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Purpose This paper aims to verify the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on Chinese listed firms’ earnings management and tax avoidance. Specifically, this study investigates whether government-guided CSR implementation indeed drives firms to behave in a responsible manner by constraining earnings management and tax avoidance. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyses a sample of Chinese listed companies that are confronted with the unique situation of CSR being developed at a rapid pace by government-led policy and regulation. The study further investigates whether the effect of CSR on earnings management and tax avoidance is different for state-owned and private enterprises by partitioning the sample into these two subgroups. Findings The findings of this study show that government-guided CSR could be effective in reducing the firms’ earnings management and tax avoidance, even though the effect is limited to state-owned enterprises. Originality/value This paper provides new evidence on the relation of CSR with earnings management and tax avoidance in the Chinese context and sheds light on the importance of differentiating between the state-owned and private enterprises when studying the corporate behaviors of Chinese firms.

Nursing students are the main force of future nursing development, and their hope and death anxiety are important aspects of their coping styles and clinical practice.The present study examined the relationships between hope, death anxiety and simplified coping style scores of nursing students during the outbreak of COVID-19.Between February and April 2020, a cross-sectional descriptive study was performed using a Sojump online survey, and 870 nursing students completed the herth hope (HH), death anxiety scale (DAS) and simplified coping style questionnaire. The data were analyzed using t-tests, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and multiple linear regression in SPSS 23.0 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY).The average HH, DAS and active and passive coping scores of the 870 nursing students were 3.07 ±â€Š0.32, 3.01 ±â€Š0.37, 2.84 ±â€Š0.48, and 2.25 ±â€Š0.50, respectively. Participants with contact experience with individuals with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 were more likely to adopt passive coping styles than students without contact experience (t = 5.019, P = .025). Being older and having higher inner positive readiness and expectancy, a lower inner sense of temporality and future, and lower time awareness were predictors of passive coping styles (P 

This paper aims to study the impact of community form on building energy consumption of commercial district. Building typology and FAR (floor area ratio) are two important morphology factors in district energy efficiency design. To explore how they influence building energy consumption, two major questions are concerning: (1) how a given FAR generates alternative building typologies that have different effects on energy consumption? (2) how increasing FAR affects building energy consumption generally? In this paper, a group of representative hypothetical models are built based on the form of actual office buildings in Shanghai. The energy consumption of three building typologies (the pavilion, the slab and the courtyard) are examined using DesignBuilder and EnergyPlus. The results suggest that, with the same building density, office building energy consumptions have a positive relationship with FAR, and different building typologies can lead to variations in energy consumption as well as energy-FAR relationship.

The purpose of this research is to propose a simple and fast method to evaluate the effect of heat rejection of split-type air conditioner on the thermal environment surrounding the building and the building cooling demand to provide guidance for architectural design in the urban planning stage. In this paper, we first determined the factors that affect or are affected by heat rejection as heat dissipation, wind speed, and ambient air temperature, which as inputs to the CFD to build the regression model of the temperature rise. Then, the regression model is coupled with the energy consumption simulation software EnergyPlus to estimate the building cooling increase. The result of taking a typical residential building as a reference show that the maximum temperature rise and cooling demand increase with the values of 1.86°C and 17%.

The article "Remodelin, an inhibitor of NAT10, could suppress hypoxia-induced or constitutional expression of HIFs in cells", written by "Yaqian Wu, Yanan Cao, Haijing Liu, Mengfei Yao, Ningning Ma and Bo Zhang", was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11010-020-03776-w on 11 June 2020 with open access. With the author(s)' decision to step back from Open Choice, the copyright of the article changed on 6 July 2020 to © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of copyright. The original article has been corrected.

