National trends in resection of the distal pancreas

AIM:To investigate national trends in distal pancreatectomy(DP) through query of three national patient care databases.METHODS:From the Nationwide Inpatient Sample(NIS,2003-2009),the National Surgical Quality Improvement Project(NSQIP,2005-2010),and the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results(SEER,2003-2009) databases using appropriate diagnostic and procedural codes we identified all patients with a diagnosis of a benign or malignant lesion of the body and/or tail of the pancreas that had undergone a partial or distal pancreatectomy.Utilization of laparoscopy was defined in NIS by the International Classification of Diseases,Ninth Revision correspondent procedure code;and in NSQIP by the exploratory laparoscopy or unlisted procedure current procedural terminology codes.In SEER,patients were identified by the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology,Third Edition diagnosis codes and the SEER Program Code Manual,third edition procedure codes.We analyzed the databases with respect to trends of inpatient outcome metrics,oncologic outcomes,and hospital volumes in patients with lesions of the neck and body of the pancreas that underwent operative resection.RESULTS:NIS,NSQIP and SEER identified 4242,2681 and 11 082 DP resections,respectively.Overall,laparoscopy was utilized in 15%(NIS) and 27%(NSQIP).No significant increase was seen over the course of the study.Resection was performed for malignancy in 59%(NIS) and 66%(NSQIP).Neither patient Body mass index nor comorbidities were associated with operative approach(P = 0.95 and P = 0.96,respectively).Mortality(3% vs 2%,P = 0.05) and reoperation(4% vs 4%,P = 1.0) was not different between laparoscopy and open groups.Overall complications(10% vs 15%,P < 0.001),hospital costs [44 741 dollars,interquartile range(IQR) 28 347-74 114 dollars vs 49 792 dollars,IQR 13 299-73 463,P = 0.02] and hospital length of stay(7 d,IQR 4-11 d vs 7 d,IQR 6-10,P < 0.001) were less when laparoscopy was utilized.One and two year survival after resection for malignancy were unchanged over the course of the study(ductal adenocarinoma 1-year 63.6% and 2-year 35.1%,P = 0.53;intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm and nueroendocrine 1-year 90% and 2-year 84%,P = 0.25).The majority of resections were performed in teaching hospitals(77% NIS and 85% NSQIP),but minimally invasive surgery(MIS) was not more likely to be used in teaching hospitals(15% vs 14%,P = 0.26).Hospitals in the top decile for volume were more likely to be teaching hospitals than lower volume deciles(88% vs 43%,P < 0.001),but were no more likely to utilize MIS at resection.Complication rate in teaching and the top decile hospitals was not significantly decreased when compared to non-teaching(15% vs 14%,P = 0.72) and lower volume hospitals(14% vs 15%,P = 0.99).No difference was seen in the median number of lymph nodes and lymph node ratio in N1 disease when compared by year(P = 0.17 and P = 0.96,respectively).CONCLUSION:There appears to be an overall underutilization of laparoscopy for DP.Centralization does not appear to be occurring.Survival and lymph node harvest have not changed.

ZTE Wins National IPTV Project in Belarus

ZTE Corporation (ZTE), a leading global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, successfully penetrates the Eastern European IPTV market by sealing an IPTV project contract with the Republican Unitary Telecommunication Enterprise (RUE) Beltelecom, a National Telecommunications Operator of the Republic of Belarus, in April 2008.

ANTEL Selects ZTE for Uruguay National GPON Project

On September 19,2011, ZTE Corporation, a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, announced it has been selected by the Administracion Nacional de Telecomunicaciones （ANTEL） to assist in providing 300,000 subscribers in the country with a gigabit passive optical network （GPON）. The tender was one of the largest ever put out in South America.

A Consideration of Issues in the Government＇s Public Housing Projects in Post-War Iraq

Post-war Iraq is a mix of potential opportunities, promising intentions, and difficult challenges. After 2003, the government adopted a program to manage the housing crisis and satisfy housing needs. Through a fieldwork survey, we aimed to present this program by reviewing the government targets, main housing problems, governmental legislations, and construction process. We found that the government abandoned its centralized role in its National Housing Project as it opened the door of Iraqi housing market to foreign and local investors. We also found that, considering the enormous need for housing the occupancy rate of the governmental housing units are so low and construction is also generally slow. We deduced that the pricing model of the government＇s national housing project is far from our general notion of public housing for low-income post-war people. Moreover, it is necessary for the government to formulate a clearer strategic vision and to adopt more innovative approaches to address effectively and rapidly the trade-offs of the short and long terms objectives of the reconstruction process in post-war Iraq.

