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This paper offers a comprehensive study of the jurisprudence on the ‘as a result of unforeseen developments’ test under the WTO's safeguards (SG) rules. It contributes to the existing scholarship by making three fresh arguments. First, the Appellate Body's decision to ‘revive’ this test as a prerequisite for the application of SG measures is not necessarily incompatible with the drafting record of the SG Agreement, even though this agreement does not make explicit reference to the test. Second, the test is not excessively difficult to satisfy under the standard of review established by case law, even though governments failed to pass it in almost all SG disputes to date. Third, in sharp contrast, the recent US–Safeguard Measure on PV Products decision took a strikingly more deferential approach which fell far short of the established standard of review, leading to the first and only decision in which the test was found to be satisfied. This decision has arguably created a new standard which could lead to abuse of SG measures and damage to the dispute settlement system and hence should be avoided in future disputes.
To assess the accuracy of the Varian PerfectPitch six-degree-of-freedom (6DOF) robotic couch by using a Varian SRS QA phantom.
Methods:
The stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) phantom has five tungsten carbide BBs each with 7·5 mm in diameter arranged with the known geometry. Optical surface images and cone beam CT (CBCT) images of the phantom were taken at different pitch, roll and rotation angles. The pitch, roll, and rotation angles were varied from −3 to 3 degrees by inputs from the linac console. A total of 39 Vision RT images with different rotation angle combinations were collected, and the Vision RT software was used to determine the rotation angles and translational shifts from those images. Eight CBCT images at most allowed rotational angles were analysed by in-house software. The software took the coordinates of the voxel of the maximum CT number inside a 7·5-mm sphere surrounding one BB to be the measured position of this BB. Expected BB positions at different rotation angles were determined by multiplying measured BB positions at zero pitch and roll values by a rotation matrix. Applying the rotation matrix to 5 BB positions yielded 15 equations. A linear least square method was used for regression analysis to approximate the solutions of those equations.
Results:
Of the eight calculations from CBCT images, the maximum rotation angle differences (degree) were 0·10 for pitch, 0·15 for roll and 0·09 for yaw. The maximum translation differences were 0·3 mm in the left–right direction, 0·5 mm in the anterior–posterior direction and 0·4 mm in the superior–inferior direction.
Conclusions:
The uncertainties of the 6-DOF couch were examined with the methods of optical surface imaging and CBCT imaging of the SRS QA phantom. The rotational errors were less than 0·2 degree, and the isocentre shifts were less than 0·8 mm.
This paper presents a multi-band rectangular slot antenna, which can be used in Beidou navigation system, 4G, WLAN and 5G system. The proposed antenna adopts a single feeding line, generating circular polarization for satellite navigation, and linear polarization for mobile communication systems. The proposed antenna consists of three c-type resonators and three rectangular loop slots. A c-type resonator and a rectangular loop slot work together to produce a usable frequency band. Multiple frequency bands can be generated by increasing the number of c-type resonator and rectangular loop slots. It is found that the c-type resonator changes the current distribution on the antenna surface, making the axial ratio less than 3 dB in the low frequency bands. Eventually, five operation frequency bands are realized. Experimentally, it is verified that the impedance bandwidths of each frequency band are 11.8% (1.12–1.26 GHz), 15.4% (1.5–1.75 GHz), 11.9% (2.36–2.66 GHz), 19.7% (3.15–3.84 GHz) and 2.6% (4.47–4.59 GHz), respectively. The measured 3 dB axial ratio bandwidths are 20 MHz at 1.2 and 1.56 GHz, fully covering BDS B1 and B2 bands. The measured gains are 3, 3.59, 4.07, 4.2 and 4.35 dBi, respectively.
Evidence on the long-term comparative effectiveness of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) psychotherapies in adults remains unknown. Therefore, we performed an extensive network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to determine the comparative effectiveness of psychotherapies for people diagnosed with PTSD.
Methods
A comprehensive search was conducted in Cochrane library, Embase, Medline-OVID, PubMed, Scopus, and Psych-Info until March 2021. Studies on the effectiveness of cognitive processing therapy (CPT), cognitive therapy (CT), eye movement desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR), narrative exposure therapy (NET), prolonged exposure (PE), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), present-centred therapy (PCT), brief eclectic psychotherapies (BEP), psychodynamic therapy (PDT) or combination therapies compared to no treatment (NT) or treatment as usual (TAU) in adults with PTSD were included. Frequentist and Bayesian approaches were used for analysis in R-software.
Results
We included 98 RCTs with 5567 participants from 18 897 studies. CPT, EMDR, CT, NET, PE, CBT, and PCT were significant to reduce PTSD symptoms (SMD range: −1.53 to −0.75; Certainty: very low to high) at immediate post-treatment and ranked accordingly. Longitudinal analysis found EMDR (1.02) and CPT (0.85) as the significant therapies with large effect size in short-term and long-term follow-up, respectively. NET and CPT showed higher proportion of loss of PTSD diagnosis (RR range: 5.51–3.45) while there were no significant psychotherapies for retention rate compared to NT.
