576 research outputs found
The etiology of esophageal cancer in high- and low- risk areas of Jiangsu province, China
No full text [Background]Esophageal cancer (EC) remains one of the most common and fatal malignancies worldwide. The geographic variation in EC occurrence is striking, and China is an area with one of the highest incidences of EC. A number of epidemiological studies have been conducted toward EC in the past decades, results suggested that tobacco smoking, alcohol drinking, unhealthy dietary factors and chronic injuries of the esophageal mucosa are important in the development of this disease. Genetic polymorphisms in enzymes involved in metabolism of carcinogens may also influence individual susceptibility. However, the effects of major lifestyle and hereditary risk factors on the development of EC remain poorly understood in China. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the etiological heterogeneity between similar areas with great risk gradient. [Methods]From 2003 to 2007, a large population-based case-control study of EC has been conducted in a selected high-risk area and a selected low-risk area of Jiangsu Province, one of the highest cancer incidence areas in China. In total, 1,520 cases and 3,879 controls were recruited. In this thesis, we evaluated the role of major lifestyle factors such as tobacco smoking, alcohol drinking and dietary factors, as well as inherited determinants including family history of cancer and genetic polymorphisms of alcohol-metabolizing related genes on the risk of EC. In addition, we investigated how much of the risk gradient between two areas could be explained by variation in the distributions of major risk factors. [Results] Tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking moderately increased the risk of EC, while the positive associations were only found among men but not among women. Dietary factors were observed to play important roles in the development of EC. Specific dietary habits i.e., fast eating speed, and hot eating and/or drinking substantially elevated EC risk and could explain more than 20% of EC cases each. High intake of salty foods and fried foods, low consumption of raw garlic were also observed to increase the risk of EC. In addition to environmental and lifestyle factors, we confirmed that a positive family history can significantly increase EC risk, and found the inheritance may modify the effect of some unhealthy lifestyles. Moreover, we further explored the relationship between EC and single nucleotide polymorphismsof ADH1B, ADH1C and ALDH2 genes. Results showed that the slow metabolizing ADH1B G allele, ADH1C G allele and ALDH2 A allele significantly increased EC risk among moderate-to-heavy alcohol drinkers, and a significant interaction was observed between ALDH2 gene and alcohol consumption. Lastly, we found that more than 60% of EC cases could be attributable to major lifestyle risk factors in the study population; furthermore, dissimilar distribution of several lifestyle factors, together with variations of hereditary factors may be largely responsible for the incidence difference between two study areas. [Conclusion]The findings in this thesis confirm that unhealthy lifestyles including smoking, alcohol drinking and some dietary factors are the predominant risk factors of EC in China, and a large proportion of incidence difference between regions at varying risk could be attributed to the different prevalence of lifestyle factors. As most of the identified risk factors are modifiable, these could be translated into risk reduction prevention programs in China, and a substantial proportion of new EC cases are expected to be prevented by eliminating or avoiding these risk factors in the population. </p
The first Glosselytrodea (Insecta) from the latest Middle Permian of Anhui Province, China
No full textThe Middle Permian Sinojurina permiana n. gen., n. sp. is the oldest Chinese representative of the insect order Glosselytrodea. Despites of its strong similarities with the Australian Late Triassic genus Polycytella, it is not possible to attribute it to a precise family because of the great confusion in the systematic of this order.Le premier Glosselytrodea (Insecta) du Permien moyen de la province Anhui, China.
Sinojurina permiana n. gen., n. sp. du Permien moyen est le plus ancien représentant de l'ordre Glosselytrodea trouvé en Chine. Malgré ses fortes similarités avec le genre Polycytella du Trias supérieur d'Australie, il n'est pas possible de l'attribuer à une famille précise du fait de la grande confusion qui règne dans la systématique de cet ordre.Huang Diying, Nel André, Lin Qi-bin, Dong Fa-bing. The first Glosselytrodea (Insecta) from the latest Middle Permian of Anhui Province, China. In: Bulletin de la Société entomologique de France, volume 112 (2), juin 2007. pp. 179-182
The first Glosselytrodea (Insecta) from the latest Middle Permian of Anhui Province, China
No full textThe Middle Permian Sinojurina permiana n. gen., n. sp. is the oldest Chinese representative of the insect order Glosselytrodea. Despites of its strong similarities with the Australian Late Triassic genus Polycytella, it is not possible to attribute it to a precise family because of the great confusion in the systematic of this order.Le premier Glosselytrodea (Insecta) du Permien moyen de la province Anhui, China.
