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Background: County public hospital reform is one of the major tasks proposed in Chinese Healthcare Reform., and the evaluation of hospital reform effectiveness is very important and beneficial since it helps the government to understand the current situation of pilot county public hospitals and smoothly start the reform in all county hospitals. Methods: This study used hospitals data from 2009 to 2012 to evaluate the effectiveness of county public hospital reform through comprehensive service capability. Descriptive analysis method was used, and factor analysis method was used to extract the main factors associated with service capabilities as well as to calculate a composite score. The t-test of two independent-samples methods was used to comparison analyze. Results: The differences of common factor scores (hospital scale and service capacity, treatment quality, service quality, and services efficiency) between pilot and non-pilot hospitals were not statistically significant (P>0.05). The service capability score in 2012 was better than that in 2009 either in pilot or non-pilot group (P<0.05). The pilot hospitals’ service capability score was better than that in non-pilot groups either in 2010 or 2012 (P<0.05). However, the differences from 2009 to 2012 of service capability score between pilot and non-pilot hospitals were not statistically significant. Conclusion: The comprehensive service capability of both pilot and non-pilot group all got improvement. However, county public hospital reform did not significantly play a due good role in improving the service capability in pilot group. The reform was helpful to improve the hospital current situation, but it has not completely achieved policy objectives in the sample hospitals of this study.

Order execution is an important operational level of activity encountered in portfolio investment and risk management. We study a sequential Stackelberg order execution game which arises naturally from the practice of algorithm trading in financial markets. The game consists of two risk-neutral traders, one leader and one follower, who compete to maximize their expected payoffs respectively by trading a single risky asset whose price dynamics follows a linear-price market impact model over a finite horizon. This new Stackelberg game departs from the Nash games which have been the main focus in the algorithm trading literature. We derive a closed-form solution for the unique open-loop Stackelberg equilibrium by exploiting the special structures of the model. This analytic solution enables us to develop new and complementary managerial insights by looking at both players’ equilibrium behavior in terms of trading speeds and positions, expected price dynamics, price of anarchy, first mover’s advantage, and trading horizon effect.

Dong, Y.; Zhang, F., and Fu, L., 2019. Ecological design: The role of extended producer responsibility system. In: Guido-Aldana, P.A. and Mulahasan, S. (eds.), Advances in Water Resources and Exploration. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 93, pp. 354–361. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. With the development of the society, terrestrial and marine ecosystems are destroyed seriously. To protect the ecosystems, ecological design is the key factor to implement the extended producer responsibility system (EPR), which can effectively improve the nature resource utilization, and reduce the waste of resources and environmental destruction during the production, circulation, use and processing stages for products. Firstly, this paper studies the driving factors of producer extended responsibility system, which includes government regulation and incentive, consumer demand pressure, the internal environment of the enterprise management and so on. After analyzing these factors, this paper studies the driving factors on ecological design. Through interviews and questionnaires on the production enterprises, and combined with the current research literatures in china and abroad, this paper verified and developed the scale for ecological design, extended producer responsibility, the driving force of ecological performance factors. The results show that as key elements of EPR, government regulation and incentives, corporate internal environment management can effectively promote the concept and behavior of ecological design of manufacturing enterprises; but consumer demand pressure cannot significantly affect the implementation of ecological design.

Dong, Y.; Zheng, Q., and Fu, L., 2019. Eco-compensation standard under river basin control: A perspective from asymmetric game. In: Gong, D.; Zhu, H. and Liu, R. (eds). Selected Topics in Coastal Research: Engineering, Industry, Economy, and Sustainable Development. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 94, pp. 60–66. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. The research on ecological compensation has also been increasingly valued by scholars. This paper develops a new bi-level model and takes a case to test the feasibility of the model. Through the analysis of specific examples, this study found that: (1) The government will reduce enterprises' compensation and social welfare will decrease as the cost of consumption increases when consumers participate in the sewage treatment compensation; (2) Only when the sum of cost paid by consumers and the price compensation granted by the government increases, the enterprises' sewage treatment capacity will increase, so will the corporate profits. Therefore, this paper argues that it is necessary for the government to compensate the enterprises. Finally, based on the conclusions of the study, this paper puts forward the corresponding policy recommendations.

