Search

This study explores Mandarin children’s competence with quantifier domain restriction. We present results from two experiments in which adults and four- to five-year old children evaluated two possible candidates for the domain selection associated with the distributive operator dou ‘all’ in Mandarin Chinese. In the first experiment, we investigated whether children and adults are capable of selecting an appropriate domain when two candidate NPs both appear inside dou’s quantification scope; i.e., both of the NPs c-command dou. In the second experiment, still two candidate NPs were presented, but one within dou’s scope and the other outside its scope. Our results indicate that four- to five-year-old children are capable of basic distributive computation associated with dou, but they may choose an NP that adults do not usually choose as the domain of dou, resulting in non-adult interpretations of distributive computation in certain cases. Based on the results, we propose that four- to five-year-old children are less certain about the domain restriction associated with dou-quantification. This proposal has important implications for the current debate on the acquisition of universal quantifiers, specifically, the problem of quantifier spreading. We explain children’s uncertainty about the domain restriction with a universal grammar-based statistical acquisition model.

BackgroundIschemic heart disease causes a high disease burden globally and numerous challenges in treatment, particularly in developing countries such as China. The National Chest Pain Centers Program (NCPCP) was launched in China as the first nationwide, hospital-based, comprehensive, continuous quality improvement (QI) program to improve early diagnosis and standardized treatment of acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and improve patients’ clinical outcomes. With implementation and scaling up of the NCPCP, we investigated barriers and enablers in the NCPCP implementation process and provided examples and ideas for overcoming such barriers.MethodsWe conducted a nationally representative survey in six cities in China. A total of 165 key informant interviewees, including directors and coordinators of chest pain centers (CPCs) in 90 hospitals, participated in semi-structured interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, translated into English, and analyzed in NVivo 12.0. We used the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) to guide the codes and themes.ResultsBarriers to NCPCP implementation mainly arose from nine CFIR constructs. Barriers included the complexity of the intervention (complexity), low flexibility of requirements (adaptability), a lack of recognition of chest pain in patients with ACS (patient needs and resources), relatively low government support (external policies and incentives), staff mobility in the emergency department and other related departments (structural characteristics), resistance from related departments (networks and communications), overwhelming tasks for CPC coordinators (compatibility), lack of available resources for regular CPC operations (available resources), and fidelity to and sustainability of intervention implementation (executing). Enablers of intervention implementation were inner motivation for change (intervention sources), evidence strength and quality of intervention, relatively low cost (cost), individual knowledge and beliefs regarding the intervention, pressure from other hospitals (peer pressure), incentives and rewards of the intervention, and involvement of hospital leaders (leadership engagement, engaging).ConclusionSimplifying the intervention to adapt routine tasks for medical staff and optimizing operational mechanisms between the prehospital emergency system and in-hospital treatment system with government support, as well as enhancing emergency awareness among patients with chest pain are critically important to NCPCP implementation. Clarifying and addressing these barriers is key to designing a sustainable QI program for acute cardiovascular diseases in China and similar contexts across developing countries worldwide.Trial registrationThis study was registered in the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR 2100043319), registered 10 February 2021.

Background Depressive symptoms has become an increasingly important public health issue, contributing to disability and disease burden around the world. Higher socioeconomic status (SES) has been found to be associated with lower prevalence of depression, but there are few studies about the older Chinese adults with long‐term follow up and rigorous prospective design. Meanwhile, there is little conclusive evidence about the mechanisms through which SES influences the onset of depressive symptoms. Objective To prospectively examine the association of baseline socioeconomic factors with the risks of developing depressive symptoms during 7‐year follow up in older Chinese population, and to study the mechanism by which SES impacts the prevalence of depressive symptoms. Methods A total of 5677 individuals over 45 years who participated in an ongoing nationally representative prospective cohort study, China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, were free from depressive symptoms at baseline, and completed 7‐year follow‐up were included. Depressive symptoms were assessed using the 10‐item Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale score. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to examine the association of SES and the incidence of depressive symptoms in 2011 to 2018. Generalized structural equation model was used to analyze the mediation effects of social support on the relation between SES and depressive symptoms. Results During the 7‐year follow‐up, 2398 (42.2%) cases were identified as depressive symptoms. Compared with the lowest level of household income, participants with the highest level of household income had a 20% reduction in risk (95% CI, 0.70–0.92, P

