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In practice, it is observed that transformer-based models can learn concepts in context in the inference stage. While existing literature, e.g., \citet{zhang2023trained,huang2023context}, provide theoretical explanations on this in-context learning ability, they assume the input $x_i$ and the output $y_i$ for each sample are embedded in the same token (i.e., structured data). However, in reality, they are presented in two tokens (i.e., unstructured data \cite{wibisono2023role}). In this case, this paper conducts experiments in linear regression tasks to study the benefits of the architecture of transformers and provides some corresponding theoretical intuitions to explain why the transformer can learn from unstructured data. We study the exact components in a transformer that facilitate the in-context learning. In particular, we observe that (1) a transformer with two layers of softmax (self-)attentions with look-ahead attention mask can learn from the prompt if $y_i$ is in the token next to $x_i$ for each example; (2) positional encoding can further improve the performance; and (3) multi-head attention with a high input embedding dimension has a better prediction performance than single-head attention.

Pre-training is known to generate universal representations for downstream tasks in large-scale deep learning such as large language models. Existing literature, e.g., \cite{kim2020adversarial}, empirically observe that the downstream tasks can inherit the adversarial robustness of the pre-trained model. We provide theoretical justifications for this robustness inheritance phenomenon. Our theoretical results reveal that feature purification plays an important role in connecting the adversarial robustness of the pre-trained model and the downstream tasks in two-layer neural networks. Specifically, we show that (i) with adversarial training, each hidden node tends to pick only one (or a few) feature; (ii) without adversarial training, the hidden nodes can be vulnerable to attacks. This observation is valid for both supervised pre-training and contrastive learning. With purified nodes, it turns out that clean training is enough to achieve adversarial robustness in downstream tasks., Comment: To appear in AISTATS2024

Deep learning models have performed well on many NLP tasks. However, their internal mechanisms are typically difficult for humans to understand. The development of methods to explain models has become a key issue in the reliability of deep learning models in many important applications. Various saliency explanation methods, which give each feature of input a score proportional to the contribution of output, have been proposed to determine the part of the input which a model values most. Despite a considerable body of work on the evaluation of saliency methods, whether the results of various evaluation metrics agree with human cognition remains an open question. In this study, we propose a new human-based method to evaluate saliency methods in NLP by crowdsourcing. We recruited 800 crowd workers and empirically evaluated seven saliency methods on two datasets with the proposed method. We analyzed the performance of saliency methods, compared our results with existing automated evaluation methods, and identified notable differences between NLP and computer vision (CV) fields when using saliency methods. The instance-level data of our crowdsourced experiments and the code to reproduce the explanations are available at https://github.com/xtlu/lreccoling_evaluation., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, Accepted for LREC-Coling 2024 (Oral)

Wearing masks reduces the spread of COVID-19, but compliance with mask mandates varies across individuals, time, and space. Accurate and continuous measures of mask wearing, as well as other health-related behaviors, are important for public health policies. This article presents a novel approach to estimate mask wearing using geotagged Twitter image data from March through September, 2020 in the United States. We validate our measure using public opinion survey data and extend the analysis to investigate county-level differences in mask wearing. We find a strong association between mask mandates and mask wearing-an average increase of 20%. Moreover, this association is greatest in Republican-leaning counties. The findings have important implications for understanding how governmental policies shape and monitor citizen responses to public health crises.

We study the problem of multi-agent coordination in unpredictable and partially observable environments, that is, environments whose future evolution is unknown a priori and that can only be partially observed. We are motivated by the future of autonomy that involves multiple robots coordinating actions in dynamic, unstructured, and partially observable environments to complete complex tasks such as target tracking, environmental mapping, and area monitoring. Such tasks are often modeled as submodular maximization coordination problems due to the information overlap among the robots. We introduce the first submodular coordination algorithm with bandit feedback and bounded tracking regret -- bandit feedback is the robots' ability to compute in hindsight only the effect of their chosen actions, instead of all the alternative actions that they could have chosen instead, due to the partial observability; and tracking regret is the algorithm's suboptimality with respect to the optimal time-varying actions that fully know the future a priori. The bound gracefully degrades with the environments' capacity to change adversarially, quantifying how often the robots should re-select actions to learn to coordinate as if they fully knew the future a priori. The algorithm generalizes the seminal Sequential Greedy algorithm by Fisher et al. to the bandit setting, by leveraging submodularity and algorithms for the problem of tracking the best action. We validate our algorithm in simulated scenarios of multi-target tracking., Comment: Accepted to RSS 2023

