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By considering the stock market’s fuzzy uncertainty and investors’ psychological factors, this paper studies the portfolio performance evaluation problems with different risk attitudes (optimistic, pessimistic, and neutral) by the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. In this work, the return rates of assets are characterized as trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, whose membership functions with risk attitude parameters are described by exponential expression. Firstly, these characteristics with risk attitude are strictly derived including the possibilistic mean, variance, semi-variance, and semi-absolute deviation based on possibility theory. Secondly, three portfolio models (mean-variance, mean-semi-variance, and mean-semi-absolute-deviation) with different risk attitudes are proposed. Thirdly, we prove the real frontiers determined by our models are concave functions through mathematical theoretical derivation. In addition, two novel indicators are defined by difference and ratio formulas to characterize the correlation between DEA efficiency and portfolio efficiency. Finally, numerical examples are given to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our model. No matter what risk attitude an investor holds, the DEA can generate approximate real frontiers. Correlation analysis indicates that our proposed approach outperforms in evaluating portfolios with risk attitudes. At the same time, our model is an improvement of Tsaur’s work (2013) which did not study the different risk measures, and an extension of Chen et al.’s work (2018) which only considered risk-neutral attitude.

Redirected Walking (RDW) algorithms aim to impose several types of gains on users immersed in Virtual Reality and distort their walking paths in the real world, thus enabling them to explore a larger space. Since collision with physical boundaries is inevitable, a reset strategy needs to be provided to allow users to reset when they hit the boundary. However, most reset strategies are based on simple heuristics by choosing a seemingly suitable solution, which may not perform well in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based reset algorithm adaptive to different RDW algorithms. Inspired by the approach of finite element analysis, our algorithm splits the boundary of the physical world by a set of endpoints. Each endpoint is assigned a reset vector to represent the optimized reset direction when hitting the boundary. The reset vectors on the edge will be determined by the interpolation between two neighbouring endpoints. We conduct simulation-based experiments for three RDW algorithms with commonly used reset algorithms to compare with. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the number of resets.

The sialidases, which catalyze the hydrolysis of sialic acid from extracellular glycoconjugates, are a group of major virulence factors in various pathogenic bacteria. In Porphyromonas gingivalis, which causes human periodontal disease, sialidase contributes to bacterial pathogenesis via promoting the formation of biofilms and capsules, reducing the ability for macrophage clearance, and providing nutrients for bacterial colonization. Here, the crystal structure of the P. gingivalis sialidase SiaPG is reported at 2.1 Å resolution, revealing an N-terminal carbohydrate-binding domain followed by a canonical C-terminal catalytic domain. Simulation of the product sialic acid in the active-site pocket together with functional analysis enables clear identification of the key residues that are required for substrate binding and catalysis. Moreover, structural comparison with other sialidases reveals distinct features of the active-site pocket which might confer substrate specificity. These findings provide the structural basis for the further design and optimization of effective inhibitors to target SiaPG to fight against P. gingivalis-derived oral diseases.

In Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), vehicular networks are enabling technologies for onboard data services such as traffic safety, user infotainment, etc. Vehicular networks face many challenges when it comes to providing satisfactory quality of service, mainly because of issues that arise from unreliable communication in unfavorable propagation conditions. One prime example is Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication in the presence of big vehicles that present obstacles in the communication path of smaller vehicles, where the signal strength decays drastically due to the big vehicle shadowing. As a result, the communication range is shortened, and the safety message dissemination capability is reduced. In this paper, we analyze the impact of big vehicle shadowing on V2V communications, taking into account Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) networks. A geometric as well as a stochastic approach is employed to analyze the length of shadow regions for conventional cars and big vehicles on the road in different scenarios. This paper analyses the effect of large vehicles shadowing on a V2V communication link as a function of the shadow region length. A beamforming-based signal reception technique is proposed in order to mitigate packet collisions caused by hidden nodes. Considering relaying operation by big vehicles, three relaying schemes are proposed to improve the V2V message dissemination performance. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes. Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Published version The work of Yong Liang Guan and Hieu T. Nguyen was supported by A*STAR, Singapore through the RIE2020 Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (AME) Industry Alignment Fund-Pre Positioning (IAF-PP) under Grant A19D6a0053.

