A Text Mining Based Approach for Mining Customer Attribute Data on Undefined Quality Problem

Understanding how the consumer perceives quality is a key issue in supply chain management. However, as the market structure continues to deepen, traditional evaluation methods using SEVRQUAL are unable identify all issues related to customer quality and unable to supply solutions. The maturation of data mining technology, however, has opened the possibilities of mining customer attribute data on quality problems from unstructured data. Based on the consumer perspective, this research uses an unsupervised machine learning text mining approach and the Recursive Neural Tensor Network to resolve the attribution process for undefined quality problems. It was found that the consumer quality perception system has a typical line-of-sight that can assist consumers quickly capture the logical structure of the quality problem. Although attributions related to quality problems are very scattered, a highly unified view was found to exist within each group, and a strategy to solve the undefined quality problem was agreed through group consensus by 61% of the consumers

A Hybrid Model to Analyze Air Pollution Spread Scales in Xi\u27 an and Surrounding Cities

Air quality analysis and prediction are very important in environmental research as airborne pollution has become a significant health threat, especially in Chinese urban agglomerations. Most previous analysis systems have been based on direct factors, such as pollutant concentrations, wind speeds and direction, relative humidity, and temperature; however, the air quality in a city is also affected by the air quality conditions in surrounding areas. This paper proposes a novel strategy for the analysis and forecast of air quality levels, for which Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are employed to elucidate the complex relationships between air quality and meteorological predictor variables. The experimental results in the study demonstrated that the normalized EEMD-ANN model outperformed other models in terms of the Precise, MAE and MAPE. The proposed model, therefore, demonstrated its potential as an administrative tool for issuing air pollution forecasts and for designing suitable abatement strategies

Discovery of potential biomarkers for osteoporosis using LC/GC−MS metabolomic methods

PurposeFor early diagnosis of osteoporosis (OP), plasma metabolomics of OP was studied by untargeted LC/GC−MS in a Chinese elderly population to find possible diagnostic biomarkers.MethodsA total of 379 Chinese community-dwelling older adults aged ≥65 years were recruited for this study. The BMD of the calcaneus was measured using quantitative ultrasound (QUS), and a T value ≤-2.5 was defined as OP. Twenty-nine men and 47 women with OP were screened, and 29 men and 36 women were matched according to age and BMI as normal controls using propensity matching. Plasma from these participants was first analyzed by untargeted LC/GC−MS, followed by FC and P values to screen for differential metabolites and heatmaps and box plots to differentiate metabolites between groups. Finally, metabolic pathway enrichment analysis of differential metabolites was performed based on KEGG, and pathways with P ≤ 0.05 were selected as enrichment pathways.ResultsWe screened metabolites with FC>1.2 or FC<1/1.2 and P<0.05 and found 33 differential metabolites in elderly men and 30 differential metabolites in elderly women that could be potential biomarkers for OP. 2-Aminomuconic acid semialdehyde (AUC=0.72, 95% CI 0.582-0.857, P=0.004) is highly likely to be a biomarker for screening OP in older men. Tetradecanedioic acid (AUC=0.70, 95% CI 0.575-0.818, P=0.004) is highly likely to be a biomarker for screening OP in older women.ConclusionThese findings can be applied to clinical work through further validation studies. This study also shows that metabolomic analysis has great potential for application in the early diagnosis and recurrence monitoring of OP in elderly individuals

Stretch-Optimal Scheduling for On-Demand

In order to effectively utilize the broadcast bandwidth, it is necessary to have efficient on-line scheduling algorithms that can balance individual and overall performance and can scale in terms of database sizes and client populations. Moreover, the scheduling algorithm should be applicable to a heterogeneous environment where data items have different sizes. We address these issues in this paper. As stretch is widely adopted as a performance metric for variable-size data requests, we propose a broadcast scheduling algorithm to optimize the system performance in terms of stretch. We show by analysis that the proposed algorithm can indeed achieve the optimal performance in terms of stretch. Moreover, the proposed scheduling algorithm has very low decision overhead, which makes it a practical solution for on-demand broadcast scheduling. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing scheduling algorithms under various scenarios

Synergistic effect of magnetic nanoparticles of Fe3O4 with gambogic acid on apoptosis of K562 leukemia cells