Diffusion model has become a main paradigm for synthetic data generation in many subfields of modern machine learning, including computer vision, language model, or speech synthesis. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion model for generating synthetic tabular data. The heterogeneous features in tabular data have been main obstacles in tabular data synthesis, and we tackle this problem by employing the auto-encoder architecture. When compared with the state-of-the-art tabular synthesizers, the resulting synthetic tables from our model show nice statistical fidelities to the real data, and perform well in downstream tasks for machine learning utilities. We conducted the experiments over $15$ publicly available datasets. Notably, our model adeptly captures the correlations among features, which has been a long-standing challenge in tabular data synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCLA-Trustworthy-AI-Lab/AutoDiffusion.

Treatment effect estimation can assist in effective decision-making in e-commerce, medicine, and education. One popular application of this estimation lies in the prediction of the impact of a treatment (e.g., a promotion) on an outcome (e.g., sales) of a particular unit (e.g., an item), known as the individual treatment effect (ITE). In many online applications, the outcome of a unit can be affected by the treatments of other units, as units are often associated, which is referred to as interference. For example, on an online shopping website, sales of an item will be influenced by an advertisement of its co-purchased item. Prior studies have attempted to model interference to estimate the ITE accurately, but they often assume a homogeneous interference, i.e., relationships between units only have a single view. However, in real-world applications, interference may be heterogeneous, with multi-view relationships. For instance, the sale of an item is usually affected by the treatment of its co-purchased and co-viewed items. We hypothesize that ITE estimation will be inaccurate if this heterogeneous interference is not properly modeled. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to model heterogeneous interference by developing a new architecture to aggregate information from diverse neighbors. Our proposed method contains graph neural networks that aggregate same-view information, a mechanism that aggregates information from different views, and attention mechanisms. In our experiments on multiple datasets with heterogeneous interference, the proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods for ITE estimation, confirming the importance of modeling heterogeneous interference.

We study the problem of multi-agent coordination in unpredictable and partially-observable environments with untrustworthy external commands. The commands are actions suggested to the robots, and are untrustworthy in that their performance guarantees, if any, are unknown. Such commands may be generated by human operators or machine learning algorithms and, although untrustworthy, can often increase the robots' performance in complex multi-robot tasks. We are motivated by complex multi-robot tasks such as target tracking, environmental mapping, and area monitoring. Such tasks are often modeled as submodular maximization problems due to the information overlap among the robots. We provide an algorithm, Meta Bandit Sequential Greedy (MetaBSG), which enjoys performance guarantees even when the external commands are arbitrarily bad. MetaBSG leverages a meta-algorithm to learn whether the robots should follow the commands or a recently developed submodular coordination algorithm, Bandit Sequential Greedy (BSG) [1], which has performance guarantees even in unpredictable and partially-observable environments. Particularly, MetaBSG asymptotically can achieve the better performance out of the commands and the BSG algorithm, quantifying its suboptimality against the optimal time-varying multi-robot actions in hindsight. Thus, MetaBSG can be interpreted as robustifying the untrustworthy commands. We validate our algorithm in simulated scenarios of multi-target tracking.

Existing pruning techniques preserve deep neural networks' overall ability to make correct predictions but may also amplify hidden biases during the compression process. We propose a novel pruning method, Fairness-aware GRAdient Pruning mEthod (FairGRAPE), that minimizes the disproportionate impacts of pruning on different sub-groups. Our method calculates the per-group importance of each model weight and selects a subset of weights that maintain the relative between-group total importance in pruning. The proposed method then prunes network edges with small importance values and repeats the procedure by updating importance values. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on four different datasets, FairFace, UTKFace, CelebA, and ImageNet, for the tasks of face attribute classification where our method reduces the disparity in performance degradation by up to 90% compared to the state-of-the-art pruning algorithms. Our method is substantially more effective in a setting with a high pruning rate (99%). The code and dataset used in the experiments are available at https://github.com/Bernardo1998/FairGRAPE, Comment: To appear in ECCV 2022

