China's Regional Inequality in Innovation Capability, 1995-2004

Relying on a recently developed decomposition framework, this paper explores spatial distribution of innovation capability in China. It is found that at the regional level, China's inequality in innovation capability increased from 1995 to 2004. At the provincial level, the inequality decreased from 1995 to 2000, but increased from 2000 to 2004. Location, industrialization and urbanization, human capital, and openness (foreign direct investment) are significant contributors to the inequality in innovation capability. Unbalanced development in high-tech parks exerts a growing explanatory power in driving innovation disparity, which implies that institutional factor plays a direct role.innovation, regional disparity, inequality, decomposition, Asia, China

Source-free Active Domain Adaptation for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading Based on Ultra-wide-field Fundus Image

Domain adaptation (DA) has been widely applied in the diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading of unannotated ultra-wide-field (UWF) fundus images, which can transfer annotated knowledge from labeled color fundus images. However, suffering from huge domain gaps and complex real-world scenarios, the DR grading performance of most mainstream DA is far from that of clinical diagnosis. To tackle this, we propose a novel source-free active domain adaptation (SFADA) in this paper. Specifically, we focus on DR grading problem itself and propose to generate features of color fundus images with continuously evolving relationships of DRs, actively select a few valuable UWF fundus images for labeling with local representation matching, and adapt model on UWF fundus images with DR lesion prototypes. Notably, the SFADA also takes data privacy and computational efficiency into consideration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SFADA achieves state-of-the-art DR grading performance, increasing accuracy by 20.9% and quadratic weighted kappa by 18.63% compared with baseline and reaching 85.36% and 92.38% respectively. These investigations show that the potential of our approach for real clinical practice is promising

Effects of congestion charging and subsidy policy on vehicle flow and revenue with user heterogeneity

Traffic congestion is a major issue in urban traffic networks. Both congestion charging and subsidy policy can solve traffic congestion to some extent, but which one is better? Based on this, this paper constructs a typical transit network consisting of three travel tools in four common travel modes. Travelers' values of time affect their choice of transportation in the congestion network, thus a stochastic user equilibrium model is established by considering travelers' heterogenous values of time to evaluate the effects of different combinations of congestion charging and subsidy policies on vehicle flow and revenue. Numerical results indicate that the effectiveness of congestion charging and subsidy policy in alleviating traffic congestion depends on the object of charging or subsidizing. Congestion charging for private cars can reduce traffic flow and alleviate traffic congestion, but charging for ridesharing cars does not reduce traffic flow and may even cause traffic congestion. Subsidizing public buses does not reduce traffic flow, but it can ease congestion by coordinating traffic flow on both edges of the dual-modal transport. The combination of no subsidy for public buses and charging for both private cars and ridesharing cars can obtain the greatest revenue, but it does not alleviate traffic congestion. Although the combination of charging for private cars and subsidizing public buses does not bring the most benefits, it can reduce traffic flow, and its revenue is also considerable. This study can provide quantitative decision support for the government to ease traffic congestion and improve government revenue

Yiguanjian cataplasm attenuates opioid dependence in a mouse model of naloxone-induced opioid withdrawal syndrome

AbstractObjectiveTo investigate the effect of Yiguanjian (YGJ) cataplasm on the development of opioid dependence in a mouse model of naloxone-induced opioid withdrawal syndrome.MethodsOne hundred Swiss albino mice, of equal male to female ratio, were randomly and equally divided into 10 groups. A portion (3 cm2) of the backside hair of the mice was removed 1 day prior to the experiment. Morphine (5 mg/kg) was intraperitoneally administered twice daily for 5 days. YGJ cataplasm was prepared and pasted on the bare region of the mice immediately before morphine administration on day 3 and subsequently removed at the end day 5. On day 6, naloxone (8 mg/kg) was intraperitoneally injected to precipitate opioid withdrawal syndrome. Behavioral observation was performed in two 30-min phases immediately after naloxone injection.ResultsThe YGJ cataplasm significantly and dose-dependently attenuated morphine-naloxone-induced experimental opioid withdrawal, in terms of withdrawal severity score and the frequencies of jumping, rearing, forepaw licking, and circling behaviors. However, YGJ cataplasm treatment did not alter the acute analgesic effect of morphine.ConclusionYGJ cataplasm could attenuate opioid dependence and its associated withdrawal symptoms. Therefore, YGJ cataplasm could serve as a potential therapy for opioid addiction in the future

Image fusion for the novelty rotating synthetic aperture system based on vision transformer

