Online crowdfunding holds the promise of empowering entrepreneurs and small businesses as an innovative alternative financing channel. However, doubts have been expressed as to whether online ...crowdfunding can deliver its promise because of the lack of empirical evidence regarding its effects. In this study, we investigate the effects that prosocial crowdfunding has on traditional microfinance institutions (MFIs). Combining multiple data sources, including data from Kiva.org and the Microfinance Information Exchange Market (MIX Market), we examine how access to crowdfunding influences MFIs’ sustainability and interest rates. We find that after joining Kiva, MFIs’ sustainability improves and interest rates decrease. Further investigation suggests that the changes mainly result from efficiency improvement, rather than increased supply of low-cost funds. We propose that joining an online crowdfunding platform induces greater transparency and crowd monitoring, which motivates and empowers MFIs to improve operations and become more efficient.
Some have argued that online intermediaries facilitate sales of counterfeit and fake products. This study investigates the association between anti-counterfeit efforts and the revenue models ...implemented by intermediaries. We build a stylized analytical model to investigate the conditions under which either the advertising model or the brokerage model would lead to a higher anti-counterfeit effort. We find the intensity of market competition plays a critical role in the intermediary’s decisions on anti-counterfeit effort. Specifically, when market competition is less intense, we show that the intermediary has a greater economic incentive to combat counterfeit selling in the brokerage model than in the advertising model. We supplement empirical support to the results. In particular, using a composite score, we find the intermediary that adopts the advertising model tends to have a lower composite score than one using the brokerage model. Our results suggest the focusing on anti-counterfeit measures is more a means rather than an ends in combating counterfeit sales and the policymakers should pay more attention to the impacts from the adopted revenue model.
Accurate urban flow prediction (UFP) is crucial for a range of smart city applications such as traffic management, urban planning, and risk assessment. To capture the intrinsic characteristics of ...urban flow, recent efforts have utilized spatial and temporal graph neural networks to deal with the complex dependence between the traffic in adjacent areas. However, existing graph neural network based approaches suffer from several critical drawbacks, including improper graph representation of urban traffic data, lack of semantic correlation modeling among graph nodes, and coarse-grained exploitation of external factors. To address these issues, we propose DiffUFP, a novel probabilistic graph-based framework for UFP. DiffUFP consists of two key designs: (1) a semantic region dynamic extraction method that effectively captures the underlying traffic network topology, and (2) a conditional denoising score-based adjacency matrix generator that takes spatial, temporal, and external factors into account when constructing the adjacency matrix rather than simply concatenation in existing studies. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DiffUFP over the state-of-the-art UFP models and the effect of the two specific modules.
Background: Prosocial crowdfunding helps the underprivileged obtain non-profit seeking loans from multitudinous lenders. Some platforms introduce team competition to motivate member participation and ...may thus induce team rivalry. Methods: We investigate how team rivalry affects lending decisions using data from Kiva.org. We argue that a rivalry relationship may engage teams to compete directly against rivals by lending to the same project or prevent them from doing so because they intend not to cooperate. Result: We find that a team is less likely to lend to a project that has received funding from its rival team, suggesting that rival teams tend to avoid cooperation. Conclusions: We discuss the implications of our findings for crowdfunding and competition-based motivation mechanisms in general.
Since the implementation of the Chinese economic reforms. The habitat quality of coastal has gradually deteriorated with economic development, but the concept of "ecological construction" has slowed ...the negative trend. For quantitative analysis of the correlation between the Pearl River Delta urban expansion and changes in habitat quality under the influence of the policy, we first analyzed the habitat quality change based on the InVEST model and then measured the impact of construction land expansion on the habitat quality through habitat quality change index (HQCI) and contribution index (CI) indicators. Finally, the correlation between urbanization level and habitat quality was evaluated using geographically weighted regression (GWR) and the Self-organizing feature mapping neural network (SOFM). The results indicated that: (1) during the study period from 2000 to 2020, habitat quality declined due to urban sprawl, indicating a deterioration of ecological structure and function, and the decrease was most significant from 2000 to 2010. (2) The urbanization index had a negative effect on the habitat quality, but the negative effect have improved after 2000, reflecting the positive effect of policies such as "ecological civilization construction" (3) The implementation degree of ecological civilization varies greatly among cities in the study area: Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, and Zhongshan have the best level of green development. These results reflect the positive role of policies in the prevention of damage to habitat quality caused by economic development and provide a reference for the formulation of sustainable urban development policies with spatial differences.
Previous studies on the pneumonia outbreak caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) were based on information from the general population. Limited data are available for pregnant women ...with COVID-19 pneumonia. This study aimed to evaluate the clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in pregnancy and the intrauterine vertical transmission potential of COVID-19 infection.