ZTE Selected by BelTelecom for GPON National Broadband Network Project

ZTE Corporation announced on May 30, 2011 that it had won BelTelecom＇s national broadband network project in Belarus.

Poverty alleviation through e-commerce:Village involvement and demonstration policies in rural China

The diffusion of e-commerce has played a significant role in recent rural economic development in China.E-commerce is also considered as an efficient channel to alleviate poverty in rural China.Voluminous studies have investigated the contribution of e-commerce to agricultural development,yet it is lacking empirical evidence as to the effects of e-commerce on rural poverty alleviation.Since the year of 2014,in order to develop rural e-commerce,Chinese government launched the National Rural E-commerce Comprehensive Demonstration Project.This gradual involvement policy offered a natural experiment for evaluation of e-commerce.Based on village-level survey data from rural China and Heckit method,our study finds that rural e-commerce has a significantly positive effect on rural income.Moreover,the effect is inverted U-shaped for the relative-poverty villages.The estimation of the propensity scores matching model confirms that the results are robust.The following policy recommendations are proposed:(1)policy support to rural e-commerce should prioritize the povertystricken villages.By doing so,the marginal income effects of e-commerce will be maximized.(2)Investment in internet infrastructure and establishment of human resources for e-commerce in rural areas will have spillover effects,increasing rural income through the"digital dividend".

Main progress and prospect for China’s hydrogeological survey

This paper reviewed the main achievements of hydrogeological survey in China,summarized the significant progress of hydrogeological survey over the past decade,and forecasted the key responsibilities for hydrogeological survey in the“14th Five-year Plan”.The significant progress includes:China established the 1:50000 standard hydrogeological survey system with Chinese characteristics and produced the new generation of highquality hydrogeological maps;the national groundwater monitoring project was completed and accepted,which marks China taking the leading position in groundwater monitoring internationally;fruitful results were achieved in the national groundwater quality survey,and groundwater quality background values were basically identified and checked;hydrogeological and environmental geological survey was continuously promoted in karst areas and the ecological restoration of rocky desertification achieved remarkable results;China strengthened layer exploration techniques for groundwater,integrating the key and practical techniques of layer exploration and monitoring;the exploration of groundwater in the poverty-stricken regions and old revolutionary base areas were effectively promoted to strongly guarantee the poverty alleviation and drinking water safety;the mystery of desert groundwater was uncovered,making up for the shortage of 1:250000 hydrogeological survey in the Badain Jaran Desert;and more efforts were made to conduct survey on the water resources in the basin,and to finish the unified measurement of national-scale groundwater level.

SOD-like Activities of SOD and Cu(Ⅱ)Complexes inLiposomes

The SOD-like activities of SOD, four Cu(Ⅱ)Complexes, SOD-and Cu(Ⅱ)com-plex-liposomes were determined respectively by using cytochrome C method. The results showed that all of these systems had SOD-like activities to some extent of which the Cu(His)_2-liposome displayed the highest activity and the Cu(Ⅱ)complexes and liposomes had some positive cooperative action.

Vascular changes caused by deep brain stimulation using double-dose gadolinium-enhanced brain MRI

We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of 32 patients with medically intractable idiopathic Parkinson＇s disease who had undergone staged bilateral deep brain stimulation of the subtha-lamic nuclei from January 2007 to May 2011. The vascularture of the patients who received two deep brain stimulations was detected using double-dose gadolinium-enhanced brain MRI. The dimensions of straight sinus, superior sagittal sinus, ipsilateral internal cerebral vein in the tha- lamic branch and ipsilateral anterior caudate vein were reduced. These findings demonstrate that bilateral deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nuclei affects cerebral venous blood flow.

Building the Three Gorges Project for the Chinese Nation—An Interview with General Manager Lu Youmei, China Yangtze River Three Gorges Project Development Corporation

The Yangtze River has nurtured the fertile land on both its banks and hundreds of millions of Chinese people. but its raging waters have also wreaked havoc on the people living in its reaches. Since the founding of New China, large-scale surveys, planning, scientific research and feasibility studies have been carried out in an effort to harness the

Text-mining analysis using national R&D project data of South Korea to investigate innovation in graphene environment technology

This study investigates the possibilities offered by the development of graphene environment technology that can contribute to new and effective approaches for the transition to an ecologically benign ecosystem.To analyze the research and development progress in graphene environment technology,graphene environment technology research trends of South Korea for the years 2009e2020 are investigated by acquiring information pertaining to national research and development projects related to graphene environment technology from the National Science and Technology Information Service.Both structured and unstructured data are analyzed using diverse text-mining methods,such as keyword frequency analysis,association rule mining,and topic modelling.The results indicate that graphene research in South Korea is focused primarily on graphene use in batteries and energy-storage devices,such as solar cells,fuel cells,and secondary batteries.This study can help understand the manner by which the South Korean government has been investing in the research and development of graphene environment technology;additionally,it discusses the future applications and prospects of graphene for the next decade.