Conclusions:
Our findings provide evidence for improving current guidelines and informing clinical decision-making for PTSD management. However, the best PTSD treatment plan should be tailored to patients' needs, characteristics, and clinician expertise.
This study investigated the developmental pattern of early lexical production and composition in Mandarin-speaking children. Forty Mandarin-speaking children and their parents participated in this one-and-a-half-year longitudinal study, and naturalistic samples of parent-to-child speech in toy play were collected when the children were 1;8, 2;2, and 3;0. The results showed that children’s lexical production increased significantly between ages 1;8 and 3;0. The proportion of closed-class words increased significantly with age, whereas the proportion of common nouns showed the inverse pattern, indicating the role of grammatical words increased as the children grew. Furthermore, nouns and verbs were predominant in Mandarin-speaking children between ages 1;8 and 3;0, and Mandarin-speaking children used more verbs than nouns at 2;2 and 3;0 in the toy play context. The longitudinal study clarifies early lexical development in Mandarin-speaking children, which provides a valuable contrast for different language systems.
Consumers make trade-offs when they choose between utilitarian and hedonic products. The former is practical, instrumental, and functional, whereas the latter is sensational and experiential. Prior research shows that people feel more guilt when they contemplate on engaging in hedonic consumption than engaging in utilitarian consumption. The current research investigates the effect of decision targets (i.e., making decisions for oneself or another person) on preferences for utilitarian and hedonic products. Consumers deciding for others were more likely to choose hedonic over utilitarian options than were consumers deciding for themselves. Utilitarian/hedonic was manipulated either through attributes of similar products (Study 1) or through different products (Study 2). Anticipatory guilt accounted for such self–other difference (Study 2). In particular, anticipatory guilt triggered by contemplating hedonic consumption is less for consumers who made choices for others than for those who made choices for themselves. In sum, preferences for utilitarian and hedonic products depend on decision targets.
In the Three Gorges and adjacent areas, there are three planation surfaces and five terraces along the Yangtze River that record the evolution history of the river system. Here, we used diagnostic heavy minerals, U-Pb geochronology, and trace elements of detrital zircons from one planation surface, two terraces, and a modern point bar to reconstruct the evolution history of the upper Yangtze River, specifically the Chuan River in the Sichuan Basin. The sediments in the lowest planation surface had different felsic source rocks derived from east of the Three Gorges, which indicated that before the disintegration of the lowest planation surface (0.75 Ma), there were two paleorivers: the westward-flowing paleo-Chuan River and eastward-flowing paleo-Yangtze River separated by the Huangling Dome. At 0.75–0.73 Ma, the dominant detrital zircons from the Sichuan Basin in the sediments of terrace T5 (the highest terrace) confirmed that the paleo-Yangtze River cut through the Three Gorges and captured the paleo-Chuan River, and the Daliang Mountains became the new drainage divide. Finally, the appearance of materials from the upper Jinsha River in terrace T2 indicated that the paleo-Yangtze River progressively captured the paleo-Jinsha River, and the modern upper Yangtze River formed before 0.05 Ma. These river capture events of the upper Yangtze River confirmed the Quaternary uplift of the SE Tibetan Plateau.
To examine the thematic features of dignity therapy generativity documents of advanced cancer patients receiving chemotherapy in mainland China from the perspective of meaning-making during dignity therapy.
Methods
This is a qualitative descriptive study. Content analysis was used to analyze 24 dignity therapy generativity documents derived from a quasi-experimental trial of dignity therapy for advanced cancer patients receiving chemotherapy in a daycare center at a cancer hospital in northern China.
Results
Among the 24 advanced cancer patients whose generativity documents were analyzed, 14 were male and ranged in age from 26 to 78 years (average = 50.3). Two dimensions emerged from the data: (1) the sources of meaning in life, which consisted of social relationships, things and circumstances providing meaning in life, and (2) the ultimate meaning in life, referring to finding one’s real self and realizing the purpose in life, including personal life goals, dignity and autonomy, and morality of patients.
Significance of results
The multidimensional constructs of meaning in life with distinctive traditional Chinese cultural characteristics could provide insights into dignity-conserving care for advanced cancer patients with Chinese culture and provide evidence for refining the implementation protocol of DT through intentionally addressing the ultimate meaning of patients in the therapeutic session.