Objectives Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tones, since CIs do not transmit pitch information effectively. It has been suggested that longer CI experience provides additional benefits for children implanted early, enabling them to achieve language abilities similar to that of normal-hearing (NH) children (Colletti 2009). Mandarin is a tonal language with four lexical tones and a neutral tone (T0), characterized by distinct pitch and durational patterns. It has been suggested that early implantation (i.e., before 2 years) greatly benefits the acquisition of Mandarin tones by children with CIs (Tang et al. 2019c). In this study, we extend those findings to investigate the effect of CI experience on the acquisition of Mandarin tones for children implanted early. We asked the extent to which they were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns of both lexical tones and T0 as a function of CI experience, and the extent to which their tonal productions were acoustically like that of NH children. Design Forty-four NH 3-year olds and 28 children implanted with CIs between 1 and 2 years, aged 3 to 7, were recruited. The children with CIs were grouped according to the length of CI experience: 3 to 6 years, 2 to 3 years, and 1 to 2 years. Lexical tone and T0 productions were elicited using a picture-naming task. Tonal productions from the children with CIs were acoustically analyzed and compared with those from the NH children. Results Children with 3 to 6 years of CI experience were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns for both lexical tones and T0, with NH-like acoustic realizations. Children with 2 to 3 years of CI experience were also able to produce the expected tonal patterns, although their productions were not yet NH-like. Those with only 1 to 2 years of CI experience, however, were not yet able to produce the distinct acoustic patterns for either lexical tones or T0. Conclusions These results provide acoustic evidence demonstrating that, when Mandarin-speaking children are implanted before the age of 2, only those with 3 to 6 years of experience were able to produce NH-like tones, including both lexical tone and T0. Children with shorter CI experience (less than 3 years) were unable to produce distinct acoustic patterns for the different tones. This suggests that at least 3 years of CI experience is still needed for early implanted children to acquire tonal distinctions similar to those of NH 3-year olds.

With the rapid popularity of agent technology, a public opinion early warning agent has attracted wide attention. Furthermore, a deep learning model can make the agent more automatic and efficient. Therefore, for the agency of a public opinion early warning task, the deep learning model is very suitable for completing tasks such as popularity prediction or emergency outbreak. In this context, improving the ability to automatically analyze and predict the virality of information cascades is one of the tasks that deep learning model approaches address. However, most of the existing studies sought to address this task by analyzing cascade underlying network structure. Recent studies proposed cascade virality prediction for agnostic-networks (without network structure), but did not consider the fusion of more effective features. In this paper, we propose an innovative cascade virus prediction model named CasWarn. It can be quickly deployed in intelligent agents to effectively predict the virality of public opinion information for different industries. Inspired by the agnostic-network model, this model extracts the key features (independent of the underlying network structure) of an information cascade, including dissemination scale, emotional polarity ratio, and semantic evolution. We use two improved neural network frameworks to embed these features, and then apply the classification task to predict the cascade virality. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two large social network datasets. Furthermore, the experimental results prove that CasWarn can make timely and effective cascade virality predictions and verify that each feature model of CasWarn is beneficial to improve performance.

Phonological processes can pose a learning challenge for children, where the surface form for an underlying contrast may vary as a function of the phonological environment. Mandarin tone sandhi is a complex phonological process that requires knowledge about both the tonal and the prosodic context in which it applies. The present study explored the productive knowledge of tone sandhi processes by 108 3- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 33 adults. Participants were asked to produce novel tone sandhi compounds in different tonal contexts and prosodic structures. Acoustic analysis showed that 3-year-olds have abstracted the tone sandhi process and can productively apply it to novel disyllabic words across tonal contexts. However, even 5-year-olds still differed from adults in applying tone sandhi in response to the trisyllabic prosodic structure. The results are discussed in terms of the factors that influence how tone sandhi processes, and phonological alternations more generally, are acquired.

Rock bursts are an extreme behaviour in coal mine strata that can cause fatalities and severe economic losses. Pressure relief drilling is a widely used method in coal mines to release high stress concentrations and effectively reduce the rock mass volumetric elastic potential energy; thus, this method can effectively reduce the occurrence of rock bursts in underground coal mines. Based on actual geologic conditions in the area of a rock burst that occurred in the Yangcheng Mine, a series of experimental studies on mechanical properties are conducted using gypsum-type coal-like materials with different numbers and configurations of pressure relief boreholes . The change in parameters, such as the strength and energy dissipation index of bored coal-like materials under a uniaxial compression, is studied, and the fracture propagation characteristics in the rock surrounding the boreholes in the experiments are analysed. FRACOD, which is a numerical code that predicts the explicit fracturing process in rocks using fracture mechanical principles, is then used to simulate the laboratory tests, and the numerical results are compared with the experimental results. The code is also used to study the relief effect of three boreholes with different geometrical configurations ; thus, local fracture initiation and propagation around the boreholes are investigated. Combined with the characteristics of the stress change in the rock surrounding the boreholes, the optimal configurations of the pressure relief boreholes for the Yangcheng coal mine are determined. The results have shown that the larger the drilling density is, the more the rock fracture development around the boreholes, the greater the energy release and, hence, the more effective the relief effect. Finally, this study presents a new methodology for choosing the optimal layout parameters for pressure relief drilling, which could aid future research in related fields.