Lixia Lin,* Feng Mei,* Jingyu Liao, Yao Yang, Fang Duan, Xiaofeng Lin Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Xiaofeng Lin; Fang DuanState Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510060, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 18922103830; +86 13710790313Email linxiaof@mail.sysu.edu.cn; duanfangg@126.comPurpose: To analyze the pathogen spectrum of isolated pathogens and antibiotic susceptibility trends of infectious endophthalmitis over 9 years from a large referral eye center in southern China.Methods: Data from all inpatients who were clinically diagnosed with infectious endophthalmitis and underwent microbiological evaluation at the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center from January 2010 to December 2018 were collected retrospectively and analyzed according to different clinical etiologies.Results: A total of 816 cases were collected in the study. Open-globe injuries had caused 473 (57.97%) cases, 70 (8.58%) cases presented endophthalmitis after infectious keratitis, 156 (19.12%) cases were postoperative, and endogenous causes accounted for 117 (14.34%) cases. Among the 309 culture-positive cases, the predominant pathogen for both postoperative and posttraumatic endophthalmitis was gram-positive cocci (59.52% and 49.72%, respectively). Regarding keratitis-related endophthalmitis, the main pathogens were filamentous fungi (57.58%) and gram-negative bacilli (30.30%). The pathogens of endogenous endophthalmitis were almost evenly distributed among gram-positive cocci, gram-negative bacilli, and fungi. Eighty-five (10.42%) cases underwent evisceration/enucleation, including 42 cases secondary to keratitis-related endophthalmitis. The incidence of evisceration/enucleation was much higher in keratitis-related endophthalmitis than the total endophthalmitis popul

© 2020 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim A facile design and fabrication of self-standing metal-free polyaniline (PANI)@carbon nanotubes (CNTs) composite membrane was initially proposed by straightforward noncovalent wrapping the polymer around pure CNTs. Without introduction of extra heteroatoms into CNTs, the optimized PANI@CNTs composite exhibits a much better electrocatalytic performance for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) than pure CNTs via favorable interfacial modification with PANI to largely expose the active sites of on the surface of pure CNTs. Besides, it displays good oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performance. When directly utilized as bifunctional air electrode without extra additive agents, the composite membrane-enabled rechargeable Zn-air batteries not only deliver a high peak power density (201.9 W g−1) and a large energy density (850.3 Wh kgZn−1), but also present robust cycling performance for 216 cycles with a high energy efficiency of 57.8%.

© 2020 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim A facile design and fabrication of self-standing metal-free polyaniline (PANI)@carbon nanotubes (CNTs) composite membrane was initially proposed by straightforward noncovalent wrapping the polymer around pure CNTs. Without introduction of extra heteroatoms into CNTs, the optimized PANI@CNTs composite exhibits a much better electrocatalytic performance for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) than pure CNTs via favorable interfacial modification with PANI to largely expose the active sites of on the surface of pure CNTs. Besides, it displays good oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) performance. When directly utilized as bifunctional air electrode without extra additive agents, the composite membrane-enabled rechargeable Zn-air batteries not only deliver a high peak power density (201.9 W g−1) and a large energy density (850.3 Wh kgZn−1), but also present robust cycling performance for 216 cycles with a high energy efficiency of 57.8%.

