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In light of China's growing weight as a technological power in the international arena, an increasing body of literature is dedicated to conceptualizing China as a nascent norm-shaper in global cyber governance. However, a nuanced investigation into the process of China's norm diffusion in cyber governance has been lacking. Drawing on the latest advancements from norm diffusion theory, this study provides a nuanced understanding of the complex and multidimensional nature of China's cyber-governance norm cluster and the diffusion mechanisms. By contesting the linear and static conceptualization of norms, this study conceptualizes China's cyber governance norms through the lens of norm cluster. It demonstrates that China has actively promoted a constellation of values and appropriate behaviours in order to address the myriad of problems and challenges it identifies in global cyber governance, revolving around three core values, namely: cyber sovereignty, multilateralism and the balance between security and development. This research also demonstrates that instead of using a single diffusion mechanism, China has relied on a dynamic combination of socialization and positive incentives which are driven by both state-led actors and private sectors to diffuse its cyber norms and approaches at regional and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing integration levels of modern electronic products, effective thermal management has become a critical concern to ensure the operational efficiency and longevity of electronic devices. Developing thermal interface materials that possess both high thermal conductivity (κ) and reliable insulation properties has presented a significant challenge. In this study, boron nitride fibers (BNF) with a substantial length-to-diameter ratio were fabricated to serve as vertically aligned thermal conduction channels within a composite pad containing a silicone gel matrix.Under typical packing pressure conditions, the resulting BNF pad exhibits an exceptionally high through-plane thermal conductivity (40 vol. %: κ⊥ = 16.77 W/mK). Additionally, the BNF pad demonstrates favorable mechanical and dielectric properties, enhancing its versatility and applicability. The results of actual heat dissipation tests further validate the excellent thermal management capabilities of these composites in high-power electronic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High red and processed meat intake and genetic predisposition are risk factors of colorectal cancer (CRC). However, evidence of their independent and joint associations on the risk of colorectal neoplasms is limited. We assessed these associations among 4774 men and women undergoing screening colonoscopy. Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were calculated based on 140 loci related to CRC. We used multiple logistic regression models to evaluate the associations of red and processed meat intake and PRS with the risk of colorectal neoplasms. Adjusted odds ratios (aORs) were translated to genetic risk equivalents (GREs) to compare the strength of the associations with colorectal neoplasm risk of both factors. Compared to ≤1 time/week, processed meat intake >1 time/week was associated with a significantly increased risk of colorectal neoplasm [aOR (95% CI): 1.28 (1.12–1.46)]. This risk increase was equivalent to the risk increase associated with a 19 percentile higher PRS. The association of red meat intake with colorectal neoplasm was weaker and did not reach statistical significance. High processed meat intake and PRS contribute to colorectal neoplasm risk independently. Limiting processed meat intake may offset a substantial proportion of the genetically increased risk of colorectal neoplasms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic narratives have become an important tool with which states define their geopolitical reality and shape the types of foreign policy decisions that emerge. In order to build a more favourable international environment, China has deployed substantial resources to disseminate its strategic narratives and communicate its role, identity and vision and legitimise Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. Despite the obvious importance of narratives on conflict and global security, remarkably few studies have examined China's strategic narratives on security-related issues. This article marks the first systematic effort to map out China's strategic narratives in the context of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Based on a corpus linguistics approach and qualitative content analysis, the findings reveal that China does not project itself as a neutral player and that its strategic narratives often echo Russia's portrayal of the Ukrainian war. However, the analysis also highlights China's efforts to maintain its distance from Russia while presenting itself against the backdrop of the US/West-Russian rivalry as an equidistant player belonging to the wider international community as well as the most suitable actor to manage a peaceful global