Aim: The aim of the research is to determine characteristic of the correlation between climate and stroke through the analysis of relevant documents. Methods: We found 115 researches of temperature and season on stroke mortality/incidence and these were categorized according to location, meteorology, date span, data source and research sites’ latitudes. We divided the globe into 5 temperature zones based on latitude ranges: 0 - 10, 10 - 23.5, 23.5 - 40, 40 - 50, and >50 degrees, and allotted a zone to each country. Stroke mortality by five temperature zones was calculated per 100,000 people. Results: 70% of the researches came from latitudes greater than 40 degrees with 92% of researches located in Europe, USA, and Asia. The mortality range was 42 - 63 per 105 individuals within latitudes 0 - 40 degrees. In latitudes 40 - 66.5 degrees, a linear upward trend (y = 69.82x − 22.823, R2 = 0.99) was noticed. More than 75% of the research reports indicated a negative correlation between climate and stroke, and the proportion was almost 6 and 7 times greater than that of the fluctuation and non-correlation, respectively. The most frequently used research methods were regression analysis and time series analysis. Conclusion: All of the research results confirmed that lower temperature is associated with higher mortality and incidence of stroke, while higher latitude is correlated with higher stroke mortality, consistent with the temperature zones.

The current study investigated the correlation between stroke mortality and temperature. Monthly and seasonal variations in stroke mortality were plotted and daily stroke-related deaths were calculated. The lag times were calculated using the time series analysis. The correlation between stroke incidence and the diurnal temperature range (DTR) was analyzed using case-crossover analysis. Global stroke mortality was described in five latitudes. In the eastern region of Inner Mongolia, the stroke mortality was 174.18/105, about twice of that of the midwestern regions (87.07/105), and temperature was negatively correlated with stroke mortality. Mortality peaked in the winter and troughed in the summer (χ2 = 13.634, P 40°; the highest mortality was 188.05/105 at the highest latitude. Only in relatively cold regions as the temperature decreases does stroke mortality increase for various populations. Differences in the time lag as well as in the DTR lag and DTR critical point vary for both the temperature and region.

This chapter introduces the application of information cascading analysis in social networks. We present a deep learning based framework of social network information cascade analysis, and we show the challenges of applying the MDATA model. The phenomenon of information dissemination in social networks is widespread, and Social Network Information Cascade Analysis (SNICA) aims to acquire valuable knowledge in the process of information dissemination in social networks. As the number, volume, and resolution of social network data increase rapidly, traditional social network data analysis methods, especially the analysis method of social network graph (SNG) data have become overwhelmed in SNICA. At the same time, the MDATA model fuses data from multiple sources in a graph, which can be applied to the SNICA problems. Recently, deep learning models have changed this situation, and it has achieved success in SNICA with its powerful implicit feature extraction capabilities. This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of recent progress in applying deep learning techniques for SNICA.

Credit card fraud detection (CCFD) is important for protecting the cardholder’s property and the reputation of banks. Class imbalance in credit card transaction data is a primary factor affecting the classification performance of current detection models. However, prior approaches are aimed at improving the prediction accuracy of the minority class samples (fraudulent transactions), but this usually leads to a significant drop in the model’s predictive performance for the majority class samples (legal transactions), which greatly increases the investigation cost for banks. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous ensemble learning model based on data distribution (HELMDD) to deal with imbalanced data in CCFD. We validate the effectiveness of HELMDD on two real credit card datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with current state-of-the-art models, HELMDD has the best comprehensive performance. HELMDD not only achieves good recall rates for both the minority class and the majority class but also increases the savings rate for banks to 0.8623 and 0.6696, respectively.

