Convergence of the Ginzburg-Landau approximation for the Ericksen-Leslie system

We establish the local well-posedness of the general Ericksen-Leslie system in liquid crystals with the initial velocity and director field in $H^1 \times H_b^2$. In particular, we prove that the solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau approximation system converge smoothly to the solution of the Ericksen-Leslie system for any $t \in (0,T^\ast)$ with a maximal existence time $T^\ast$ of the Ericksen- Leslie system

Activation of extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase 5 is essential for cystitis- and nerve growth factor-induced calcitonin gene-related peptide expression in sensory neurons

Background Cystitis causes considerable neuronal plasticity in the primary afferent pathways. The molecular mechanism and signal transduction underlying cross talk between the inflamed urinary bladder and sensory sensitization has not been investigated. Results In a rat cystitis model induced by cyclophosphamide (CYP) for 48 h, the mRNA and protein levels of the excitatory neurotransmitter calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) are increased in the L6 dorsal root ganglia (DRG) in response to bladder inflammation. Cystitis-induced CGRP expression in L6 DRG is triggered by endogenous nerve growth factor (NGF) because neutralization of NGF with a specific NGF antibody reverses CGRP up-regulation during cystitis. CGRP expression in the L6 DRG neurons is also enhanced by retrograde NGF signaling when NGF is applied to the nerve terminals of the ganglion-nerve two-compartmented preparation. Characterization of the signaling pathways in cystitis- or NGF-induced CGRP expression reveals that the activation (phosphorylation) of extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (ERK)5 but not Akt is involved. In L6 DRG during cystitis, CGRP is co-localized with phospho-ERK5 but not phospho-Akt. NGF-evoked CGRP up-regulation is also blocked by inhibition of the MEK/ERK pathway with specific MEK inhibitors U0126 and PD98059, but not by inhibition of the PI3K/Akt pathway with inhibitor LY294002. Further examination shows that cystitis-induced cAMP-responsive element binding protein (CREB) activity is expressed in CGRP bladder afferent neurons and is co-localized with phospho-ERK5 but not phospho-Akt. Blockade of NGF action in vivo reduces the number of DRG neurons co-expressing CGRP and phospho-CREB, and reverses cystitis-induced increases in micturition frequency. Conclusions A specific pathway involving NGF-ERK5-CREB axis plays an essential role in cystitis-induced sensory activation

Catastrophic Emission of Charges from Near-Extremal Nariai Black Holes

Using the in-out formalism and also the monodromy method, we study the emission of charges from near-extremal charged Nariai black holes with the black hole and cosmological horizons close to each other. The emission becomes catastrophic for a charge with energy greater than its chemical potential, whose leading exponential factor increases inversely proportional to the separation of two horizons. This implies that near-extremal Nariai black holes quickly evaporate through the charge emission and end in the de Sitter space, in contrast to near-extremal RN-dS black holes that have the Breitenlohner-Friedman bound below which they become stable against Hawking radiation and Schwinger effect of charge emission. We illuminate the origin of the catastrophic emission in the phase-integral formulation by comparing near-extremal charged Nariai black holes with near-extremal RN-dS black holes.Comment: 15 page

Experimental Investigation of Longitudinal Space-Time Correlations of the Velocity Field in Turbulent Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard Convection

We report an experimental investigation of the longitudinal space-time cross-correlation function of the velocity field, $C(r,\tau)$, in a cylindrical turbulent Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection cell using the particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique. We show that while the Taylor's frozen-flow hypothesis does not hold in turbulent thermal convection, the recent elliptic model advanced for turbulent shear flows [He & Zhang, \emph{Phys. Rev. E} \textbf{73}, 055303(R) (2006)] is valid for the present velocity field for all over the cell, i.e., the isocorrelation contours of the measured $C(r,\tau)$ have a shape of elliptical curves and hence $C(r,\tau)$ can be related to $C(r_E,0)$ via $r_E^2=(r-\beta\tau)^2+\gamma^2\tau^2$ with $\beta$ and $\gamma$ being two characteristic velocities. We further show that the fitted $\beta$ is proportional to the mean velocity of the flow, but the values of $\gamma$ are larger than the theoretical predictions. Specifically, we focus on two representative regions in the cell: the region near the cell sidewall and the cell's central region. It is found that $\beta$ and $\gamma$ are approximately the same near the sidewall, while $\beta\simeq0$ at cell center.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, submitted to J. Fluid Mec

Expressions of toll-like receptors 2 and 4, and relative cellular factors in HIV patients with tuberculosis infection

Purpose: To investigate the expressions of toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2), toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), IFN-γ (IFN- gamma), interleukin 2 (IL-2), interleukin 6 (IL-6) and interleukin 10 (IL-10) in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients with tuberculosis (TB) infection.Methods: Two groups of HIV patients (68 in each group) were used for this study. These were HIV with TB (HIV/TB) group and HIV without TB group. A third group (68 healthy people) served as control. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was adopted to measure TLR-2 and TLR-4 expressions in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), while the serum levels of TNF-α, IFN-γ, IL-2, IL-6 and IL-10 were determined by ELISA.Results: The △Ct values of TLR-2 and TLR-4 in HIV/TB and HIV groups were significantly lower than those in the control group (p < 0.05). Compared to control group, the serum levels of TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-10 significantly increased, while IFN-γ and IL-2 in HIV/TB and HIV groups significantly decreased (p < 0.05). However, IFN-γ and IL-2 decreased significantly in HIV/TB group (p < 0.05). Expression of TLR2 correlated positively with serum levels of TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-10, but negatively with IFN-γ and IL-2 (p < 0.05).Conclusion: TLR2 signal pathway plays a role in HIV patients with TB infection by promoting the expressions of TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-10, while inhibiting IFN-γ and IL-2 cellular factors, and thus may provide a new pathway for the treatment of patients with HIV/TB.Keywords: HIV, Tuberculosis, Toll-like receptor, Cellular factors, Tumor necrosis factor, Interleuki