The national multi-center artificial intelligent myopia prevention and control project

In recent years,the incidence of myopia has increased at an alarming rate among children and adolescents in China.The exploration of an effective prevention and control method for myopia is in urgent need.With the development of information technology in the past decade,artificial intelligence with the Internet of Things technology(AIoT)is characterized by strong computing power,advanced algorithm,continuous monitoring,and accurate prediction of long-term progression.Therefore,big data and artificial intelligence technology have the potential to be applied to data mining of myopia etiology and prediction of myopia occurrence and development.More recently,there has been a growing recognition that myopia study involving AIoT needs to undergo a rigorous evaluation to demonstrate robust results.

Schooling and Income Effect of Education Development in China:Evidence from the National Compulsory Education Project in China’s Poor Areas

Whether investing in hardware for basic education is conducive to the long-term development of school-age children is a controversial issue in academic literature.Based on the data from the 2013 Chinese Household Income Project(CHIP),this paper uses the difference-in-differences(DID)method with cross-sectional data to evaluate the policy effects of China’s National Compulsory Education Project for Poor Areas launched in 12 central provinces in the mid-1990s.We fi nd that through the construction,renovation,or expansion of primary and junior middle school buildings and purchase of teaching equipment,this project achieved on its goal of“raising education levels”:the years of schooling of the benefi ciaries after they reached adulthood increased signifi cantly by roughly 0.7 years.However,the project was not found to have an“income effect”,i.e.,the income of the benefi ciary children did not increase with the increase in schoolings.The econometric analysis shows that although the project could raise the income levels of the children in adulthood,it did not significantly increase the likelihood of the beneficiary groups moving to cities as migrant workers.Limited by the late development of secondary and tertiary industries in poor counties,the benefi ciaries who stayed locally were less likely to engage in non-farm occupations,and thus their income did not signifi cantly increase.This indicates that policies like the Compulsory Education Project designed to improve school hardware in a short period of time can effectively promote the development of basic education in poverty-stricken areas.Nonetheless,to achieve the fundamental goal of raising income while increasing schooling,it is also necessary to actively guide people moving to cities to work as migrant workers and bolster the development of local secondary and tertiary sectors.

A Preliminary Study on Evaluation of Electro-Acupunctural Effect by Using Cortical Infrared Thermography

Objective: To explore the possibility of using cortical infrared thermography (CIT) and temperature in studying the principle of acupuncture and moxibustion. Methods: The changes of the cerebral cortical temperature during electro-acupuncture (EA) measured by CIT in twenty cats were observed. By opening the skull before experiments, the cortex of animals was revealed. The distribution of the conical temperature of the awakened animals was studied by AGA infrared thermovision, and the thermograms were analysed by computer. Results: (1) The thermograms of the profile of the cortex could be displayed clearly, the temperature was higher in the ante and lower in post-cortex than that in other regions. (2) No tendency of conical temperature ascending within 30 minutes in cats without EA. (3 ) After EA, the temperature of cortex generally increased by 0.3 to 1.7 degrees centigrade, and 5 min after EA, the increment of temperature was the highest, 10 min after EA, the temperature increment was higher than before EA, but lower than 5 min after EA. The conical temperature recovered 10 min after stopping the stimulation. (4) The temperature increment was more obvious in the regions of ant. ectosylvian, ant. supra-Sylvian and ant. Sylvian than that in other regions. No matter where the site of EA was, every group had its own special region of higher temperature increment. Conclusion: The temperature increased in the cortex were mainly in the somatosensory regions. The extent and position of temperature response of cortex after EA could be displayed with CIT directly by picture. The display of the temperature response could be taken as the indication of the nervous activity. CIT could be used to conduct the studies of the acupuncture and the brain.

An Intelligence Project Concerning the Future of the Chinese Nation

Asocial public welfare undertaking—"an intelligence project" of great practical significance and profound historical significance was formally unfolded to the public by the end of 1993. This is the glad tidings of 25 million people who live in the region of Iodine Deficiency Disease (IDD) as well as a great matter of concern for the 1.2 billion people of China.