The study compares the rehabilitation outcome of two voice intervention methods for female elementary school teachers with self-reported voice disorders.A total of 34 female teachers from two primary schools volunteered in the study. Participants from one school were assigned to the experimental group (16 teachers), who received the combination of vocal hygiene education and resonant voice therapy. Participants from the other school were assigned to the control group (18 teachers), who received vocal hygiene education only. Pre- and post-treatment data were compared.The total score of the Voice Handicap Index (VHI) decreased significantly from 12.19 ± 8.58 to 8.63 ± 7.27 (P0.05); the functional score of VHI significantly decreased from 5.38 ± 3.9 to 3.81 ± 3.62 (P0.05). No statistical significance was found in physiological and emotional scores of VHI. No statistical significance was found in the control group. In the experimental group, the maximum phonation time was increased from 14.34 ± 6.80s to 17.21 ± 6.06s (P0.05), Jitter decreased from 0.45% ± 0.13% to 0.26% ± 0.05% (P0.05), and Shimmer decreased from 0.21 ± 0.10. to 0.12 ± 0.03 (P0.05). Furthermore, the harmonic to noise ratio increased from 23.06 ± 2.99 to 25.23 ± 1.92 (P0.05), Spectrum Convergence Ratio increased from 0.53 ± 0.12 to 0.60 ± 0.11 (P0.05), yet no statistical significance was found in Nonlinear Energy Difference Ratio data for the experimental group. No statistical significance was found in the control group. In the auditory perception assessment (GRBAS), the G score decreased from 1.19 ± 0.54 to 0.81 ± 0.40 (P0.05), and the R score decreased from 1.19 ± 0.54 to 0.75 ± 0.45 (P0.05) in the experimental group. No statistical significance was found in the B, A, and S scores in the experimental group; moreover, none of the GRBAS scores in the control group demonstrated statistical significance. In the voice type component profile (VTC), the proportion of VTC1 of the experimental group increased significantly, while the proportions of VTC3 and VTC4 decreased significantly, indicating the improvement of voice quality was obvious after the intervention. The proportions of VTC of the control group did not demonstrate significant change.The results of this study show that a combination of vocal hygiene education and resonant voice therapy can significantly improve the voice function of professional voice users and effectively improve their voice quality. In this study, the professional voice users receiving vocal hygiene education only did not show significant improvement of their voice quality.

The development of the Internet and artificial intelligence has brought a lot of convenience to people's production and life. The rise and progress of the transportation industry means that people's travel efficiency has been improved. Public transportation, as one of the means of delivery, bears the task of urban residents' life. Interactive information design gives birth to intelligent urban public transportation and promotes the development of people-oriented information communication industry to meet people's needs. Based on the characteristics of information interaction, this paper intends to explore the interactive information design of intelligent urban public transportation. From a design point of view, automobiles have evolved from a vehicle to a design object containing personal space, public space and social space. In this context, the human-computer interaction design of intelligent vehicles has become the focus of the automotive enterprises and technology companies at home and abroad.

The phenomenon of information dissemination in social networks is widespread, and Social Network Information Cascade Analysis (SNICA) aims to acquire valuable knowledge in the process of information dissemination in social networks. As the number, volume, and resolution of social network data increase rapidly, traditional social network data analysis methods, especially the analysis method of social network graph (SNG) data becoming overwhelmed in SNICA. Recently, deep learning models have changed this situation, and it has achieved success in SNICA with its powerful implicit feature extraction capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent progress in applying deep learning techniques for SNICA. We first introduce related concepts and summarize the advantages of deep learning technology in SNICA. Then, we propose a general framework for deep learning technology, which applies to SNICA. Then, different SNICA application scenarios in the framework are classified and discussed according to user behavior analysis, information cascade analysis, rumor detection, and social network event analysis. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current work and suggest future directions.

Objective This study was performed to investigate the analgesic effects of intramuscular injection of dezocine-based local anesthesia in patients undergoing inguinal hernia repair. Methods A total of 120 patients underwent local herniorrhaphy from July 2015 to December 2016 and were randomly divided into 2 groups: the dezocine group, in which a preoperative intramuscular injection of dezocine was administered, and the control group, in which no dezocine injection was administered. The patients’ pain and comfort levels were evaluated at 30 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours postoperatively. Results The visual analog scale scores at 30 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours were significantly lower in the dezocine than control group. In the Bruggemann comfort scale evaluation, patients who received dezocine injections showed significantly greater comfort than those in the control group at 30 minutes, 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours. No adverse reactions occurred in the dezocine group. Conclusions Dezocine-based local anesthesia can attenuate postoperative pain and increase the comfort level during and after herniorrhaphy.

