Teams are pervasive in the history of mankind. Particularly in our fast-growing modern society, teams composed of members from different cultures and disciplines are quite often used at the ...workplace. Though widely used, the effectiveness of teams is inconsistent. Meta-analyses report a double-edged effect of diversity on creativity and innovation, suggesting that diversity needs to be tactfully managed if we want to leverage the creative potential of teams. The current paper strives to meet this challenge and makes recommendations on how to foster creativity in intercultural and interdisciplinary teams. It discusses the concepts of teams vs. groups and creativity vs. innovation. Drawing upon sociocultural theories of creativity and innovation, particularly literature reviews and meta-analyses, this paper attempts to identify non-cognitive, cognitive and environmental enablers of team creativity. The VICTORY model offers a summary of these enablers, as it focuses on team (T) and synthesizes both non-cognitive (Vision, Openness, Risk-taking, Yes-I-Can Mindset) and cognitive (Ideation, Combination) antecedents of team creativity. Yet it is only through the combination and integration of environmental factors (including communication, collaboration, and support, among others) that the effect of these antecedents can be fully realized.
Based on entrepreneurial psychology, the current situation of foreign students' use of learning strategies in Chinese learning is explored, the overall situation of learning strategies in this ...process is analyzed, and the relationship between foreign students' use of learning strategies and various factors are obtained through the designed questionnaire survey. First, a questionnaire suitable for the research respondents is designed to investigate the current situation of foreign students' use of learning strategies in Chinese learning; second, 200 questionnaires are distributed, and 195 questionnaires are recovered, with a recovery rate of 97.5%. After the invalid questionnaire is excluded, the effective rate is 95%; furthermore, the reliability of the questionnaire data is analyzed by SPSS25 software, and Cronbach's α coefficient is 0.869, which proves that the questionnaire has high reliability; finally, the overall situation of foreign students' use of learning strategies in Chinese learning is analyzed from the aspects of their majors, their levels of Chinese proficiency, Chinese learning time, age and personality. The results show that the frequency of using cognitive strategies in learning Chinese is the highest, with a score of 3.689; There is a positive correlation between the use of learning strategies and the degree of proficiency of Chinese; Among them, the foreign students who have studied for 2-3 years use learning strategies the most frequently, and the students aged 28-32 use learning strategies the most frequently in the Chinese level test 4. This study provides new ideas for foreign students' Chinese teaching and has a certain reference for foreign students' Chinese teaching strategies.
•Six convnet fusion architectures and their adaptations are investigated.•IAF R-CNN model for multispectral pedestrian detection is proposed.•An illumination-aware weighting mechanism is ...introduced.•A new state-of-the-art result on KAIST Benchmark is reported.
Multispectral images of color-thermal pairs have shown more effective than a single color channel for pedestrian detection, especially under challenging illumination conditions. However, there is still a lack of studies on how to fuse the two modalities effectively. In this paper, we deeply compare six different convolutional network fusion architectures and analyse their adaptations, enabling a vanilla architecture to obtain detection performances comparable to the state-of-the-art results. Further, we discover that pedestrian detection confidences from color or thermal images are correlated with illumination conditions. With this in mind, we propose an Illumination-aware Faster R-CNN (IAF R-CNN). Specifically, an Illumination-aware Network is introduced to give an illumination measure of the input image. Then we adaptively merge color and thermal sub-networks via a gate function defined over the illumination value. The experimental results on KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Benchmark validate the effectiveness of the proposed IAF R-CNN.
Background
Cadmium is a ubiquitous toxic heavy metal and environmental toxicant. Inflammation exerts central roles in the process of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, few ...epidemiological studies on the correlation between cadmium exposure and COPD are available. The aim of this study was to evaluate the correlations among serum cadmium, inflammatory cytokines and pulmonary function in COPD patients.
Methods
All 940 COPD patients were finally recruited in this study. Demographic characteristics and clinical information were extracted. Fasting serum was collected. Serum cadmium was detected through graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometry. Serum inflammatory cytokines were measured using enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay.
Results
All patients were classified into three groups according to the tertile division of serum cadmium concentration: low (<0.77 μg/L, L), medium (0.77–1.01 μg/L, M), and high (1.01 μg/L, H). Logistic regression analysis found that serum cadmium was inversely correlated with pulmonary function before and after adjusted confounding variables. When stratified by gender, serum cadmium was still negatively correlated with pulmonary function in COPD patients. Moreover, higher serum cadmium elevated CAT (COPD Assessment Test) score before and after adjusted confounding variables. Though a non‐linear association between serum cadmium and inflammatory cytokines, serum cadmium was positively associated with inflammatory cytokines (TNF‐α and MCP‐1). TNF‐α and MCP‐1 exerted a partial mediator in the association between cadmium exposure and pulmonary function decline in COPD patients.
