It is of great significance to have a clear understanding of the international environment that China faces. But this is an uneasy job. Since September 11, the world situation has become so complicated that it is hard...It is of great significance to have a clear understanding of the international environment that China faces. But this is an uneasy job. Since September 11, the world situation has become so complicated that it is hard to grasp its essence even with painstaking efforts. To judge such an already complicated international environment from China’s perspective adds more difficulties, for different people usually have different views due to the different angles from which they see the situation and different methods they adopt. This, understandably, leads to hot debates within the Chinese academic circles. To provide a stage for exchange of views, at the invitation of the CIR Expert Forum, some well-known scholars and experts on international relations from Beijing gathered to hold a symposium on November 5, 2002, with the theme of "How to assess the international environment that China faces". The speeches at the symposium will be published in two installments. Following are the first half.展开更多
Ever since Bush entered the White house, especially after 9/11 events, America has successively published series of strategic documents, such as the Nuclear Posture Review, Quadrennial Defense Review, National Securit...Ever since Bush entered the White house, especially after 9/11 events, America has successively published series of strategic documents, such as the Nuclear Posture Review, Quadrennial Defense Review, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction. After its unilateralist practices gained points military and lost points politically in the Afghan war and the Iraq war, the multi-lateralist posture on dealing with展开更多
Aim: To investigate the causes and costs of flexible ureteroscope damage, and to develop recommendations to limit damage. Methods: The authors analysed repair figures and possible causes of damage to 35 instruments ...Aim: To investigate the causes and costs of flexible ureteroscope damage, and to develop recommendations to limit damage. Methods: The authors analysed repair figures and possible causes of damage to 35 instruments sent for repair to a leading UK supplier over a 1-year period, and calculated cost figures for maintenance of the instruments as opposed to repair and replacement costs. Results: All damages were handling-induced and therefore did not fall under the manufacturer's warranty: 28 % were damaged by misfiring of the laser inside the instrument; 72 %, mainly crushing and stripping of the ureteroscope shaft tube, were likely to have occurred during out-of-surgery handling, washing and disinfection. Seventeen (4 %) instruments were not repaired and consequently taken out of service due to the extensive costs involved. Eighteen (51%) ureteroscopes were repaired at an average cost of 10 833 USD. Conclusion: Damages to flexible ureteroscopes bear considerable costs. Most damages occur during handling between surgical procedures. Thorough adherence to handling procedures, and courses for theater staff and surgeons on handling flexible instruments may help to reduce these damages and prove a cost-saving investment. The authors provide a list of recommended procedural measures that may help to prevent such damages.展开更多
Recent image aesthetic assessment methods have achieved remarkable progress due to the emergence of deep convolutional neural networks(CNNs).However,these methods focus primarily on predicting generally perceived pref...Recent image aesthetic assessment methods have achieved remarkable progress due to the emergence of deep convolutional neural networks(CNNs).However,these methods focus primarily on predicting generally perceived preference of an image,making them usually have limited practicability,since each user may have completely different preferences for the same image.To address this problem,this paper presents a novel approach for predicting personalized image aesthetics that fit an individual user’s personal taste.We achieve this in a coarse to fine manner,by joint regression and learning from pairwise rankings.Specifically,we first collect a small subset of personal images from a user and invite him/her to rank the preference of some randomly sampled image pairs.We then search for the K-nearest neighbors of the personal images within a large-scale dataset labeled with average human aesthetic scores,and use these images as well as the associated scores to train a generic aesthetic assessment model by CNN-based regression.Next,we fine-tune the generic model to accommodate the personal preference by training over the rankings with a pairwise hinge loss.Experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively learn personalized image aesthetic preferences,clearly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.Moreover,we show that the learned personalized image aesthetic benefits a wide variety of applications.展开更多
Background Recently, the combination of sevoflurane and remifentanil has been widely used in general anesthesia. In this study, we investigated the sevoflurane-remifentanil pharmacodynamic interactions at clinical con...Background Recently, the combination of sevoflurane and remifentanil has been widely used in general anesthesia. In this study, we investigated the sevoflurane-remifentanil pharmacodynamic interactions at clinical concentrations using the observer's assessment of alertness/sedation (OAA/S) and the bispectral index (BIS) by response surface analysis. Methods Totally 65 American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) I patients age 20 to 50 years old were included in this study. Patients were randomly assigned to be anesthetized with different target end-tidal sevoflurane concentrations that ranged from 0.2% to 3.4% in increments of 0.2%. The end-tidal sevoflurane concentration was maintained constant throughout the study. Remifentanil was infused with a target controlled infusion (TCI) system at increasing step-wise concentrations from 1 ng/ml to 10 ng/ml. The values of OAA/S and BIS at different sevoflurane-remifentanil concentration combinations were measured. The pharmacodynamic interactions between sevoflurane and remifentanil were analyzed by a response surface