Lixia Lin,* Fang Duan,* Yao Yang, Bingsheng Lou, Lingyi Liang, Xiaofeng LinZhongshan Ophthalmic Center, State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workPurpose: To analyze the genus profile of isolated pathogens and antibiotic susceptibility trends of microbial keratitis over nine years at a large referral eye center in southern China.Methods: Data of corneal specimens from January 2010 to August 2018 of patients clinically diagnosed with infectious keratitis were obtained from the center’s microbiology database. Results with positive cultures along with antibiotic susceptibility were reviewed and analyzed.Results: We collected and reviewed 7,229 specimens, including 3,092 with positive cultures. Among them, 1,630 (52.72%) were bacterial, 1781 (57.60%) were fungal, and 319 (10.32%) were coinfected. A significant decreasing trend was observed in the isolates of Gram-positive cocci (r =−0.711, P=0.032), among which the proportion of coagulase-negative staphylococcus (CNS) was also reduced (r =−0.883, P=0.002). In contrast, an increasing trend in the proportion of Gram-negative bacilli was observed (r=0.661, P=0.053). The susceptibility rates of Gram-positive cocci to cephalosporins were near 90%, which was relatively high compared to fluoroquinolones. Fluoroquinolones represented the antibiotics to which Gram-negative bacilli were the most susceptible. Their susceptibility to moxifloxacin was 78.79%. The overall performance of aminoglycosides and vancomycin was both around 70%. The susceptibility of Gram-positive cocci to several antibiotics including levofloxacin (r=−0.717, P=0.03), tobramycin (r= −0.933, P<0.001), cefazolin (r= −0.964, P<0.001), ceftazidime (r=−0.929, P=0.003), chloramphenicol (r=−0.929, P=0.003), and cefuroxime (r=−0.829, P=0.042) decrease

Recent advances in molecular technology have revolutionized research on all aspects of the biology of organisms, including ciliates, and created unprecedented opportunities for pursuing a more integrative approach to investigations of biodiversity. However, this goal is complicated by large gaps and inconsistencies that still exist in the foundation of basic information about biodiversity of ciliates. The present paper reviews issues relating to the taxonomy of ciliates and presents specific recommendations for best practice in the observation and documentation of their biodiversity. This effort stems from a workshop that explored ways to implement six Grand Challenges proposed by the International Research Coordination Network for Biodiversity of Ciliates (IRCN-BC). As part of its commitment to strengthening the knowledge base that supports research on biodiversity of ciliates, the IRCN-BC proposes to populate The Ciliate Guide, an online database, with biodiversity-related data and metadata to create a resource that will facilitate accurate taxonomic identifications and promote sharing of data., U.S. National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Depto. de Genética, Fisiología y Microbiología, Fac. de Ciencias Biológicas, TRUE, pub

In the present study the morphology and ciliary pattern of three marine tintinnid ciliates, namely Tintinnopsis tocantinensis Kofoid and Campbell, 1929, Tintinnopsis radix (Imhof, 1886) Brandt, 1907, and Tintinnopsis cylindrica Daday, 1887, isolated from Chinese coastal waters off Shenzhen and Qingdao, respectively, were investigated using living observation and silver impregnation methods. Detailed ciliary patterns of T. tocantinensis and T. radix are reported here for the first time, comprising a ventral, dorsal, and posterior kinety as well as a right, left, and lateral ciliary field. Furthermore, based on previous and present investigations, redescriptions for all three species and improved diagnoses for T. tocantinensis and T. radix are supplied.

In the present study the morphology and ciliary pattern of three marine tintinnid ciliates, namely Tintinnopsis tocantinensis Kofoid and Campbell, 1929, Tintinnopsis radix (Imhof, 1886) Brandt, 1907, and Tintinnopsis cylindrica Daday, 1887, isolated from Chinese coastal waters off Shenzhen and Qingdao, respectively, were investigated using living observation and silver impregnation methods. Detailed ciliary patterns of T. tocantinensis and T. radix are reported here for the first time, comprising a ventral, dorsal, and posterior kinety as well as a right, left, and lateral ciliary field. Furthermore, based on previous and present investigations, redescriptions for all three species and improved diagnoses for T. tocantinensis and T. radix are supplied.

The morphology of a new marine urostylid ciliate, Apokeronopsis sinica n. sp., collected from the Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, was investigated. Additionally, the SSrRNA gene was sequenced in order to make a comparison at molecular level. Based on both morphological and molecular data, descriptions and comparisons with its congeners are provided. Apokeronopsis sinica is characterized by: body size about 150-200 x 50-65 mu m in vivo; two kinds of cortical granules; about 20 cirri in frontal area which form the non-typical bicorona; 2 frontoterminal, ca. 4 buccal and 10 transverse cirri; midventral complex consists of 21-32 pairs of cirri; on average 35 right and 30 left marginal cirri; about 50 membranelles; invariably 3 dorsal kineties. A key to the identification of the known Apokeronopsis species was suggested. The small subunit rRNA gene sequence differences between Apokeronopsis sinica and its congeners range from 1.64\% to 3.72\%.