Factors Predicting Emotional Cue-Responding Behaviors of Nurses in Taiwan: An Observational Study

Objective Responding to emotional cues is an essential element of therapeutic communication. The purpose of this study is to examine nurses' competence of responding to emotional cues (CRE) and related factors while interacting with standardized patients with cancer. Methods This is an exploratory and predictive correlational study. A convenience sample of registered nurses who have passed the probationary period in southern Taiwan was recruited to participate in 15-minute videotaped interviews with standardized patients. The Medical Interview Aural Rating Scale was used to describe standardized patients' emotional cues and to measure nurses' CRE. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was used to evaluate nurses' anxiety level before the conversation. We used descriptive statistics to describe the data and stepwise regression to examine the predictors of nurses' CRE. Results A total of 110 nurses participated in the study. Regardless of the emotional cue level, participants predominately responded to cues with inappropriate distancing strategies. Prior formal communication training, practice unit, length of nursing practice, and educational level together explain 36.3% variances of the nurses' CRE. Conclusions This study is the first to explore factors related to Taiwanese nurses' CRE. Compared to nurses in other countries, Taiwanese nurses tended to respond to patients' emotional cues with more inappropriate strategies. We also identified significant predictors of CRE that show the importance of communication training. Future research and education programs are needed to enhance nurses' CRE and to advocate for emotion-focused communication

Diverse Data Augmentation with Diffusions for Effective Test-time Prompt Tuning

Benefiting from prompt tuning, recent years have witnessed the promising performance of pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, on versatile downstream tasks. In this paper, we focus on a particular setting of learning adaptive prompts on the fly for each test sample from an unseen new domain, which is known as test-time prompt tuning (TPT). Existing TPT methods typically rely on data augmentation and confidence selection. However, conventional data augmentation techniques, e.g., random resized crops, suffers from the lack of data diversity, while entropy-based confidence selection alone is not sufficient to guarantee prediction fidelity. To address these issues, we propose a novel TPT method, named DiffTPT, which leverages pre-trained diffusion models to generate diverse and informative new data. Specifically, we incorporate augmented data by both conventional method and pre-trained stable diffusion to exploit their respective merits, improving the models ability to adapt to unknown new test data. Moreover, to ensure the prediction fidelity of generated data, we introduce a cosine similarity-based filtration technique to select the generated data with higher similarity to the single test sample. Our experiments on test datasets with distribution shifts and unseen categories demonstrate that DiffTPT improves the zero-shot accuracy by an average of 5.13\% compared to the state-of-the-art TPT method. Our code and models will be publicly released.Comment: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision 202

Molecular cloning, expression profiling, and yeast complementation of 19 β-tubulin cDNAs from developing cotton ovules

Microtubules are a major structural component of the cytoskeleton and participate in cell division, intracellular transport, and cell morphogenesis. In the present study, 795 cotton tubulin expressed sequence tags were analysed and 19 β-tubulin genes (TUB) cloned from a cotton cDNA library. Among the group, 12 cotton TUBs (GhTUBs) are reported for the first time here. Transcription profiling revealed that nine GhTUBs were highly expressed in elongating fibre cells as compared with fuzzless-lintless mutant ovules. Treating cultured wild-type cotton ovules with exogenous phytohormones showed that individual genes can be induced by different agents. Gibberellin induced expression of GhTUB1 and GhTUB3, ethylene induced expression of GhTUB5, GhTUB9, and GhTUB12, brassinosteroids induced expression of GhTUB1, GhTUB3, GhTUB9, and GhTUB12, and lignoceric acid induced expression of GhTUB1, GhTUB3, and GhTUB12. When GhTUBs were transformed into the Saccharomyces cerevisiae inviable mutant, tub2, which is deficient in β-tubulin, one ovule-specific and eight of nine fibre-preferential GhTUBs rescued this lethality. This study suggests that the proteins encoded by cotton GhTUBs are involved during cotton fibre development

A Research Survey of Electronic Commerce Innovation: Evidence from the Literature

The development of technology has ignited many innovations in business management, especially in the electronic commerce area. The essential example, that is, online stores and online shopping, is a critical evolution and innovation from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to clicks and mortar. Following previous research (Van Oorschot et al.), this present study adopted bibliometric and keyword analysis to review the main characteristics of electronic commerce innovations. Focused on the academic sources, the research data used in this study were searched for and collected from the Web of Science (WoS), a renowned academic database which covers the most influential research journals in electronic commerce. Based on a combination of several keywords related to “innovation” and “electronic commerce,” the keyword search in the WoS was conducted in May 2019. As a result, a total of 334 research articles related to electronic commerce innovations were collected. Derived from the bibliometric analysis, some keywords that were seldom used in the earlier decade (2000-2009), but which rapidly grew in use in the recent decade (2010-2018) were found, including m-commerce, platforms, social commerce, online review, and co-creation. In addition, the top 10 influential articles listed in each of the two decades were identified. The results show some of the research trajectories in EC innovations. In the first decade (2000-2009), the top 10 papers focused on traditional IT adoption, such as self-service technology, enterprise resource planning systems, and the adoption of general attitude-intention theories such as the technology acceptance model. In the recent decade (2010-2018), researchers have shown more diverse interest in innovative EC applications, such as RFID applications, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, etc. Accompanying these EC innovation contexts, in addition to general attitude-intention theories, more theories such as signaling theory, have been adopted