Sinojurina permiana n. gen., n. sp. du Permien moyen est le plus ancien représentant de l'ordre Glosselytrodea trouvé en Chine. Malgré ses fortes similarités avec le genre Polycytella du Trias supérieur d'Australie, il n'est pas possible de l'attribuer à une famille précise du fait de la grande confusion qui règne dans la systématique de cet ordre.Huang Diying, Nel André, Lin Qi-bin, Dong Fa-bing. The first Glosselytrodea (Insecta) from the latest Middle Permian of Anhui Province, China. In: Bulletin de la Société entomologique de France, volume 112 (2), juin 2007. pp. 179-182
«Angsten for medienes umenneskeliggjørende virkning»: Fremtidsmedier sett gjennom science fiction. - En respons til Jon Bing
No full textAbstract
Fear of the Dehumanizing Effect of Media: Future Media Seen through Science Fiction. A Response to Jon Bing.
In 1994 the Norwegian science fiction author and professor of law informatics Jon Bing wrote an essay about the media of the future. This article, written after a re-reading of Bing’s essay, reflects upon the changes that have taken place since the nineties up until today both in theoretical approaches to and popular discourse on digital media. Taking examples from recent science fiction and the current media discourse I show how the red thread Bing found in literature, «an anxiety about media’s dehumanizing effect,» is still central, and how it can be understood through an awareness of the digital dualism we can see today in the theories of the nineties
The Distinguishing Features of B\ue9la Bart\uf3k\ue2s \ue3Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op.20 \ue3
No full textInfluenced by the ideological trend of nationalism, B\ue9la Bart\uf3k (1881-1945), an important Hungarian composer in the 20th century, dedicated himself to compositions with native culture. His piano solo work, Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op.20 (1920), is made of traditional Hungarian peasant music.
In addition to its melody, mode scale, and the unique rhythm derive from the peasant music, this arrangement is created by using 20th-century compositional technique. Bart\uf3k had once claimed that this music piece is the most mature and integrated one among all his transcriptions of folk music.
The first chapter of the paper introduces the B\ue9la Bart\uf3k\ue2s journey of collecting the folk materials and the musical characteristics of Hungarian folk music, showing its thorough impact on his works. The second chapter discusses the classification of Bart\uf3k\ue2s different methods to compose transcriptions of folk music. The third chapter focuses on finding the distinguishing features of Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op.20. The compositional methods about how Bart\uf3k made use of the folk music are analyzed from aspects of melodic structure, rhythmic application, and mode scale
An Efficient Deployment Heuristic to Support Temporal Coverage of Heterogeneous Objects in Rotatable and Directional (R&D) Sensor Networks
No full textRotatable and directional (R&D) sensors are wireless sensors that have the sector-like coverage range and rotation capability. These sensors can provide temporal coverage of objects by periodically rotating to monitor them. An object is called \uce\ub4i-time covered if it can be monitored by R&D sensor(s) for at least \uce\ub4i portion of a period, where 0 < \uce\ub4i \ue2\ua4 1. Given a set of heterogeneous objects that have different \uce\ub4i-time covered requirements, the paper formulates a generalized R&D sensor deployment (GRSD) problem, which determines how to deploy the minimum number of R&D sensors to satisfy the coverage requirement of each object. We prove that the GRSD problem is NP-hard and develop an efficient heuristic to deploy R&D sensors based on the distribution and \uce\ub4i values of objects. Extensive simulation results show that our GRSD heuristic can save more sensors compared with other methods, which significantly reduces the deployment cost of R&D sensor networks
Efficient Flow Management in Multi-domain SDN-based Networks with Multiple Controllers
No full textIn the modern era of advanced information, the architecture of multi-domain networks is gradually being applied to data center networks, enterprise networks, and campus networks. In such networks, resource management must be flexible, scalable, and easy to expand. The emerging software-defined network (SDN) technique separates the control and data planes of a network, and makes it easy for network administrators to dynamically manage the network, thereby opening up new ways for network management.
This paper aims to apply SDN to multi-domain network environment for load balancing. Considering that in a large-scale network, not necessarily every of its domains will stay in a busy state. Thus, idle switches may cause waste in resources. One good way is to let their idle switches help share the loads of congested switches, so as to improve the overall utilization and performance of the network.
In our proposed load-balancing strategy, the controller in a busy domain first schedules routes for traffic flows to avoid congestion. In case that there is no alternative route for some congested links, a cross-domain load-balancing mechanism is invoked to find other paths on neighboring domains. This mechanism allows the system to still have opportunities under the premise of limited hardware resources to achieve load balance, thereby alleviating serious network congestion. According to the simulation results, our proposed strategy can effectively improve the overall performance of a multi-domain network
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