The morphology of a new marine urostylid ciliate, Apokeronopsis sinica n. sp., collected from the Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, was investigated. Additionally, the SSrRNA gene was sequenced in order to make a comparison at molecular level. Based on both morphological and molecular data, descriptions and comparisons with its congeners are provided. Apokeronopsis sinica is characterized by: body size about 150-200 x 50-65 mu m in vivo; two kinds of cortical granules; about 20 cirri in frontal area which form the non-typical bicorona; 2 frontoterminal, ca. 4 buccal and 10 transverse cirri; midventral complex consists of 21-32 pairs of cirri; on average 35 right and 30 left marginal cirri; about 50 membranelles; invariably 3 dorsal kineties. A key to the identification of the known Apokeronopsis species was suggested. The small subunit rRNA gene sequence differences between Apokeronopsis sinica and its congeners range from 1.64\% to 3.72\%.

The morphology of a new marine urostylid ciliate, Apokeronopsis sinica n. sp., collected from the Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, was investigated. Additionally, the SSrRNA gene was sequenced in order to make a comparison at molecular level. Based on both morphological and molecular data, descriptions and comparisons with its congeners are provided. Apokeronopsis sinica is characterized by: body size about 150-200 x 50-65 mu m in vivo; two kinds of cortical granules; about 20 cirri in frontal area which form the non-typical bicorona; 2 frontoterminal, ca. 4 buccal and 10 transverse cirri; midventral complex consists of 21-32 pairs of cirri; on average 35 right and 30 left marginal cirri; about 50 membranelles; invariably 3 dorsal kineties. A key to the identification of the known Apokeronopsis species was suggested. The small subunit rRNA gene sequence differences between Apokeronopsis sinica and its congeners range from 1.64\% to 3.72\%.

The morphology and infraciliature of Orthodonella sinica n. sp. and Apokeronopsis wrighti n. sp., isolated from the coastal water off Hong Kong, were investigated in living and stained specimens. Orthodonella sinica n. sp. is diagnosed as: a marine Orthodonella 150-310 x 40-80 mu m in vivo; with a dominant beak-like projection at the anterior end; about 70 somatic kineties; 84-126 dikinetids in the synhymenium; one contractile vacuole in the posterior one-fourth of cell, near the left margin; one conspicuous dorsal suture. Apokeronopsis wrighti n. sp. is diagnosed as: an Apokeronopsis about 150-230 x 35-55 mu m in vivo; dark-reddish blood-cell-shaped cortical granules grouped in three rows on the ventral side and two rows on the dorsal side; 23-35 cirri in the right mid-ventral rows (MVR) and 23-32 cirri in the left MVR; six to eight buccal, two frontoterminal, 30-42 left marginal, and 32-43 right marginal cirri; 21-30 transverse cirri extending anteriorly beyond the level of mid-body; consistently three dorsal kineties. The separation of A. wrighti n. sp. and its highly similar congeners Apokeronopsis crassa and Apokeronopsis bergeri was supported by comparison of their SSrRNA gene sequences.

The urosylid genus Pseudoamphisiella was established bySong (1996) with hitherto only two known congeners. In the present work, the morphology and infraciliature of a new member, Pseudoamphisiella quadrinucleata n. sp., a form with conspicuous alveolar layer and four macronuclear nodules isolated from the coastal waters both near Hong Kong and near Guangzhou, South China were investigated using living observation and protargol silver impregnation methods. Pseudoamphisiella quadrinucleata differs from other two known forms mainly by the number of macronuclear nodules: constantly four vs. two in Pseudoamphisiella alveolata and 24-57 in Pseudoamphisiella lacazei. To support this, the sequence of the small subunit rDNA of P. quadrinucleata n. sp. showed 14 and 74 nucleotides in comparison with that of the two known congeners, respectively, which hence firmly supports the validity of the new species.

