Yan Liu

Copyright © 2015 by ASME.This paper replaces the hinged pivots of an eight-bar linkage with flexure joints in order to achieve a flexure-connected linkage system that guides rectilinear movement of its end-effector. The goal is a linkage design that can be reduced in size to provide a suspension for the proof masses of a MEMS gyroscope. The symmetric design of the linkage and its long travel relative to other MEMS suspensions has the potential to provide a number of advantages, such as the reduction of quadrature error. The design presented yields 0.1% deviation over its range of movement. An example also presents the driving linkage of the MEMS gyroscope, which is also designed as flexure connected linkage.

© 2015 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Inc. Plasminogen activator inhibitor 1 level is extremely elevated in the edematous fluid of acutely injured lungs and pleurae. Elevated PAI-1 specifically inactivates pulmonary urokinase-type and tissue-type plasminogen activators. We hypothesized that plasminogen activation and fibrinolysis may alter epithelial sodium channel activity, a key player in clearing edematous fluid. Two-chain urokinase has been found to strongly stimulate heterologous human αβγ ENaC activity in a dose- and time-dependent manner. This activity of tcuPA was completely ablated by PAI-1. Furthermore, a mutation of the active site of the enzyme also prevented ENaC activation. By comparison, three truncation mutants of the amino-terminal fragment of tcuPA still activated ENaC. uPA enzymatic activity was positively correlated with ENaC current amplitude prior to reaching the maximal level. In sharp contrast to uPA, neither single-chain tPA nor derivatives, including two-chain tPA and tenecteplase, affected ENaC activity. Furthermore, γ but not α subunit of ENaC was proteolytically cleaved at by tcuPA. In summary, the underlying mechanisms of urokinase-mediated activation of ENaC include release of self-inhibition, proteolysis of γ ENaC, incremental increase in opening rate, and activation of closed channels. This study for the first time demonstrates multifaceted mechanisms for uPA-mediated up-regulation of ENaC, which form the cellular and molecular rationale for the beneficial effects of urokinase in mitigating mortal pulmonary edema and pleural effusions.

Background: Anopheles sinensis is a major malaria vector in China and other Southeast Asian countries, and it is becoming increasingly resistant to the insecticides used for agriculture, net impregnation, and indoor residual spray. Very limited genomic information on this species is available, which has hindered the development of new tools for resistance surveillance and vector control. We used the 454 GS FLX system and generated expressed sequence tag databases of various life stages of An. sinensis, and we determined the transcriptional differences between deltamethrin resistant and susceptible mosquitoes.Results: The 454 GS FLX transcriptome sequencing yielded a total of 624,559 reads with the pooled An. sinensis mosquitoes across various development stages. The de novo assembly generated 33,411 contigs with average length of 493 bp. A total of 8,057 ESTs were generated with Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes annotation. A total of 2,131 ESTs were differentially expressed between deltamethrin resistant and susceptible mosquitoes collected from the same field site in Jiangsu, China. Among these differentially expressed ESTs, a total of 294 pathways were mapped to the KEGG database, with the predominant ESTs belonging to metabolic pathways. Furthermore, a total of 2,408 microsatellites and 15,496 single nucleotide polymorphisms were identified.Conclusions: The annotated EST and transcriptome databases provide a valuable genomic resource for further genetic studies of this important malaria vector species. The differentially expressed ESTs associated with insecticide resistance identified in this study lay an important foundation for further functional analysis. The identified microsatellite and SNP markers will provide useful tools for future population genetic and comparative genomic analyses of malaria vectors. © 2014 Zhu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

© 2014 Li et al. Aedes albopictus is a very invasive and aggressive insect vector that causes outbreaks of dengue fever, chikungunya disease, and yellow fever in many countries. Vector ecology and disease epidemiology are strongly affected by environmental changes. Urbanization is a worldwide trend and is one of the most ecologically modifying phenomena. The purpose of this study is to determine how environmental changes due to urbanization affect the ecology of Aedes albopictus. Aquatic habitats and Aedes albopictus larval population surveys were conducted from May to November 2013 in three areas representing rural, suburban, and urban settings in Guangzhou, China. Ae. albopictus adults were collected monthly using BG-Sentinel traps. Ae. albopictus larva and adult life-table experiments were conducted with 20 replicates in each of the three study areas. The urban area had the highest and the rural area had the lowest number of aquatic habitats that tested positive for Ae. albopictus larvae. Densities in the larval stages varied among the areas, but the urban area had almost two-fold higher densities in pupae and three-fold higher in adult populations compared with the suburban and rural areas. Larvae developed faster and the adult emergence rate was higher in the urban area than in suburban and rural areas. The survival time of adult mosquitoes was also longer in the urban area than it was in suburban and rural areas. Study regions, surface area, water depth, water clearance, surface type, and canopy coverage were important factors associated with the presence of Ae. albopictus larvae. Urbanization substantially increased the density, larval development rate, and adult survival time of Ae. albopictus, which in turn potentially increased the vector capacity, and therefore, disease transmissibility. Mosquito ecology and its correlation with dengue virus transmission should be compared in different environmental settings.

To identify the boundary conditions for proactive employees making whistle-blowing decisions, we developed a cross-level model comprising employee proactive personality and two types of whistle-blowing intentions that incorporates the influences of organizational- and individual-level attributes. Analyses of data collected from 432 Chinese employees in 32 companies indicated that proactive personality was positively related to internal whistle-blowing intention and even more positively related to external whistle-blowing intention when individuals were working in organizations characterized by an instrumental ethical climate and employees with a high level of moral identity.

