Your search
Results 220 resources
-
The physiological mechanisms underlying variation in aggression in fish remain poorly understood. One possibly confounding variable is the lack of standardization in the type of stimuli used to elicit aggression. The presentation of controlled stimuli in videos, a.k.a. video playback, can provide better control of the fight components. However, this technique has produced conflicting results in animal behaviour studies and needs to be carefully validated. For this, a similar response to the video and an equivalent live stimulus needs to be demonstrated. Further, different physiological responses may be triggered by live and video stimuli and it is important to demonstrate that video images elicit appropriate physiological reactions. Here, the behavioural and endocrine response of male Siamese fighting fish Betta splendens to a matched for size conspecific fighting behind a one-way mirror, presented live or through video playback, was compared. The video playback and live stimulus elicited a strong and similar aggressive response by the focal fish, with a fight structure that started with stereotypical threat displays and progressed to overt attacks. Post-fight plasma levels of the androgen 11-ketotestosterone were elevated as compared to controls, regardless of the type of stimuli. Cortisol also increased in response to the video images, as previously described for live fights in this species. These results show that the interactive component of a fight, and its resolution, are not needed to trigger an endocrine response to aggression in this species. The study also demonstrates for the first time in a fish a robust endocrine response to video stimuli and supports the use of this technique for researching aggressive behaviour in B. splendens.
-
In this essay, we respond to Dustin Crummett’s argument that one cannot consistently appeal to body count reasoning to justify being a single-issue pro-life voter if one is also committed to the usual response to the embryo rescue case. Specifically, we argue that a modified version of BCR we call BCR* is consistent with the usual response. We then move to address concerns about the relevance of BCR* to Crummett’s original thesis.
-
The key challenge of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for analyzing time series data is to learn domain-invariant representations by capturing complex temporal dependencies. In addition, existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods for time series data are designed to align marginal distribution between source and target domains. However, existing UDA methods (e.g. R-DANN Purushotham et al. (2017), VRADA Purushotham et al. (2017), CoDATS Wilson et al. (2020)) neglect the conditional distribution discrepancy between two domains, leading to misclassification of the target domain. Therefore, to learn domain-invariant representations by capturing the temporal dependencies and to reduce the conditional distribution discrepancy between two domains, a novel Attentive Recurrent Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Top-k time series pseudo-labeling method called ARADA-TK is proposed in this paper. In the experiments, our proposed method was compared with the state-of-the-art UDA methods (R-DANN, VRADA and CoDATS). Experimental results on four benchmark datasets revealed that ARADA-TK achieves superior classification accuracy when it is compared to the competing methods.
-
The extent of citizens' trust in government determines the success or failure of e-government initiatives. Nevertheless, the idiosyncrasies of the concept and the broad spectrum of its approach still present relevant challenges. This work presents a systematic literature review on e-government trust while elaborating and summarizing a conceptual analysis of trust, introducing evaluation methods for government trust, and compiling relevant research on e-government trust and intentional behavior. A total of 26 key factors that constitute trust have been identified and classified into six categories: Government trust, Trust in Internet and technology (TiIT), Trust in e-government (TiEG), Personal Beliefs, Trustworthiness, and Trust of intermediary (ToI). The value added of this work consists of developing a conceptual framework of TiEG to provide a significant reference for future in-depth studies and research on e-government trust.
-
This study examined 206 casino dealers in hospitality at Macau to investigate the extent of their subjective career success and work engagement. Casino dealers were work engaged, but their subjective career success was fairly low, with significant difference between them, which indicates they have cognitive dissonance about their jobs. Several personality variables (emotional suppression and work ethic), organizational variables, i.e., organizational socialization (training, understanding, coworker support, future prospects), and distributive justice, were assessed in relation to subjective career success and work engagement. Organizational socialization, work ethic, and distributive justice were positively correlated with and predictors of subjective career success and work engagement; while emotion suppression was negatively correlated with and predictor of work engagement. This study provides evidence of extending the theories of subjective career success and work engagement in Chinese society and hospitality. Also, it identifies factors that could resolve the employees’ cognitive dissonance, and implementations for management were discussed.
-
Air pollution in Macau has become a serious problem following the Pearl River Delta’s (PRD) rapid industrialization that began in the 1990s. With this in mind, Macau needs an air quality forecast system that accurately predicts pollutant concentration during the occurrence of pollution episodes to warn the public ahead of time. Five different state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms were applied to create predictive models to forecast PM2.5, PM10, and CO concentrations for the next 24 and 48 h, which included artificial neural networks (ANN), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), support vector machine (SVM), and multiple linear regression (MLR), to determine the best ML algorithms for the respective pollutants and time scale. The diurnal measurements of air quality data in Macau from 2016 to 2021 were obtained for this work. The 2020 and 2021 datasets were used for model testing, while the four-year data before 2020 and 2021 were used to build and train the ML models. Results show that the ANN, RF, XGBoost, SVM, and MLR models were able to provide good performance in building up a 24-h forecast with a higher coefficient of determination (R2) and lower root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and biases (BIAS). Meanwhile, all the ML models in the 48-h forecasting performance were satisfactory enough to be accepted as a two-day continuous forecast even if the R2 value was lower than the 24-h forecast. The 48-h forecasting model could be further improved by proper feature selection based on the 24-h dataset, using the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) value test and the adjusted R2 value of the 48-h forecasting model. In conclusion, the above five ML algorithms were able to successfully forecast the 24 and 48 h of pollutant concentration in Macau, with the RF and SVM models performing the best in the prediction of PM2.5 and PM10, and CO in both 24 and 48-h forecasts.
