Yuanyuan 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.

An abrupt cooling event in the North Atlantic region 8,200 years ago affected climate throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The event is well constrained in Greenland ice cores, but lack of resolution in records from other regions has challenged our understanding of the timing and nature of the associated teleconnections. Speleothem records from East Asia have suggested monsoonal changes associated with the 8,200 year event, but the nature of these changes remains controversial. Here we assess changes in East Asian precipitation during the event from a sub-annually resolved stalagmite record from central China. Using δ 18 O and Mg/Ca measurements of the speleothem carbonate, we show that climate dried significantly about 8,200 years ago. Based on our annual-layer-counted chronology, we show that the dry event lasted 150 years, with a central period of pronounced aridity that lasted 70 years. The duration and evolution of the event is indistinguishable from that observed in the Greenland ice cores. We therefore conclude that an effective and rapid atmospheric teleconnection exists between the North Atlantic and the monsoon system in warm climates similar to today's. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

There is an important contemporary debate in moral responsibility about whether the following asymmetry thesis is true: moral responsibility for actions does not require alternative possibilities but moral responsibility for omissions does. In this paper, we do two things. First, we consider and reject a recent argument against the asymmetry thesis, contending that the argument fails because it rests on a false view about the metaphysics of omissions. Second, we develop and defend a new argument against the asymmetry thesis, one that avoids the problem with the first argument by not resting on any assumptions about what omissions are metaphysically.

Based on the social identity theory, the relationship and influencing mechanism between high-performance human resource practices and employees’ voice behavior were explored by constructing a moderated mediation model, and the relationship between the field of human resources and the field of organizational behavior was also established. Through 1,178 paired samples of supervisor-employee survey and multilevel linear model analysis technology, it was found that HPHRPs had a positive impact on employees’ voice behavior; perceived insider status played a mediating role between HPHRPs and voice behavior; voice efficacy played a moderating role between perceived insider status and voice behavior; and voice efficacy played a mediating role in the relationship between “HPHRPs-perceived insider status-voice behavior.”

The power trading system has the characteristics of nonlinearity, dynamics, and complexity. Part of the business data in the trading system needs to be exposed to numerous external business systems. The traditional centralized power trading model has some problems, such as low data security and trust crisis of regulators. Blockchain technology provides prominent ideas for solving these problems. Firstly, the improved AdaBoost algorithm is used to predict the supply and demand gap of power trading nodes. Secondly, based on the fact that the information on the blockchain is only open to the power supply side, a two-stage game model of asymmetric information between the power supply side and the power user is constructed to capture the price competition behavior between them in order to find the Nash equilibrium price in two stages. Finally, the US PJM market electricity market data are used to carry out an example analysis to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm and model.

The paper considers two-agent order acceptance scheduling problems with different scheduling criteria. Two agents have a set of jobs to be processed by a single machine. The processing time and due date of each job are known in advance. In the order accepting scheduling problem, jobs are allowed to be rejected. The objective of the problem is to maximize the net revenue while keeping the weighted number of tardy jobs for the second agent within a predetermined value. A mixed-integer linear programming formulation is provided to obtain the optimal solution. The problem is considered as an NP-hard problem. Therefore, MILP can be used to solve small problem instances optimally. To solve the problem instances with realistic size, heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms have been proposed. A heuristic method is used to determine and secure a quick solution while the metaheuristic based on particle swarm optimization is designed to obtain the near-optimal solution. A numerical experiment is piloted and conducted on the benchmark instances that could be obtained from the literature. The performances of the proposed algorithms are tested through numerical experiments. The proposed PSO can obtain the solution within 0.1% of the optimal solution for problem instances up to 60 jobs. The performance of the proposed PSO is found to be significantly better than the performance of the heuristic.

This thesis is about the creativity in the East and the West, but I will mainly focus on the view of creativity in ancient Greek philosophy and Chinese philosophy. In the first chapter, I will explore the concept of creativity, the history of creativity, and the research on creativity, including the creativity research in psychology and philosophy, which will set the stage for further disscusion. Then in the second chapter, I will start from Plato’s dialogue, Ion, and explore the traditional theory of creativity in ancient Greek philosophy, and claim that their creative ability is inspired by divine being. After this, I will show people’s view on creativity has undergone a process of demystification. During this process, people gradually began to resist the divine source and explore the world individually and independently. Meanwhile, the meaning of the concept of creativity has become broader, since it is not limited to poem any more, but it can be applied to other fields, such as art, science, and education. In the third chapter, I will turn to the modern creativity theory, including the lateral thinking and emotional creativity, and explore how to be creative with lateral thinking techniques and how to improve creativity through emotion regulation. After the examination in the West, I will turn to the theory of creativity in Chinese philosophy, by focusing on classical works in Daoism and Confucianism. In the fourth chapter, I will explore the view of creativity in philosophy of Daoism. I will claim that the creativity in Daoism is natural and cosmological, and there is no external creative source, so I will claim it is self- creativity, which is distinct from the ancient Western creativity pushed by external divine power. In the fifth chapter, I will argue that the creativity in Confucianism is evolutionary, which is unlike the revolutionary creativity in the West, and I will propose the way to become creative in Confucianism based on its classics, Analects, and then will explore the creativity principle and how the agent cultivate their creative ability in Confucianism. In the conclusion, I will summarize the difference between the creativity in East and West, from the perspective of the source of creativity, nature of creativity. I will claim that the source of creativity in ancient Greek philosophy is divine being, whereas there is no divine source for creativity in Chinese philosophy, therefore, the creativity in the West traditionally is inspired creativity, while the creativity in the East traditionally is natural and cosmological creativity. In addition, the concept of creativity in the West is revolutionary, whereas the concept of creativity in the East is evolutionary and the moral function of creativity is also addressed in Chinese philosophy.

Creativity is a developing topic in philosophy in recent years, and it raises a series of challenging questions both in theory and practice for us. In this paper, I will explore creativity with the lateral thinking techniques which aim to solve problems in a creative and lateral way. I will examine the meaning of lateral thinking and its three kinds, the conceptual lateral thinking, the emotive lateral thinking, and the diagrammatic lateral thinking, trying to find out how the space of possible solutions is affected by lateral thinking, which separates the creative from the problem-solver.

With the development of economic globalization, more and more clinical research and trials shift from developed countries to developing countries. The globalization of clinical trials also brings some ethical and scientific concerns. This paper discussed some ethical problems of clinical trials in the developing countries including 1) "golden rice" event in China; 2) Informed consent in clinical trials in developing countries; 3) Ethical consciousness in clinical research and trials in developing countries. The essay suggests that the level of medical ethics in developing countries is lower than that in developed countries. How can we improve the ethical consciousness of clinical researchers and subjects and how can we protect patient rights are important problems faced by developing countries.