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As a classical and effective method for solving various time-varying problems, the zeroing neural network (ZNN) is widely applied in the scientific and industrial realms. In plentiful studies on the ZNN model, its robustness and convergence have been two essential criteria to evaluate the quality of the model. Improvements in the ZNN model have been focused on its convergence speed; however, the adjustability of its convergence speed has been neglected in most prior works, which restricts its extensive promotion in practical application. Considering the above-mentioned issue, a well-designed activation function (WDAF) is designed. Based on the WDAF, a robust predefined-time convergence ZNN (RPTCZNN) model with adjustable convergence speed is proposed to solve the dynamic matrix inversion problem. In addition, the upper bound of the RPTCZNN model's convergence time is theoretically validated by strict mathematical analysis in a noiseless and noisy environment. Finally, several simulation experiments of the proposed model are conducted to find solutions of dynamic matrix inversion with different dimensions. Moreover, the realization of the tracking control of the robotic manipulator further illustrates the model's superior convergence and robustness.

Wearable technologies for functional brain monitoring in freely behaving subjects would advance our understanding of cognitive processing and adaptive behavior. Existing technologies are lacking in this capability or need procedures which are invasive and/or otherwise impede brain assessments during social behavioral conditions, exercise, and sleep. In response we developed a complete system combining cerebral blood flow (CBF) measurement, O2 and CO2 supplies, and behavior recording for use on conscious, freely behaving mice. An innovative diffuse speckle contrast flowmetry (DSCF) device and associated hardware were miniaturized and optimized for small subject applications. The installation and use of this wearable, fiber-free, near-infrared DSCF head-stage/probe required no craniotomy, invasive probe implantation, or restraints of awake animals. Significant correlations were found between measurements with the new DSCF design and an optical standard. The system successfully and repeatedly detected CBF responses to CO2-induced hypercapnia in both anesthetized and moving mice. Collecting CBF and activity information together during natural behaviors provides realistic physiological results and opens the path to exploring their correlations with pathophysiological conditions.

Session-based travel packages recommendation aims to predict users’ next click based on their current and historical sessions recorded by Online Travel Agencies (OTAs). Recently, an increasing number of studies attempted to apply Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to the session-based recommendation and obtained promising results. However, most of them do not take full advantage of the explicit latent structure from attributes of items, making learned representations of items less effective and difficult to interpret. Moreover, they only combine historical sessions (long-term preferences) with a current session (short-term preference) to learn a unified representation of users, ignoring the effects of historical sessions for the current session. To this end, this article proposes a novel session-based model named STR-VGAE, which fills subtasks of the travel packages recommendation and variational graph auto-encoders simultaneously. STR-VGAE mainly consists of three components: travel packages encoder , users behaviors encoder , and interaction modeling . Specifically, the travel packages encoder module is used to learn a unified travel package representation from co-occurrence attribute graphs by using multi-view variational graph auto-encoders and a multi-view attention network. The users behaviors encoder module is used to encode user’ historical and current sessions with a personalized GNN, which considers the effects of historical sessions on the current session, and coalesce these two kinds of session representations to learn the high-quality users’ representations by exploiting a gated fusion approach. The interaction modeling module is used to calculate recommendation scores over all candidate travel packages. Extensive experiments on a real-life tourism e-commerce dataset from China show that STR-VGAE yields significant performance advantages over several competitive methods, meanwhile provides an interpretation for the generated recommendation list.

Diagenetic facies play a significant role in the evaluation and prediction of reservoirs as they comprehensively reflect the spatial distribution characteristics of deposition, diagenesis, and petrophysical properties. Based on the petrographic observation and considering pores, lithology, and diagenesis types, the diagenetic facies types were identified, and the pore evolution process and its influence on the quality of low permeability tight gas reservoirs were analyzed. The results show that six types of diagenetic facies were identified, including siliceous cementation intergranular pore facies (A), carbonate dissolution pore facies (B), matrix dissolution pore facies (C), clastic dissolution pore facies (D), matrix filling and strong compaction tight facies (E), and carbonate cementation and metasomatism tight facies (F). The evolution process of porosity shows that the restored original porosity is indicated to be between 34.2% and 36.0%. The average porosity loss caused by compaction was 17.1%, while the average porosity loss caused by cementation is 14.1%. The average porosity increased by 2.5% on diagenetic facies B, C, and D due to dissolution. Consequently, diagenetic facies A with weak compaction and diagenetic facies B, C, and D with strong dissolution are effective reservoirs with porosity greater than 6.6% and permeability greater than 0.25 − 0.6 × 10 − 3 μm2. The distribution areas of A, B, C, and D are favorable areas for tight gas exploration and are important indicators for the prediction of tight gas in the Upper Paleozoic Shanxi Formation in the eastern Ordos Basin. This study provides a new petrographic method for reservoir prediction and exploration of natural gas, which has practical value and economic significance.

The excessive use of fossil energy has caused a series of environmental problems. Hydrogen is a green energy substitute for fossil energy, and photocatalytic hydrogen production is an effective means of hydrogen production. Indium zinc sulfide catalyst has great application prospect in the field of photocatalysis due to its advantages of high stability and visible light absorption. Based on this, Cu doped indium zinc sulfide nanosheets were prepared in this paper. Compared with pure indium zinc sulfide nanosheets, copper doped indium zinc sulfide nanosheets have better photocatalytic hydrogen production performance. The design and synthesis of photocatalytic hydrogen-producing catalyst has important guiding significance.

