Understanding Attitudes towards Proenvironmental Travel: An Empirical Study from Tangshan City in China

Understanding people’s attitudes towards proenvironmental travel will help to encourage people to adopt proenvironmental travel behavior. Revealed preference theory assumes that the consumption preference of consumers can be revealed by their consumption behavior. In order to investigate the influences on citizens’ travel decision and analyze the difficulties of promoting proenvironmental travel behavior in medium-sized cities in China, based on revealed preference theory, this paper uses the RP survey method and disaggregate model to analyze how individual characteristics, situational factors, and trip features influence the travel mode choice. The field investigation was conducted in Tangshan City to obtain the RP data. An MNL model was built to deal with the travel mode choice. SPSS software was used to calibrate the model parameters. The goodness-of-fit tests and the predicted outcome demonstrate the validation of the parameter setting. The results show that gender, occupation, trip purpose, and distance have an obvious influence on the travel mode choice. In particular, the male gender, high income, and business travel show a high correlation with carbon-intensive travel, while the female gender and a medium income scored higher in terms of proenvironmental travel modes, such as walking, cycling, and public transport

Experiencing the terroir: An exploration into the relationship between landscape architecture and viticulture : A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master at Lincoln University

With the development of wine tourism, vineyards and wineries are no longer merely a place for planting grapes and wine production, they have become an attraction for local and international visitors. There is a greater demand for vineyard landscape to be designed compared to other productive landscapes. The design of the winery and vineyard landscape has become a significant challenge and a popular commission in recent years. More wineries have hired architects to design the cellar door as a form of promotions and part of their branding strategy, and there is a growing research interest in ‘wine architecture’. However, there is a gap in the literature on the relationship between landscape architecture and the wine industry, and very few landscape architects have been involved in the practice of vineyard design in New Zealand. In this dissertation, two wineries and vineyards from the Hawke’s Bay wine region will be critiqued to examine visitors’ experience provided by the existing design and provide strategies for enhancing this experience in the vineyard from the perspective of landscape architecture. By examining the winery design that links place to terroir, this dissertation will explore and demonstrate the possible contributions that landscape architecture can make to the wine industry

Query-Utterance Attention with Joint modeling for Query-Focused Meeting Summarization

Query-focused meeting summarization (QFMS) aims to generate summaries from meeting transcripts in response to a given query. Previous works typically concatenate the query with meeting transcripts and implicitly model the query relevance only at the token level with attention mechanism. However, due to the dilution of key query-relevant information caused by long meeting transcripts, the original transformer-based model is insufficient to highlight the key parts related to the query. In this paper, we propose a query-aware framework with joint modeling token and utterance based on Query-Utterance Attention. It calculates the utterance-level relevance to the query with a dense retrieval module. Then both token-level query relevance and utterance-level query relevance are combined and incorporated into the generation process with attention mechanism explicitly. We show that the query relevance of different granularities contributes to generating a summary more related to the query. Experimental results on the QMSum dataset show that the proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202

A survey of overlooked viral infections in biological experiment systems

It is commonly accepted that there are many unknown viruses on the planet. For the known viruses, do we know their prevalence, even in our experimental systems? Here we report a virus survey using recently published small (s)RNA sequencing datasets. The sRNA reads were assembled and contigs were screened for virus homologues against the NCBI nucleotide (nt) database using the BLASTn program. To our surprise, approximately 30% (28 out of 94) of publications had highly scored viral sequences in their datasets. Among them, only two publications reported virus infections. Though viral vectors were used in some of the publications, virus sequences without any identifiable source appeared in more than 20 publications. By determining the distributions of viral reads and the antiviral RNA interference (RNAi) pathways using the sRNA profiles, we showed evidence that many of the viruses identified were indeed infecting and generated host RNAi responses. As virus infections affect many aspects of host molecular biology and metabolism, the presence and impact of viruses needs to be actively investigated in experimental systems

Flow cytometric analysis of CK19 expression in the peripheral blood of breast carcinoma patients: relevance for circulating tumor cell detection

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Immunocytochemistry and RT-PCR have been widely used for the detection of circulating tumor cells in patients with breast cancer but their specificity is limited. Our purpose is to utilize a convenient and specific technology to detect circulating tumor cells in breast cancer patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>To determine the sensitivity and specificity of our method, A431 cells were serially diluted with human peripheral blood leukocytes and stained with CK19. A total of 73 blood specimens including 25 healthy volunteers and 48 patients with breast carcinoma and benign tumor were tested by flow cytometry to quantify the expression of CK19.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The detectable upper limit of A431 cells was 1 cancer cell among 10⁴human white blood cells. CK19 was detected in 27% of breast cancer patients but none control gives positive result. The number of cancer cells increased gradually along with the disease stages for it was the least in stage I (0%) and the most in stage IV (1.29%). Fifteen patients were observed during three month chemotherapy after surgery, and most of their CK19 expression levels declined after treatment.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our research convinces that the detection of CK19 in peripheral blood by flow cytometry is also a specific and feasible method to monitor circulating tumor cells in breast cancer.</p