Weak syllables in Germanic and Romance languages have been reported to be challenging for young children, with syllable omission and/or incomplete reduction persisting till age five. In Mandarin Chinese, neutral tone (T0) involves a weak syllable with varied pitch realizations across (preceding) tonal contexts and short duration. The present study examined how and when T0 was acquired by 108 Beijing Mandarin-speaking children (3–5 years) relative to 33 adult controls. Lexicalized (familiar) and non-lexicalized (unfamiliar) T0 words were elicited in different preceding tonal contexts. Unlike previous reports, the present study revealed that children as young as three years have already developed a phonological category for T0, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations of T0 for both familiar and unfamiliar items. However, mastery of adult-like pitch and duration implementation of T0 is a protracted process not completed until age five. The implications for the acquisition of weak syllables more generally are discussed.

Large-scale system reliability problem is a nonconvex integer nonlinear programming problem, traditional mathematical programming methods have computation limits and can not optimize an effective solution in a reasonable time. This paper employed an amended harmony search algorithm(AHS) to solve large-scale system reliability problems. In AHS, perturbation strategy, key parameter adjustment and global dimension selection strategy are designed to balance the capability of exploitation and exploration. A comprehensive comparison is carried out to assess the search efficiency and convergence performance of AHS. Function test and large-scale system reliability case results show that AHS is superior to many previously reported well-known and excellent algorithms.

With the development of electrified railways and high-voltage transmission lines, it is often inevitable that buried metal structures are subjected to interference from the alternating current (AC) induced by the neighboring power facilities. Commonly found in soil, sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) have the capability to accelerate metal corrosion. In this paper, with electrochemical methods, surface analysis techniques, and weight-loss test, the influence of AC and SRB on the X80 steel corrosion behavior was explored in coastal saline soil. The results revealed that the 100 A m−2 AC inhibited the growth of the sessile and planktonic SRB cell. Under the action of 100 A m−2 AC, the metabolic activity of viable bacteria was enhanced, and the process of extracellular electron transfer was accelerated. When both AC and SRB were introduced, the maximum pit depth (76.2 μm) increased significantly to be 15 times higher than in the control condition (4.9 μm). Both SRB and AC played a role in enhancing corrosion. The corrosion rate of the AC-influenced specimen was far higher than that of the SRB-influenced specimen, while SRB and AC produced a synergistic effect on the enhanced corrosion of the specimen.

In this work, electrochemical measurements and surface analysis techniques were used to investigate the effects of alternating current (AC) and nitrate reducing bacteria (NRB) on the corrosion behavior of X80 pipeline steel in the Shenyang soil extract solution. Either AC or NRB increases the corrosion rate of X80 steel samples, and the combination of AC and NRB can make the corrosion rate reach about 16.5 times of that without AC and NRB. Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) images show that the maximum pitting depth is up to 38.3 μm through the synergistic effect of AC and NRB. The data in this paper strongly confirms that AC and NRB synergistically accelerate the pitting formation of X80 pipeline steel, and lead to the generation of deeper and larger pits.

In the process of oilfield development, with the continuous development of resource exploitation and oil transportation, the later exploitation is likely to reduce the potential energy of the oilfield, which has a serious impact on the oil exploitation. In order to make our oilfield development efficiency has been significantly improved, and effectively improve the comprehensive development and utilization efficiency of our oilfield, we must continue to use the oilfield potential enhancement technology. In the actual production process, we need to combine a variety of technologies, such as hydraulic transmission pressure fracture, water plugging, acidification and other technologies. Through the comprehensive utilization of these technologies, we can reduce the water content of comprehensive oil wells in the oilfield, effectively improve the production of the oilfield, bring greater economic benefits to the society, and promote the long-term, stable and healthy development of China’s oilfield.

This paper is concerned with robust pole assignment optimization for synthesizing feedback control systems via state feedback or observer-based output feedback in specified union regions using the harmony search algorithm. By using exact pole placement theory and the harmony search algorithm, robust pole assignment for linear discrete-time systems or linear continuous-time systems in union regions can be converted into a global dynamical optimization problem. The robust measured indices are derived for robust union region stability constraints and a robust [Formula: see text] performance. For the nonlinear, robust measured indices, a set of dynamic poles and the corresponding feedback controllers can be obtained by global dynamic optimization based on the harmony search algorithm and the idea of robust exact pole assignment. One key merit of the proposed approach is that the radius or the position of the sub-regions can be arbitrarily specified according to the transient performance request. Furthermore, the eigenstructure of the closed-loop system matrix can be optimized with better robustness for the proposed approach. Finally, the simulation results for a discrete-time system and a continuous-time system demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.