order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence and mortality are higher among men than among women. We aimed to estimate overall and age‐specific risk advancement periods (RAPs) for men compared to women, which quantify how many years earlier comparable levels of risk are reached by men. RAPs were derived by Cox regression models among 331 224 participants aged 40 to 69 at baseline of the UK Biobank with no previous diagnosis of CRC and no previous CRC screening examination who were followed with respect to CRC incidence for up to 13 years. Men were at substantially higher risk of CRC than women in age groups 50 to 59 and 60 to 69, with RAPs (95% confidence intervals) as high as 8.7 (4.5‐13.0) and 6.2 (4.5‐7.9), respectively. These RAPs were higher than those for family history of CRC in these age groups. By contrast, no significant sex difference but a major impact of family history was seen in age group 40 to 49 (P‐value for interaction between sex and age =.00079). The observed patterns suggest that consideration of gender‐specific starting ages of screening might be warranted in countries in which screening offers start at ages above 50 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past two decades have witnessed a tremendous increase in the scholarly attention paid to the European Union (EU)'s external relations as well as the nature of the union's role in world politics. With an aim to contribute to the EU-as-a-power debate, this research explores how EU economic and market-related norms and policies have been promoted and received by taking the EU's relations with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an empirical case study. Drawing on transnational diffusion literature, this paper seeks to bridge existing scholarly discussions on Normative Power Europe and Market or Regulatory Power Europe, offering a more nuanced understanding of subjects of the EU's externalization, as well as the processes and effectiveness of the EU's diffusion of market-related norms and regulatory approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Whether and to what extent the relationship between physical activity (PA) and colorectal cancer (CRC) differs according to CRC‐related genetic risk remains to be determined, and no studies to date have quantified how much genetically determined risk could be compensated for with active exercise. Methods: Genetic risk was quantified by a polygenic risk score (PRS) summarizing the estimated effect of 140 CRC‐associated genetic variants. Associations of PA with CRC risk were estimated by multivariable logistic regression across PRS levels. We also compared the impact of PA and specific PA types to the PRS using "genetic risk equivalent (GRE)", a novel approach to enhance effective risk communication. Results: Among 5058 CRC patients and 4134 controls, we observed no significant association between overall PA level in quartiles and CRC risk. However, the highest versus lowest lifetime leisure time physical activity (LTPA) was associated with a 13% lower CRC risk [odds ratio 0.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.77–1.00] independent of PRS levels (adjusted p value for interaction = 0.18). This effect was equivalent to the effect of having 11 percentiles lower PRS (GRE −10.6, 95% CI −20.7 to −0.6). The GRE (95% CI) for the highest lifetime sports tertile was −23.0 (−33.9 to −12.0). Conclusions: LTPA was inversely associated with CRC risk irrespective of polygenic risk for CRC, which reinforces the importance of LTPA in CRC prevention among the general population. Adequate sports activity can compensate for a large share of polygenic risk for CRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Obesity is an established risk factor for colorectal cancer (CRC); but the evidence for the association is inconsistent across molecular subtypes of the disease.Methods: We pooled data on BMI, tumor microsatellite instability (MSI) status, CpG island methylator phenotype (CIMP) status, BRAF and KRAS mutations, and Jass classification types for 11,872 CRC cases and 11,013 controls from 11 observational studies. We used multinomial logistic regression to estimate odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) adjusted for covariables.Results: Higher BMI was associated with increased CRC risk (OR per 5 kg/m2, 1.18, 95%CI: 1.15-1.22). The positive association was stronger for men than women, but similar across tumor subtypes defined by individual molecular markers. In analyses by Jass type, higher BMI was associated with elevated CRC risk for types 1-4 cases but not for type 5 CRC cases (considered familial-like/Lynch syndrome MSI-H, CIMP-low/negative, BRAF-wildtype, KRAS-wildtype, OR, 1.04, 95%CI: 0.90-1.20). This pattern of associations for BMI and Jass types was consistent by sex and design of contributing studies (cohort or case-control).Conclusions: In contrast to previous reports with fewer study participants, we found limited evidence of heterogeneity for the association between BMI and CRC risk according to molecular subtype, suggesting that obesity influences nearly all major pathways