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Additional file 1: Figure S1. The effect of PYQ and its active compounds on the viability of THP-1 cells.

Background: Computer vision studies and three-dimensional (3D) models are used to restore two-dimensional (2D) images. Computer vision studies have been conducted in the computer graphic field, and due to its broad applications, numerous related explorations have been performed. Methodology: To directly and effectively convey the design concept of the virtual vision technology, the graphic design was changed from 2D to 3D, which broadened the graphic design development space. Based on the 3D virtual vision and interactive design, this study constructed an interior design platform. After the detailed introduction of the function design of the 3D virtual visual effect displays of the interior design platform, the 3D virtual rendering functions of the interior design platform were designed. Results: When the traditional interior design platform was improved, panoramic information combined with 3D virtual vision technology can be used to record and analyze the results and to generate the corresponding image workflow for establishing a completely functional interior design platform. Based on this, ordinary and interior design platforms were comparatively analyzed. Conclusion: The interior design platform can accurately determine the interior landscape position and draw good 3D images.

BackgroundAsthma is a major global health challenge. The global strategic management and prevention of asthma report has been published, but health system planning for asthma requires a careful assessment of asthma epidemiology. This study described the incidence and mortality of global asthma from 1990 to 2019.MethodsBased on data from the global burden of disease study (GBD) 2019, we present spatial and temporal trends in asthma incidence and mortality for the world and its 204 countries and territories from 1990 to 2019. Meanwhile, age-period-cohort analysis was used to explore factors influencing asthma incidence and mortality.ResultsFrom 1990 to 2019, the incidence of asthma decreased from 601.20 per 1,00,000 to 477.92 per 1,00,000, and the mortality of asthma decreased from 8.60 per 1,00,000 to 5.96 per 1,00,000. High sociodemographic index (SDI) areas have higher age-standardised asthma incidence and low sociodemographic index areas have higher age-standardised asthma mortality. The age-period-cohort analysis results showed that the relative risk (RR) of incidence was high in children and the RR of mortality was high in elderly individuals. The RR of both asthma incidence and mortality showed a decreasing trend over time. The RR of asthma incidence in the recent birth cohort was higher than that in the previous birth cohort. The RR of asthma mortality continued to decline with the change in the birth cohort.ConclusionsGlobal asthma incidence and mortality decreased from 1990 to 2019. The decline in asthma incidence was mainly attributed to age effects and period effects, and the decline in asthma mortality was mainly attributed to period effects and cohort effects. Focusing on the risk of incidence in children and the risk of mortality in the elderly, promoting healthy lifestyles and controlling environmental risk factors can help to better control asthma.

In developing countries, supply chains are rapidly transforming. However, smallholder farmers, in particular, have experienced mixed impacts in inclusion and exclusion from modern supply chains (MSC). Therefore, by taking Pakistan’s mandarin industry as a case, this study aims to analyze the farmers’ efficiency and inclusiveness in modern supply chains and compare them across the farm size categories, i.e., small, medium, and large. For that purpose, cross-sectional data from 300 farmers were collected to test the posit objectives. The empirical investigation was made using the endogenous treatment effect model and the propensity score matching approach. Findings show that large farmers prefer to participate in MSC, driven by contractors, processors or exporters. Conversely, the smallholders are more inclined to participate in the traditional supply chains (TSCs), driven by village vendors, local retailers/consumers, middlemen, and traditional fruit and vegetable markets. The results also revealed a positive connection between efficiency and farmers’ inclusion in the MSC. Orchard size, education, off-farm income, and extension services positively impact profitability. In terms of an increase in farmers’ profitability, the efficiency improvement can benefit the resource-poor smallholders who make up 74% of the total farmers in the sample. Therefore, these results are noteworthy for devising policy actions to facilitate smallholder inclusion in the modern agri-food supply chains to alleviate rural poverty and ensure farmers’ wellbeing.

Although organic rice is a niche market in Pakistan, it has exhibited enormous potential for growth in export-oriented production. Since contract farming is the leading promoter of export-oriented organic rice production in Punjab, Pakistan, improving the technical efficiency of smallholder rice farmers through contract farming holds sufficient potential. This work examines the influence of contract farming participation on smallholder rice farmers’ technical efficiency using a cross-sectional data set of 650 respondents. We applied a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to examine the production frontier and inefficiency estimates. Further, propensity score matching (PSM) was used to control endogeneity and self-selection bias in technical efficiency estimates. The results reveal that the technical efficiency score of organic rice farmers in Punjab, Pakistan, is 89.7%, which can still be improved by 10.3% at the current sociodemographic characters and input levels. Likewise, land size, seed, and machine expenditures are the key inputs of the production frontier. Results show a positive and significant connection between contract farming participation and technical efficiency. The study extends the literature on technical efficiency, export-oriented production, contract farming, and the well-being of smallholder farmers. Moreover, the study’s findings provide cues for policies and practices.