Understanding various historical entity information (e.g., persons, locations, and time) plays a very important role in reasoning about the developments of historical events. With the increasing concern about the fields of digital humanities and natural language processing, named entity recognition (NER) provides a feasible solution for automatically extracting these entities from historical texts, especially in Chinese historical research. However, previous approaches are domain-specific, ineffective with relatively low accuracy, and non-interpretable, which hinders the development of NER in Chinese history. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid deep learning model called “subword-based ensemble network” (SEN), by incorporating subword information and a novel attention fusion mechanism. The experiments on a massive self-built Chinese historical corpus CMAG show that SEN has achieved the best with 93.87% for F1-micro and 89.70% for F1-macro, compared with other advanced models. Further investigation reveals that SEN has a strong generalization ability of NER on Chinese historical texts, which is not only relatively insensitive to the categories with fewer annotation labels (e.g., OFI) but can also accurately capture diverse local and global semantic relations. Our research demonstrates the effectiveness of the integration of subword information and attention fusion, which provides an inspiring solution for the practical use of entity extraction in the Chinese historical domain.
In view of the cooperative guidance problem with time delay, this paper proposes a two-stage time-delay prescribed-time cooperative guidance law in the three-dimensional (3D) space. In the first stage, by introducing a time scaling function and time-delay consensus, the proposed cooperative guidance law can overcome the negative influence of time delay to guaranteed the desired convergence performance. Derived from the Lyapunov convergence analysis, the time-delay stability of the first stage can be ensured and the convergence time can be described as the relationship between delayed time and mission-assigned convergence time. Then, taking the prescribed-time-related convergence time as the switching point, the second stage begins with suitable initial conditions and all interceptors are governed by proportional navigation guidance. Finally, comparative simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed time-delay guidance law.
Portuguese explorations opened the sea-route to Asia, bringing armed trading to the Indian Ocean. This Element examines the impact of the 1511 Portuguese conquest of the port-kingdom of Melaka on early travel literature. Putting into dialogue accounts from Portuguese, mestiço, and Malay perspectives, this study re-examines early modern 'discovery' as a cross-cultural trope. Trade and travel were intertwined while structured by religion. Rather than newness or wonder, Portuguese representations focus on recovering what is known and grafting Asian knowledges-including local histories-onto European epistemologies. Framing Portuguese rule as a continuation of the sultanate, they re-spatialize Melaka into a European city. However, this model is complicated by a second one of accidental discovery facilitated by native agents. For Malay texts too, travel traverses known routes and spaces. Malay travelers insert themselves into foreign spaces by forging new kinship alliances, even as indigenous networks were increasingly disrupted by European incursions.
Hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL) is one of the rate-determining enzymes in the hydrolysis of TAG, playing a crucial role in lipid metabolism. However, the role of HSL-mediated lipolysis in systemic nutrient homoeostasis has not been intensively understood. Therefore, we used CRISPR/Cas9 technique and Hsl inhibitor (HSL-IN-1) to establish hsla-deficient (hsla-/-) and Hsl-inhibited zebrafish models, respectively. As a result, the hsla-/- zebrafish showed retarded growth and reduced oxygen consumption rate, accompanied with higher mRNA expression of the genes related to inflammation and apoptosis in liver and muscle. Furthermore, hsla-/- and HSL-IN-1-treated zebrafish both exhibited severe fat deposition, whereas their expressions of the genes related to lipolysis and fatty acid oxidation were markedly reduced. The TLC results also showed that the dysfunction of Hsl changed the whole-body lipid profile, including increasing the content of TG and decreasing the proportion of phospholipids. In addition, the systemic metabolic pattern was remodelled in hsla-/- and HSL-IN-1-treated zebrafish. The dysfunction of Hsl lowered the glycogen content in liver and muscle and enhanced the utilisation of glucose plus the expressions of glucose transporter and glycolysis genes. Besides, the whole-body protein content had significantly decreased in the hsla-/- and HSL-IN-1-treated zebrafish, accompanied with the lower activation of the mTOR pathway and enhanced protein and amino acid catabolism. Taken together, Hsl plays an essential role in energy homoeostasis, and its dysfunction would cause the disturbance of lipid catabolism but enhanced breakdown of glycogen and protein for energy compensation.
The identification of herbicide tolerance is essential for effective chemical weed control. According to whole-plant dose–response assays, none of 29 pond lovegrass [Eragrostis japonica (Thunb.) Trin.] populations were sensitive to penoxsulam. The effective dose values of penoxsulam causing 50% inhibition of fresh weight (GR50: 105.14 to 148.78 g ai ha−1) in E. japonica populations were much higher than the label rate of penoxsulam (15 to 30 g ai ha−1) in the field. This confirmed that E. japonica was tolerant to penoxsulam. Eragrostis japonica populations showed 52.83- to 74.76-fold higher tolerance to penoxsulam than susceptible barnyardgrass [Echinochloa crus-galli (L.) P. Beauv.]. The mechanisms of tolerance to penoxsulam in E. japonica were also identified. In vitro activity assays revealed that the penoxsulam concentration required to inhibit 50% of the acetolactate synthase (ALS) activity (IC50) was 12.27-fold higher in E. japonica than in E. crus-galli. However, differences in the ALS gene, previously found to endow target-site resistance in weeds, were not detected in the sequences obtained. Additionally, the expression level of genes encoding ALS in E. japonica was approximately 2-fold higher than in E. crus-galli after penoxsulam treatment. Furthermore, penoxsulam tolerance can be significantly reversed by three cytochrome P450 monooxygenase (CytP450) inhibitors (1-aminobenzotriazole, piperonyl butoxide, and malathion), and the activity of NADPH-dependent cytochrome P450 reductase toward penoxsulam in E. japonica increased significantly (approximately 7-fold higher) compared with that of treated E. crus-galli. Taken together, these results indicate that lower ALS sensitivity, relatively higher ALS expression levels, and stronger metabolism of CytP450s combined to bring about penoxsulam tolerance in E. japonica.
