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American Heart Association Career Development Award (19CDA34760160) The objective of this project is to develop a pathological biomarker-responsive biomimetic microvessel (PRBV) that enables the delivery of therapeutic payload in amounts that are controlled by the environmental levels of hypoxanthine, a biomarker of cardiac ischemia in both acute MI and HF, and the recruitment of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) to induce angiomyogenesis for heart repair. The long-term goal of this project is to develop a new therapeutic platform that increases the success rates of therapy for both acute MI and HF.

The present disclosure describes, in part, an enzyme-mediated radical initiating system and methods of using the system to produce polymers, including polymeric hydrogels, at ambient conditions.

The scaling of large language models has greatly improved natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning. In this work, we develop a system that trained a trillion-parameter language model on a cluster of Ascend 910 AI processors and MindSpore framework, and present the language model with 1.085T parameters named PanGu-Σ. With parameter inherent from PanGu-α, we extend the dense Transformer model to sparse one with Random Routed Experts (RRE), and efficiently train the model over 329B tokens by using Expert Computation and Storage Separation(ECSS). This resulted in a 6.3x increase in training throughput through heterogeneous computing. Our experimental findings show that PanGu-Σ provides state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot learning of various Chinese NLP downstream tasks. Moreover, it demonstrates strong abilities when fine-tuned in application data of open-domain dialogue, question answering, machine translation and code generation.

Large pre-trained code generation models, such as OpenAI Codex, can generate syntax- and function-correct code, making the coding of programmers more productive and our pursuit of artificial general intelligence closer. In this paper, we introduce CodeGeeX, a multilingual model with 13 billion parameters for code generation. CodeGeeX is pre-trained on 850 billion tokens of 23 programming languages as of June 2022. Our extensive experiments suggest that CodeGeeX outperforms multilingual code models of similar scale for both the tasks of code generation and translation on HumanEval-X. Building upon HumanEval (Python only), we develop the HumanEval-X benchmark for evaluating multilingual models by hand-writing the solutions in C++, Java, JavaScript, and Go. In addition, we build CodeGeeX-based extensions on Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Cloud Studio, generating 4.7 billion tokens for tens of thousands of active users per week. Our user study demonstrates that CodeGeeX can help to increase coding efficiency for 83.4% of its users. Finally, CodeGeeX is publicly accessible and in Sep. 2022, we open-sourced its code, model weights (the version of 850B tokens), API, extensions, and HumanEval-X at https://github.com/THUDM/CodeGeeX.

In 2020, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) left around 81% of the global workforce, nearly 2.7 billion workers, affected. Employment in China was the first to be hit by COVID-19. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is expected to bring dynamism to China’s employment market in an era of long COVID-19. This study aims to examine the number of sectoral jobs that the RCEP will create in China, with the number of skilled or unskilled labour employed in each sector. The exogenous shocks to the RCEP can be reflected in the number of jobs created through multipliers based on a social accounting matrix compiled from China’s input-output tables in 2017, combined with the employment satellite accounts compiled. The results show that the RCEP is expected to create over 17 million potential jobs in China, with unskilled labour accounting for 10.44 million and skilled labour for 6.77 million. It is even expected that there will be job losses in the metalworking machinery sector. The contribution of this paper can serve as a reference for policies to protect vulnerable sectors, further open up trade markets and strengthen cooperation among RCEP members as important measures to address the employment impact of long COVID-19.

The traditional logistics route planning method is easily affected by cargo damage and vehicle carbon emissions, which makes it difficult to obtain the optimal logistics route. To solve this problem, this paper designs a new route planning method for cross-border e-commerce logistics of agricultural products based on recurrent neural network. Firstly, by calculating the speed of logistics vehicles under different traffic flow conditions, on the basis of analyzing the travel time of cross-border e-commerce logistics route of agricultural products, combining with the ratio of the carrying capacity to the maximum carrying capacity of cross-border e-commerce logistics routes of agricultural products, the driving speed of logistics vehicles is derived. In order to select the optimal distribution path, the total fixed cost, transportation damage cost and cargo damage cost in the process of agricultural product distribution are calculated. Combined with the penalty cost, the recursive neural network is used to establish the logistics route planning model and planning process of agricultural products’ cross-border e-commerce. The experimental results show that: the route planning method for cross-border e-commerce logistics of agricultural products based on recurrent neural network can effectively resist the influence of external factors, so as to obtain the optimal route of cross-border e-commerce logistics of agricultural products.