Clinical records, laboratory results, and chest CT scans were retrospectively reviewed for nine pregnant women with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 pneumonia (ie, with maternal throat swab samples that were positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 SARS-CoV-2) who were admitted to Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, from Jan 20 to Jan 31, 2020. Evidence of intrauterine vertical transmission was assessed by testing for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in amniotic fluid, cord blood, and neonatal throat swab samples. Breastmilk samples were also collected and tested from patients after the first lactation.
All nine patients had a caesarean section in their third trimester. Seven patients presented with a fever. Other symptoms, including cough (in four of nine patients), myalgia (in three), sore throat (in two), and malaise (in two), were also observed. Fetal distress was monitored in two cases. Five of nine patients had lymphopenia (<1·0 × 10⁹ cells per L). Three patients had increased aminotransferase concentrations. None of the patients developed severe COVID-19 pneumonia or died, as of Feb 4, 2020. Nine livebirths were recorded. No neonatal asphyxia was observed in newborn babies. All nine livebirths had a 1-min Apgar score of 8–9 and a 5-min Apgar score of 9–10. Amniotic fluid, cord blood, neonatal throat swab, and breastmilk samples from six patients were tested for SARS-CoV-2, and all samples tested negative for the virus.
The clinical characteristics of COVID-19 pneumonia in pregnant women were similar to those reported for non-pregnant adult patients who developed COVID-19 pneumonia. Findings from this small group of cases suggest that there is currently no evidence for intrauterine infection caused by vertical transmission in women who develop COVID-19 pneumonia in late pregnancy.
Hubei Science and Technology Plan, Wuhan University Medical Development Plan.
Lung cancer is the most common cancer that cannot be ignored and cause death with late health care. Currently, CT can be used to help doctors detect the lung cancer in the early stages. In many ...cases, the diagnosis of identifying the lung cancer depends on the experience of doctors, which may ignore some patients and cause some problems. Deep learning has been proved as a popular and powerful method in many medical imaging diagnosis areas. In this paper, three types of deep neural networks (e.g., CNN, DNN, and SAE) are designed for lung cancer calcification. Those networks are applied to the CT image classification task with some modification for the benign and malignant lung nodules. Those networks were evaluated on the LIDC-IDRI database. The experimental results show that the CNN network archived the best performance with an accuracy of 84.15%, sensitivity of 83.96%, and specificity of 84.32%, which has the best result among the three networks.
Rapid urbanization has a significant impact on the ecological environment. Net primary productivity (NPP) can effectively reflect the growth of urban vegetation and the carbon sequestration capacity ...of an ecosystem. Taking the rapidly growing Pearl River Delta (PRD) as our study area, the relative contributions of human activities and climate change to NPP were analyzed using an improved two-step method based on residual trend analysis. The decoupling index was used to compare the coordinated development of socioeconomic factors and the NPP in different time periods. This study lays the foundation for formulating comprehensive and reasonable urban low-carbon development measures. The results showed that (1) NPP decreased significantly before 2010, but by 2019, NPP in most regions of the PRD showed a slight increase. The NPP of new urban land was better than that of original urban land. (2) The negative contribution of climatic factors to NPP was clearer than that of human activities, and human activities contributed positively to NPP outside urban land. (3) The decoupling status of socioeconomic factors and NPP is improving, and the degree of decoupling in 2010–2019 was higher than that in 2000–2010. In conclusion, as the first forest urban agglomeration in China, the PRD has shown a good implementation of carbon sequestration policies, which can provide a reference for the coordinated development of urbanization and carbon sequestration.
Empirical studies based on patient flow data are needed to provide more materials to summarize the general pattern of patient distribution models. This study takes Shanghai as an example and tries to ...demonstrate the inpatient flow distribution model for different levels and specialties of medical institutions. Power, negative exponential, Gaussian, and log-logistic models were used to fit the distributions of inpatients, and a model of inpatient distribution patterns in Shanghai was derived, based on these four models. Then, the adjusted coefficient of determination (R
) and Akaike information criterion (AIC) values were used to assess the model fitting effect. The log-logistic function model has a good simulation effect and the strongest applicability in most hospitals. The estimated value of the distance-decay parameter β in the log-logistic function model is 1.67 for all patients, 1.89 for regional hospital inpatients, 1.40 for tertiary hospital inpatients, 1.64 for traditional Chinese medicine hospital inpatients, and 0.85 for mental hospital inpatients. However, the simulations at the tumor, children's and maternity hospitals, were not satisfactory. Based on the results of empirical analysis, the four attenuation coefficient models are valid in Shanghai, and the log-logistic model of the inpatient distributions at most hospitals have good simulation effects. However, further in-depth analysis combined with the characteristics of specific specialties is needed to obtain the inpatient model in line with the characteristics of these specialties.
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