Background: A simple and sensitive quantitation analytical technique by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) is essential for fedratinib in biological media with kinetic study in healthy rabbits. Objective: The main objectives of the present research work are to LC-MS/MS method development and validate procedure for the quantitation of fedratinib and its application to kinetic study in rabbits. Methods: Separation of processed samples were employed on zorbax SB C18 column (50mm×4.6 mm) 3.5µm with a movable phase of methanol, acetonitrile and 0.1% formic acid in the ratio of 30:60:10. The movable phase was monitored through column at 0.8 ml/min flow rate. The drug and ibrutinib internal standard (IS) were evaluated by monitoring the transitions of m/z -525.260/57.07 and 441.2/55.01 for fedratinib and IS respectively in multiple reaction monitoring mode. Results: The linear equation and coefficient of correlation (R2) results were y =0.00348x+0.00245 and 0.9984, respectively. Intra and inter-day precision RSD findings of the developed technique were found in the range of 2.4 - 5.3% for the quality control (QC)-samples (252.56, 1804.0 and 2706 ng/ml). The proposed method was subjected to pharmacokinetic study in healthy rabbits and the kinetic study, fedratinib showed mean AUClast 13190±18.1 hr*ng/ml and Cmax was found to be 3550±4.31 ng/ml in healthy rabbits. Conclusion: The validated method can be applicable for the pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies in the clinical and forensic analysis of fedratinib in different kinds of biological matrices successfully.

Introduction: We developed and evaluated a method for dose calibration and monitoring under conventional and ultra-high dose rates for small animal experiments with small-field proton beams using a Faraday cup. Methods: We determined a relationship between dose and optical density (OD) of EBT-XD Gafchromic film using scanned 10x10 cm2 proton pencil beams delivered at clinical dose rates; the dose was measured with an Advanced Markus chamber. On a small animal proton irradiation platform, double-scattered pencil beams with 5 or 8 mm diameter brass collimation at conventional and ultra-high dose rates were delivered to the EBT-XD films. The proton fluence charges were collected by a Faraday cup placed downstream from the film. The average of the irradiated film ODs was related to the Faraday cup charges. A conversion from the Faraday cup charge to the average dose of the small-field proton beam was then obtained. Results: The relationship between the small-field average profile dose and Faraday cup charge was established for 10 and 15 Gy mice FLASH experiments. The film OD was found to be independent of dose rate. At small-animal treatments, the Faraday cup readings were conveniently used to QA and monitor the delivered dose and dose rates to the mice under conventional and ultra-high dose rates. Conclusion: The dose calibration and monitoring method with Faraday cup for small animal proton FLASH experiments is time-efficient and cost-effective and can be used for irradiations of various small field sizes. The same approach can also be adopted for clinical proton dosimetry for small-field irradiations., 18 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics (JACMP), note that Abbas Husain and Jeremiah Ryser are co-authors. All authors are associated with the University of Pennsylvania except for Francois Vander Stappen who is employed as a research assistant for iba-proton therapy. This project is partially supported by NIH grant P01CA257904-01A1