Jia Hou, Jin-Feng Li, Xiu-Juan Yan, Yong-Liang Zhang, Meng-Yu Zhang, Yuan Zhang Department of Pharmacy, Weihai Municipal Hospital, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, Weihai, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yuan Zhang, Department of Pharmacy, Weihai Municipal Hospital, Cheeloo College of Medicine, Shandong University, No. 70 Heping Road, Huancui District, Weihai City, Shandong Province, 264200, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-18660377685, Email yuany20222022@163.comObjective: The purpose of this study was to analyze the improvement effect of clinical pharmacist intervention on renal function impairment in patients with antimicrobial-induced acute kidney injury (AKI).Methods: A total of 145 patients with AKI caused by antibiotics admitted to the ICU department were selected as the research subjects. The patients were divided into the control group (n=57) and the intervention group (n=88) according to whether there were ICU specialist clinical pharmacists involved in clinical treatment. The renal function outcome and infection control were evaluated in the two groups.Results: The proportion of renal function outcome in the intervention group was 88.6%, which was significantly higher than that in the control group. However, there was no statistically significant difference in infection control between the two groups. For the intervention group, the clinical pharmacists adopted three intervention methods: dose adjustment, drug replacement and CRRT treatment, respectively, according to the disease conditions of AKI patients. Among them, dose adjustment and drug replacement were the most frequently used intervention methods. In addition, the proportion of renal function outcome was higher in the group of patients who changed antibiotics and underwent CRRT, which were 93.1% and 100%, respectively. The adjusted-dose group had the highest infection control rate at 82.1%. However, there were no statistically significant differences in renal function outcomes and infection control among the three interventions.Conclusion: Clinical pharmacists participating in the clinical treatment of patients with antimicrobial-induced AKI in ICU can effectively improve the renal function of patients.Keywords: clinical pharmacists, acute kidney injury, antimicrobial, renal function

In this paper, a new preamble waveform design and a corresponding minimum-point processing algorithm at receiver are proposed to perform radar sensing of communication signal echoes. In our design, we consider the millimeter wave (mmWave) 802.11ad/802.11ay communication frame format as a reference. Our proposed new preamble replaces the second pair of single-carrier (SC) Golay complementary code (GCC) used in the preamble of IEEE 802.11ad/802.11ay by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) GCC waveform, resulting in a SC-OFDM GCC preamble waveform. At the receiver, a point-wise minimum operation is performed on the separate radar ambiguity functions (AF) of the SC-GCC and OFDM-GCC to improve the overall quality of the preamble AF. Furthermore, point-wise minimum processing is applied to fuse the communication data AF and the preamble AF, so as to further enhance the radar sensing quality of the entire communication frame. In addition, theoretical analysis of the performance gain of such radar AF fusion is provided. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the newly proposed SC-OFDM GCC preamble design and the minimum-point fusion of data AF and preamble AF provide a significant performance improvement for automotive radar sensing. Specifically, the proposed SC-OFDM GCC preamble with minimum-point processing algorithm improves the peak-to-max-sidelobe ratio (PMSR) of radar AF over the conventional 802.11ad/802.11ay preamble. Moreover, the proposed preamble-data AF fusion technique further enhances the PMSR as well as the Doppler resolution over the existing joint radar communication systems (which process either the preamble echo or the data echo only). Finally, the proposed minimum-point processing and data AF fusion are extended from single-frame to multi-frame processing to further improve the Doppler resolution. Submitted/Accepted version The work of Pingzhi Fan was supported by NSFC Project No. 62020106001.

Botrytis cinerea, a widespread plant pathogen with a necrotrophic lifestyle, causes gray mold disease in many crops. Massive secretion of enzymes and toxins was long considered to be the main driver of infection, but recent studies have uncovered a rich toolbox for B. cinerea pathogenicity. The emerging picture is of a multilayered infection process governed by the exchange of factors that collectively contribute to disease development. No plant shows complete resistance against B. cinerea, but pattern-triggered plant immune responses have the potential to significantly reduce disease progression, opening new possibilities for producing B. cinerea-tolerant plants. We examine current B. cinerea infection models, highlight knowledge gaps, and suggest directions for future studies.