Lower bounded correlation clustering problem (LBCorCP) is a new generalization of the correlation clustering problem (CorCP). In the LBCorCP, we are given an integer L and a complete labelled graph. Each edge in the graph is either positive or negative based on the similarity of its two endpoints. The goal is to find a clustering of the vertices, each cluster contains at least L vertices, so as to minimize the sum of the number of positive cut edges and negative uncut edges. In this paper, we first introduce the LBCorCP and give three algorithms for this problem. The first algorithm is a random algorithm, which is designed for the instances of the LBCorCP with fewer positive edges. The second one is that we let the set V itself as a cluster and prove that the algorithm works well on two specially instances with fewer negative edges. The last one is an LP-rounding based iterative algorithm, which is also provided for the instances with fewer negative edges. The above three algorithms can quickly solve some special instances in polynomial time and obtain a smaller approximation ratio. In addition, we conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of our algorithms.

Purpose Using statistical analysis, this paper aims to understand and investigate the factors for starting a new company successfully. Indicators from the literature and the data analysis prove that entrepreneurial environment, ability, intentions and self-actualization affect the success rate of entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach To analyze the success factors for entrepreneurship, the authors take entrepreneurial environment and entrepreneurial ability as the independent variables, self-actualization as the mediating variable and entrepreneurial intentions as the dependent variable. Then, the authors build the frame model of the influencing factors according to entrepreneurial intentions based on the self-actualization mediating effect of college students. At last, four hypotheses are proposed based on this frame model. Findings The empirical research proves that the better the entrepreneurial environment, the stronger the entrepreneurial intentions of college students; the stronger the entrepreneurial ability of students, the stronger the entrepreneurial intentions; and under the mediating effect of self-actualization, entrepreneurial environment and entrepreneurial ability will affect entrepreneurial intentions strongly. Finally, based on the empirical results, this paper proposes to pay attention to entrepreneurship education and strengthen the construction of the entrepreneurial environment to better enhance entrepreneurial intentions. Research limitations/implications The study has a few limitations because, as it refers to the sample for college students and the new start-up, it would require a more generalized analysis of the factors, such as to include more and better indicators for demographic, economic and institutional determinants of the entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurship. For further studies on entrepreneurship, the validate measuring scale of the concept must be addressed. Practical implications The present work shows that optimizing the entrepreneurial environment and improving the entrepreneurial ability of college students can enhance the success rate of the entrepreneurship. Besides, the entrepreneurial intentions should be enhanced from outside to inside. Namely, stimulate the entrepreneurial desire of college students from the external environment, such as policy support, ideological education and mobilization on employment options and other aspects of new college graduates. The psychological aspects of graduates should be guided. Originality/value For the study of entrepreneurial intentions, most scholars mainly studied the entrepreneurial psychology to discuss its relationship with entrepreneurial intentions in the early years, and gradually extended to the study of external factors, such as the entrepreneurial environment. However, the study on graduate entrepreneurship has yet to be improved. Based on the existing research, this paper makes an in-depth study on the influence mechanism of entrepreneurial intentions from entrepreneurial ability and entrepreneurial environment, puts forward a research model taking self-actualization as a mediating variable and studies the intrinsic driving force of entrepreneurial intentions.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) can induce chronic heart failure (CHF), a condition referred to as type 4 cardiorenal syndrome (CRS4). The pathophysiological mechanisms remain unclear, and suitable early warning biomarkers for CHF in CKD patients are lacking. A total of 258 CHF key genes and 383 CKD-related secreted proteins were identified through differential expression analysis and WGCNA. PPI analysis revealed 81 genes as potential pathogenic genes related to CRS4. Enrichment analysis of these pathogenic genes highlighted pathways involved in cytokine activity, extracellular matrix remodeling, and immune response. Three machine learning algorithms identified two hub genes (MME and SERPINF1) as potential biomarkers for CHF, and a nomogram model was constructed. ROC analysis demonstrated that the model achieved an AUC greater than 0.80 in both the CHF merged dataset and two external cohorts. Furthermore, immune cell infiltration analysis indicated a correlation between these biomarkers and the infiltration scores of fibroblasts, CD8 T cells, and mast cells in CHF. Finally, our clinical cohort validated the expression patterns of these two biomarkers in serum, with the diagnostic model achieving an AUC of 0.880. CKD may promote the progression of CHF through proteins secreted by the kidneys and blood cells. MME and SERPINF1 may serve as potential biomarkers for CHF in CKD patients.