Rotating synthetic aperture (RSA) technology offers a promising solution for achieving large-aperture and lightweight designs in optical remote-sensing systems. It employs a rectangular primary mirror, resulting in noncircular spatial symmetry in the point-spread function, which changes over time as the mirror rotates. Consequently, it is crucial to employ an appropriate image-fusion method to merge high-resolution information intermittently captured from different directions in the image sequence owing to the rotation of the mirror. However, existing image-fusion methods have struggled to address the unique imaging mechanism of this system and the characteristics of the geostationary orbit in which the system operates. To address this challenge, we model the imaging process of a noncircular rotating pupil and analyse its on-orbit imaging characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose an image-fusion network based on a vision transformer. This network incorporates inter-frame mutual attention and intra-frame self-attention mechanisms, facilitating more effective extraction of temporal and spatial information from the image sequence. Specifically, mutual attention was used to model the correlation between pixels that were close to each other in the spatial and temporal dimensions, whereas long-range spatial dependencies were captured using intra-frame self-attention in the rotated variable-size attention block. We subsequently enhanced the fusion of spatiotemporal information using video swin transformer blocks. Extensive digital simulations and semi-physical imaging experiments on remote-sensing images obtained from the WorldView-3 satellite demonstrated that our method outperformed both image-fusion methods designed for the RSA system and state-of-the-art general deep learning-based methods

Dimension Analysis-Based Model for Prediction of Shale Compressive Strength

The compressive strength of shale is a comprehensive index for evaluating the shale strength, which is linked to shale well borehole stability. Based on correlation analysis between factors (confining stress, height/diameter ratio, bedding angle, and porosity) and shale compressive strength (Longmaxi Shale in Sichuan Basin, China), we develop a dimension analysis-based model for prediction of shale compressive strength. A nonlinear-regression model is used for comparison. A multitraining method is used to achieve reliability of model prediction. The results show that, compared to a multi-nonlinear-regression model (average prediction error = 19.5%), the average prediction error of the dimension analysis-based model is 19.2%. More importantly, our dimension analysis-based model needs to determine only one parameter, whereas the multi-nonlinear-regression model needs to determine five. In addition, sensitivity analysis shows that height/diameter ratio has greater sensitivity to compressive strength than other factors

Autophagy promotes tumor cell survival and restricts necrosis, inflammation, and tumorigenesis

SummaryDefective apoptosis renders immortalized epithelial cells highly tumorigenic, but how this is impacted by other common tumor mutations is not known. In apoptosis-defective cells, inhibition of autophagy by AKT activation or by allelic disruption of beclin1 confers sensitivity to metabolic stress by inhibiting an autophagy-dependent survival pathway. While autophagy acts to buffer metabolic stress, the combined impairment of apoptosis and autophagy promotes necrotic cell death in vitro and in vivo. Thus, inhibiting autophagy under conditions of nutrient limitation can restore cell death to apoptosis-refractory tumors, but this necrosis is associated with inflammation and accelerated tumor growth. Thus, autophagy may function in tumor suppression by mitigating metabolic stress and, in concert with apoptosis, by preventing death by necrosis

Mortality and Attrition Rates within the First Year of Antiretroviral Therapy Initiation among People Living with HIV in Guangxi, China: An Observational Cohort Study

Objective. To assess the mortality and attrition rates within the first year of antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation among people living with human immunodeficiency virus (PLHIV) in rural Guangxi, China. Design. Observational cohort study. Setting. The core treatment indicators and data were collected with standard and essential procedures as per the Free ART Manual guidelines across all the rural health care centers of Guangxi. Participants. 58,115 PLHIV who were under ART were included in the study. Interventions. The data collected included sociodemographic characteristics that consist of age, sex, marital status, route of HIV transmission, CD4 cell count before ART, initial ART regimen, level of ART site, and year of ART initiation. Primary and Secondary Outcome Measures. Mortality and attrition rate following ART initiation. Results. The average mortality rate was 5.94 deaths, and 17.52 attritions per 100 person-years within the first year of ART initiation among PLHIV. The mortality rate was higher among intravenous drug users (Adjusted Hazard Ratio (AHR) 1.27, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) 1.14-1.43), prefecture as a level of ART site (AHR 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28), and county as the level of ART site (AHR 2.12, 95% CI 1.90-2.37). Attrition was higher among intravenous drug users (AHR 1.87, 95% CI 1.75-2.00), the first-line ART containing AZT (AHR 1.09, 95% CI 1.03-1.16), and first-line ART containing LVP/r (AHR 1.34, 95% CI 1.23-1.46). Conclusion. The mortality and attrition rates were both at the highest level in the first year of post-ART; continued improvement in the quality of HIV treatment and care is needed