involved in colorectal carcinogenesis. The null association observed for the Jass type 5 suggests that BMI is not a risk factor for the development of CRC for individuals with Lynch syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) in younger adults is increasing in many countries. Smoking is an established risk factor of CRC risk, but evidence on its impact on early-onset CRC (EOCRC) risk is limited. We aimed to evaluate the association of smoking exposure with EOCRC and compare it with late-onset CRC (LOCRC). Methods Smoking history and other known or suspected CRC risk factors were ascertained in detail in personal interviews among 6264 CRC patients and 6866 controls (frequency matched for age, sex, and county of residence) who were recruited in 2003-2020 in the DACHS study (Darmkrebs: Chancen der Verhütung durch Screening [German]; Colorectal Cancer: Chances for Prevention Through Screening [English]), a population-based case-control study from Germany. Associations of smoking with EOCRC (<55 years, 724 cases, 787 controls) and LOCRC (≥55years, 5540 cases, 6079 controls) were estimated using multiple logistic regression. Results Smoking exposure was much higher among EOCRC cases than among controls, and strong associations of smoking were observed for both EOCRC and LOCR. Adjusted odds ratios for EOCRC and LOCRC were as follows: current smoking: 1.57 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.20 to 2.04, P  < .001) and 1.46 (95% CI = 1.28 to 1.67, P  < .001); former smoking: 1.39 (95% CI = 1.07 to 1.81, P  = .01) and 1.24 (95% CI = 1.13 to 1.36, P  < .001); per 10 pack-years: 1.15 (95% CI = 1.05 to 1.27, P  < .001) and 1.05 (95% CI = 1.03 to 1.08, P  < .001). These patterns were similar for colon and rectum cancer and for early- and late-stage CRC. Conclusion Smoking is a strong risk factor for both EOCRC and LOCRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research seeks to unpack the development of the EU as a security actor in cyberspace. Drawing on the theoretical approach of role theory, this article shows that the EU's role in cyberspace should be understood in relationality to the other poles. On the one hand, the declining hegemonic role of the US in cyberspace as well as the divergence between the US and the EU with regard to cybersecurity governance has made the EU more aware of the need for cyber sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Therefore, the EU seeks to pursue a role of an autonomous cybersecurity player through the enactment of cybersecurity at institutional and operational level. On the other hand, under conditions of increasing interdependence, the EU has considered international cooperation to address challenges in cyberspace as a strategic priority, therefore seeking to act as a promoter of a multi-stakeholder model. Moreover, interpolariy in cyberspace determines the contestation of EU role by other poles. While the EU has recorded some small successes as a regulation-setter, emerging poles of power in the cybersecurity domain contest the EU's desired role, promoting more state-centric approaches and seeking to transfer regulatory authority in the cybersecurity domain to the UN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cavum septum pellucidum (CSP) is one of the most important physiologic structures that should be detected in Ultrasound (US) scanning for the normal development of the fetal central nervous system. However, manual measurement of CSP is still a difficult and time-consuming task due to the high noise of US images, even for experienced sonographers. Especially considering that maternal mortality remains high in many developing countries, a data-driven system with a medical diagnosis can help sonographers and obstetricians make decisions rapidly and improve their work efficiency. In this study, we propose a novel data-driven system based on deep learning for the diagnosis of CSP called CA-Unet, which consists of a channel attention network to segment the CSP and a post-processing module to measure and diagnose the anomalies of CSP. We collected the US data from three hospitals in China from 2012 to 2018 year to validate the effectiveness of our system. Experiments on a fetal US dataset demonstrated that our proposed system is able to help doctors make decisions and has achieved the highest precision of 79.5% and the largest Dice score of 77.5% in the segmentation of CSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code is a disease classification method formulated by the World Health Organization(WHO). ICD coding usually requires clinicians to manually allocate ICD codes to clinical documents, which is labor-intensive, expensive, and error-prone. Therefore, many methods have been introduced for automatic ICD coding. However, most of the methods have ignored or cannot combine two essential features well: long-tailed label distribution and label correlation. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Joint Attention Network (JAN) to solve these two problems. JAN includes Document-based attention and Label-based attention to capture semantic information from clinical document text and label description, respectively, which helps solve the classification of dense and sparse data in long-tailed label distribution. Besides, an Adaptive fusion layer and CorNet block are presented to adaptively adjust the weight of these two attentions and exploit label co-occurrence relations, respectively. Experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-II datasets demonstrate that our proposed JAN outperformed previous state-of-art methods achieving Micro-F1 of 0.553, Micro-AUC of 0.989 and precision at top 8(P@8) of 0.735. Finally, we also provide attention and label correlation visualization to verify the effectiveness of our model and improve the interpretation of our deep learning-based method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better capture the dynamics of global cyber governance, it is important to go beyond the established West vs. non-West dichotomy in the scholarly literature and thus develop a more nuanced understanding of the variations of cyber governance norms and approaches within and beyond the traditional Western camp, as well as to take into account the role of regional organisations in reshaping the normative framework of cyber governance. Indeed, the European Union is emerging as a new norm entrepreneur and autonomous regional actor in cyber governance by proactively projecting its regulatory and normative power in the digital sphere. In contrast, the development of ASEAN's cyber governance norms is a process of norm subsidiarity based on ASEAN's unique diplomatic culture and normative structure characterised by the ASEAN Way and the principle of ASEAN centrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power shift from West to East has engendered an increasingly confrontational and competitive multipolar system in cyberspace governance. The West has to confront the real possibility of its decline in the face of the rising influence of the non-Western world, as shown in the intensive discussions over 'Westlessness' at the 2020 Munich Security Conference. In order to address scholarly concerns around cyberspace governance in a digitalised world, this Special Core examines competing ideas and norms of cyberspace governance from comparative perspectives, shedding light on the promising research field of global cyberspace governance and the debate on 'Westlessness' in the study of international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flow fluctuations in the highly dynamic Internet of Vehicles (IoV) make the IoV difficult to provide reliable and scalable wireless network services for the emerging applications in the 5 G and beyond era. The software-defined networks (SDN) could feasibly manage and optimize the network according to the network load. Controller placement is a critical problem in SDN to achieve its robustness and flexibility with the changes of network status. Motivated by the advantages of SDN and Mobile-edge computing (MEC), this paper aims at enhancing the performance of IoV with the assistance of these two. Specifically, we consider a three-layer hierarchical SDN control plane for the IoV, where the SDN controllers are placed at the edge of networks. Under this framework, we investigate a multi-objective optimization problem on controller placement problem including delay, load balancing, and path reliability. To efficiently solve the formulated NP-hard problems, we develop an algorithm based on multi-agent deep Q-learning networks (MADQN) because of its advantages for large-scale combinatorial optimization. At last, we use multi-process technology to accelerate the operation of the algorithm, so as to complete the algorithm iteration faster. Numerical results show that the proposed methods achieve better performances than three baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of Normative Power Europe (NPE) has sparked widespread debate over the EU's external relations and its role in world politics. Whist the EU studies community has engaged with the NPE literature and studied EU norm-entrepreneurship at theoretical and empirical levels, the NPE literature suffers from two major shortcomings: first, it falls short in uncovering the multifaceted nature of EU diffusion objects across different policy areas; second, the effectiveness of EU norm diffusion remains underexplored. To remedy these limitations, this article aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the EU's projection of normative power by drawing on analytical tools from diffusion literature. By doing so, this research argues that the EU's projection of normative power in relation to other international actors can be conceptualised as a process of diffusion of EU norm-clusters in various policy areas. It also reconceptualises the impact of the EU's normative power as varying diffusion outcomes. By undertaking an empirical case study of the EU–ASEAN security cooperation, this research adopts the analytical framework to unpack the EU's projection of normative power and diffusion of security-related norm-cluster in relation to ASEAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]