Microdochium chuxiongense H. Yu, W.Q. Zou & D.X. Tang, sp. nov. (Figure 2) MycoBank:— MB 844086 Etymology:— Referring to Chuxiong City where was this species collected. Typus:— The Zixi Mountains, Chuxiong City, Yunnan Province, China (25°04′19.88′′ N, 110°54′60.46′′ E, alt. 2300 m), on pileus of Bondarzewia sp., 22 September 2020, Hong Yu (YHH 20400, holotype; YFCC 8794, ex-holotype living culture). Asexual morph:— Mycelium immersed and superficial, hyphae hyaline, branched, smooth, septate, 2–3 μm wide (x̅=3 µm, n =30). Conidiophores cylindrical, straight, septate, 8–15 × 2–3 μm (x̅=11 × 2 µm, n =10), and borned from the hyphae. Conidiogenous cells sparse, solitary, clavate, occasionally curved or swollen, hyaline, smooth, septate, 27–74 × 2–3 μm (x̅=50 × 2 µm, n =20). Conidia single or multiple, long oval, shuttle or sickle, straight or curved, 0(–3)-septate, 4–12 × 2–5 μm (x̅=7 × 3 µm, n =30). Chlamydospores were produced directly from mycelium, single, round or palmate, 9–11 × 10 μm (x̅=10 × 10 µm, n =10). Sexual morph were not found. Culture characteristics:— The colony was on PDA medium fast-growing, 55–60 mm (x̅= 58 mm, n =3) in diameter after 7 days. The center has obvious milky white aerial mycelium bulge, and the edge mycelium was smooth, back light yellow. The colony was 78–82 mm (x̅= 80 mm, n =3) in diameter after 14 days, with pale aerial mycelium cottony, forming an obvious black circle in centre, back dark brown. Know distribution:— The Zixi Mountains, Chuxiong City, Yunnan Province, China. Notes:— This study reported that M. chuxiongense was isolated from pileus of Bondarzewia sp., and was different from the host reported by previous studies. Phylogenetic analysis based on four genes showed that M. chuxiongense was formed a separate clade with M. indocalami and M. maculosum, it was a sister with M. indocalami, with strongly being supported by BI posterior probabilities (PP = 83%) and ML boostrap proportions (BP = 82%). The sequence length was 3255 bp for M. indocalami and M. chuxiongense, the gap sites of M. indocalami was 293 bp, and M. chuxiongense was 759 bp, their conserved sites were 2385 bp, and variable sites were 106 bp, 73% similar to M. indocalami and M. chuxiongense. M. chuxiongense was very similar to M. indocalami in the colony, conidiophores and conidiogenous cells and conidia. However, it differed in the colony forming an obvious black circle in centre (Huang et al. 2020) (Table 2). Moreover, the shape of conidiophores differs from M. chuxiongense and M. indocalami. M. chuxiongense was cylindrical, straight, septate, 8–15 × 2–3 μm, M. indocalami was straight or slightly curved, septate, aggregated in the aerial mycelium (Table 2). In addition, the size and shape of conidiogenous cells also differ from two species, conidiogenous cells of M. indocalami was terminal or intercalary, denticulate, straight or bent, 11–28 × 2–3 μm. Nevertheless, M. chuxiongense was sparse, occasionally curved or swollen, 27–74 × 2–3 μm (Table 2). The size, shape and septate of conidia reported for M. indocalami (13–16 × 4–6 μm, cylindrical, clavate to obovoid, base usually flattened, 1–3-septate) were different from M. chuxiongense (4–12 × 2–5 μm, single or multiple, long oval, shuttle or sickle, straight or curved, 0–3-septate) (Table 2). Importantly, chlamydospores were observed in M. chuxiongense, and yet M. indocalami was not observed., Published as part of Tang, De-Xiang, Zou, Wei-Qiu, Wang, Yao-Ming, Huang, Ou & Yu, Hong, 2022, Morphology and phylogeny of Microdochium chuxiongense sp. nov., a fungus from Southwest China, pp. 147-158 in Phytotaxa 555 (2) on page 151, DOI: 10.11646/phytotaxa.555.2.3, http://zenodo.org/record/6875964, {"references":["Huang, S., Xia, J., Zhang, X., Sun, W. X. & Li, Z. (2020) Two new species of Microdochium from Indocalamus longiauritus in southwestern China. MycoKeys 72: 93 - 108. https: // doi. org / 10.3897 / mycokeys. 72.55445"]}

Objectives: To explore the possible mechanism of human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cell (hUC-MSC) transplantation in mice after spinal cord hemisection. Methods: Thoracic spinal cord hemisection injuries were performed on adult female Kunming mice. The mice with spinal cord injury (SCI) were injected with hUC-MSCs suspended in normal saline, while the control mice received an equal volume of normal saline. The histological HE staining and Nissl staining were performed 4 and 8 weeks after hUC-MSC transplantation in SCI mice. The Basso-Beattie-Bresnahan (BBB) locomotor rating scale was used to assess functional recovery after SCI. Western blotting was performed to determine the protein expressions. Results: hUC-MSCs transplantation decreased cavitation and tissue loss and increased the number of Nissl bodies in the damaged areas of the spinal cord after 4 and 8 weeks. The BBB locomotor performance of the transplanted mice was significantly improved (P