method. The three-dimensional response surfaces were constructed with Minitab Software. Model parameters were estimated with NONMEM program. Results Sevoflurane and remifentanil acted synergistically on OANS. Sevoflurane alone could produce OANS 〈1 at a minimal alveolar concentration (MAC) of 0.93%. When used in combination with remifentanil at 1, 3, 6, and 10 ng/ml, the corresponding sevoflurane MACs were reduced to 0.79%, 0.58%, 0.48%, and 0.38%, with reductions of 17.2%, 37.6%, 48.4%, and 62.0% from baseline, respectively. In patients administered remifentanil alone, the OANS score was 〉3 even when the remifentanil concentration reached 10 ng/ml. BIS was closely associated with the sevoflurane concentration and the remifentanil concentration did not noticeably influence the relationship between the sevoflurane concentration and BIS. A sevoflurane concentration of (1.04+0.19)% to (1.81+0.21)% could maintain a BIS between 60 and 40. Conclusions The response surface method can analyze the pharmacodynamic interactions between remifentanil and sevoflurane qualitatively and quantitatively. Within the range of our study (remifentanil 〈10 ng/ml, sevoflurane 〈3.4%), the two drugs produced synergistic effects on OAA/S but had no interactive effect on BIS. A guideline of BIS between 40 and 60 may cause excessive anesthesia when opioids are used to maintain anesthesia.展开更多
Quantitative assessment of water quality and its spatial variation identification, as well as the discernment of primary factors affecting water quality are in its urgent in water environment management. In this study...Quantitative assessment of water quality and its spatial variation identification, as well as the discernment of primary factors affecting water quality are in its urgent in water environment management. In this study, four key water quality indicators,namely, ammonia nitrogen(NH_4^+-N), permanganate index(COD_(Mn)), total phosphorus(TP) and total nitrogen(TN) at 71 sampling sites were selected to evaluate water quality and its spatial variation identification. More concerns were emphasized on the anthropogenic factors(land use pattern) and natural factors(river density, elevation and precipitation) to quantify the overall water quality variations at different spatial scales. Results showed that the Yi-Shu-Si River sub-basin had a better water quality status than the Huai River sub-basin. The moderate polluted area nearly distributed in the upper and middle reaches of the Shaying River and Guo River. The high cluster centers which were surrounded with COD_(Mn), NH_4^+-N, TN and TP mainly also distributed in the upper and middle reaches of the Shaying River and Guo River. Redundancy analysis showed that the 200 m buffer area acted as the most sensitive area, which was easily subjected to pollution. The precipitation was identified as the most important variables among all the studied hydrological units, followed by farmland, urban land or elevation. The point source pollution was still existed although the non-point source pollution was also identified. The urban surface runoff pollution was severer than farmland fertilizer loss at the sub-basin scale in flood season, while the farmland showed "small-scale" effects for explaining overall water quality variations. This research is helpful for identifying the overall water quality variations from the scale-process interactions and providing a scientific basis for pollution control and decision making for the Huai River Basin.展开更多
The microbial quality of urban recreational water is of great concern to public health.The monitoring of indicator organisms and several pathogens alone is not sufficient to accurately and comprehensively identify mic...The microbial quality of urban recreational water is of great concern to public health.The monitoring of indicator organisms and several pathogens alone is not sufficient to accurately and comprehensively identify microbial risks.To assess the levels of bacterial pathogens and health risks in urban recreational water,we analyzed pathogen diversity and quantified four pathogens in 46 water samples collected from waterbodies in Beijing Olympic Forest Park in one year.The pathogen diversity revealed by 16 S r RNA gene targeted next-generation sequencing(NGS) showed that 16 of 40 genera and 13 of 76 reference species were present.The most abundant species were Acinetobacter johnsonii,Mycobacterium avium and Aeromonas spp.Quantitative polymerase chain reaction(q PCR) of Escherichia coli(uid A),Aeromonas(aer A),M.avium(16S r RNA),Pseudomonas aeruginosa(oaa) and Salmonella(inv A) showed that the aer A genes were the most abundant,occurring in all samples with concentrations of 10^(4–6) genome copies/100 m L,followed by oaa,inv A and M.avium.In total,34.8% of the samples harbored all genes,indicating the prevalence of these pathogens in this recreational waterbody.Based on the q PCR results,a quantitative microbial risk assessment(QMRA) showed that the annual infection risks of Salmonella,M.avium and P.aeruginosa in five activities were mostly greater than the U.S.EPA risk limit for recreational contacts,and children playing with water may be exposed to the greatest infection risk.Our findings provide a comprehensive understanding of bacterial pathogen diversity and pathogen abundance in urban recreational water by applying both NGS and q PCR.展开更多
文摘It is of great significance to have a clear understanding of the international environment that China faces. But this is an uneasy job. Since September 11, the world situation has become so complicated that it is hard to grasp its essence even with painstaking efforts. To judge such an already complicated international environment from China’s perspective adds more difficulties, for different people usually have different views due to the different angles from which they see the situation and different methods they adopt. This, understandably, leads to hot debates within the Chinese academic circles. To provide a stage for exchange of views, at the invitation of the CIR Expert Forum, some well-known scholars and experts on international relations from Beijing gathered to hold a symposium on November 5, 2002, with the theme of "How to assess the international environment that China faces". The speeches at the symposium will be published in two installments. Following are the first half.