Background The coexistence of hypertension and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) may largely increase the risk for cardiovascular disease. However, there is no clear consensus on the association between hypertension and the risk of diabetes. Gut microbiota plays important roles in the development of hypertension and T2DM, but whether there is difference between hypertension patients with or without T2DM has not been explored yet. Methods We recruited 101 hypertension patients in this study (72 patients without T2DM named HT group and 29 patients with T2DM named HT-T2DM group). Their blood samples were collected for testing clinical characteristics and fecal samples were tested for bacterial DNA using 16 S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing targeting the V3 and V4 region. The data of 40 samples were downloaded from project PRJNA815750 as health control (HC group) in this study. The community composition and structure of the microbiome, taxonomic difference, co-occurrence network and functional enrichment were analyzed by alpha/beta diversity, LEfSe, Fruchterman Reingold’s algorithm and PICRUSt2 functional analysis, respectively. Results Alpha and beta diversity analysis showed significant differences in microbial community richness and composition among the three groups. The HC group had a significantly higher Simpson index and a distinct microbiota community compared to the HT and HT-T2DM groups, as demonstrated by significant differences in unweighted and weighted UniFrac distances. The LEfSe analysis identified specific taxa that had significantly different abundance among the groups, such as Bacteroides uniformis , Blautia wexlerae , Alistipes putredinis , and Prevotella stercorea in the HC group, Prevotella copri and Phascolarctobacterium faecium in the HT group, and Klebsiella pneumoniae in the HT-T2DM group. Co-occurrence network analysis indicates that Prevotella copri , Mediterraneibacter gnavus , Alistipes onderdonkii and some unidentified species act as key nodes in the network. Differentially functional pathway identified by PICRUSt2 were concentrated in nutrition and energy metabolism, as well as the biosynthesis of other secondary metabolites. Conclusions Our study found significant differences in microbial community richness, composition, and function among the healthy controls, hypertension patients with and without T2DM. Some specific taxa may explain this difference and serve as potential therapeutic targets for hypertension, T2DM, and their coexistence.

Objective In order to explore the differences in gut microbiota and their metabolites between patients with H-type hypertension and non-H-type hypertension. Method Our study included 100 hypertensive patients from the Department of Cardiology at Shaoxing Second Hospital, with 51 patients having H-type hypertension (H group) and 49 having non-H-type hypertension (non-H group). Blood samples were collected for clinical and metabolite testing, and fecal samples were collected for 16 S rRNA sequencing and metabolite testing. Results No significant difference in the α and β diversity of the gut microbiota between the two groups of patients were observed. However, at the phylum level, patients in the non-H group have a higher abundance of Firmicutes and a lower abundance of Actinobacteriota. At the genus level, compared to the non-H group, the H-type group has a higher abundance of Bifidobacterium; at the species level, the Non-H group has a higher abundance of Bacteroides vulgatus and lower abundances of Bacteroides stercoris and Bacteroides plebeius. In the serum of both groups, the concentrations of Acetate and Isobutyrate were significantly higher in the H group ( P  < 0.05), while in the feces of both groups of patients, the concentration of Malonate was significantly higher in the Non-H group. Conclusion The microbial sequencing shows distinct differences between the H and non-H groups, with the latter having higher Firmicutes and Bacteroides vulgatus, while the H group has more Bifidobacterium and higher serum acetate levels. These variations suggest unique gut microbiota compositions and metabolite profiles for each group.

In response to the impacts of climate change and the intensity of human activities in the alpine meadow region, there is an urgent need to determine the ecological quality and its drivers in alpine meadow areas. In this paper, Shangri-La was adopted as an example, the spatial and temporal evolution patterns of the ecological quality in Shangri-La were determined in both natural and social dimensions, and the contributions of various driving factors were analyzed. The conclusions are as follows: (1) the natural status index of Shangri-La from 2000 to 2020 generally showed a spatial distribution pattern that decreased from the central townships toward the north and south, and the social pressure index was irregularly distributed in high-value areas and continuously distributed in low-value areas. (2) From 2000 to 2020, the areas with high values of the ecological quality index were mainly distributed in central Shangri-La, with a maximum value of 0.91, while the low values were largely distributed in some townships in the north and south, with a minimum value of 0.26. (3) In the driving factors, the influences of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and net primary productivity (NPP) were greater than those of the other factors, among which the NDVI attained the largest mean value of 0.452, while the relative humidity (RHU) attained the lowest value of 0.036. (4) In terms of relative contributions, evapotranspiration (EVP) and precipitation (TEM) shifted from a positive drive to a negative drive from south to north. The contribution of the temperature to the ecological quality was the highest, at 64%. The spatial heterogeneity in the contributions of human disturbance activity factors to the ecological quality varied significantly, with the largest negative driving contribution of the NPP, at − 42.36%. The results could provide a basis for regional ecological quality protection and restoration.