Why have some former enemy countries established durable peace while others remain mired in animosity? When and how does historical memory matter in post-conflict interstate relations? Focusing on ...two case studies, Yinan He argues that the key to interstate reconciliation is the harmonization of national memories. Conversely, memory divergence resulting from national mythmaking harms long-term prospects for reconciliation. After WWII, Sino-Japanese and West German-Polish relations were both antagonized by the Cold War structure, and pernicious myths prevailed in national collective memory. In the 1970s, China and Japan brushed aside historical legacy for immediate diplomatic normalization. But the progress of reconciliation was soon impeded from the 1980s by elite mythmaking practices that stressed historical animosities. Conversely, from the 1970s West Germany and Poland began to de-mythify war history and narrowed their memory gap through restitution measures and textbook cooperation, paving the way for significant progress toward reconciliation after the Cold War.
Falls are a very dangerous situation especially among elderly people, because they may lead to fractures, concussion, and other injuries. Without timely rescue, falls may even endanger their lives. ...The existing optical sensor-based fall monitoring systems have some disadvantages, such as limited monitoring range and inconvenience to carry for users. Furthermore, the fall detection system based only on an accelerometer often mistakenly determines some activities of daily living (ADL) as falls, leading to low accuracy in fall detection. We propose a human fall monitoring system consisting of a highly portable sensor unit including a triaxis accelerometer, a triaxis gyroscope, and a triaxis magnetometer, and a mobile phone. With the data from these sensors, we obtain the acceleration and Euler angle (yaw, pitch, and roll), which represents the orientation of the user's body. Then, a proposed fall detection algorithm was used to detect falls based on the acceleration and Euler angle. With this monitoring system, we design a series of simulated falls and ADL and conduct the experiment by placing the sensors on the shoulder, waist, and foot of the subjects. Through the experiment, we re-identify the threshold of acceleration for accurate fall detection and verify the best body location to place the sensors by comparing the detection performance on different body segments. We also compared this monitoring system with other similar works and found that better fall detection accuracy and portability can be achieved by our system.
Anti-Japanese popular nationalism is rising high in China today. Little evidence to date proves that it is officially orchestrated. Nonetheless, Chinese popular nationalism still has deep roots in ...the state's history propaganda which has implanted pernicious myths in the national collective memory. Fueling mistrust and exacerbating a mutual threat perception, popular nationalism could be a catalyst for future Sino-Japanese conflict over the Taiwan problem, island disputes, and maritime resource competition. The increasingly liberalized but often biased Chinese media, the role of nationalist sub-elites, and the government's accommodation have all contributed to the strength of anti-Japanese nationalism, which cannot be mitigated by bilateral economic interdependence. To rid bilateral relations of the negative historical legacy, the two countries need the vision and determination to remove nationalistic myths and promote a shared history through mutual critique and self-reflection in transnational historians' dialogues.
Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) has been recognized to be an effective therapy for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, in China, the application of PR interventions is still less ...promoted. Therefore, this cross-sectional study aimed to understand COPD patients' intention to receive PR, capture the potential personal, social and environmental barriers preventing their willingness of receiving PR, and eventually identify demanding PR services with the highest priority from patients' point of view.
In total 237 COPD patients were recruited from 8 health care facilities in Zhejiang, China. A self-designed questionnaire was applied to investigate patients' intention to participate in PR and potentially associated factors, including personal dimension such as personal awareness, demographic factors, COPD status and health-related literacy/behaviors, as well as social policies and perceived environmental barriers. The demand questionnaire of PR interventions based on the Kano model was further adopted.
Among the 237 COPD patients, 75.1% of COPD patients were willing to participate in PR interventions, while only 62.9% of the investigated patients had heard of PR interventions. Over 90% of patients believed that the cost of PR services and the ratio of medical insurance reimbursement were potential obstacles hindering them from accepting PR services. The multiple linear regression analysis indicated that the PR skills of medical staff, knowledge promotion and public education levels of PR in the community, patients' transportation concerns and degree of support from family and friends were significantly associated with willingness of participation in PR interventions. By using the Kano model, the top 9 most-requisite PR services (i.e., one-dimensional qualities) were identified from patients' point of view, which are mainly diet guidance, education interventions, psychological interventions and lower limb exercise interventions. Subgroup analysis also revealed that patients' demographics, such as breathlessness level, age, education and income levels, could influence their choice of priorities for PR services, especially services related to exercise interventions, respiratory muscle training, oxygen therapy and expectoration.