An Wen,1,2 Wen-Feng Cao,1,2 Shi-Min Liu,1,2 Yong-Liang Zhou,1,2 Zheng-Bing Xiang,1,2 Fan Hu,1,2 Ling-Feng Wu,1,2 Wen Cai,1,2 Er-Ling Leng3 1Department of Neurology, Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital (The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang Medical College), Nanchang, People’s Republic of China; 2Institution of Neurology, Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital (The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang Medical College), Nanchang, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Pediatrics, Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital (The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang Medical College), Nanchang, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Er-Ling Leng, Department of Pediatrics, Jiangxi Provincial People’s Hospital (The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang Medical College), No.92 Aiguo Road, Nanchang, 330006, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86791-8772-1401, Email wenan666@sina.comObjective: Tuberculous meningitis (TBM) is a common form of central nervous system (CNS) tuberculosis (TB). Cranial nerve palsy is a serious complication of TBM. Literature regarding this subject is still limited in China. This study evaluated the incidence of cranial nerve palsy in patients with TBM in South China, its association with the clinical forms of TB, and other patient characteristics.Methods: A retrospective chart review of patients with a diagnosis of TBM between January 2004 and December 2019 was conducted, and the demographic characteristics, clinical characteristics, and laboratory results of 114 patients were collected and followed up for 3 months. A multivariate logistic regression analysis model was used to explore the risk factors of cranial nerve palsy in patients with TBM.Results: A total of 114 patients were enrolled in this study. Cranial nerve palsy was observed in approximately 38 (33.3%) of TBM patients. Among them, 13 (28.3%) had optic nerve palsy, 24 (52.2%) had oculomotor nerve palsy, 5 (10.9%) had abducens nerve palsy, 2 (4.3%) had auditory nerve palsy, 1 (2.2%) had glossopharyngeal nerve palsy, and 1 (2.2%) had vagus nerve palsy. Using logistic regression analysis, focal neurological deficit, extracranial TB and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) total white cell count (WCC) were shown to be risk factors for cranial nerve palsy.Conclusion: The prevalence rate of cranial nerve palsy was 33.3% in patients with TBM. Focal neurological deficits, extracranial TB and CSF total WCC are important predictors of cranial nerve palsy in patients with TBM.Keywords: tuberculous meningitis, tuberculosis, cranial nerve palsy, risk factors, prediction

This paper investigates an uplink coordinated multi-point (CoMP) coverage scenario, in which multiple mobile users are grouped for sparse code multiple access (SCMA), and served by the remote radio head (RRH) in front of them and the RRH behind them simultaneously. We apply orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation for each user to exploit the degrees of freedom arising from both the delay and Doppler domains. As the signals received by the RRHs in front of and behind the users experience respectively positive and negative Doppler frequency shifts, our proposed OTFS-based SCMA (OBSCMA) with CoMP system can effectively harvest extra Doppler and spatial diversity for better performance. Based on maximum likelihood (ML) detector, we analyze the single-user average bit error rate (ABER) bound as the benchmark of the ABER performance for our proposed OBSCMA with CoMP system. We also develop a customized Gaussian approximation with expectation propagation (GAEP) algorithm for multi-user detection and propose efficient algorithm structures for centralized and decentralized detectors. Our proposed OBSCMA with CoMP system leads to stronger performance than the existing solutions. The proposed centralized and decentralized detectors exhibit effective reception and robustness under channel state information uncertainty., 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

The invertibility of a Toeplitz matrix can be assessed based on the solvability of two standard equations. The inverse of the nonsingular Toeplitz matrix can then be represented as the sum of products of circulant and skew-circulant (CS) matrices. In this note, we provide a new structured perturbation analysis for the CS representation of Toeplitz inversion and the new upper bound is just half as large as the existing upper bound proposed by Wu et al. (Numer Linear Algebra Appl 22(4):777–792, 2015) and Feng et al. (East Asian J Appl Math 5(2):160–175, 2015). Meanwhile, some practical issues and numerical experiments involving the numerical solutions of fractional partial differential equations are reported to support our theoretical findings.

A ratiometric fluorescent probe based on a “dual-key-and-lock” design was reported for the imaging of vicinal dithiol proteins in living cells.

An unprecedented cobaloxime-based zirconium metal–organic framework (Zr-TCPCo) is designed and synthesized, which exhibits excellent catalytic activity for aerobic oxidation of arylboronic acids to phenols as a photocatalyst.