Given its knowledge centred nature, retaining key talents is essential for any IT organization. Inability to do so reflects a failure in employee-organization relationship. Since IT professionals possess unique workplace behaviours, it is presumed that they leave organizations as more committed to the profession. Thus, the study aimed to investigate the influence of professional commitment and perceived organizational support on IT professionals' turnover intention. Data was analysed using a structural equation model. A sample of 96 software engineers revealed that professional commitment negatively influences turnover intention while its effect is partially mediated by job satisfaction. Surprisingly, unlike for other employees, for IT professionals, perceived organizational support had no influence on turnover intention: instead stimulated job satisfaction. Similarly, professional commitment stimulates job satisfaction. Job satisfaction negatively influenced the turnover intention. Gender showed no moderating effect on the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention while career stage moderated the relationship. The comparison between the findings of professional commitment and perceived organizational support directs IT firms to re-visit presumptions about IT professionals and to re-assess what is meant by organizational support to IT professionals. Since gender had no effect on the job satisfaction-turnover intention relationship, both male and female IT professionals must be acknowledged for their equal professionalism in the industry. IT companies must take initiatives to retain talented early career staged IT professional who have proven to easily leave their organizations compared to others. Such efforts can be integrated to professional commitment and job satisfaction.

Workforce demographics have changed, and business leaders have started to question how to handle employees from different generations. With the noticeable generational divide, the issue of generational conflict is gaining prominence. Generational disagreement among employees is not new as each generation is shaped by different historical, socio-economic, and political events where each generation brings with them their unique perspective. Leaders in most organizations are aware of it, albeit few are willing to address such conflicts. Even if they do, uncertainties arise. These differences, or their unique generational characteristics, are due to the exposure to historical events during their early years. As most literature stems from the West and the historical events that happened are different, their characteristics may differ in terms of geography. An in-depth and practical understanding of generational dynamics could enhance the effectiveness of management in handling today’s multi-generational workforce. Hence, this research aims to provide insights into the characteristics of Malaysian Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y who are working locally and comparing them with the West.

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-ppg-10.1177_03091333211059995 for Fitting limit lines (envelope curves) to spreads of geoenvironmental data by Paul A Carling, Philip Jonathan and Teng Su in Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-ppg-10.1177_03091333211059995 for Fitting limit lines (envelope curves) to spreads of geoenvironmental data by Paul A Carling, Philip Jonathan and Teng Su in Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment

To better understand the effect of creep deformation on gas permeability, creep experiments under unloading radial stress (URS) were carried out based on the in-situ stress state in coal at depth. The gas permeability was measured using a transient pulse decay method along with the axial and radial strains during all creep tests. The evolution of coal permeability was analysed with time and creep deformation. The results show that gas permeability evolution is sensitive to the deformation process in such coal and can be used as an indicator of microstructural change such as the growth of micro-cracks. During the creep tests, the permeability decreases in the primary creep stage, remains stable in the steady creep stage and increases rapidly in the accelerated creep stage. It can be further generalized that the permeability curves are concave upward in the time or strain space. Then, an improved permeability model was suggested by assuming that percolating network in correlation with permeability provides the minimum potential energy of coal during the evolution of pore or fracture in coal. The model developed in the study provides a better agreement with the entire process of permeability evolution, which first decreases, maintains a constant level, and then increases during creep tests of URS in deep coal.

Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have become the new paradigm for Natural Language Processing (NLP). PLMs with hundreds of billions parameters such as GPT-3 have demonstrated strong performances on natural language understanding and generation with \textit{few-shot in-context} learning. In this work, we present our practice on training large-scale autoregressive language models named PanGu-$��$, with up to 200 billion parameters. PanGu-$��$ is developed under the MindSpore and trained on a cluster of 2048 Ascend 910 AI processors. The training parallelism strategy is implemented based on MindSpore Auto-parallel, which composes five parallelism dimensions to scale the training task to 2048 processors efficiently, including data parallelism, op-level model parallelism, pipeline model parallelism, optimizer model parallelism and rematerialization. To enhance the generalization ability of PanGu-$��$, we collect 1.1TB high-quality Chinese data from a wide range of domains to pretrain the model. We empirically test the generation ability of PanGu-$��$ in various scenarios including text summarization, question answering, dialogue generation, etc. Moreover, we investigate the effect of model scales on the few-shot performances across a broad range of Chinese NLP tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superior capabilities of PanGu-$��$ in performing various tasks under few-shot or zero-shot settings., The technique report for PanGu-$\alpha$

Purpose Foreign and local banks in Malaysia are competing in terms of skilled staff, innovative products and services, rendering quality services and customer satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to examine the overall service quality and customer satisfaction of both foreign and local banks. Design/methodology/approach The data used to test the hypothesis were collected from 748 foreign and local bank customers in Malaysia. The research model was analysed using a structural equation modelling technique. Findings Results show that knowledge and staff competencies, as well as convenience of the bank is more significant for local bank customers while bank image and internet banking are important components for foreign bank customers. The results also reveal that foreign bank customers have higher satisfaction as compared to local bank customers. Research limitations/implications No analysis is undertaken of any difference in the service quality dimensions between banks of different size. Further research on banking services could usefully test services quality dimensions across banks of different sizes. Practical implications The findings serve as a valuable reference for local banks understand service quality challenges they may face from foreign banks in this competitive industry. Findings suggest that, to provide high-quality services, financial institutions need to heighten customer satisfaction differentiation strategies. Originality/value The outcomes of this study enhance the knowledge on the performance of both local and foreign banks in Malaysia as well as customer satisfaction, which are invaluable to all bank managers and industry players in improving their services.

In this paper, to improve the performance of the thermodynamic system and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fuel utilization, a novel power generation system based on syngas-fueled solid oxide fuel cell, gas turbine, organic flash cycle, and a thermoelectric generator was devised. The performance of the proposed system was analyzed through energy, exergy, exergoeconomic, economic, and environmental viewpoints. Finally, the multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm and TOPSIS and LINMAP decision-making methods were employed to obtain the optimum performance. According to the obtained results at the base operation condition, the main performance metrics were FX, FX, FX, FX, FX. For fuel cost of 3 $/GJ and electricity cost of FX, the payback time was around FXyears with a total profit of FX at the end of the economic lifetime. The parametric study revealed that the SOFC with anode and cathode gas recycling exhibits a higher exergy efficiency and lower Levelized total emissions. For the energy-cost optimization scenario, the optimum energy efficiency selected by LINMAP methods was FX, and the minimum total specific cost selected by TOPSIS method was FX. For the exergy-cost optimization scenario, the optimum exergy efficiency selected by TOPSIS was FX.

Moderate exercise diminishes proinflammation cytokine production in various types of immune cells, but the intracellular signaling pathways involved are not completely understood. Phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt, a crucial downstream protein of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), may modulate inflammation. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of exercises on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated inflammatory response in splenocytes and to explore potential mechanisms of the PI3K/Akt pathway. Male rats were divided into sedentary and exercise groups. Animals in the exercise group underwent endurance training 30 min/day, 7 days/wk, at the speed of 20 m/min on a treadmill for 1 wk. Here, we showed that exercise 1) attenuated TLR4, 2) increased PI3K/phospho-Akt (p-Akt), and 3) diminished phospho-nuclear factor-κB (p-NF-κB) expression. In addition, administration of splenocytes isolated from trained rats with LPS in vitro showed 1) reduced tumor necrosis factor (TNF-α), interleukin 6 (IL-6), and nitric oxide secretion and 2) decreased splenocyte proliferation. The plasma corticosterone (CCS) level in the exercise group was higher than that in the sedentary group. We confirmed that CCS down-regulated TNF-α and IL-6 secretion in response to LPS in rat splenocytes. Dexamethasone also significantly attenuated LPS-evoked release of TNF-α and IL-6 in a dose-dependent manner. These findings suggested that exercise dampened the secretion of inflammation mediators probably through partial inhibition of TLR4 and p-NF-κB and activation of PI3K/p-Akt expression in the spleen.