Baoan Chen1,*, Yiqiong Liang1,*, Weiwei Wu1, Jian Cheng1, Guohua Xia1, Feng Gao1, Jiahua Ding1, Chong Gao1, Zeye Shao1, Guohong Li1, Wenji Chen1, Wenlin Xu2, Xinchen Sun3, Lijie Liu4, Xiaomao Li5, Xuemei Wang61Department of Hematology; 3Department of Oncology, The Affiliated Zhongda Hospital, Clinical Medical School, Southeast University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Hematology, The Affiliated People’s Hospital, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, People’s Republic of China; 4Institution of Physiology, Southeast University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Physics, University of Saarland, Saarbruechen, Germany; 6State Key Lab of Bioelectronics (Chien-Shiung Wu Laboratory), Southeast University, Nanjing, Peoples Republic of China; *These authors have contributed equally to this workAbstract: Gambogic acid (GA) has a significant anticancer effect on a wide variety of solid tumors. Recently, many nanoparticles have been introduced as drug-delivery systems to enhance the efficiency of anticancer drug delivery. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential benefit of combination therapy with GA and magnetic nanoparticles of Fe3O4 (MNPs-Fe3O4). The proliferation of K562 cells and their cytotoxicity were evaluated by MTT assay. Cell apoptosis was observed and analyzed by microscope and flow cytometry, respectively. Furthermore, realtime polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting analyses were performed to examine gene transcription and protein expression, respectively. The results showed that MNPs-Fe3O4 dramatically enhanced GA-induced cytotoxicity and apoptosis in K562 cells. The typical morphological features of apoptosis treated with GA and MNPs-Fe3O4 were observed under an optical microscope and a fluorescence microscope, respectively. The transcription of caspase-3 and bax gene in the group treated with GA and MNPs-Fe3O4 was higher than that in the GA-alone group or MNPs-Fe3O4-alone group, but the transcription of bcl-2, nuclear factor-κB, and survivin degraded as did the expression of corresponding proteins in K562 cells. Our data suggests a potential clinical application of a combination of GA and MNPs-Fe3O4 in leukemia therapy.Keywords: gambogic acid, magnetic nanoparticles of Fe3O4, traditional Chinese medicine, K562 leukemia cells, apoptosi

ªA Mixed Data Dissemination Strategy for Mobile Computing Systems,º

Abstract. Broadcasting is a very effective technique to disseminate information to a massive number of clients when the data size is small. However, if the data size is large, the broadcast cycle may be long, and hence the access delay becomes a problem. Caching frequently accessed data at the client side can reduce the access latency and improve the bandwidth utilization. However, caching techniques may not perform well when the data are frequently updated. In this paper, we propose to apply different techniques (broadcasting and caching) to deal with different components of the data based on their update frequency. Compared to previous schemes, the proposed solution not only reduces the query latency, but also improves the throughput and the bandwidth utilization.

Kinematic evolution of fold-and-thrust belts in the Yubei-Tangbei area: Implications for tectonic events in the southern Tarim Basin

The Yubei-Tangbei area in the southern Tarim Basin is one of the best-preserved Early Paleozoic northeast-southwest trending fold-and-thrust belts within this basin. This area is crucial for the exploration of primary hydrocarbon reservoirs in northwestern China. In this study, we constructed the structural geometric morphology of the Yubei-Tangbei area using geophysical logs, drilling, and recent two- and three-dimensional (2-D and 3-D) seismic data. The Early Paleozoic fault-propagation folds, the Tangnan triangle zone, fault-detachment folds, and trishear fault-propagation folds developed with the detachment of the Middle Cambrian gypsum–salt layer. According to a detailed chronostratigraphic framework, the growth strata in the Upper Ordovician–Lower Silurian layer formed by onlapping the back limb of the asymmetric fault-propagation folds, which therefore defines the timing of deformations. The changes in kink band hinges and amplitudes in the Permian–Carboniferous and Cenozoic folding strata suggest that the evolution of the fold-and-thrust belts followed a sequential evolution process rather than a simultaneous one. Above the pre-existing Precambrian basement structure, the Yubei-Tangbei fold-and-thrust belts can be divided into four tectonic evolution stages: Late Cambrian, Late Ordovician to Early Carboniferous, Carboniferous to Permian, and Cenozoic. The northwestern-verging Cherchen Fault is part of the piedmont fold-and-thrust system of the southern Tarim foreland basin. We interpreted its strata as a breakthrough trishear fault-propagation fold that developed in three phases: Mid–Late Ordovician, Silurian to Middle Devonian, and Triassic to present. These tectonic events are responses of the Altyn-Tagh and Kunlun collisional orogenic belts and the Indian-Eurasian collision. The inherited deformation and structural modification in the southern Tarim Basin may be an indicator of the growth and evolution of peripheral orogens