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Live streaming is an essential means through which spectators view and engage with esports. In this study, an extended model is proposed and tested based on the expectation confirmation theory to examine esports fans' live streaming experience and the factors contributing to their intention to continue using particular live streaming platforms. Survey data (N = 1004) were collected from King Pro League fans in China and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate that effort and enjoyment expectancies are important factors driving fans' confirmation of expectations regarding live streaming services. The findings also confirm that both spatial presence and co-presence positively relate to viewers' satisfaction with a live streaming platform and their continued intention to use it. This study provides new insights into esports fans' viewing practices and the experiences they find most engaging via live streaming platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an aggressive disease with a high mortality rate and a poor prognosis. The human microbiota has been confirmed to participate in oncogenesis and may influence the treatment response to both chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Evidence for the association of the microbiota with PDAC risk, tumorigenesis, treatment response, and survival period is rapidly emerging. The oral microbiota and gut microbiota have the potential to be used in early diagnosis and risk stratification. Intratumor microbiota-targeted intervention strategies may be used as adjuvants to current treatments to improve therapeutic efficacy and overall survival. Here, we summarize the effect and association of the oral, gut and intratumor microbiota on the oncogenesis, progression and treatment of PDAC, as well as the potential of the microbiota to serve as a biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of PDAC, as well as a therapeutic target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of electronic sports (eSports) is thriving worldwide but has received limited attention as a cultural and creative industry (CCI). This study is the first to employ three layers (productivity, robustness, and niche creation) of the business ecosystem (BE) to systematically examine the flourishing eSports sector and its development as a CCI-BE. It also maps out the dynamic and emerging stakeholders that have contributed to the eSports ecosystem. We conducted content analysis combined with observations, fifty interviews with elite stakeholders, and analysis of financial and investment data. We found that the development of eSports as a CCI-BE reflects great potential and precarity. First, the business agenda of the media conglomerate Tencent aligns with the 'cultural confidence' slogan proposed by the government, thus ensuring the robustness and stability of the eSports ecosystem. Second, municipal governments, local real estate developers, and eSports tournaments are increasingly interconnected and their contemporary business models and innovation activities in the eSports industry have co-evolved. Third, the role of real estate developers remains nascent without the ability to coordinate and co-evolve with the eSports value chain. eSports may provide a novel converging territory for contemporary cultural and creative industries/traits in the Chinese digital society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Football in China is undergoing an unprecedented expansion, the result of targeted industrial policy, private sector investment, and the increased popularity of the world's most popular game in the world's most populous nation. Yet, as China's own football infrastructure matures and foreign clubs seek to establish new fanbases there, little is known about Chinese football fans themselves, the ways in which they express their fandom, or the methods by which they consume football. This study aims to take a first step in identifying and exploring football fandom in the People's Republic of China, with a view to critically understanding the context out of which it has emerged, and its likely trajectory of development in the short-to-medium term. Adopting an inductive approach to survey research to explore the attitudes, behaviours and activities of Chinese football fans, an online survey resulting in 710 usable responses was conducted on a Chinese online survey platform Wenjuanxing (问卷星) for three weeks in March 2018. Our research identifies similarities with fandom found elsewhere in the world, yet with key differences generally characteristic of Chinese football fans resulting from the geography, distance and league structures of China's domestic football infrastructure. A tendency to support more than one club, often one domestic and one foreign club, is also noted, with distinct methods of consumption which eschew traditional forms such as match attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on eSports have essentially focused on its "sportiness" without giving attention to aspects such as media, information, and technology. By assessing the emerging research field of eSports through the lens of Actor-Network Theory, this study regards the Chinese eSports industry as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Accordingly, this study disassembles and unpacks eSports to understand how it is assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. Using