This study suggested that PR-related knowledge education among patients and their family, as well as providing basic package of PR services with the most-requisite PR items to COPD patients, were considerable approaches to promote PR attendance in the future.
Allergic rhinitis is a common health concern that affects quality of life. This study aims to examine the online search trends of allergic rhinitis in China before and after the COVID-19 epidemic and ...to explore the association between the daily air quality and online search volumes of allergic rhinitis in Beijing.
We extracted the online search data of allergic rhinitis-related keywords from the Baidu index database from January 23, 2017 to June 23, 2022. We analyzed and compared the temporal distribution of online search behaviors across different themes of allergic rhinitis before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China, using the Baidu search index (BSI). We also obtained the air quality index (AQI) data in Beijing and assessed its correlation with daily BSIs of allergic rhinitis.
The online search for allergic rhinitis in China showed significant seasonal variations, with two peaks each year in spring from March to May and autumn from August and October. The BSI of total allergic rhinitis-related searches increased gradually from 2017 to 2019, reaching a peak in April 2019, and declined after the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the first half of 2020. The BSI for all allergic rhinitis themes was significantly lower after the COVID-19 pandemic than before (all p values < 0.05). The results also revealed that, in Beijing, there was a significant negative association between daily BSI and AQI for each allergic rhinitis theme during the original variant strain epidemic period and a significant positive correlation during the Omicron variant period.
Both air quality and the interventions used for COVID-19 pandemic, including national and local quarantines and mask wearing behaviors, may have affected the incidence and public concern about allergic rhinitis in China. The online search trends can serve as a valuable tool for tracking real-time public concerns about allergic rhinitis. By complementing traditional disease monitoring systems of health departments, these search trends can also offer insights into the patterns of disease outbreaks. Additionally, they can provide references and suggestions regarding the public's knowledge demands related to allergic rhinitis, which can further be instrumental in developing targeted strategies to enhance population-based disease education on allergic diseases.
Polyethylene based polyurethanes (PE-PUs) with 20% ethyl branches were synthesized through hydrogenation reaction of linear and thermoplastic hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene based polyurethanes ...(HTPB-PUs), which has not been explored widely. Linear and thermoplastic HTPB-PUs with
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ranged from 130~280 kg/mol were synthesized by microwave-assisted reaction. More importantly, we systematically researched a series of reaction conditions to ensure the degree of hydrogenation meanwhile slow down the extent of degradation reaction of urethane bond. In addition, structure and thermal performance of PE-PUs have been investigated in the present work by NMR, FT-IR, DSC and TGA. The
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of PE-PUs ranging from 120~207 kg/mol were carried out with a high temperature GPC. Moreover, the degree of crystalline of PE-PUs with 20% ethyl branches at the range of 10% to 33% were further explored by X-ray diffraction, which in turn certify that the PE-PUs possess certain strength but lower than polyethylene with no branches.
Road scene parsing is a common task in semantic segmentation. Its images have characteristics of containing complex scene context and differing greatly among targets of the same category from ...different scales. To address these problems, we propose a semantic segmentation model combined with edge detection. We extend the segmentation network with an encoder-decoder structure by adding an edge feature pyramid module, namely Edge Feature Pyramid Network (EFPNet, for short). This module uses edge detection operators to get boundary information and then combines the multiscale features to improve the ability to recognize small targets. EFPNet can make up the shortcomings of convolutional neural network features, and it helps to produce smooth segmentation. After extracting features of the encoder and decoder, EFPNet uses Euclidean distance to compare the similarity between the presentation of the encoder and the decoder, which can increase the decoder’s ability to restore from the encoder. We evaluated the proposed method on Cityscapes datasets. The experiment on Cityscapes datasets demonstrates that the accuracies are improved by 7.5% and 6.2% over the popular SegNet and ENet. And the ablation experiment validates the effectiveness of our method.
To investigate information-seeking behavior related to urticaria before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in China.
Search query data for terms related to urticaria were retrieved using Baidu Index ...database from October 23, 2017 to April 23, 2022, and daily COVID-19 vaccination doses data were obtained from the website of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Among the 23 eligible urticaria search terms, four urticaria themes were generated as classification, symptom, etiology, and treatment of urticarial, respectively. Baidu Search Index (BSI) value for each term were extracted to analyze and compare the spatial and temporal distribution of online search behavior for urticaria before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and to also explore the correlation between search query and daily COVID-19 vaccination doses.