The urosylid genus Pseudoamphisiella was established bySong (1996) with hitherto only two known congeners. In the present work, the morphology and infraciliature of a new member, Pseudoamphisiella quadrinucleata n. sp., a form with conspicuous alveolar layer and four macronuclear nodules isolated from the coastal waters both near Hong Kong and near Guangzhou, South China were investigated using living observation and protargol silver impregnation methods. Pseudoamphisiella quadrinucleata differs from other two known forms mainly by the number of macronuclear nodules: constantly four vs. two in Pseudoamphisiella alveolata and 24-57 in Pseudoamphisiella lacazei. To support this, the sequence of the small subunit rDNA of P. quadrinucleata n. sp. showed 14 and 74 nucleotides in comparison with that of the two known congeners, respectively, which hence firmly supports the validity of the new species.

The morphology and infraciliature of Orthodonella sinica n. sp. and Apokeronopsis wrighti n. sp., isolated from the coastal water off Hong Kong, were investigated in living and stained specimens. Orthodonella sinica n. sp. is diagnosed as: a marine Orthodonella 150-310 x 40-80 mu m in vivo; with a dominant beak-like projection at the anterior end; about 70 somatic kineties; 84-126 dikinetids in the synhymenium; one contractile vacuole in the posterior one-fourth of cell, near the left margin; one conspicuous dorsal suture. Apokeronopsis wrighti n. sp. is diagnosed as: an Apokeronopsis about 150-230 x 35-55 mu m in vivo; dark-reddish blood-cell-shaped cortical granules grouped in three rows on the ventral side and two rows on the dorsal side; 23-35 cirri in the right mid-ventral rows (MVR) and 23-32 cirri in the left MVR; six to eight buccal, two frontoterminal, 30-42 left marginal, and 32-43 right marginal cirri; 21-30 transverse cirri extending anteriorly beyond the level of mid-body; consistently three dorsal kineties. The separation of A. wrighti n. sp. and its highly similar congeners Apokeronopsis crassa and Apokeronopsis bergeri was supported by comparison of their SSrRNA gene sequences.

Data: 2008 –09 – 29Level: Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration, 15 hp,Title: International business negotiation in the South and North ChinaAuthors: Xiaofeng Lin, Ran Yan, Argiris Christakopoulos,Supervisor: Leif SannerProblem: Concurred with China's economic development, the commercial activitiesamong China and different countries have become more frequent. Manyscholars have come to realize that China's different cultural background hasbeen a great extent influenced by the international business activities, andmany articles have been described about how the Chinese unique culturalinfluence the international business negotiation. But because the cultures inthe South and north China have some great differences, therefore, when wereviewed those articles, we found that those descriptions in the articleswere not comprehensive. Some of the opinions were feasible and effectivein north of China in business negotiation, but perhaps were not suitable inthe South of China.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to get a better understanding of how the differentcultures from north and south China affect the international negotiationprocess.Method: We have developed the qualitative approach to fulfill our thesis purpose. Thisqualitative study was conducted by interviewing two managers from ChinaOcean Shipping Agency Fuzhou (south China) and JINAN XiaoYa CO.Ltd(north China). All the final results are derived from the analysis of thegathered empirical data and the theories presented.Result: By analyzing the connection between the collected empirical data and thepresented theories, the main conclusion we get is that in an internationalnegotiation process, the different cultures from south and north China mayhave an effect on different levels.

The urosylid genus Pseudoamphisiella was established bySong (1996) with hitherto only two known congeners. In the present work, the morphology and infraciliature of a new member, Pseudoamphisiella quadrinucleata n. sp., a form with conspicuous alveolar layer and four macronuclear nodules isolated from the coastal waters both near Hong Kong and near Guangzhou, South China were investigated using living observation and protargol silver impregnation methods. Pseudoamphisiella quadrinucleata differs from other two known forms mainly by the number of macronuclear nodules: constantly four vs. two in Pseudoamphisiella alveolata and 24-57 in Pseudoamphisiella lacazei. To support this, the sequence of the small subunit rDNA of P. quadrinucleata n. sp. showed 14 and 74 nucleotides in comparison with that of the two known congeners, respectively, which hence firmly supports the validity of the new species.