Background: In recent times, large diameter plastic pipes have been widely used in many functions because of their unique advantages. These applications include water supply, drainage, heating network, industrial transportation, gas delivery, agricultural irrigation, etc. Therefore, manufacturing large diameter plastic pipes economically and efficiently has now become an important research area. Objective: This paper reviews patents of plastic pipe manufacturing or forming to provide insights and references to researchers in the domain of larger diameter plastic pipe production. Methods: This paper reviews the Spouted-accumulated Forming, a production method that combines the advantages of traditional extrusion, calendaring, and additive manufacturing. It is a novel process to manufacture large diameter plastic pipes. Results: The experiment result shows that Spouted-accumulated Forming can be used to manufacture large diameter plastic pipes efficiently with lower costs. This paper argues that this novel method will serve as a promising technology to manufacture larger diameter pipes in the future. Conclusion: Since traditional manufacturing processes cannot fulfil the requirement of large diameter of plastic pipes, it is necessary to develop novel processes such as Spouted-Accumulated Forming (SAF, based on additive manufacturing).

This paper describes our best system and methodology for ADD 2022: The First Audio Deep Synthesis Detection Challenge\cite{Yi2022ADD}. The very same system was used for both two rounds of evaluation in Track 3.2 with a similar training methodology. The first round of Track 3.2 data is generated from Text-to-Speech(TTS) or voice conversion (VC) algorithms, while the second round of data consists of generated fake audio from other participants in Track 3.1, aiming to spoof our systems. Our systems use a standard 34-layer ResNet, with multi-head attention pooling \cite{india2019self} to learn the discriminative embedding for fake audio and spoof detection. We further utilize neural stitching to boost the model's generalization capability in order to perform equally well in different tasks, and more details will be explained in the following sessions. The experiments show that our proposed method outperforms all other systems with a 10.1% equal error rate(EER) in Track 3.2., Accepted to ICASSP 2022

Additional file 2: Supplemental Table 2. The questionnaires and answer options for variables.

We investigate robustness properties of pre-trained neural models for automatic speech recognition. Real life data in machine learning is usually very noisy and almost never clean, which can be attributed to various factors depending on the domain, e.g. outliers, random noise and adversarial noise. Therefore, the models we develop for various tasks should be robust to such kinds of noisy data, which led to the thriving field of robust machine learning. We consider this important issue in the setting of automatic speech recognition. With the increasing popularity of pre-trained models, it's an important question to analyze and understand the robustness of such models to noise. In this work, we perform a robustness analysis of the pre-trained neural models wav2vec2, HuBERT and DistilHuBERT on the LibriSpeech and TIMIT datasets. We use different kinds of noising mechanisms and measure the model performances as quantified by the inference time and the standard Word Error Rate metric. We also do an in-depth layer-wise analysis of the wav2vec2 model when injecting noise in between layers, enabling us to predict at a high level what each layer learns. Finally for this model, we visualize the propagation of errors across the layers and compare how it behaves on clean versus noisy data. Our experiments conform the predictions of Pasad et al. [2021] and also raise interesting directions for future work., Comment: 5 pages, 14 figures

High gradient quadrupole magnets are required on both sides of the interaction points in the proposed Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC). There are three double aperture superconducting quadrupoles with a crossing angle between two aperture centerlines of 33 mrad. It is challenging to meet stringent design requirements, including limited space, magnetic field crosstalk between two apertures, magnetic field gradients up to 142 T/m, etc. In this paper, status of superconducting magnets in CEPC interaction region in the technical design stage is described. Magnetic design of superconducting quadrupole magnet with three kinds of quadrupole coil structures, including cos(2theta) coil, CCT coil, and Serpentine coil is presented and compared. In addition, the development status of a single aperture short model quadrupole magnet with a magnetic length of 0.5 m is presented., Proceedings of the 65th ICFA Advanced Beam Dynamics Workshop on High Luminosity Circular e+e- Colliders, eeFACT2022, Frascati, Italy

This paper presents the details of our system designed for the Task 1 of Multimodal Information Based Speech Processing (MISP) Challenge 2021. The purpose of Task 1 is to leverage both audio and video information to improve the environmental robustness of far-field wake word spotting. In the proposed system, firstly, we take advantage of speech enhancement algorithms such as beamforming and weighted prediction error (WPE) to address the multi-microphone conversational audio. Secondly, several data augmentation techniques are applied to simulate a more realistic far-field scenario. For the video information, the provided region of interest (ROI) is used to obtain visual representation. Then the multi-layer CNN is proposed to learn audio and visual representations, and these representations are fed into our two-branch attention-based network which can be employed for fusion, such as transformer and conformed. The focal loss is used to fine-tune the model and improve the performance significantly. Finally, multiple trained models are integrated by casting vote to achieve our final 0.091 score., Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 2022

Additional file 1: Supplemental Table 1. Definitions and odds ratio (OR) used for each of the risk factors.