Objective In patients with chemotherapy-induced amenorrhea (CIA), the menopausal status is ambiguous and difficult to evaluate. This study aimed to establish a discriminative model to predict and classify the menopausal status of breast cancer patients with CIA. Methods This is a single center hospital-based study from 2013 to 2016. The menopausal age distribution and accumulated incidence rate of CIA are described. Multivariate models were adjusted for established and potential confounding factors including age, serum concentration of estradiol (E2) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), feeding, pregnancy, parity, abortions, and body mass index (BMI). The odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) of different risk factors were estimated. Results A total of 1,796 breast cancer patients were included in this study, among whom, 1,175 (65.42%) were premenopausal patients and 621 (34.58%) were post-menopause patients. Five hundred and fifty patients were included in CIA analysis, and a cumulative CIA rate of 81.64% was found in them. Age (OR: 1.856, 95% CI: 1.732-1.990), serum concentration of E2 (OR: 0.976, 95% CI: 0.972-0.980) and FSH (OR: 1.060, 95% CI: 1.053-1.066), and menarche age (OR: 1.074, 95% CI: 1.009-1.144) were found to be associated with the patients' menopausal status. According to multivariate analysis, the discriminative model to predict the menopausal status is Logit (P)=-28.396+0.536Age-0.014E2+0.031FSH. The sensitivities for this model were higher than 85%, and its specificities were higher than 89%. Conclusions The discriminative model obtained from this study for predicting menstrual state is important for premenopausal patients with CIA. This model has high specificity and sensitivity and should be prudently used.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has become a promising approach for tumor somatic mutation detection. However, stringent validation is required for its application on clinical specimens, especially for low-quality formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. Here, we validated the performance of an amplicon-based targeted NGS assay, OncoAim™ DNA panel, on both commercial reference FFPE samples and clinical FFPE samples of Chinese colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. Then we profiled the mutation spectrum of 648 Chinese CRC patients in a multicenter study to explore its clinical utility. This NGS assay achieved 100% test specificity and 95–100% test sensitivity for variants with mutant allele frequency (MAF) ≥ 5% when median read depth ≥ 500×. The orthogonal methods including amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS)-PCR and Sanger sequencing validated that NGS generated three false negatives (FNs) but no false positives (FPs) among 516 clinical samples for KRAS aberration detection. Genomic profiling of Chinese CRC patients with this assay revealed that 63.3% of the tumors harbored clinically actionable alterations. Besides the commonly mutated genes including TP53 (52.82%), KRAS (46.68%), APC (24.09%), PIK3CA (18.94%), SMAD4 (9.47%), BRAF (6.15%), FBXW7 (5.32%), and NRAS (4.15%), other less frequently mutated genes were also identified. Statistically significant association of specific mutated genes with certain clinicopathological features was detected, e.g., both BRAF and PIK3CA were more prevalent in right-side CRC (p

Argumentation mining aims at automatically extracting the premises-claim discourse structures in natural language texts. There is a great demand for argumentation corpora for customer reviews. However, due to the controversial nature of the argumentation annotation task, there exist very few large-scale argumentation corpora for customer reviews. In this work, we novelly use the crowdsourcing technique to collect argumentation annotations in Chinese hotel reviews. As the first Chinese argumentation dataset, our corpus includes 4814 argument component annotations and 411 argument relation annotations, and its annotations qualities are comparable to some widely used argumentation corpora in other languages.

Argument Component Boundary Detection (ACBD) is an important sub-task in argumentation mining; it aims at identifying the word sequences that constitute argument components, and is usually considered as the first sub-task in the argumentation mining pipeline. Existing ACBD methods heavily depend on task-specific knowledge, and require considerable human efforts on feature-engineering. To tackle these problems, in this work, we formulate ACBD as a sequence labeling problem and propose a variety of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods, which do not use domain specific or handcrafted features beyond the relative position of the sentence in the document. In particular, we propose a novel joint RNN model that can predict whether sentences are argumentative or not, and use the predicted results to more precisely detect the argument component boundaries. We evaluate our techniques on two corpora from two different genres; results suggest that our joint RNN model obtain the state-of-the-art performance on both datasets., 6 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE SMC 2017

