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This study investigated the R&amp, D manipulation of Chinese listed companies under preferential tax policies based on the bunching approach. On this basis, differences in organizational performance aspirations were used to distinguish firm heterogeneity. This was to clarify how tax incentives affected firm innovation performance. The empirical results show that preferential tax policies can effectively reduce the actual tax burden of high-tech enterprises. Some companies have enjoyed corporate income tax breaks by manipulating R&amp, D spending. The counterfactual estimate of R&amp, D intensity shows that the elasticity of taxable income of R&amp, D investment of listed companies in China is between 0.55 and 0.8. The elasticity of taxable income of manufacturing enterprises is between 0.6 and 0.75. Furthermore, within the R&amp, D operating range, firm-level variations will affect innovation performance. The incentive effect of R&amp, D activities of enterprises with a negative organizational performance aspiration gap is higher than that of enterprises with a positive organizational performance aspiration gap. The conclusion provides the basis for the country to improve preferential tax policies for high-tech enterprises.

Shuai Yang,* Han Guan,* Sheng Wang, Hongliang Wu, Wenyan Sun, Zhijun Chen, Qingwen Li Department of Urology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Bengbu Medical College, Bengbu, Anhui 233000, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Qingwen Li; Zhijun ChenDepartment of Urology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Bengbu Medical College, Bengbu, Anhui 233000, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +86-552-3086153; +86-13956356152Email bymnlqw@163.com; 1084243167@qq.comBackground: This study aimed to determine the potential utility of plasma fibrinogen as a prognostic factor in patients with bladder cancer (BCa) after radical cystectomy (RC).Methods: Patients with BCa who underwent RC from 2014 to 2019 were analyzed retrospectively. The indexes of plasma coagulation and fibrinolysis system factors were collected. Kaplan–Meier survival curves were used to calculate the overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). The prognostic value of plasma fibrinogen was analyzed by using Cox regression model, and a nomogram of BCa based on plasma fibrinogen was generated by R software.Results: Among 145 patients, the optimal cut-off value of plasma fibrinogen was 3.14g/L. High level of plasma fibrinogen was related to the poor prognosis of patients with BCa, and plasma fibrinogen has a more accurate prognostic ability than other plasma coagulation and fibrinolysis system factors. Multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that plasma fibrinogen was an independent predictor of OS (> 3.14 vs ≤ 3.14 HR, 2.58, 95% CI = 1.28– 5.23; p = 0.008) and DFS (> 3.14 vs ≤ 3.14 HR, 2.60, 95% CI = 1.20– 5.65; p = 0.016), and the nomogram based on plasma fibrinogen had better accuracy and discrimination (area under the curve (AUC): OS = 0.741, DFS = 0.733).Conclusion: Plasma fibrinogen can be used as an independent predictor of OS and DFS for RC patients, and the nomogram based on plasma fibrinogen was a reliable model for predicting the prognosis after RC.Keywords: bladder cancer, plasma fibrinogen, radical cystectomy, prognosis, nomogram

Etch bias is a key parameter to determine AEICD performance, and the photo rework is a routine method if photo process abnormal. Dependence of etch bias on photo rework is firstly found and studied in this work. By theoretical analysis and experimental verification, the model of the this dependence is proposed, which mainly attributes to the new dense OX film left below Barc after rework and the high selectivity of Barc to OX for Barc open step. Under the above two conditions, part of plasma convert its etch direction from vertical to horizontal during the OX open period, which attributes to trimming Barc CD, and thus changing etch bias. This dependence gets weaker when transmission rate increases due to macro-loading effect. Besides, it also gets stronger for dense pattern than for iso pattern, which attributes to micro-loading effect. While this dependence may induce AEICD and thus the WAT shift, solution to weaken the side effect of etch bias shift is proposed.

As a key material for manufacturing EAST lower divertor heat sink, high-quality CuCrZr/316 L bonding plate is preferred to be manufactured by explosive welding, which is advantageous in zero input heat without deteriorating the material performance of CuCrZr and 316 L. In accordance with various detections and analyses of CuCrZr/316 L after the explosive welding: metallographic phase and electron microscope analysis showed the bonding interface contains no cavity or Cu/Fe metallic mutual dissolution; tensile stress of the bonding interface is higher than that of the CuCrZr material; a hollow heat sink sample (3 mm wall thickness) made of this material can withstand 4.5 MPa water pressure without deformation or leakage, and has been successfully undergone helium leak detection (200℃, 1 MPa, 1 × 10−11 m3/s). Such test results showed the bonding plate by explosive welding met all high quality requirements on fusion engineering that it can be applied to EAST divertor reliably.

Introduction: Primary cardiac angiosarcoma is a rare tumor and the common treatment is surgical resection followed by chemotherapy. Peripherally inserted central venous catheters (PICCs) are widely used in cancer patients and ultrasound-guided PICC insertion could improve success rate especially in patient with abnormal anatomy structure. Reports about PICCs being placed in patient who had suffered from the cardiac angiosarcoma and neoplasty of right atrium with an ipsilateral cardiac permanent pacemaker are rarely. After patient's informed consent, we present a case of the successful insertion of PICC into a patient with the ipsilateral cardiac disease with a pacemaker placement, which has not been previously reported. Conclusions: This report highlights PICC could be used in patient with cardiac disease with a pacemaker placement for chemotherapy.

