trained on multiple past events and adapted to multiple ongoing events, a multi-task learning approach is proposed using pre-trained language models. This approach outperforms baselines and an ensemble approach further improves performance..

DETERMINANTS OF BANK CAPITAL: EVIDENCE FROM THE U.S.

This paper analyses factors that affect bank capital. We use a sample of U.S. banks over the period 1996 to 2012. According to bank size, we separate the whole sample into small banks, medium banks and large banks. These three groups have different abilities to manage risks and access capital markets. To see the impact of the recent financial crisis, we further separate the whole sample into two subsamples: 1996 to 2006 and 2007 to 2012. Making use of an advanced estimation method (GMM), we find that bank capital is influenced by risk, profitability, deposits, loan loss provision, and size

Group Search Optimizer for the Mobile Location Management Problem

We propose a diversity-guided group search optimizer-based approach for solving the location management problem in mobile computing. The location management problem, which is to find the optimal network configurations of management under the mobile computing environment, is considered here as an optimization problem. The proposed diversity-guided group search optimizer algorithm is realized with the aid of diversity operator, which helps alleviate the premature convergence problem of group search optimizer algorithm, a successful optimization algorithm inspired by the animal behavior. To address the location management problem, diversity-guided group search optimizer algorithm is exploited to optimize network configurations of management by minimizing the sum of location update cost and location paging cost. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Aryl piperazine suppresses cataractogenesis in a diabetic rat model via Nrf2/HO-1 signaling pathway

Purpose: To investigate the inhibitory potential of aryl piperazine on cataract formation in diabetic rats, and the underlying mechanism of action. Methods: Sprague-Dawley rats (7-week-old) were divided into 7 groups: control rats, untreated diabetic rats, and five aryl piperazine treatment groups given the drug at doses of 1, 2, 5, 10 and 15 mg/kg. Diabetes was induced in the rats via injection of streptozocin (STZ) in citrate buffer at a dose of 65 mg/kg. An ophthalmoscope was used to evaluate cataract formation, while GlucoLeader was used for the measurement of blood glucose level. Results: Aryl piperazine treatment significantly reduced blood glucose level from 6 to 12 weeks following administration of STZ, and prevented cataractogenesis in the diabetic rats (p < 0.05). Cataract score in the diabetic rats was also significantly decreased by aryl piperazine (p < 0.01). Aryl piperazine exposure reversed STZ-mediated decreases in antioxidant capacity (AOC) and glutathione (GSH) levels, enhanced glutathione peroxidase (GPX) activity and decreased malondialdehyde (MDA) levels in diabetic rats (p < 0.05). It suppressed the expressions of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and interleukin (IL)-1β in retinal tissues, while it upregulated the expressions of nuclear factor erythroid 2- related factor 2 (NRF2) and heme oxygenase (HO-1). Conclusion: Aryl piperazine suppresses cataractogenesis and reduces cataract score in diabetic rats by targeting oxidative stress. Moreover, in retinal tissues of diabetic rats, aryl piperazine activates Nrf2/mHO-1 signaling pathway. Thus, aryl piperazine has a potential for use in the prevention of cataracts