Submerged flexible vegetation occupies the core of aquatic ecosystem research. Hydrodynamics of submerged flexible vegetation and its interaction with the flow in an open channel are of great significance in studying the mass and momentum transports in the flow. In this study, a numerical model for highly flexible vegetation based on large eddy simulation and the immersed boundary method was used to simulate the flow–vegetation interaction. It is recognised that alternate vortices with opposite sense rotations appear at the flow–vegetation interface. These vortices prompt the vegetation canopy to have wave-like coherent waving motion, commonly called the monami phenomena. The spatial scale and the spreading velocity in the streamwise direction of these vortices determine the wavelength, frequency and amplitude of the vegetation coherent waving motion. In this study, the fast Fourier transform method was applied to analyse the factors affecting the characteristics of the vegetation coherent waving motion. It is revealed that, as the flow velocity increases, the wavelength of the coherent waving motion decreases, while the frequency and amplitude increase. Besides, as the vegetation spacing increases, the wavelength and amplitude of the coherent waving motion increase, but the frequency decreases. Furthermore, an increase in the relative density of vegetation magnifies the amplitude of coherent waving motion without affecting the wavelength and frequency.
The restrictions put in place in 2020 to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 limited or eliminated social connections that are vital for psychosocial well-being. The objectives of this research were to examine the impact of early pandemic-related restrictions on feelings of loneliness, depression, and anxiety as well as social activity disruption and their concomitant associations in a sample of community-dwelling older adults residing in a small-town region in the USA.
Design and Setting:
Cross-sectional data collected from an ongoing population-based cohort study in Southwestern, Pennsylvania.
Participants:
Analyses included 360 adults aged 65 years and older whose annual study assessment occurred during the first 120 days of pandemic-related restrictions.
Measurements:
Self-reported feelings of loneliness, depression, and anxiety due to the pandemic-related restrictions were each measured using a single question. Depressive symptoms and anxiety were also assessed with the modified Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 item tools. Disruption in a variety of common social activities was also assessed.
Results:
Feeling lonely affected 36% of participants who were more likely to be female, not currently married, and living alone. Giving up in-person visits with family was associated with significantly higher odds of feeling lonely, and feeling lonely was associated with significantly higher odds of feelings of anxiety and depression.
Conclusions:
Loneliness is a serious outcome of pandemic-related restrictions among older adults, potentially linked to loss of connection with family, and may be associated with increased feelings of depression and anxiety.
Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) demonstrates elevated iron content in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients within the basal ganglia, though it has infrequently been studied in relation to gait difficulties including freezing of gait (FOG). Our purpose was to relate QSM of basal ganglia and extra-basal ganglia structures with qualitative and quantitative gait measures in PD.
Methods:
This case–control study included PD and cognitively unimpaired (CU) participants from the Comprehensive Assessment of Neurodegeneration and Dementia study. Whole brain QSM was acquired at 3T. Region of interests (ROIs) were drawn blinded manually in the caudate nucleus, putamen, globus pallidus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, red nucleus, substantia nigra, and dentate nucleus. Susceptibilities of ROIs were compared between PD and CU. Items from the FOG questionnaire and quantitative gait measures from PD participants were compared to susceptibilities.
Results:
Twenty-nine participants with PD and 27 CU participants were included. There was no difference in susceptibility values in any ROI when comparing CU versus PD (p > 0.05 for all). PD participants with gait impairment (n = 23) had significantly higher susceptibility in the putamen (p = 0.008), red nucleus (p = 0.01), and caudate nucleus (p = 0.03) compared to those without gait impairment (n = 6). PD participants with FOG (n = 12) had significantly higher susceptibility in the globus pallidus (p = 0.03) compared to those without FOG (n = 17). Among quantitative gait measures, only stride time variability was significantly different between those with and without FOG (p = 0.04).
Conclusion:
Susceptibilities in basal ganglia and extra-basal ganglia structures are related to qualitative measures of gait impairment and FOG in PD.