Introduction: Peripherally inserted central venous catheters (PICC) are widely used in cancer patients and ultrasound-guided PICC insertion could improve success rate. The tip position of the catheter should be located at the border of lower one-third of the superior vena cava (SVC) and cavo-atrial junction. The migration is malposition at the late stage after PICCs were inserted, and catheter malposition was associated with thrombosis and other complications. After patient's informed consent, we report a case of a 66-year-old male with twice catheter migrations resulting in thrombosis after being diagnosed with cardiac cancer. Conclusion: The correct position of the catheter tip can ensure the normal use of PICC and reduce the complications. For the migrated catheter, it should be removed as soon as possible, and when thrombosis has been developed, standard anticoagulant therapy should be given.

Ethernet Passive Optical Network (abbreviated as EPON) has gained a lot of attention as an effective solution to broadband local access network. While it is a very cost-effective solution, it has some key technologies needed to develop, including upstream traffic synchronization. In the upstream direction, EPON is a multipoint-to-point network. In this paper, we present the principle and simulation of upstream synchronization, a process of finding a specific delay for every network unit, such that all upstream transmissions will arrive at the central office without collisions.

To accurately segment putamen with fuzzy edges of basal ganglia region in brain Magnetic Resonance (MR) images, a shortest path based interactive segmentation method is proposed in this paper. Considering anatomical features of putamen, a cost function is designed by using weight coefficients in sub-regions and sub-orientations, and the shortest path search is restrained in a region, so that the fuzzy edges of putamen can be identified effectively. The proposed method solves the problem of Live-wire, which is easy to be attracted by the edge of claustrum in detecting edge of putamen. A great deal of experiments demonstrates that proposed method can realize fast segmentation with accuracy and stability for putamen.

The human cationic antimicrobial protein LL-37 is a multifunctional host defense peptide with a wide range of immunomodulatory activities. Previous work has shown that LL-37 exerts both pro- and anti-inflammatory effects. The role of mitochondria in the skin inflammatory effects of LL-37 has not been well studied. Therefore, our aim was to investigate the immunomodulatory effect of LL-37 in HaCaT cells and to delineate the underlying mechanisms related to mitochondrial function. Immunohistochemistry results from tissue microarrays showed strong cytoplasmic LL-37 staining in inflammatory cells in chronic dermatic inflammation. Using exogenous LL-37 stimulation and LL-37 knockdown and overexpression, LL-37 was demonstrated to dramatically reduce the mRNA levels and protein secretion of inflammatory cytokines including IL-6, IL-8, IL-1α and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), which are induced by lipopolysaccharides (LPS). The anti-inflammatory effects of LL-37 are dependent upon its ability to increase mitochondrial biogenesis and to maintain mitochondrial homeostasis. Furthermore, we observed that LL-37 enhances the LPS-induced phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK1/2) and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). The mTOR inhibitor rapamycin can neutralize the protective effects of LL-37 on mitochondria. In conclusion, these results suggest that high LL-37 expression levels correlate with chronic skin inflammation; mitochondrial dysfunction occurs in HaCaT cells during inflammation; and LL-37 attenuates inflammatory impairment by stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis and protecting mitochondrial function, which are dependent upon mTOR signaling. These findings provide new insights into targeting mitochondria with LL-37 to prevent skin inflammatory reactions. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

It has been of high concern that the phosphorus pollution is getting serious after lake eutrophication in the Taihu Lake, the third largest freshwater lake in China. As a sensitive recorder of the ambient water and fish exposures, fish otolith has been studied as a potential dynamic monitor of water quality by many biologists and mineralogists. In order to work out the correlation of phosphorus enrichment in carp otoliths to the ambient water of the carps, the phosphorus concentration in carp otoliths was measured in situ using laser ablation plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and comparison with the relevant data of the water was conducted. Significant positive correlation was found for phosphorus concentration in carp otoliths to the ambient water in the corresponding time. Therefore, the wild carp otoliths have the potential to act as an environmental indicator of water phosphorus pollution and lake eutrophication. Key words : Carp otoliths, environmental pollution, lake eutrophication, phosphorus enrichment, mineral monitoring, Taihu Lake.

For finite geometry low-density parity-check codes, heavy row and column weights in their parity check matrix make the decoding with even Min-Sum (MS) variants computationally expensive. To alleviate it, we present a class of hybrid schemes by concatenating a parallel bit flipping (BF) variant with an Min-Sum (MS) variant. In most SNR region of interest, without compromising performance or convergence rate, simulation results show that the proposed hybrid schemes can save substantial computational complexity with respect to MS variant decoding alone. Specifically, the BF variant, with much less computational complexity, bears most decoding load before resorting to MS variant. Computational and hardware complexity is also elaborated to justify the feasibility of the hybrid schemes., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables