WHO approves? Relative trust, the WHO, and China's COVID-19 vaccines.

This paper aims to answer a general question: whether an international organization (IO) is able to shape public opinion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, countries across the globe have switched gear from prevention to vaccination. Most had to not only secure a sufficient supply of vaccines, but also to curb vaccine hesitancy among their populations. Can endorsement by an international organization like the World Health Organization (WHO) enhance a vaccine's acceptability? Based on a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan, our study leverages the special relationship between China and Taiwan to show that WHO endorsement can induce acceptance of Chinese vaccines among Taiwanese people. However, the effect is found to be contextual in the sense that it only works when people's trust in the WHO is higher than their trust in the vaccine's country of origin. Our study not only contributes to the literature of IO legitimacy by empirically showing IOs' causal effects on public opinion, but also sheds light on how a vaccine's credibility can be enhanced to promote vaccination uptake. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-022-09481-1.

H-Theorem in an Isolated Quantum Harmonic Oscillator.

We consider the H-theorem in an isolated quantum harmonic oscillator through the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The effect of potential in producing entropy is investigated in detail, and we found that including a barrier potential into a harmonic trap would lead to the thermalization of the system, while a harmonic trap alone would not thermalize the system. During thermalization, Shannon entropy increases, which shows that a microscopic quantum system still obeys the macroscopic thermodynamics law. Meanwhile, initial coherent mechanical energy transforms to incoherent thermal energy during thermalization, which exhibiting the decoherence of an oscillating wave packet featured by a large decreasing of autocorrelation length. When reaching thermal equilibrium, the wave packet comes to a halt, with the density distributions both in position and momentum spaces well-fitted by a microcanonical ensemble of statistical mechanics.

Vaccine nationalism among the public: A cross-country experimental evidence of own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination.

What types of vaccines are citizens most likely to accept? We argue that citizens' identification with their nation may lead them to prefer vaccines developed and produced within their national borders, to the exclusion and/or detriment of vaccines from other nations. We administered a conjoint experiment requesting 15,000 adult citizens across 14 individual countries from around the world to assess 450,000 profiles of vaccines that randomly varied on seven attributes. Beyond vaccine fundamentals such as efficacy rate, number of doses, and duration of the protection, we find that citizens systematically favor vaccines developed and produced in their own country of residence. The extent of preference in favor of vaccines developed and produced within the national borders is particularly large among citizens who identify more strongly with their nation, suggesting nationalism plays a role in explaining the bias in favor of vaccines developed and produced locally. This public opinion bias on vaccine preferences has significant theoretical and practical implications.

Citizen journalism reduces the credibility deficit of authoritarian government in risk communication amid COVID-19 outbreaks.

During the outbreak of an epidemic, the success in risk communications to make the public comply with disease preventive measures depends on the public's trust in the government. In this study, we aim to understand how media audiences update their trust in the government during the COVID-19 outbreak depending on the information they received. We conducted an online survey experiment in February 2020 in Hong Kong (n = 1,016) in which respondents were randomly provided with a government press release and an endorsement either from an official or a non-official source. This study shows that the information from a non-official source enhances the credibility of official government messages. Our findings imply that dictators can actually "borrow credibility" from their citizen journalists and even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism. Allowing information flow from non-official sources can be a practical measure for governments to address the problem of a credibility deficit during a pandemic.

Inpatient versus outpatient intravenous diuresis for the acute exacerbation of chronic heart failure.

BACKGROUND: We established an IV outpatient diuresis (IVOiD) clinic and conducted a quality improvement project to evaluate safety, effectiveness and costs associated with outpatient versus inpatient diuresis for patients presenting with acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) to the emergency department (ED). METHODS: Patients who were clinically diagnosed with ADHF in the ED, but did not have high-risk features, were either diuresed in the hospital or in the outpatient IVOiD clinic. The dose of IV diuretic was based on their home maintenance diuretic dose. The outcomes measured were the effects of diuresis (urine output, weight, hemodynamic and laboratory abnormalities), 30-90 day readmissions, 30-90 day death and costs. RESULTS: In total, 36 patients (22 inpatients and 14 outpatients) were studied. There were no significant differences in the baseline demographics between groups. The average inpatient stay was six days and the average IVOiD clinic days were 1.2. There was no significant difference in diuresis per day of treatment (1159 vs. 944 ml, p = 0.46). There was no significant difference in adverse outcomes, 30-90 day readmissions or 30-90 day deaths. There was a significantly lower cost in the IVOiD group compared to the inpatient group ($839.4 vs. $9895.7, p=<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Outpatient IVOiD clinic diuresis may be a viable alternative to accepted clinical practice of inpatient diuresis for ADHF. Further studies are needed to validate this in a larger cohort and in different sites.

Thermalization in a Quantum Harmonic Oscillator with Random Disorder.

We propose a possible scheme to study the thermalization in a quantum harmonic oscillator with random disorder. Our numerical simulation shows that through the effect of random disorder, the system can undergo a transition from an initial nonequilibrium state to a equilibrium state. Unlike the classical damped harmonic oscillator where total energy is dissipated, total energy of the disordered quantum harmonic oscillator is conserved. In particular, at equilibrium the initial mechanical energy is transformed to the thermodynamic energy in which kinetic and potential energies are evenly distributed. Shannon entropy in different bases are shown to yield consistent results during the thermalization.

Thermotolerance evaluation of Taiwan Japonica type rice cultivars at the seedling stage.

BACKGROUND: The subtropical rice varieties grown in Taiwan are mainly Japonica-type rice varieties, which are grown in the southernmost- and lowest-latitude Japonica type rice cultivation area in the world. In Taiwan, seedlings that are planted either by transplanting or direct seeding in the second crop will face the season with the highest temperatures during the year. High-temperature stress severely influences early rice growth and causes yield losses. With global warming deteriorating, this problem is becoming increasingly severe. This study attempted to establish a high-efficiency and time-saving screening tool for rice varieties that exhibit thermotolerance during the early growth stages and further identify good donors with better tolerance for high temperature stress from Taiwan Japonica type rice germplasm. RESULTS: During the initial germination stage, there were significantly different responses to heat stress among the different rice varieties. After the temperature induction response technique (TIR) treatment, the seedling survival rate and relative growth rate of the rice varieties under high temperature stress were significantly improved. In addition, the seedlings of the thermotolerant varieties demonstrated greater thermotolerance performance in the pot experiment as well as cell membrane stability (CMS) and cell activity (2,3,5-triphenyl-tetrazolium chloride; TTC) test results. However, the correlation between the thermotolerance of the seedlings and seeds was low. A phylogenetic dendrogram was plotted and revealed that thermotolerant genes did not concentrate in specific clusters. Furthermore, there was a non-significant correlation between the thermotolerance of the varieties and the years in which they were released. CONCLUSIONS: The temperature induction screening tool established by this study could determine the potential of each variety to adapt to high temperature stress. Additionally, thermotolerance during different growth stages (i.e., the germination, seedling, and grain maturation stages) exhibited low correlations. In this study, the varieties obtained through preliminary screening (i.e., TK14, HC56, TT30, TNG70, and TK8) exhibited outstanding thermotolerance. The screen tools and thermotolerance varieties could be valuable resources for the countries that grow Japonica type rice to apply when breeding thermotolerant varieties in the future.

Superconductivity in Empty Bands and Multiple Order Parameter Chirality.

Recent experiments have shown rotation of the plane of polarization of light reflected from the surface of some superconductors. The photon energy exceeds the electronic bandwidth, so that completely filled or completely empty bands must play a role. We show that in strong-coupling theory a Coulomb interaction can produce an order parameter in the unoccupied band that explains the observations. Thus the phenomenology puts tight constraints on the form of the order parameter in different bands. We propose that the experiments have detected, for the first time, the existence of a superconducting order parameter in a band far from the Fermi energy. This is only possible because of the sensitivity to delicate symmetries: a positive Kerr effect indicates that time reversal and certain mirror symmetries are broken in the ordered phase. Furthermore, detailed analysis of the results implies that in UPt3 there exist bands that have different order parameter chiralities, opening up complex new possibilities for topological superconductivity.