-
In February 2020, Macau became one of the first regions where the pandemic of coronavirus or Covid-19 affected the totality of social and economic life leading to increased anxieties over movement and distance. Although Macau has had very few actual cases of the virus – 46 in total –and no deaths from it, the Macau government rapidly instituted a lock down. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the social experience of being in lockdown can provide insights into understanding the type of experience or condition that we provisionally term ‘anxious immobility.’ Such a condition is characterized by a total disruption of everyday rhythms and specifically anxious waiting for the normalization of activity while being the subject of biosocial narratives of quarantine and socially responsible. The paper is based upon 3 months of ethnographic research conducted by two researchers based in Macau. We also reflect upon some aspects of the politics of mobilities in the light of disruptions and friction points between Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, and the rest of the world.
-
Approximately 50 million people are suffering from epilepsy worldwide. Corals have been used for treating epilepsy in traditional Chinese medicine, but the mechanism of this treatment is unknown. In this study, we analyzed the transcriptome of the branching coral Acropora digitifera and obtained its Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), EuKaryotic Orthologous Groups (KOG) and Gene Ontology (GO) annotation. Combined with multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis, we discovered three polypeptides, we named them AdKuz1, AdKuz2 and AdKuz3, from A. digitifera that showed a close relationship to Kunitz-type peptides. Molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation indicated that AdKuz1 to 3 could interact with GABAA receptor but AdKuz2–GABAA remained more stable than others. The biological experiments showed that AdKuz1 and AdKuz2 exhibited an anti-inflammatory effect by decreasing the aberrant level of nitric oxide (NO), IL-6, TNF-α and IL-1β induced by LPS in BV-2 cells. In addition, the pentylenetetrazol (PTZ)-induced epileptic effect on zebrafish was remarkably suppressed by AdKuz1 and AdKuz2. AdKuz2 particularly showed superior anti-epileptic effects compared to the other two peptides. Furthermore, AdKuz2 significantly decreased the expression of c-fos and npas4a, which were up-regulated by PTZ treatment. In addition, AdKuz2 reduced the synthesis of glutamate and enhanced the biosynthesis of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). In conclusion, the results indicated that AdKuz2 may affect the synthesis of glutamate and GABA and enhance the activity of the GABAA receptor to inhibit the symptoms of epilepsy. We believe, AdKuz2 could be a promising anti-epileptic agent and its mechanism of action should be further investigated.
-
The role of hormones as modulators of aggressive behavior in fish remains poorly understood. Androgens and corticosteroids, in particular, have been associated with aggressive behavior in fish but it is still not clear if animals adjust the secretion of these hormones to regulate behavior during ongoing fights, in response to fight outcomes in order to adjust aggressive behavior in subsequent fights, or both. With its stereotyped displays and high aggression levels, the Siamese fighting fish Betta splendens is an excellent model to investigate this question. Here, we compared the behavioral and endocrine response of male B. splendens to fights where there is no winner or loser by presenting them with a size-matched live interacting conspecific behind a transparent partition or with a mirror image. The aggressive response started with threat displays that were overall similar in frequency and duration towards both types of stimuli. Fights transitioned to overt attacks and interacting with a live conspecific elicited a higher frequency of attempted bites and head hits, as compared with the mirror image. There was a pronounced increase in plasma androgens (11-ketotestosterone and testosterone) and corticosteroids (cortisol) levels in response to the aggression challenge, independent of stimulus type. Post-fight intra-group levels of these hormones did not correlate with measures of physical activity or aggressive behavior. A linear discriminant analysis including all behavioral and endocrine data was a poor classifier of fish from the conspecific and mirror trials, showing that overall the behavioral and endocrine response to mirror images and conspecifics was similar. The results show that fight resolution is not necessary to induce an evident increase in peripheral levels of androgens and corticosteroids in B. splendens. However, the function of these hormones during present and future aggressive contests remains to be clarified.
-
Abstract: The Portuguese language poses several challenges for children in the initial phase of learning how to read, particularly in the case of letters that may correspond to more than one phoneme, two letters that correspond to a single phoneme and in the case of words containing complex syllabic structures. The objective of this study was to perform a psycholinguistic analysis of the reading errors of children, attending the 1st (n=175) and 2nd year (n=137) of schooling, specifically in the case of words containing digraphs or complex syllabic structures and to analyse the differences between children’s reading errors in these two years. An oral reading test was used for data collection. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the type of reading errors was conducted using words with consonant digraphs (ch, nh, lh, gu, rr, ss), and words with complex syllables <CVC and CCV>. This analysis showed that children presented greater difficulties in some specific digraphs and tended to simplify complex syllables, either by adding or deleting phonemes. The quantity and quality of the reading errors of children attending both grades were discussed in light of reading acquisition theories and children’s phonological development.