Additional file 3: Supplemental Table 3. GBD 2019 sequelae, health states, health state lay descriptions, and disability weights.

Additional file 2: Supplementary Table 2. Effect of number of TDs on OS in GC patients. Abbreviations: CI, confidence interval; DFS, disease-free survival; GC, gastric cancer; HR, hazard ratio; No., number; OS, overall survival; Pts, patients; Ref., reference; TD, tumor deposit.

Surrogate endpoint (SE) for overall survival in cancer patients is essential to improving the efficiency of oncology drug development. In practice, we may discover a new patient level association with survival, based on one or more clinical or biological features, in a discovery cohort; and then measure the trial level association across studies in a meta-analysis to validate the SE. To understand how well various patient level metrics would indicate the eventual trial level association, we considered causal biological trajectories based on bi-exponential functions, modeled the strength of their impact on survival hazards via a parameter {\alpha}, and simulated the trajectories and survival times in randomized trials simultaneously. We set an early time point in the trials when the trajectory measurement became the SE value. From simulated discovery cohorts, we compared patient level metrics including C index, integrated brier score, and log hazard ratio between SE values and survival times. We assembled multiple simulated studies to enable meta-analyses to estimate the trial level association. Across all the simulation scenarios considered here, we found tight correlations among the three patient level metrics and similar correlations between any of them and the trial level metric. Despite the continual increase in {\alpha}, both patient and trial level metrics often plateaued together; their association always decreased quickly as {\alpha} increased. This suggests that incorporating additional biological factors into a composite SE is likely to have diminishing returns on improving both patient level and trial level association., Comment: the main body has 23 pages and 8 figures

The impact assessment of micro finance on agriculture development in district Badin was performed. The results showed that the total credit disbursement by various commercial banks in Badin district was 103.97, 72.84, 90.33, 39.97, 139.44, 103.37 and 131.28 million rupees during the years 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17; while total amount of loans under short and long term schemes during this period was 103.97, 72.84, 90.33, 39.97, 139.44, 103.37 and 131.28 million rupees, respectively. The cross partial correlation coefficient results suggested that total credit (TCR) is significantly correlated with GNP. This gives greater association of agricultural production with micro credit, where fertilizer is highly correlated with seed and production is highly correlated with cropping intensity. The seed is highly correlated with pesticides which are all important purchased inputs. The regression analysis indicates that the total institutional credit was a significant determinant of seed, fertilizer, pesticides, cropping intensity and GNP. In all cases, the total credit appears also to be highly significant. The flow of agricultural credit from institutional sources resulted in significant expansion after the participation of commercial banks which made appreciable efforts to accomplish the objectives and captured substantial market. The results of the present study show that the institutional credit proves to have more impact on farm productivity. It is suggestible that in Badin district, the credit availability and loan size, farmers’ education and landholding structure need to be improved for all farmers and farmers are not homogenous in their demand for credit and subsequently in their credit constraints, and this has important effect on their technical efficiency.

Over time, the government of Pakistan introduced several strategies to deal with the issue of slums in its capital city, Islamabad. Contrary to the traditional strategies that primarily focus on the tenure security of occupants, the strategy of slum redevelopment is more composite. It involves the up-gradation of slums in their existing sites as well as the demolition of slums from the posh areas. The present study is first to empirically investigates the outcomes of the slums redevelopment policies on the value of adjacent residential properties. Using a rental valuation based hedonic price model, the study examined the spillover effects of an urban slum up-gradation and eviction projects on the nearby housing values. The results show that the redevelopment of slums reduces the adverse effects on residential value. It is essential for the urban planners to cautiously include the slum redevelopment projects spillover effects on the adjacent property value in different geographical locations, to maximize the net positive effects of improvements on the neighborhood.

