Identity Construction of Female Consumers in Chinese and American Cosmetics Advertisements: A Critical Pragmatic Study

At present, women are still the main force among cosmetics consumers. In order to stimulate female consumers’ desire to buy cosmetics, cosmetics advertisers strive to build identities for female consumers that they are deeply yearning for, so as to guide and entice female consumers to buy their products. From the perspective of critical pragmatics, this study focuses on the types, distribution, means, and purposes of identity construction in Chinese and American advertisements, and conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis on cosmetic advertisements. Through contrastive analysis, it reveals the types and frequency of identity, and pragmatic strategies, motivation of advertisers in China and America. These identities are used to attract consumers to purchase behavior. When constructing these identities, cosmetics advertisers adopt explicit and implicit means to make psychological hints to female consumers. This study criticizes and analyzes the marketing motives of advertisers from the perspective of pragmatic identity theory, thereby revealing consumption traps for female consumers, and providing new thinking for identity construction and marketing strategies

A fully-mapped and energy-efficient FPGA accelerator for dual-function AI-based analysis of ECG

In this paper, a fully-mapped field programmable gate array (FPGA) accelerator is proposed for artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG). It consists of a fully-mapped 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) and a fully-mapped heart rate estimator, which constitute a complementary dual-function analysis. The fully-mapped design projects each layer of the 1-D CNN to a hardware module on an Intel Cyclone V FPGA, and a virtual flatten layer is proposed to effectively bridge the feature extraction layers and fully-connected layer. Also, the fully-mapped design maximizes computational parallelism to accelerate CNN inference. For the fully-mapped heart rate estimator, it performs pipelined transformations, self-adaptive threshold calculation, and heartbeat count on the FPGA, without multiplexed usage of hardware resources. Furthermore, heart rate calculation is elaborately analyzed and optimized to remove division and acceleration, resulting in an efficient method suitable for hardware implementation. According to our experiments on 1-D CNN, the accelerator can achieve 43.08× and 8.38× speedup compared with the software implementations on ARM-Cortex A53 quad-core processor and Intel Core i7-8700 CPU, respectively. For the heart rate estimator, the hardware implementations are 25.48× and 1.55× faster than the software implementations on the two aforementioned platforms. Surprisingly, the accelerator achieves an energy efficiency of 63.48 GOPS/W, which obviously surpasses existing studies. Considering its power consumption is only 67.74 mW, it may be more suitable for resource-limited applications, such as wearable and portable devices for ECG monitoring

Genome-wide association study on serum alkaline phosphatase levels in a Chinese population

Background: Serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP) is a complex phenotype influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Recent Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have identified several loci affecting ALP levels; however, such studies in Chinese populations are limited. We performed a GWAS analyzing the association between 658,288 autosomal SNPs and serum ALP in 1,461 subjects, and replicated the top SNPs in an additional 8,830 healthy Chinese Han individuals. The interactions between significant locus and environmental factors on serum ALP levels were further investigated. Results: The association between ABO locus and serum ALP levels was replicated (P = 2.50 × 10-21, 1.12 × 10-56 and 2.82 × 10-27 for SNP rs8176720, rs651007 and rs7025162 on ABO locus, respectively). SNP rs651007 accounted for 2.15% of the total variance of serum ALP levels independently of the other 2 SNPs. When comparing our findings with previously published studies, ethnic differences were observed across populations. A significant interaction between ABO rs651007 and overweight and obesity was observed (FDR for interaction was 0.036); for individuals with GG genotype, those with normal weight and those who were overweight or obese have similar serum ALP concentrations; minor allele A of rs651007 remarkably reduced serum ALP levels, but this effect was attenuated in overweight and obese individuals. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that ABO locus is a major determinant for serum ALP levels in Chinese Han population. Overweight and obesity modifies the effect of ABO locus on serum ALP concentrations

Quantitative proteomics reveals the crucial role of YbgC for Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis survival in egg white

Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis (S. Enteritidis) is a food-borne bacterial pathogen that can cause human salmonellosis predominately by contamination of eggs and egg products. However, its survival mechanisms in egg white are not fully understood, especially from a proteomic point of view. In this study, the proteomic profiles of S. Enteritidis in Luria-Bertani (LB) broth containing 50% and 80% egg white, and in whole egg white were compared with the profile in LB broth using iTRAQ technology to identify key proteins that were involved in S. Enteritidis survival in egg white. It was found that there were 303, 284 and 273 differentially expressed proteins in S. Enteritidis after 6 h exposure to whole, 80% and 50% egg white, respectively. Most of up-regulated proteins were primarily associated with iron acquisition, cofactor and amino acid biosynthesis, transporter, regulation and stress responses, whereas down-regulated proteins were mainly involved in energy metabolism, virulence as well as motility and chemotaxis. Three stress response-related proteins (YbgC, TolQ, TolA) of the tol-pal system responsible for maintaining cell membrane stability of Gram-negative bacteria were up-regulated in S. Enteritidis in response to whole egg white. Interestingly, deletion of ybgC resulted in a decreased resistance of S. Enteritidis to egg white. Compared with the wild type and complementary strains, a 3-log population reduction was observed in △ybgC mutant strain after incubation in whole egg white for 24 h. Cellular morphology of △ybgC mutant strain was altered from rods to spheres along with cell lysis in whole egg white. Furthermore, deletion of ybgC decreased the expression of tol-pal system-related genes (tolR, tolA). Collectively, these proteomic and mutagenic analysis reveal that YbgC is essential for S. Enteritidis survival in egg white.</p

Follow-Up Infarct Volume Prediction by CTP-Based Hypoperfusion Index, and the Discrepancy between Small Follow-Up Infarct Volume and Poor Functional Outcome—A Multicenter Study

(1) Background: Follow-up infarct volume (FIV) may have implications for prognostication in acute ischemic stroke patients. Factors predicting the discrepancy between FIV and 90-day outcomes are poorly understood. We aimed to develop a comprehensive predictive model of FIV and explore factors associated with the discrepancy. (2) Methods: Patients with acute anterior circulation large vessel occlusion were included. Baseline clinical and CT features were extracted and analyzed, including the CTP-based hypoperfusion index (HI) and the NCCT-based e-ASPECT, measured by automated software. FIV was assessed on follow-up NCCT at 3–7 days. Multiple linear regression was used to construct the predictive model. Subgroup analysis was performed to explore factors associated with poor outcomes (90-mRS scores 3–6) in small FIV (<70 mL). (3) Results: There were 170 patients included. Baseline e-ASPECT, infarct core volume, hypoperfusion volume, HI, baseline international normalized ratio, and successful recanalization were associated with FIV and included in constructing the predictive model. Baseline NIHSS, baseline hypertension, stroke history, and current tobacco use were associated with poor outcomes in small FIV. (4) Conclusions: A comprehensive predictive model (including HI) of FIV was constructed. We also emphasized the importance of hypertension and smoking status at baseline for the functional outcomes in patients with a small FIV