research methods such as participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study evaluates the material actors and relational networks of the Chinese eSports industry to trace how the actors come to be assembled, how they associate and exercise force, and how they persist or decline each other's effects. Thus, it suggests that material actors and relational networks with an agency are not simply mediating, but also structuring eSports, indicating the explicit and implicit dynamics of power within the actor-network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through our analysis of the performances and corpus of lyrics produced on the Reality TV show The Rap of China, we investigate how discrete Chinese inflections refract globally resonant hip-hop themes such as representations of masculinity and loyalty. We identify how rappers use classical Chinese cultural templates, invoking the knights-errant who populate the physical and ideational realm of Jianghu that underpins China's long tradition of folk tales, martial arts literature, and film. The article explores how Chinese rappers invoke such templates to navigate the twin demands of authenticity and the political imperative of positive energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valve-controlled pneumatic jetting technology, which is characterized by high accuracy, fast dispensing speed, and strong adaptability, has been widely applied in the field of life sciences. This paper examines the formation and separation of droplets by reporting the comprehensive influence of system parameters on the morphological changes of droplets, which was simulated by using several dimensionless numbers, including the Weber number, Reynolds number, and Ohnesorge number. In the next step, the simulation results are verified through experimental results, and the rules of the regular ejection of droplets are summarized. The simulation and experimental results indicate that if We is higher than the upper critical value or lower than the lower critical value, jetting failure situations, such as adhesion, satellite droplets, sputtering, and flow-stream will occur. Similarly, jetting failures such as adhesion or flow-stream will appear with oversize or undersize Reynolds number. Through Oh, only when the system parameters should be adjusted to keep the values of We and Re within the proposed range can normal droplets be jetted. The research also provides the recommended ranges of system parameters for ensuring successful droplet ejection, which has important reference significance for guiding the design and control of valve-controlled pneumatic jetting systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has embarked on a radical transformation of its online and mobile games industry since its government announced its ambition to be a global sporting power. This study investigates Chinese electronic sports (eSports) in the context of platform governance and platform capitalism, through a case study of the platformization of Tencent, one of China's largest media conglomerates. We employ a boundary analysis of platform documentation, a document analysis of policies, financial data, and ethnographic interviews to examine the interactivity and flow of power arising from direct state control and the processes of commercialization and professionalization. To support our proposal that the state and corporations, while genetically different, are mutually constitutive, we explore concepts of the platformization of infrastructures and infrastructuralization of platforms. This study proposes that the Chinese eSports industry has an umbrella-like structure and challenges the assumption that China is an authoritarian system with a one-size-fits-all policy. Our results imply that games industry professionals invite funding bodies to work jointly with government to develop alternatives for the eSports industry. Meanwhile, we show how Tencent utilizes its expansion of capital fluidity and data-driven multidimensionality, moving toward an ecosystem of platform dependency, organizational homogenization, and deep power asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online reality show The Rap of China has become ingrained in Chinese popular culture. However, since 18 January 2018, the hip-hop subculture in China has been censored by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. This study aims to analyse the cultural resonance of Chinese hip-hop, and to identify how hip-hop reflects the changing contours of ideology in Chinese digital youth culture. The study applies critical discourse analysis to lyrics of rap songs performed on The Rap of China by the show's co-champions: PG-One and Gai; it conducts 52 semi-structured interviews with audience members to investigate how they interpret these lyrics, and presents a comparative analysis of PG-One's and Gai's raps on that basis. The findings suggest that Chinese hip-hop culture has its roots in the hybridized 'real' which is a globalized hybrid cultural product that modifies the Western genre of hip-hop with distinct Chinese notions of conflicting authenticity, centred around the representations of 'jianghu flow' with loyalty, struggle, and compromise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether the equity market uncertainty (EMU) index contains incremental information for forecasting the realized volatility of crude oil futures. We use 5-min high-frequency transaction data