To realize the quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE) at elevated temperatures, the approach of magnetic proximity effect (MPE) was adopted to break the time-reversal symmetry in the topological insulator (Bi0.3Sb0.7)2Te3 (BST) based heterostructures with a ferrimagnetic insulator europium iron garnet (EuIG) of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Here we demonstrate phenomenally large anomalous Hall resistance (RAHE) exceeding 8 {\Omega} (\r{ho}AHE of 3.2 {\mu}{\Omega}*cm) at 300 K and sustaining to 400 K in 35 BST/EuIG samples, surpassing the past record of 0.28 {\Omega} (\r{ho}AHE of 0.14 {\mu}{\Omega}*cm) at 300 K. The remarkably large RAHE as attributed to an atomically abrupt, Fe-rich interface between BST and EuIG. Importantly, the gate dependence of the AHE loops shows no sign change with varying chemical potential. This observation is supported by our first-principles calculations via applying a gradient Zeeman field plus a contact potential on BST. Our calculations further demonstrate that the AHE in this heterostructure is attributed to the intrinsic Berry curvature. Furthermore, for gate-biased 4 nm BST on EuIG, a pronounced topological Hall effect (THE) coexisting with AHE is observed at the negative top-gate voltage up to 15 K. Interface tuning with theoretical calculations has opened up new opportunities to realize topologically distinct phenomena in tailored magnetic TI-based heterostructures., Comment: 66 pages, 16 figures

This research investigation falls in the very few studies that seek the association between city development and sustainable urban planning. This study emphasized to examine and explore ef...

Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westf��lische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2021; Aachen : RWTH Aachen University 1 Online-Ressource : Illustrationen (2021). = Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westf��lische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2021, Polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs) are a promising energy conversion technology that generates electricity from hydrogen with low noise, and less or zero emission properties. Phenomena during the fuel cell operation are complex, which are caused by many interrelated factors. In addition, the dynamic behaviors of the fuel cells will change due to different operating conditions and load changes. A fast response model that can predict the PEFCs dynamic behavior is helpful to implement optimal control to the fuel cell systems obtaining a desired performance. The aim of the thesis is to developing, analyzing and modifying a fuel cell dynamic model, in which a least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) is employed. The efficiency of the LSSVM model is first demonstrated in comparison to experimental data collected from a fuel cell test rig. Analyzing the model���s performance under various fuel cell load changes is carried out with the help of experimental data collected from our test rig and artificial data generated by a white-box model that based on the mechanism of the fuel cell systems. Two types of artificial data are generated: one is idealized artificial data with determined cell voltage and another one is oscillated artificial data that includes the oscillation on the cell voltage. Various load changes, namely current density changes, are considered in the analysis, and are represented by a combination of two factors called as ramp time and ramp value. Ramp time is used to show how fast the load is changed and ramp value is used to describe the range of load change. In addition, considering the data-driven nature of the LSSVM method, sampling interval of the test rig that determines the frequency of data collection is considered. It is found that the performance of the LSSVM model is better when smoother load changes are imposed on the system, so large ramp time and small ramp value are preferable in order to achieve good model accuracy. Moreover, to modeling a high dynamic fuel cell system, a high frequency sampling is suggested to reach a desirable model performance. The thesis defines a working zone for the LSSVM model when predicting the PEFCs dynamic response to sudden load change. Based on the acceptable error to the modeling, a set of workable combinations of sampling interval, ramp time and ramp value can be found. The working zone helps to instruct the future application of the LSSVM model when different operating load changes are applied. Last but not the least, the LSSVM model is modified in order to improve its modeling performance when predicting the dynamic behavior of the fuel cell. An online adaptive LSSVM model is developed. Determination of initial value of the internal parameters to the LSSVM model is optimized by employing a genetic algorithm to search global optimum instead of manual search. An adaptive process is carried out to update these internal parameters online. With a suitable starting point of the internal parameters and online updating processes, this online adaptive LSSVM model can well deal with complex nonlinear fuel cell systems with frequent load changes., Published by RWTH Aachen University, Aachen