The morphology and infraciliature of Orthodonella sinica n. sp. and Apokeronopsis wrighti n. sp., isolated from the coastal water off Hong Kong, were investigated in living and stained specimens. Orthodonella sinica n. sp. is diagnosed as: a marine Orthodonella 150-310 x 40-80 mu m in vivo; with a dominant beak-like projection at the anterior end; about 70 somatic kineties; 84-126 dikinetids in the synhymenium; one contractile vacuole in the posterior one-fourth of cell, near the left margin; one conspicuous dorsal suture. Apokeronopsis wrighti n. sp. is diagnosed as: an Apokeronopsis about 150-230 x 35-55 mu m in vivo; dark-reddish blood-cell-shaped cortical granules grouped in three rows on the ventral side and two rows on the dorsal side; 23-35 cirri in the right mid-ventral rows (MVR) and 23-32 cirri in the left MVR; six to eight buccal, two frontoterminal, 30-42 left marginal, and 32-43 right marginal cirri; 21-30 transverse cirri extending anteriorly beyond the level of mid-body; consistently three dorsal kineties. The separation of A. wrighti n. sp. and its highly similar congeners Apokeronopsis crassa and Apokeronopsis bergeri was supported by comparison of their SSrRNA gene sequences.

Data: 2008 –09 – 29Level: Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration, 15 hp,Title: International business negotiation in the South and North ChinaAuthors: Xiaofeng Lin, Ran Yan, Argiris Christakopoulos,Supervisor: Leif SannerProblem: Concurred with China's economic development, the commercial activitiesamong China and different countries have become more frequent. Manyscholars have come to realize that China's different cultural background hasbeen a great extent influenced by the international business activities, andmany articles have been described about how the Chinese unique culturalinfluence the international business negotiation. But because the cultures inthe South and north China have some great differences, therefore, when wereviewed those articles, we found that those descriptions in the articleswere not comprehensive. Some of the opinions were feasible and effectivein north of China in business negotiation, but perhaps were not suitable inthe South of China.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to get a better understanding of how the differentcultures from north and south China affect the international negotiationprocess.Method: We have developed the qualitative approach to fulfill our thesis purpose. Thisqualitative study was conducted by interviewing two managers from ChinaOcean Shipping Agency Fuzhou (south China) and JINAN XiaoYa CO.Ltd(north China). All the final results are derived from the analysis of thegathered empirical data and the theories presented.Result: By analyzing the connection between the collected empirical data and thepresented theories, the main conclusion we get is that in an internationalnegotiation process, the different cultures from south and north China mayhave an effect on different levels.

Protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) are important signal transducers. Most PTKs have a catalytic domain, which carries out catalysis, and regulatory domains, which regulate their activity. Autophosphorylation, the Tyr phosphorylation in the activation loop, is also a key regulatory mechanism for most PTKs. In this study, I probed the regulatory mechanisms of PTKs using Csk as a model system. Csk has two regulatory domains, SH3 and SH2, and a catalytic domain. In this study, I probed how the regulatory domains modulate Csk activity. First, the regulatory domains were required for Csk full activity, yet not involved in the recognition of Src, the physiological substrate of Csk. Second, our data indicated that Csk regulatory domains modulated multiple substructures in the catalytic domain. Third, two key interactions between the catalytic domain and the regulatory domains were identified. Another mode of Csk regulation was through the SH2 domain ligands. In this study, I probed how the SH2 domain activates Csk catalytic domain by binding to a ligand. Six residues, three from the catalytic domain and three from the SH2 domain, were identified to be important in this domain-domain communication. Among the six, three play roles in suppressing Csk activity, suggesting that the SH2 domain suppresses Csk activity, and its binding to the ligands relieves this suppression. Different from most PTKs, Csk has no Tyr in its activation loop and is not regulated by autophosphorylation. In this study, I probed the roles of the Csk activation loop. First, specific residues in this loop were not important to Src phosphorylation. Second, some loop mutants exhibited significantly higher activity toward Src than toward artificial substrates. Third, introduction of a thrombin cleavage site to the loop resulted in significant activity loss toward both substrates, but digestion with thrombin resulted in full activity recovery, implying an inhibitory role of this loop. In summary, I probed the re