for WTI crude oil futures and develop six heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) models based on classical HAR-type models. The empirical results suggest that EMU contains more incremental information than the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) for forecasting the realized volatility of crude oil futures. More importantly, we argue that EMU is a non negligible additional predictive variable that can significantly improve the 1-day ahead predictive accuracy of all six HAR-type models, and improve the 1-week ahead forecasting performance of the HAR-RV, HAR-RV-J, HAR-RSV, HAR-RV-SJ models. These findings highlight a strong short-term and a weak mid-term predictive ability of EMU in the crude oil futures market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a recently identified class of non-coding RNAs that participate in multiple biological processes and tumour progression. However, circRNA expression pattern in parathyroid neoplasms remains unknown. The circRNA profile of 6 parathyroid carcinomas (PCs), 6 parathyroid adenomas (PAs) and 4 normal parathyroid tissues was assessed by a microarray. Bioinformatic analyses were performed to investigate potential core circRNAs via co-expression network. CircRNA and corresponding mRNA expression were validated in a cohort of parathyroid neoplasms by RT-qPCR and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). Compared to normal parathyroid, 5310 and 1055 circRNAs were differentially expressed in PC and PA tissues, respectively. The differential expression of 4 circRNAs (hsa_circRNA_0035563 (p = 0.006), hsa_circRNA_0017545 (p = 0.009), hsa_circRNA_0001687 (p = 0.005) and hsa_circRNA_0075005 (p = 0.001)) and 4 mRNAs (MYC, FSCN1, ANXA2 and AKR1C3) between PC and PA tissues were confirmed by RT-qPCR. In addition, high expression of hsa_circ_0035563 was related to CDC73 mutations (p = 0.022) and recurrence in PC patients (p = 0.042). Furthermore, hsa_circ_0075005 helped distinguish PCs from benign lesions using FISH, and the area under the curve was 0.779 (p = 0.013). Our findings describe the circRNA profile of PC for the first time and suggest that circRNAs and mRNAs interact in parathyroid tumourigenesis. This study demonstrates that hsa_circ_0075005 and MYC mRNA may be used for the differential diagnosis of PC and PA. The expression levels of hsa_circ_0035563 are related to CDC73 mutations and recurrence in malignancy, highlighting the significance of this parameter in prognosis of PC patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of the xTAG liquid chip technology (xTAG-LCT) for etiological diagnosis of acute retinal necrosis (ARN).Methods: Fifteen vitreous and 3 aqueous samples from 18 ARN patients were analyzed by xTAG-LCT and multiplex PCR (mPCR)/quantitative PCR (qPCR).Results: xTAG-LCT revealed positive results in 17 of the 18 samples: 10 for Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV) alone; 5 for VZV and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV); 1 for herpes simplex viruses type 1 (HSV-1) and EBV; 1 for VZV, HSV-1 and EBV. While mPCR revealed the same results as xTAG-LCT for VZV and HSV-1 in all samples, only 2 of the 7 samples positive for EBV on xTAG-LCT were confirmed by qPCR. None of the 28 control vitreous samples from 8 non-ARN patients and 10 pair of cadaveric eyes was positive for any of the tested viruses.Conclusions: xTAG-LCT could be a useful alternative for etiological diagnosis of ARN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective:Weight loss induced by the complete resection of insulinoma is controversial in overweight patients. The study sought to explore postoperative weight loss and metabolic changes in overweight insulinoma patients. Methods:A retrospective study was conducted to review the follow-up data of insulinoma patients with a BMI ≥25kg/m2who underwent complete lesion resection between May 2010 and May 2015. Body mass index (BMI), weight loss (WL) and percentage weight loss (%WL) were main outcomes. Results:Fifty-one patients were included with a median follow-up of 28 months. The BMI at 3 months, 1 year, 2 years and 3 years postoperatively were significantly lower than the preoperative BMI values (p < .01). The WL% was 12.9% at 3 months postoperatively without significant changes throughout the 3-year follow-up. WL and the %WL were significantly higher in the high BMI group (BMI≥ 27.5 kg/m2). Multivariate analysis indicated that higher initial BMI was associated with increased weight loss (p = .001). 63.8% of patients with hypertension recovered and improved sleep quality was evident in all patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome within 1 year postoperatively. Conclusions:Weight significantly decreased postoperatively in overweight insulinoma patients, which was more evident in patients with higher BMI and metabolic comorbidities were largely improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dear Editor, In a recent article, the authors reported a randomized, double-blinded controlled trial focusing on the effect of enteral immunonutrition (EIN) on the immune, inflammatory marker and nutritional status in postoperative gastric cancer (GC) patients compared to that of standard enteral nutrition (SEN) [[1]]. The results showed that early postoperative EIN could improve immune function and inflammatory response in gastric cancer patients compared to patients receiving SEN. [Extracted from the article]