Carbon Trading in BRICS Countries: Challenges and Recommendations

As one of the world’s largest emerging economies, BRICS countries are playing an increasingly important role in addressing the global issue of climate change. To achieve their emissions reduction targets, these nations are actively promoting the construction of carbon trading markets. However, they face multiple challenges and obstacles in this endeavor, including issues related to market norms, financial support, technical capacity, social participation, and development needs. This research investigates the problems and challenges faced by BRICS countries in terms of building carbon trading markets through literature reviews and case studies. To address these challenges, this research strengthening international cooperation and technical support, improving market norms and provide following recommendations: conducting regulatory measures, enhancing social participation and communication, and balancing the relationship between economic development and environmental protection requirements. Furthermore, it is crucial for these nations to continue to strengthen international cooperation and collaboration, working together to promote the construction of carbon trading markets, achieving their emissions reduction targets, and ensuring long-term sustainability and economic development

(Main Section: Community Planning)

More and more international students come to China for higher education, and their host cities become key platforms for demonstrating China’s image and soft power. So far, many studies have analysed international students’ language learning and cultural adaptation, however, very few focus on what factors attract international students to certain Chinese cities instead of others. This study aims to determine the key factors attracting international students to study in Changchun, a city in northeast China, from a qualitative approach. The authors apply both survey questionnaires and in-depth interviews to obtain insights and determine the underlying reasons influencing their selection. Results from a total of 190 questionnaires and 59 interviews are collected for analysis. The results indicate that certain factors, including economic factors, such as the cost of living and scholarships, political factors, such as government coordination, and sociological factors, such as religious tolerance, play dominating roles in their decision-making process. Additionally, the discussion and policy recommendations of each section offer useful insights for policy-makers for attracting and accommodating international visitors to cities like Changchun

Downregulation of developmentally regulated endothelial cell locus-1 inhibits the growth of colon cancer

Developmentally regulated endothelial cell locus-1 (Del1) is an embryonic angiogenic factor expressed in early embryonic endothelial cells, but recently has been found to be expressed in some forms of cancers including colon and breast cancers, and melanoma, and human cancer cell lines. Overexpression of Del1 accelerates tumor growth by enhancing vascular formation, implying Del1 may be a potential target for anti-angiogenic cancer therapy. The study aims to investigate whether downregulation of Del1 could inhibit the growth of tumors established in nude Balb/c mice by subcutaneous implantation of human LS-174T colon cancer cells. The shRNA expression vectors targeting human Del1, and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) were constructed. Gene transfection of Del1-shRNA downregulated expression of Del1 in LS-174T cells in vivo and in vitro, but did not alter the proliferative or survival properties of cells in vitro. Gene transfection of VEGF-shRNA downregulated expression of both VEGF and Del1 in LS-174T cells in vivo and in vitro. Both Del1-shRNA and VEGF-shRNA gene therapies exhibited anti-tumor activities and they also showed a synergistic effect in suppressing growth of colon tumors by anti-angiogenesis and anti-proliferation. Although further investigation to clarify the mechanisms explaining the role of Del1 in tumor growth, and the interaction between VEGF and Del1, is required, the results indicate that downregulation of Del1 presents a potent therapeutic strategy to combat colon cancer

SOOD: Towards Semi-Supervised Oriented Object Detection

Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD), aiming to explore unlabeled data for boosting object detectors, has become an active task in recent years. However, existing SSOD approaches mainly focus on horizontal objects, leaving multi-oriented objects that are common in aerial images unexplored. This paper proposes a novel Semi-supervised Oriented Object Detection model, termed SOOD, built upon the mainstream pseudo-labeling framework. Towards oriented objects in aerial scenes, we design two loss functions to provide better supervision. Focusing on the orientations of objects, the first loss regularizes the consistency between each pseudo-label-prediction pair (includes a prediction and its corresponding pseudo label) with adaptive weights based on their orientation gap. Focusing on the layout of an image, the second loss regularizes the similarity and explicitly builds the many-to-many relation between the sets of pseudo-labels and predictions. Such a global consistency constraint can further boost semi-supervised learning. Our experiments show that when trained with the two proposed losses, SOOD surpasses the state-of-the-art SSOD methods under various settings on the DOTA-v1.5 benchmark. The code will be available at https://github.com/HamPerdredes/SOOD.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023. Code will be available at https://github.com/HamPerdredes/SOO