-
In Macau, the effectiveness of traditional classroom learning is questioned as the problem is discovered by the changes in technology advances, social media, and the varieties of learning methods. Learning experiences, interests, discoveries, and creativity development are considered essential to ac...
-
In Macau, the effectiveness of traditional classroom learning is questioned as the problem is discovered by the changes in technology advances, social media, and the varieties of learning methods. Learning experiences, interests, discoveries, and creativity development are considered essential to ac...
-
There are a large number of symptom consultation texts in medical and healthcare Internet communities, and Chinese health segmentation is more complex, which leads to the low accuracy of the existing algorithms for medical text classification. The deep learning model has advantages in extracting abstract features of text effectively. However, for a large number of samples of complex text data, especially for words with ambiguous meanings in the field of Chinese medical diagnosis, the word-level neural network model is insufficient. Therefore, in order to solve the triage and precise treatment of patients, we present an improved Double Channel (DC) mechanism as a significant enhancement to Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). In this DC mechanism, two channels are used to receive word-level and char-level embedding, respectively, at the same time. Hybrid attention is proposed to combine the current time output with the current time unit state and then using attention to calculate the weight. By calculating the probability distribution of each timestep input data weight, the weight score is obtained, and then weighted summation is performed. At last, the data input by each timestep is subjected to trade-off learning to improve the generalization ability of the model learning. Moreover, we conduct an extensive performance evaluation on two different datasets: cMedQA and Sentiment140. The experimental results show that the DC-LSTM model proposed in this paper has significantly superior accuracy and ROC compared with the basic CNN-LSTM model.
-
To solve the problem of one-sided pursuit of the shortest distance but ignoring the tourist experience in the process of tourism route planning, an improved ant colony optimization algorithm is proposed for tourism route planning. Contextual information of scenic spots significantly effect people’s choice of tourism destination, so the pheromone update strategy is combined with the contextual information such as weather and comfort degree of the scenic spot in the process of searching the global optimal route, so that the pheromone update tends to the path suitable for tourists. At the same time, in order to avoid falling into local optimization, the sub-path support degree is introduced. The experimental results show that the optimized tourism route has greatly improved the tourist experience, the route distance is shortened by 20.5% and the convergence speed is increased by 21.2% compared with the basic algorithm, which proves that the improved algorithm is notably effective.
-
Abstract With its large population and natural resources, Africa needs investors who can sustain its development. At the same time, foreign investors expect returns on their investments. In ...
-
Objective: Over the past decade, arbitration has grown in popularity as a method of resolving commercial disputes worldwide. However, this practice is relatively new in Macao SAR. Recently, official plans were announced to make Macao as a seat of arbitration for commercial disputes between China and Portuguese-speaking countries (Hereinafter PSCs). This article is dedicated to explores the possibility of Macao undertaking and implementing such a role. Accordingly, this article addresses the following issues: What are the strengths and weaknesses of Macao as a seat and eventually as venue for hosting international commercial arbitration between Chinese and PSCs entrepreneurs?Methodology: A mixed-method approach of legal doctrinal and empirical research was used in this article. We first included a thorough study of the concept of arbitration followed by analysis of various legal journals and legislations, including Macao, China, and PSCs’ arbitration laws. An empirical research was then used to collect data by surveying and interviewing with both lawyers and arbitration practitioners from Macao, China and PSCs.Results: This article argues that the strength of Macao resides in the similarities between its legal system and that of the China and PSCs and the languages advantage (Chinese and Portuguese both official languages). In spite of this, arbitration is still relatively underutilized in the region, and there is a limited number of arbitrators and legal professionals with bilingual proficiency.Contributions: This article contributes to the identification of the opportunities and challenges that Macao faces in its potential future development as a seat/venue of arbitration between China and the PSCs.
Explore
Academic Units
- Faculty of Arts and Humanities (34)
- Faculty of Business and Law (52)
- Faculty of Health Sciences (14)
- Faculty of Religious Studies and Philosophy (29)
- Institute for Data Engineering and Sciences (14)
- Institute of Science and Environment (49)
- Library (2)
- Macau Ricci Institute (3)
- School of Education (25)
Resource type
United Nations SDGs
- 03 - Good Health and Well-being (8)
- 04 - Quality Education (2)
- 05 - Gender Equality (1)
- 07 - Affordable and Clean Energy (1)
- 08 - Decent Work and Economic Growth (3)
- 09 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (9)
- 10 - Reduced Inequalities (1)
- 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities (4)
- 12 - Responsable Consumption and Production (2)
- 13 - Climate Action (2)
- 14 - Life Below Water (8)
- 15 - Life on Land (3)
- 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (1)