In this paper, we propose a secrecy communication scheme for half-duplex amplify-forward relay networks in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. Unlike conventional relay network, we consider that the relay is “green”, i.e., it is powered by the energy harvested from the relay observations. The transmission can be divided into two time slots. In the first time slot, the source and destination transmit signal and artificial noise (AN), respectively. The dual use of AN in jamming eavesdroppers and providing wireless energy for the relay is advocated. At the relay, the received signal is divided into two parts by power splitter and goes into energy harvester and information transceiver, respectively. In the second time slot, the “green” relay forwards the information to destination using the energy scavenged in the first time slot. The eavesdroppers can wiretap during both slots. Our scheme is to maximize the secrecy rate subject to the total transmit power constraint or minimize the total transmit power subject to the secrecy rate requirement. By applying successive convex approximation approach, we can convert these challenging non-convex problems into second-order cone program based iterative problems. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

We propose a low-complexity user scheduling scheme to enhance the sum rate performance for a multicell downlink system, in which the base station (BS) is equipped with a large-scale active antenna array. First, we divide each cell intoNregions according to the vertical beamwidth of the BS antennas. Next, candidate user equipment (UE) items are assigned to corresponding groups to their locations. Each scheduling slot is also divided intoNequal-time subslots. Then, at each subslot, we focus on one UE group, select the optimal number,K*, of UEs for simultaneous data transmission in the manner of round-robin scheduling, and adjust the BS antenna tilting to the optimal angleθtilt*. In particular,K*andθtilt*for each UE group are both obtained by means of large-system asymptotic analysis. Benefiting from the random matrix theory tools, the asymptotic analytical results are independent of instantaneous channel state information of UE, which make it possible to solveK*andθtilt*offline, therefore saving the online computational resources significantly. Numerical results verify that the proposed scheme achieves good sum rate performance with extremely low computational complexity.

e13112 Background: Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) assays provide a comprehensive view of clinically actionable variations in patients. The increasing application of NGS holds new promise towards accurate diagnosis, personalized treatment and precision medicine. Formalin-fixed Paraffin-embedded (FFPE) treatment remains to be the most popular format of tissue preservation. To further standardize the whole process of the application of NGS assays on FFPE tissues, the Chinese Medical Association Pathology Division organized a multi-center performance study of a NGS assay on more than 1,000 clinical FFPE specimens by inviting top pathology departments in the country. Methods: OncoAim Tumor Mutation and PharmGx Detection Kit (Singlera Genomics, Shanghai) was used for this study. Reference samples with known mutations and allele frequencies together with 1045 clinical FFPE specimens from 11 participating hospitals were tested. Among them, 615 Colorectal Cancer (CRC) and 430 Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) FFPE samples were processed and sequenced on Illumina Miseq platform and Thermo ion torrent PGM platform, respectively. Results: The results on reference materials show 100% (Confidence interval = 100%) analytical sensitivity for mutations with MAF ≥ 10% when median coverage is ≥ 500X.Positive predictive value of > 99% was observed for mutations with MAF at 5% (data not shown). The median depth for CRC and NSCLC samples were 977Xand 828X, respectively. Among all CRC samples, 564 (91.7%) samples were found containing at least 1 clinical hotspot alteration. The top mutated genes were TP53, KRAS, APC, PIK3CA, SMAD4, BRAF, FBXW7, NRAS, PTEN, and ERBB2. For all the NSCLC samples, 304 (70.69%) were detected containing at least 1 clinical hotspot mutation. The top 10 mutated genes were EGFR, TP53, KRAS, PIK3CA PTEN, VHL, ERBB2, SMAD4, NFE2L2 and CTNNB1. Conclusions: In this study, we showed that the amplification-based NGS assay can achieve very high sensitivity and specificity for samples with median depth over 500X. The samples containing at least 1 clinical hotspot mutation were about 83% on average, suggesting NGS could be of great use for further characterization of the tissues.