Kochiae Fructus (KF) is the fruit of an annual potherb Kochia scoparia (Linn.) Schrad and has been traditionally used for the treatment of diseases in the skin, eyes, and urinary tract for thousands of years in China. Recent studies have showed its anti-inflammatory, antifungal, antiallergic, and antipruritogenic effects to clarify the mechanisms of these actions. Meanwhile, its other effects, such as anticancer, hypoglycemic, and hepatoprotective effects, also have been reported. The achievement of these therapeutic effects is contributed by its chemical constituents. A total of 153 compounds have been identified in KF, mainly including triterpenoids, flavonoids, carbohydrates, amino acids, organic acids, and essential oils. Momordin Ic is the representative triterpene glycoside compound, which is used as a phytochemical marker for the quality control of Kochiae Fructus. The research on toxicity is insufficient, and only one article reported that the LD50 was 7.15 ± 0.03 g/kg for water extract of KF after oral administration in KM mice. In addition, the pharmacokinetic study was carried out on momordin Ic with linear pharmacokinetic characteristics. Above all, this review provides comprehensive information about Kochiae Fructus and may provide the theoretic foundation of its clinical application and further development.

Additional file 1. Supplementary figures.

Additional file 2: Table S1. The primers used for qRT-PCR.

So far, the conglomerate reservoir of east block No. 1 of District VII in Karamay oilfield has entered the development stage of high water cut, high decline rate, low velocity and low efficiency. Considering the complex pore structure and severe heterogeneity, it is urgent to enhance the oil recovery. Polymer flooding is a potential candidate for developing this kind of reservoir. In this paper, the control degree of polymer flooding is calculated by refined 3D geological model unit grid, Taking into account the connectivity of the plane, the main characteristics of the polymer flooding reservoir are also quantified. Based on the core experiment and related empirical formula, permeability of the reservoir was ranked and fine 3D geological model was established. On this basis, take permeability as a filter, fully considering the effect of the removal of low permeability layer and other polymer flooding on the region. Pore volume and total volume of the formation was extracted by fine model cell. Thus, control degree of polymer flooding was obtained. The research results show that: The application of 3D effect to characterize the control degree of the well pattern to the oil layer at different permeability level is beneficial to guiding the optimization of development plan of polymer flooding and improving the development effect.

Applied energy 288, 116561 (2021). doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.116561, Published by Elsevier Science, Amsterdam [u.a.]

Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westf��lische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2021; Aachen : RWTH Aachen University 1 Online-Ressource : Illustrationen (2021). = Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westf��lische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2021, This paper presents a new process for the production of microstructures from thermoplastic polymers: friction embossing. Friction embossing has points of contact with the processes of friction welding, ultrasonic hot embossing and hot embossing without ultrasound. For friction embossing, similarly short cycle times as for friction welding and ultrasonic hot embossing can be achieved, but it can produce microstructures with more evenly properties on larger surfaces. The first part of the thesis comprises measurements of the heat distribution during the ultrasonic process. The heat generation and force distribution on the surface of polymer samples under the sonotrode of an ultrasonic welding machine were measured using pyro- and piezoelectric polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) sensors. The PVDF sensors were carefully characterized to distinguish the measured electrical voltage due to pressure, stretching, shear stress and temperature changes. The studies show that the heat distribution in ultrasonic welding is uneven due to the unevenly distribution of the amplitude of the ultrasonic vibrations of the sonotrode. In order to optimize ultrasonic processes for the production of microstructures, the influence of preheating the mold was analyzed. It was found that as the preheating temperature increases, the difference in embossing depth on the weld surface decreases. Similar measurements were performed to measure shear stress, temperature generated by friction heat, cooling times, contact stroke, vibration acceleration, stop times, vibration or rotation frequency, pullback time and pullback force of the linear and circular friction welding machine. In the second part of the thesis, the production of thermoplastic microstructures by friction embossing was investigated. Mold filling by the new process was optimized by a variety of tool designs or preheating of the mold. By friction embossing with a circular friction welding machine, thermoplastic microstructures were produced in one operation on a surface of 20 �� 20 cm2. In addition, one application example of the friction welding process was investigated and presented. In the final part of this thesis, hot embossing with and without ultrasound are compared with friction embossing in terms of mold filling, shrinkage, investment costs and manufacturing costs., Published by RWTH Aachen University, Aachen