Theoretical perspectives from the field of entrepreneurship can be used to examine entrepreneurs’ intention to use IT innovations. This study collected 412 completed survey responses from entrepreneurs and used structural equation modelling to test the proposed technology acceptance decision model. The results showed the significant effect of perceived desirability, perceived feasibility and performance expectancy as the salient antecedents of intention to adopt and use IT innovation. This study examined the effect of external factors which prevent or facilitate the adoption and use of new technology. The moderating effect of the propensity to act is examined and the results indicated that when the individual propensity to act is high, taking action becomes more desirable and feasible. This study revealed that, in the current IS environment, individuals adopt and use a new system due to the attractiveness of the system and perceived feasibility, which are derived from intrinsic interest and affective beliefs. KEYWORDS Entrepreneurial Potential Model, IT Innovation, Precipitating Events, Technology Adoption Decision

Background: This paper describes the synthesis of thiolated chitosan-based hydrogels with varying degrees of crosslinking that has been utilized to modulate release kinetics of two clinically relevant FDA-approved anti-VEGF protein drugs, ranibizumab and aflibercept. These hydrogels have been fabricated into disc shaped structures for potential use as patches on ocular surface. Methods: Protein conformational changes and aggregation after loading and release was evaluated by circular dichroism (CD), steady-state tryptophan fluorescence spectroscopy, electrophoresis and size-exclusion chromatography (SEC). Finally, the capacity of both released proteins to bind to VEGF was tested by ELISA and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technology. Results: The study demonstrates the versatility of thiolated chitosan-based hydrogels for delivering proteins. The effect of various parameters of the hydrogel on protein release kinetics and mechanism of protein release was studied using the Korsmeyer-Peppas release model. Furthermore, we have studied the stability of released proteins in detail while comparing it with non-entrapped proteins under physiological conditions to understand the effect of formulation conditions on protein stability. Conclusions: The disc-shaped thiolated chitosan-based hydrogels provide a potentially useful platform to deliver ranibizumab and aflibercept for the treatments of ocular diseases such as wet AMD, DME and corneal neovascularization

Compared to others, professionals share distinguish workplace characteristics: one such is the high commitment to the professions over to working organizations. Information Technology (IT) professionals demonstrate higher turnover rates compared to others: their commitments to the profession has been suspected as a source of turnover. Considering their job satisfactions the present study aimed to investigate the influence of professional commitment on IT professionals’ turnover intentions. Data were collected from a sample of software engineers from Sri Lank using a survey questionnaire. The results of the structural equation model analysis concluded that professional commitment weakens IT professionals’ turnover intentions, which is partially mediated by job satisfaction. Professional commitment stimulates IT professionals’ job satisfaction. The findings challenge the presumption that IT professionals leave their organizations due to high commitments to the profession. Few factors were identified as significant in their job satisfactions: supervision, co-workers and work design. Pay and promotions were the least influencing job satisfaction factors. Managers may employ few strategies in their retention strategies: facilitate professional advancement needs within organizations, closely monitor supervision activities occurs and provide challenging and meaningful jobs. The study contributes to the turnover literature through empirical evidence on the influence of professional commitment on knowledge workers’ turnover intentions.

With the “Kyoto Protocol” the entry into force, wastewater treatment as one of the greenhouse gas emissions under the project has aroused increasing concern. In this paper, mass balance method and emission factor method were used to estimate the CO 2 emissions of sewage treatment. The CO 2 emissions remained relatively stable from 2001 to 2006, and reached its peak in 2006 with 19.638 million tons. From 2007, emissions amount tend to decrease. In 2008, The CO 2 emissions from wastewater treatment plant reached to 18.16 million tons, which equal to 0.67% of the total CO 2 emissions in the year. The study of the CO 2 emissions from sewage treatment is imminent.