The scale of know­ledge is growing rapidly in the big data environment, and traditional know­ledge organization and services have faced the dilemma of semantic inaccuracy and untimeliness. From a know­ledge fusion perspective-combining the precise semantic superiority of traditional ontology with the large-scale graph processing power and the predicate attribute expression ability of property graph-this paper presents an ontology and property graph fusion framework (OPGFF). The fusion process is divided into content layer fusion and constraint layer fusion. The result of the fusion, that is, the know­ledge representation model is called know­ledge big graph. In addition, this paper applies the know­ledge big graph model to the ownership network in the China’s financial field and builds a financial ownership know­ledge big graph. Furthermore, this paper designs and implements six consistency inference algorithms for finding contradictory data and filling in missing data in the financial ownership know­ledge big graph, five of which are completely domain agnostic. The correctness and validity of the algorithms have been experimentally verified with actual data. The fusion OPGFF framework and the implementation method of the know­ledge big graph could provide technical reference for big data know­ledge organization and services.

The generalized Brans–Dicke theory (GBD), as one of the modified gravitational theories, was proposed previously and some interesting properties were found in this theory. Here we investigate the traversable-wormhole physics for GBD theory. Firstly, we derive the gravitational field equation in the framework of GBD wormhole geometry. The traversable wormhole could be gained in this theory. Secondly, using the classical reconstruction technique we originally derive an Lagrangian function for describing gravity in GBD theory. And the derived Lagrangian function for gravity could be satisfied with the requirement of the viable conditions, such as the local gravity tests and the cosmological constraints, etc. Thus, the viable model for cosmology, local gravity and traversable WH can be unified in a uniform Lagrangian quantity within the framework of GBD theory. Thirdly, given that the violation of the energy conditions (ECs) often induce some problems in theory, we explore the ECs of matter in the traversable wormhole. It is shown that the null EC, the weak EC and the dominated EC for the matter can be satisfied in the traversable-wormhole physics of GBD theory, which are different from the results given in GR. It seems that the theory of GBD owns the more logic technically and consistency formally than the theory of GR. Fourthly, some other properties of GBD traversable WH are explored, such as the total gravitational energy, the volume integral quantifier, the dynamical stability of the anisotropic matter, and the difference of the propagation of sound within the matter configuration. The results support the GBD to provide an interesting candidate for traversable WH.

Although performance pressure has desirable consequences, there is evidence that it can produce unintended outcomes as employees tend to engage in dysfunctional and unethical behaviors to meet performance goals. Thus, the process through which employees think and behave unethically under performance pressure deserves more research attention. This study goes beyond the stress-appraisal perspective and investigates whether and when performance pressure influences individual work mindsets and behaviors from a moral reasoning perspective. Specifically, we contend that performance pressure is related to employee expediency through moral decoupling. We further hypothesize dialectical thinking and moral identity to be the boundary conditions of the proposed relationships. Analyses of data from a field study in three waves provide support for most of the hypotheses. In particular, we find that moral decoupling accounts for additional variance after we control for the stress-appraisal effect of performance pressure on employee expediency. The study offers several contributions to the literature on performance pressure and unethical behavior.

Rice is a staple food in China, and, thus, its security has drawn much attention. The Chinese government proactively fuels the application of biotechnology in agriculture and food to cope with increasingly severe food security issues. However, most consumers resist the commercialization of genetically modified rice. One of the important reasons is the consumer perception of its various risks. Conversely, trust in the government, scientists, and media can stimulate consumer purchase. On the basis of the dual perspectives of perceived risks and trust, this study establishes a model of purchase intention for GM rice to explore the structural relationship between variables. Perceived risks explore how exclusion can weaken the purchase intention from the consumer perspective; trust examines the benefits that support can provide. Based on the structural equation model, online survey results of 564 consumers in eight provinces and cities are analyzed. The following observations are offered: health risks, moral risks, and purchase intention are negatively correlated; environmental, functional, and economic risks have no significant correlation with purchase intention; and trust and purchase intention have a significant positive correlation.

This paper considers observer design for discrete-time descriptor systems with packet losses. By taking packet loss into consideration, the error dynamic of the proposed observer becomes a stochastic switched system. Consequently, the proposed observer is synthesized in a stochastic switched system framework. Sufficient conditions for the stochastic stability with a prescribed robust performance of the error dynamic system are derived and converted into linear matrix inequalities. Not only can the proposed observer deal with packet losses, but it also attenuates the effect of process disturbance and measurement noise. A numerical simulation of a truck-trailer is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The impact of bilingual education and bilingual experience on working memory has been an important and controversial issue in the field of psycholinguistics. Taking Chinese-English bilinguals as an example, this study aims to investigate the differences in emotional working memory between proficient and non-proficient bilinguals by using delayed matching-to-sample task paradigm and more complex n-back task in the context of emotion. The results show that proficient bilinguals have better performance on both of the two working memory tasks than non-proficient bilinguals, and the advantage effects were more apparent under high memory load conditions. Besides, the negative emotion context has a positive impact on complex n-back tasks. This study supports the notion that bilingual experience can promote the development of an individual’s cognitive ability and enable individuals to possess more advantages in working memory even in the presence of emotional distractions.

This study examined the ability to comprehend conventional and non-conventional implicatures, and the effect of proficiency and learning context on comprehension of implicature in L2 Chinese. Participants were three groups of college students of Chinese: elementary-level foreign language learners, advanced-level foreign language learners, and advanced-level heritage learners. They completed a 36-item computer-delivered listening test measuring their ability to comprehend three types of implicature: conventional indirect refusals, conventional indirect opinions, and non-conventional indirect opinions. Comprehension was analyzed for accuracy and comprehension speed. There was a significant effect of implicature type on accuracy, but not on comprehension speed. A significant effect of participant group was observed on accuracy, but the effect was mixed on comprehension speed.