文摘Ever since Bush entered the White house, especially after 9/11 events, America has successively published series of strategic documents, such as the Nuclear Posture Review, Quadrennial Defense Review, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction. After its unilateralist practices gained points military and lost points politically in the Afghan war and the Iraq war, the multi-lateralist posture on dealing with
文摘Aim: To investigate the causes and costs of flexible ureteroscope damage, and to develop recommendations to limit damage. Methods: The authors analysed repair figures and possible causes of damage to 35 instruments sent for repair to a leading UK supplier over a 1-year period, and calculated cost figures for maintenance of the instruments as opposed to repair and replacement costs. Results: All damages were handling-induced and therefore did not fall under the manufacturer's warranty: 28 % were damaged by misfiring of the laser inside the instrument; 72 %, mainly crushing and stripping of the ureteroscope shaft tube, were likely to have occurred during out-of-surgery handling, washing and disinfection. Seventeen (4 %) instruments were not repaired and consequently taken out of service due to the extensive costs involved. Eighteen (51%) ureteroscopes were repaired at an average cost of 10 833 USD. Conclusion: Damages to flexible ureteroscopes bear considerable costs. Most damages occur during handling between surgical procedures. Thorough adherence to handling procedures, and courses for theater staff and surgeons on handling flexible instruments may help to reduce these damages and prove a cost-saving investment. The authors provide a list of recommended procedural measures that may help to prevent such damages.
基金supported partially by the National Key Research and Development Program of China(2018YFB1004903)National Natural Science Foundation of China(61802453,U1911401,U1811461)+1 种基金Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(19lgpy216)Research Projects of Zhejiang Lab(2019KD0AB03).
文摘Recent image aesthetic assessment methods have achieved remarkable progress due to the emergence of deep convolutional neural networks(CNNs).However,these methods focus primarily on predicting generally perceived preference of an image,making them usually have limited practicability,since each user may have completely different preferences for the same image.To address this problem,this paper presents a novel approach for predicting personalized image aesthetics that fit an individual user’s personal taste.We achieve this in a coarse to fine manner,by joint regression and learning from pairwise rankings.Specifically,we first collect a small subset of personal images from a user and invite him/her to rank the preference of some randomly sampled image pairs.We then search for the K-nearest neighbors of the personal images within a large-scale dataset labeled with average human aesthetic scores,and use these images as well as the associated scores to train a generic aesthetic assessment model by CNN-based regression.Next,we fine-tune the generic model to accommodate the personal preference by training over the rankings with a pairwise hinge loss.Experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively learn personalized image aesthetic preferences,clearly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.Moreover,we show that the learned personalized image aesthetic benefits a wide variety of applications.