In this paper, we study the secrecy transmission in multi-antenna relay networks with multiple eavesdroppers. The relay employs the amplify-and-forward relaying protocol and simultaneously sends the artificial noise to interfere the eavesdroppers. It is assumed that only imperfect channel state information on the main and eavesdropping channels is available at the relay. We exploit the robust beam forming and jamming to maximize the worst-case secrecy rate under a total relay power budget. Because of the infinitely nonconvex constraints, the problem is difficult to solve. Therefore, we approximate the problem into several tractable semi definite programs by semi definite relaxation, S-procedure, and the successive convex approximation techniques. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Cloud system peculiarities, such as dynamic virtualization management and multi-tenant shared mode, make authentication and access control more important than ever. This paper presents an advanced Access control model based on the TCG'IF-MAP standard and the OASIS XACML standard to regulate the access of Cloud resources. The main novelty of the architecture is the introduction of MAP server, providing detailed, real-time information about the user and resources based on IF-MAP protocol aims to establish trust system domain and provides a resilient reevaluation authorization. In addition, it is quite possible that a single service may be affected by multiple policy decision authorities in cloud, for this we design the PMC module serves as a controller for interaction between the PDP and PEP.

This paper designed a high efficiency W-band extended interaction oscillator. The rectangle coupled-cavity slow-wave line along with the sheet beam can increase the impedance of the circuit and has the merit of high power operation. Through PIC simulation the optimized parameters has been achieved with the beam-wave interaction efficiency over 27%.

The segmentation and analysis of the carotid artery is useful for the diagnosis of serious cardiovascular disease. Several methods have been presented for the segmentation of ultrasound carotid artery images, but almost all need a certain degree of user interaction. In this paper, we present an automatic segmentation method for detecting the intimal and adventitial layers. The method firstly uses the blood flow image to determine the position of the carotid artery, and then the identification of the region of interest (ROI) will be performed. We use the Fuzzy c-means cluster algorithm to distinguish the initial intimal and adventitial layers of the carotid artery. Finally, the energy definition of active contour model is used. The internal force and external force in the snake model are modified to be suitable for our approach. The carotid artery intimal-medial thickness is considered and adjusted to the energy of the active contour model.

Background Bmi1 has been identified as an important regulator in breast cancer, but its relationship with other signaling molecules such as ERα and HER2 is undetermined. Methods The expression of Bmi1 and its correlation with ERα, PR, Ki-67, HER2, p16INK4a, cyclin D1 and pRB was evaluated by immunohistochemistry in a collection of 92 cases of breast cancer and statistically analyzed. Stimulation of Bmi1 expression by ERα or 17β-estradiol (E2) was analyzed in cell lines including MCF-7, MDA-MB-231, ERα-restored MDA-MB-231 and ERα-knockdown MCF-7 cells. Luciferase reporter and chromatin immunoprecipitation assays were also performed. Results Immunostaining revealed strong correlation of Bmi1 and ERα expression status in breast cancer. Expression of Bmi1 was stimulated by 17β-estradiol in ERα-positive MCF-7 cells but not in ERα-negative MDA-MB-231 cells, while the expression of Bmi1 did not alter expression of ERα. As expected, stimulation of Bmi1 expression could also be achieved in ERα-restored MDA-MB-231 cells, and at the same time depletion of ERα decreased expression of Bmi1. The proximal promoter region of Bmi1 was transcriptionally activated with co-transfection of ERα in luciferase assays, and the interaction of the Bmi1 promoter with ERα was confirmed by chromatin immunoprecipitation. Moreover, in breast cancer tissues activation of the ERα-coupled Bmi1 pathway generally correlated with high levels of cyclin D1, while loss of its activity resulted in aberrant expression of p16INK4a and a high Ki-67 index, which implied a more aggressive phenotype of breast cancer. Conclusions Expression of Bmi1 is influenced by ERα, and the activity of the ERα-coupled Bmi1 signature impacts p16INK4a and cyclin D1 status and thus correlates with the tumor molecular subtype and biologic behavior. This demonstrates the important role which is played by ERα-coupled Bmi1 in human breast cancer.