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On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced its intention to initiate the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It will pay for about $69 billion in an all-cash deal and the price will place a 45% premium on Activision Blizzard's value. Based on industry prospect analysis, competitor analysis, and SWOT analysis, this paper studies the case of Microsoft acquiring Activision to analyze the potential benefits and risks of this typical acquisition behavior. This paper finds out that the two company has a positive outlook since the COVID-19 pandemic pushed cloud service and the gaming market. The industry analysis as well as the SWOT analysis of both companies also indicate that they have the opportunity to develop mutually and complement each other's weaknesses. This paper may help to understand the business purpose, risks, and benefits of the acquisition from the perspective of future cloud services market development. On the basis of the key findings, this paper believes that the acquisition will contribute more positive effects to both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.

BACKGROUND: There are conflicting results for robot-assisted (RA) pedicle screw fixation compared with freehand (FH) pedicle screw fixation. OBJECTIVE: This study was designed to retrospectively compare the accuracy and efficacy of RA percutaneous pedicle screw fixation and traditional freehand FH pedicle screw fixation in the treatment of thoracolumbar fractures. METHODS: A total of 26 cases were assigned to the RA group, and 24 cases were assigned to the FH group. The operation time, bleeding volume, and visual analog scale (VAS) score 1 day after the operation, and the anterior/posterior (A/P) vertebral height ratio of the injured vertebrae at 3 days and at internal fixation removal 1 year after the operation were compared between the two groups. Pedicle screw position accuracy was assessed according to Gertzbein criteria. RESULTS: The operation times of the RA group and FH group were 138.69 ± 32.67 minutes and 103.67 ± 14.53 minutes, respectively, and the difference was statistically significant. The intraoperative blood loss was 49.23 ± 22.56 ml in the RA group and 78.33 ± 23.90 ml in the FH group, and the difference was statistically significant. There was a significant difference in the A/P vertebral height ratio of the injured vertebrae 3 days after the operation compared with before the operation in both groups (P

Discrimination of semantic textual similarity refers to comparing the similarity between two or more entities (including words, short texts and documents) through certain strategies to obtain a specific quantitative similarity value. Traditional research put more experience into the similarity calculation of the original text content, using the matching degree or distance of characters or words as the yardstick to judge whether the text pairs are similar. However, there are still some problems to be solved in the following aspects: the key points of sentence meaning and word semantics, which play important role in the semantic expression of natural language, are not well integrated into the similarity discrimination, and the interactive features between texts are not fully utilized. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a novel discrimination structure based on the Siamese Network model and the idea of text matching. In this structure, we introduce sentence meaning key information and word semantic information to realize the extraction of word interaction feature information, and then we realize the text vector representation by using Siamese BiLSTM. The experimental results showed that the accuracy of the proposed model is higher than that of the basic models. &nbsp

Background: Ulcerative colitis (UC), belongs to inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), frequently induces liver inflammation and injury. Previous studies have proved that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) can suppress inflammation and improve intestinal mucosal injury in colitis, however, the effects of BMSCs on colitis-induced liver injury and the underlying molecular mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we investigated the effects and mechanisms of BMSCs in acute ulcerative colitis Balb/C mice, which were induced by 4 % dextran sodium sulphate (DSS). Methods: In this study, BMSCs derived from Balb/C mice were administrated by single intravenous injection with a dose of 5*10^7 cells/kg. And then, the effects and underlying molecular mechanisms were investigated. Firstly, degree of liver injury in colitis mice was evaluated by hepatic ALT, AST, ALP and TBIL levels, which were measured by specific determination kits, the levels of TNF-α, IL-6, IFNγ and LPS were examined by ELISA. Secondly, as the indicator of intestinal-liver barrier disorder, tight junction proteins were analyzed by western blot. Thirdly, the pathological changes in colon and liver were detected by H&E staining. At last, homing of BMSCs to lesion tissues was investigated by Immunofluorescence. Results: The results indicated that histopathological changes in model mice had been greatly alleviated, BMSCs infusion remarkably decreased the serum ALT, AST, ALP and TBIL level, and meanwhile reduced pro-inflammatory cytokines in liver tissues. Furthermore, homing of BMSCs was observed in colon and liver, and the disorder of intestinal-liver barrier was declined significantly. Conclusions: In conclusion, BMSCs alleviate liver injury induced by ulcerative colitis via repairing the intestinal-liver barrier and activating hepatocyte growth factor, it has potential application prospects in the treatment of liver injury induced by ulcerative colitis.

Prediction of gas pressure development within municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills is of great importance for the stability analysis and design of gas collection systems. This study presents a fully coupled bio-hydro-chemical model for the gas pressure development in landfills. The reduction of foam on the relative gas permeability and the variation of the intrinsic permeability with degradation degree are considered. The source terms in the governing equations of two-phase flow and solute transport are chosen from the biodegradation process of MSW. Both one-step landfilling and multi-step landfilling are calculated to compare the differences. It is found that the fast hydrolysis of fresh MSW produces most of the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and leachate within the first 2 months. During multi-step landfilling, the VFA and leachate produced from fresh MSW in the top flow downward to the bottom, leading to high gas production and high leachate saturation in the deep. Meanwhile, the high concentration of VFA reduces the surface tension of the leachate, enabling it to generate foam and further reduce gas permeability. Owing to the high gas production and low gas permeability, the excess gas pressure is easily developed in the deep layer. The maximum gas pressure of multi-step landfilling is about 2·5 times that of one-step landfilling. Case studies of the laboratory column test and in situ borehole test verify the accuracy of the model in predicting the temporal and spatial distribution of gas pressure. For the slope failure induced by high gas pressure, the evolution of shear strength and stability during a 2 year landfilling period is calculated and discussed.