BACKGROUND: The incidence rate for migraine is 12% worldwide, and recurrence is common, which seriously affects the physical and mental health of patients. OBJECTIVE: To observe the clinical effect of Shallow Puncture and More Twirling method of acupuncture in treating migraine and its impact on serum 5-HT and β-EP. METHODS: A total of 76 patients with migraine were randomized into a control group and acupuncture group with 38 cases in each. In the control group, patients were orally administered flunarizine hydrochloride before sleep, 2 capsules once daily for 4 weeks. In the acupuncture group, Shallow Puncture and More Twirling method was adopted for the acupoints of Sizhukong (SJ 23), Toulinqi (GB 15) Shuaigu (GB 8), Xuanlu (GB 5), Fengchi (GB 20), Waiguan (SJ 5), Zulinqi (GB 41). Patients were given acupuncture 3 times per week for 4 weeks. Then, the total VAS (Visual Analogue Scale) scores, composite score of migraine, serum level of 5-HT and β-EP, and the clinical efficacy differences were observed before and after treatment and the side-effects were recorded among the two groups. RESULTS: The total VAS scores and composite score of migraine were significantly reduced among both groups after the treatment (P< 0.05), and the serum level of 5-HT and β-EP was significantly improved (P< 0.05). Compared with control group, the acupuncture group reported lower results in VAS score and migraine composite score (P< 0.05), and higher results in serum 5-HT and β-EP level (P< 0.05). The acupuncture group with shallow puncture and more twirling method showed a total effective rate of 86.5%, which is higher than the control group (78.4%). The difference is statistically significant (P< 0.05). CONCLUSION: Shallow Puncture and More Twirling method was superior to flunarizine hydrochloride in the treatment of clinical symptoms of migraine. Acupuncture also increases the serum level of 5-HT and β-EP in migraine.

Differential privacy (DP) has become the de facto standard of privacy protection. For graphs, there are two widely used definitions of differential privacy, namely, edge differential privacy (edge-DP) and node differential privacy (node-DP), and node-DP is preferred when the minimal unit of interest is a node. To preserve node-DP, one can develop different methods to answer each specific graph query, or develop a graph publishing method to answer all graph queries. However, no existing works worked on such graph publishing methods. In this work, we propose two methods for publishing graphs under node-DP. One is the node-level perturbation algorithm which modifies the input graph by randomly inserting and removing nodes. The other one is the edge-level perturbation algorithm which randomly removing edges and inserting nodes. Both methods can achieve a flexible privacy guarantee by adjusting the running parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic graphs to show the effectiveness and efficiency of proposed algorithms.

The demand for apparel/fashion products is usually of heavy weather-related uncertainty, which can be solved by the publicly accessible weather information provided by the government. That is because weather information provides a more accurate demand signal, and the key weather indicators fashion brand, the latter determines the wholesale price but usually postpones the price decision to observe the weather information. Alternatively, the small retailer can outsource procurement to a powerful agent, who fixes the fashion brand's wholesale price. In this article, we investigate an apparel supply chain consisting of two competing small retailers (retailers 1 and 2), a powerful procurement agent, and a famous fashion brand. Given retailer 2's procurement outsourcing, retailer 1 decides whether to outsource procurement to the agent or directly procure products from the fashion brand. We identify cooperation and competition relationships in the retailers’ ordering decisions based on the weather information. The different intensities of the cooperation/competition relationships alter retailer 1's preferences of procurement outsourcing because of the mitigated/intensified quantity competition. Interestingly, we show that, when demand uncertainty is high, retailer 1's procurement outsourcing strategy will switch from Turnkey to Consignment and back to Turnkey, as its demand becomes more sensitive to the weather condition.

Improving the litter performance of sows is one of the main challenges in the current pig industry. In this study, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the PRLR gene were performed, in order to test whether they are associated with the reproductive performance of Large White pigs. In total, we discovered nine SNP loci (g. C260G, g. C362T, g. C527G, g. A540G, g. A584G, g. A673T, g. A745G, g. C765T and g. A934G) in exon 10 of PRLR. The result showed that genotypes CC and CT at the g. C362T locus and genotype AG at g. A584G could significantly increase the litter size of different strains of Large White pigs (p < 0.05). In addition, the genotype CC at the g. C765T locus and the genotype AA at g. A934G could also increase the litter size (TNB could be increased by 1.5 piglets per year; while NBA could be increased by 0.98 piglets per year, p < 0.01). Furthermore, the haplotype combinations of H2H7 and H4H4 were the dominant combinations and contributed to larger litter sizes in the Large White pigs. In conclusion, there were dominant genotypes in the related SNP loci in the PRLR gene that were beneficial to improving the litter traits of sows. These findings will provide a reference for screening the molecular markers of a high reproductive performance in sows, and are helpful for genetic breeding and the reproductive improvement of pigs. Key words: sow, prolactin, polymorphism, reproduction, association analysis.