基金The National Natural Science Foundation Youth Fund of China
文摘Background Recently, the combination of sevoflurane and remifentanil has been widely used in general anesthesia. In this study, we investigated the sevoflurane-remifentanil pharmacodynamic interactions at clinical concentrations using the observer's assessment of alertness/sedation (OAA/S) and the bispectral index (BIS) by response surface analysis. Methods Totally 65 American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) I patients age 20 to 50 years old were included in this study. Patients were randomly assigned to be anesthetized with different target end-tidal sevoflurane concentrations that ranged from 0.2% to 3.4% in increments of 0.2%. The end-tidal sevoflurane concentration was maintained constant throughout the study. Remifentanil was infused with a target controlled infusion (TCI) system at increasing step-wise concentrations from 1 ng/ml to 10 ng/ml. The values of OAA/S and BIS at different sevoflurane-remifentanil concentration combinations were measured. The pharmacodynamic interactions between sevoflurane and remifentanil were analyzed by a response surface method. The three-dimensional response surfaces were constructed with Minitab Software. Model parameters were estimated with NONMEM program. Results Sevoflurane and remifentanil acted synergistically on OANS. Sevoflurane alone could produce OANS 〈1 at a minimal alveolar concentration (MAC) of 0.93%. When used in combination with remifentanil at 1, 3, 6, and 10 ng/ml, the corresponding sevoflurane MACs were reduced to 0.79%, 0.58%, 0.48%, and 0.38%, with reductions of 17.2%, 37.6%, 48.4%, and 62.0% from baseline, respectively. In patients administered remifentanil alone, the OANS score was 〉3 even when the remifentanil concentration reached 10 ng/ml. BIS was closely associated with the sevoflurane concentration and the remifentanil concentration did not noticeably influence the relationship between the sevoflurane concentration and BIS. A sevoflurane concentration of (1.04+0.19)% to (1.81+0.21)% could maintain a BIS between 60 and 40. Conclusions The response surface method can analyze the pharmacodynamic interactions between remifentanil and sevoflurane qualitatively and quantitatively. Within the range of our study (remifentanil 〈10 ng/ml, sevoflurane 〈3.4%), the two drugs produced synergistic effects on OAA/S but had no interactive effect on BIS. A guideline of BIS between 40 and 60 may cause excessive anesthesia when opioids are used to maintain anesthesia.
基金supported by the National Grand Science and Technology Special Project of Water Pollution Control and Improvement (Grant No. 2014ZX07204-006)the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41571028)the Key Point Deploy Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No.KFZD-SW-301)
文摘Quantitative assessment of water quality and its spatial variation identification, as well as the discernment of primary factors affecting water quality are in its urgent in water environment management. In this study, four key water quality indicators,namely, ammonia nitrogen(NH_4^+-N), permanganate index(COD_(Mn)), total phosphorus(TP) and total nitrogen(TN) at 71 sampling sites were selected to evaluate water quality and its spatial variation identification. More concerns were emphasized on the anthropogenic factors(land use pattern) and natural factors(river density, elevation and precipitation) to quantify the overall water quality variations at different spatial scales. Results showed that the Yi-Shu-Si River sub-basin had a better water quality status than the Huai River sub-basin. The moderate polluted area nearly distributed in the upper and middle reaches of the Shaying River and Guo River. The high cluster centers which were surrounded with COD_(Mn), NH_4^+-N, TN and TP mainly also distributed in the upper and middle reaches of the Shaying River and Guo River. Redundancy analysis showed that the 200 m buffer area acted as the most sensitive area, which was easily subjected to pollution. The precipitation was identified as the most important variables among all the studied hydrological units, followed by farmland, urban land or elevation. The point source pollution was still existed although the non-point source pollution was also identified. The urban surface runoff pollution was severer than farmland fertilizer loss at the sub-basin scale in flood season, while the farmland showed "small-scale" effects for explaining overall water quality variations. This research is helpful for identifying the overall water quality variations from the scale-process interactions and providing a scientific basis for pollution control and decision making for the Huai River Basin.
基金supported by the Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.51138006)the National Key Research on Water Environment Pollution Control in China(No.2012ZX07301-001)
文摘The microbial quality of urban recreational water is of great concern to public health.The monitoring of indicator organisms and several pathogens alone is not sufficient to accurately and comprehensively identify microbial risks.To assess the levels of bacterial pathogens and health risks in urban recreational water,we analyzed pathogen diversity and quantified four pathogens in 46 water samples collected from waterbodies in Beijing Olympic Forest Park in one year.The pathogen diversity revealed by 16 S r RNA gene targeted next-generation sequencing(NGS) showed that 16 of 40 genera and 13 of 76 reference species were present.The most abundant species were Acinetobacter johnsonii,Mycobacterium avium and Aeromonas spp.Quantitative polymerase chain reaction(q PCR) of Escherichia coli(uid A),Aeromonas(aer A),M.avium(16S r RNA),Pseudomonas aeruginosa(oaa) and Salmonella(inv A) showed that the aer A genes were the most abundant,occurring in all samples with concentrations of 10^(4–6) genome copies/100 m L,followed by oaa,inv A and M.avium.In total,34.8% of the samples harbored all genes,indicating the prevalence of these pathogens in this recreational waterbody.Based on the q PCR results,a quantitative microbial risk assessment(QMRA) showed that the annual infection risks of Salmonella,M.avium and P.aeruginosa in five activities were mostly greater than the U.S.EPA risk limit for recreational contacts,and children playing with water may be exposed to the greatest infection risk.Our findings provide a comprehensive understanding of bacterial pathogen diversity and pathogen abundance in urban recreational water by applying both NGS and q PCR.