Conclusions
Serum cadmium concentration is inversely correlated with pulmonary function among COPD patients. Inflammatory cytokines may be important mediators for cadmium‐induced pulmonary function decline in COPD patients.
Prior studies in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) had indicated a potential correlation between cadmium (Cd) exposure and reduction in lung function. Nevertheless, the ...influence of Cd exposure on the progression of COPD remained unknown. Exploring the relationship between Cd exposure and the progression of COPD was the aim of this investigation.
Stable COPD patients were enrolled. Blood samples were collected and lung function was evaluated. Regular professional follow-ups were conducted through telephone communications, outpatient services, and patients' hospitalization records.
Each additional unit of blood Cd was associated with upward trend in acute exacerbation, hospitalization, longer hospital stay, and death within 2 years. Even after adjusting for potential confounding factors, each 1 unit rise in blood Cd still correlated with a rise in the frequencies of acute exacerbation, longer hospital stay, and death. Moreover, COPD patients with less smoking amount, lower lung function and without comorbidities were more vulnerable to Cd-induced disease deterioration.
Patients with COPD who have higher blood Cd concentration are susceptible to worse disease progression.
Quercetin is a kind of flavonoid compounds that comes from nature and is widely existed in the daily diet. Previous studies have found that quercetin has many effects such as anti-inflammatory, ...anti-oxidation and anti-cancer. Both in vivo and in vitro experiments have demonstrated that quercetin can exert anti-tumor effects by altering cell cycle progression, inhibiting cell proliferation, promoting apoptosis, inhibiting angiogenesis and metastasis progression, and affecting autophagy. This review summarizes the evidence for the pharmacological potential and inhibition of quercetin on cancers, supporting the viewpoint that quercetin should be adequately considered as a therapeutic agent against various cancers.
Biodegradable nanoprodrugs, inheriting the antitumor effects of chemotherapy drugs and overcoming the inevitable drawback of side effects on normal tissues, hold promise as next‐generation cancer ...therapy candidates. Biodegradable nanoprodrugs of transferrin‐modified MgO2 nanosheets are developed to selectively deliver reactive oxygen species to cancer cells for molecular dynamic therapy strategy. The nanosheets favor the acidic and low catalase activity tumor microenvironment to react with proton and release nontoxic Mg2+. This reaction simultaneously produces abundant H2O2 to induce cell death and damage the structure of transferrin to release Fe3+, which will react with H2O2 to produce highly toxic ·OH to kill tumor cells.
Biodegradable nanoprodrugs of transferrin‐modified MgO2 nanosheets are developed to selectively deliver reactive oxygen species to cancer cells for molecular dynamic therapy strategy. The nanosheets favor acidic conditions and low catalase activity in the tumor microenvironment to react with protons and release nontoxic Mg2+. This reaction simultaneously produces abundant H2O2 and highly toxic ·OH, which destroys tumor cells.
The Internet of vehicles (IoV) is an Internet-of-things-based network in the area of transportation. It comprises sensors, network communication, automation control, and data processing and enables ...connectivity between vehicles and other objects. This study performed main path analysis (MPA) to investigate the trajectory of research regarding the IoV. Studies were extracted from the Web of Science database, and citation networks among these studies were generated. MPA revealed that research in this field has mainly covered media access control, vehicle-to-vehicle channels, device-to-device communications, layers, non-orthogonal multiple access, and sixth-generation communications. Cluster analysis and data mining revealed that the main research topics related to the IoV included wireless channels, communication protocols, vehicular ad hoc networks, security and privacy, resource allocation and optimization, autonomous cruise control, deep learning, and edge computing. By using data mining and statistical analysis, we identified emerging research topics related to the IoV, namely blockchains, deep learning, edge computing, cloud computing, vehicular dynamics, and fifth- and sixth-generation mobile communications. These topics are likely to help drive innovation and the further development of IoV technologies and contribute to smart transportation, smart cities, and other applications. On the basis of the present results, this paper offers several predictions regarding the future of research regarding the IoV.
Cancer cells frequently display fundamentally altered cellular metabolism, which provides the biochemical foundation and directly contributes to tumorigenicity and malignancy. Rewiring of metabolic ...programmes, such as aerobic glycolysis and increased glutamine metabolism, are crucial for cancer cells to shed from a primary tumor, overcome the nutrient and energy deficit, and eventually survive and form metastases. However, the role of lipid metabolism that confers the aggressive properties of malignant cancers remains obscure. The present review is focused on key enzymes in lipid metabolism associated with metastatic disease pathogenesis. We also address the function of an important membrane structure-lipid raft in mediating tumor aggressive progression. We enumerate and integrate these recent findings into our current understanding of lipid metabolic reprogramming in cancer metastasis accompanied by new and exciting therapeutic implications.
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