MotivationUsing DNA as the medium to store information has recently been recognized as a promising solution for long-term data storage. While several system prototypes have been demonstrated, the error characteristics in DNA data storage are discussed with limited content. Due to the data and process variations from experiment to experiment, the error variation and its effect on data recovery remain to be uncovered. To close the gap, we systematically investigate the storage channel, i.e., error characteristics in the storage process.ResultsWe first propose a new concept named sequence corruption to unify the error characteristics into the sequence level, easing the channel analysis. Then we derived the formulations of the data imperfection at the decoder including both sequence loss and sequence corruption, revealing the decoding demand and monitoring the data recovery. Furthermore, we extensively explored several data-dependent unevenness observed in the base error patterns and studied a few potential factors and their impacts on the data imperfection at the decoder both theoretically and experimentally. The results presented here introduce a more comprehensive channel model and offer a new angle towards the data recovery issue in DNA data storage by further elucidating the error characteristics of the storage process.Contactpoh.chuehloo@nus.edu.sg

The N-oxide containing conjugated semiconducting polymer is synthesized by direct (hetero)arylation polymerization and exhibit enhanced electron mobility compared to its non-oxide analogous polymer.

We report a promiscuous flavonoid 7,4′-di-O-glycosyltransferase (ZjOGT3), which shows high catalytic efficiency and regio-selectivity. And the regio-selectivity of ZjOGT3 was controlled by intrinsic reactivity and the enzyme microenvironment.

How to take certain measures to minimize the differential settlement of buildings is one of the urgent problems to be solved in the current pile-raft foundation design. In this paper, the nonlinear optimization design of pile foundation based on the principle of settlement control is developed. For the soil around the pile group, considering its nonlinear characteristics, when it yields, the ideal elastic-plastic model is adopted for calculation. Through numerical simulation, combined with the results of model test and field observation, some practical research results are obtained: the smaller the elastic modulus coefficient is, the flatter the load-settlement curve of CPF (Composite pile foundation) is, and the larger the fixed value is, the load-settlement curve is abrupt. Using settlement control to design rigid pile composite foundation has clear settlement. As a supplement to the insufficient bearing capacity of foundation soil, pile foundation makes full use of the bearing capacity of soil between piles. The design scheme is more economical, and it is a good nonlinear optimization method of pile foundation.

The importance of fluoro and trifluoromethyl substituents in drug effectiveness prompted the computational exploration of fluorine-containing substituents in valuable synthetic cycloadditions. Diels-Alder or 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reactions of typical reactants, cyclopentadiene

Zusammenfassung Angesichts der veränderten Situationen und Bedingungen für interkulturelle Kommunikation (Globalisierung, Migrationsbewegung, digitale Vernetzung etc.) wird in der Interkulturalitätsforschung seit Anfang des neuen Jahrhunderts verstärkt an einer konzeptuellen Neuorientierung gearbeitet. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht exemplarisch-exploratorisch auf die aktuellen Diskurse zum Kultur- und Interkulturalitätskonzept ein und versucht dabei, sowohl die dort ausgetragene Kritik an den „alten“ Konzeptionen als auch die als „neu“ bezeichneten Überlegungen und Ansätze näher zu beleuchten und kritisch zu hinterfragen. Außerdem wird der Frage nachgegangen, warum die neuen Theorien und Modelle kaum in der interkulturellen Praxis umgesetzt werden konnten. Unter den Aspekten eines diskursiv-reflexiven Kulturverständnisses wird schließlich diskutiert, was wir aus den neuen Debatten lernen können.

Despite the great potential of microplasma optical emission spectrometry (OES) for on-site analysis, it remains a challenge to achieve the fast, sensitive, batch, and multielement analysis of trace heavy metals in a complex matrix. Herein, a novel ultrasonic nebulization-accelerated gas-phase enrichment (GPE) following in situ microplasma desorption sampling approach is employed for the determination of trace heavy metals by a miniature dielectric barrier discharge (DBD)-OES device. The volatile heavy metal species obtained by hydride generation (HG) can be quickly separated from the complex matrix under the action of ultrasonic nebulization, adsorbed on the surface of the activated carbon electrode tip for GPE, and then in situ desorbed and excited by DBD microplasma to achieve multielement OES analysis. With an array nebulizer plate, a batch of 10 samples can be handled for GPE in 40 s, and DBD-OES analysis is maintained at a rate of 6 s per sample. Under the optimized conditions, the detection limits for simultaneous determinations of Hg, Cd, Cu, and Sn are 0.005, 0.01, 0.03, and 0.04 μg L