The classification of urticaria accounted for nearly half of the urticaria queries on the internet. Regular seasonal patterns of BSI were observed in urticaria-related online search, by attaining its highest level in spring and summer and lowest level in winter. The BSIs of all urticaria themes significantly increased after the COVID-19 pandemic than that before the pandemic (all
<0.05). Xizang, Qinghai and Ningxia are the most active geographical areas for increased urticaria-searching activities after the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also a significant positive correlation between daily BSIs and daily COVID-19 vaccination doses in each urticaria theme. Cross-correlation analysis found that the search of symptom, etiology, and treatment attained their strongest correlation with daily COVID-19 vaccination doses at 11-27 days before the injection of vaccine, imply vaccination hesitation related to concerns of urticaria.
This study used the internet as a proxy to provide evidence of public search interest and spatiotemporal characteristics of urticaria, and revealed that the search behavior of urticaria have increased significantly after the COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19 vaccination. It is anticipated that the findings about such increase in search behavior, as well as the behavior of urticaria-related vaccine-hesitancy, will help guide public health education and policy regulation.
Coastal terrestrial-aquatic interfaces (TAIs) are crucial contributors to global biogeochemical cycles and carbon exchange. The soil carbon dioxide (CO2) efflux in these transition zones is however ...poorly understood due to the high spatiotemporal dynamics of TAIs, as various sub-ecosystems in this region are compressed and expanded by complex influences of tides, changes in river levels, climate, and land use. We focus on the Chesapeake Bay region to (i) investigate the spatial heterogeneity of the coastal ecosystem and identify spatial zones with similar environmental characteristics based on the spatial data layers, including vegetation phenology, climate, landcover, diversity, topography, soil property, and relative tidal elevation; (ii) understand the primary driving factors affecting soil respiration within sub-ecosystems of the coastal ecosystem. Specifically, we employed hierarchical clustering analysis to identify spatial regions with distinct environmental characteristics, followed by the determination of main driving factors using Random Forest regression and SHapley Additive exPlanations. Maximum and minimum temperature are the main drivers common to all sub-ecosystems, while each region also has additional unique major drivers that differentiate them from one another. Precipitation exerts an influence on vegetated lands, while soil pH value holds importance specifically in forested lands. In croplands characterized by high clay content and low sand content, the significant role is attributed to bulk density. Wetlands demonstrate the importance of both elevation and sand content, with clay content being more relevant in non-inundated wetlands than in inundated wetlands. The topographic wetness index significantly contributes to the mixed vegetation areas, including shrub, grass, pasture, and forest. Additionally, our research reveals that dense vegetation land covers and urban/developed areas exhibit distinct soil property drivers. Overall, our research demonstrates an efficient method of employing various open-source remote sensing and GIS datasets to comprehend the spatial variability and soil respiration mechanisms in coastal TAI. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to modeling carbon fluxes released by soil respiration in coastal TAIs, and our study highlights the importance of further research and monitoring practices to improve our understanding of carbon dynamics and promote the sustainable management of coastal TAIs.
Many countries/regions implemented strict border measures (e.g., 14-day quarantines) as a blanket policy to prevent COVID-19 importations, while proposed “travel bubbles” as an alternative to reduce ...the impact of border controls. We aim to examine the differential importation risks with departure origins and post-arrival controls.
We developed a Bayesian framework to model disease progress of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of travel measures and inferred the origin-specific disease prevalence among inbound travellers, using data on passengers arriving in Hong Kong and laboratory-confirmed imported cases. We estimated the origin-specific risks of releasing infectious travellers under different control strategies and traveller volumes. We also estimated the risk of having released infectious travellers when a resurgence occurs in departure locations with no imported cases during a certain period.
Under the then strict controls of 14-day quarantine and testing on day 12, the Philippines imposed the greatest importation risk among the studied countries/regions (95.8% of releasing at least one infectious traveller, 95% credible interval (CrI), 94.8-96.6%). This was higher than that from low prevalence countries/regions (e.g., 23.4%, 95% CrI, 21.6-25.3% for Taiwan) if controls relaxed (i.e., 7-day quarantine and test on day 5). Increased traveller volumes and resurgence in departure locations with low prevalence under relaxed controls did not impose a greater importation risk than high prevalence locations under stricter controls.
Moderate relaxation of control measures for travellers arriving from low prevalence locations did not impose higher risks of community outbreaks than strict controls on travellers from high prevalence locations.
Health and Medical Research Fund, Hong Kong.
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