Violence detection based on deep learning is a research hotspot in intelligent video surveillance. The pre-trained Three-Dimensional convolutional network (C3D) has a weak ability to extract spatiotemporal features of video. It can only achieve an accuracy of 88.2% on the UCF-101 data set, which cannot meet the accuracy requirements for detecting violent behavior in videos. Thus, this paper proposes a network architecture based on the C3D and fusion of the Inception-Resnet-v2 network residual Inception module. Through adaptive learning of feature weights, the three-dimensional features of violent behavior videos can be fully explored and the ability to express features is enhanced. Secondly, in view of the small amount of data in the data set for violence detection (HockeyFights), which easily leads to the problems of overfitting and low generalization ability, the UCF101 data set is used for fine-tune, so that the shallow layer of the network can fully extract the spatiotemporal features; Finally, the use of quantization tools to quantify network parameters and adjusting the sliding window parameters during inference can effectively improves the inference efficiency and improves the real-time performance while ensuring high accuracy. Through experiments, the accuracy of the network designed in the paper on the UCF-101 dataset is improved by 6.1% compared to the C3D network, and by 3.1% compared with the R3D network, indicating that the improved network structure can extract more spatiotemporal features, and finally achieved an accuracy of 95.1% on the HockeyFights test set.

Self-supervised visual pretraining has shown significant progress recently. Among those methods, SimCLR greatly advanced the state of the art in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. The input feature representations for speech and visual tasks are both continuous, so it is natural to consider applying similar objective on speech representation learning. In this paper, we propose Speech SimCLR, a new self-supervised objective for speech representation learning. During training, Speech SimCLR applies augmentation on raw speech and its spectrogram. Its objective is the combination of contrastive loss that maximizes agreement between differently augmented samples in the latent space and reconstruction loss of input representation. The proposed method achieved competitive results on speech emotion recognition and speech recognition.

Building a good speech recognition system usually requires large amounts of transcribed data, which is expensive to collect. To tackle this problem, many unsupervised pre-training methods have been proposed. Among these methods, Masked Predictive Coding achieved significant improvements on various speech recognition datasets with BERT-like Masked Reconstruction loss and Transformer backbone. However, many aspects of MPC have not been fully investigated. In this paper, we conduct a further study on MPC and focus on three important aspects: the effect of pre-training data speaking style, its extension on streaming model, and how to better transfer learned knowledge from pre-training stage to downstream tasks. Experiments reveled that pre-training data with matching speaking style is more useful on downstream recognition tasks. A unified training objective with APC and MPC provided 8.46% relative error reduction on streaming model trained on HKUST. Also, the combination of target data adaption and layer-wise discriminative training helped the knowledge transfer of MPC, which achieved 3.99% relative error reduction on AISHELL over a strong baseline.

In this work, worm-like SnS2 nanoparticles were prepared by a hydrothermal process. And then their photocatalytic activity was explored for the restoration of effluent containing Cr (VI). The results indicate that the product obtained is hexagonal SnS2 nanoparticles and adopts a worm-like morphology with length of approximate 6 nm and diameter of 3 nm. Moreover, the as-prepared SnS2 nanoparticles possess high photocatalytic activity for the visible light-driven reduction of Cr (VI). When the concentration of Cr (VI) is 4 × 10−4 mol/L, 99% Cr (VI) can be reduced over the as-prepared SnS2 nanoparticles within 30 min under visible irradiation.

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Quercetin has various biological activities, but its poor water solubility and stability limit its applications. In this study, β-cyclodextrin was used as the host and quercetin was encapsulated in its cavity to prepare an inclusion compound. Then, a nanofilm was formed using electrospinning. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and thermogravimetric differential scanning calorimetry (TG-DSC) were used to characterize the properties of the inclusion compound nanofilms. SEM images showed that the nanofilm prepared by optimizing the electrospinning process parameters had a good nanofiber structure. XRD, FTIR and TG/DSC characterization of the nanofilm showed that quercetin was encapsulated in the cavity of β-cyclodextrin and was present in the nanofilm. The quercetin was slowly released from the nanofilm and still had good bacteriostatic effects on Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli, indicating that the process of embedding and electrospinning did not affect the antibacterial activity of quercetin.

Shi Zuo,1,* Wei Zou,2,3,* Rong-Min Wu,4 Jing Yang,5 Jian-Nan Fan,2 Xue-Ke Zhao,5 Hai-Yang Li1 1Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, The Hospital Affiliated to Guizhou Medical University, Guiyang, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Sports Medicine, The Hospital Affiliated to Guizhou Medical University, Guiyang, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Orthopedics, The Fourth People’s Hospital of Guiyang, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Ultrasonography, The Maternity Hospital of Guizhou, Guiyang, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Infectious Disease, The Hospital Affiliated to Guizhou Medical University, Guiyang, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Hai-Yang LiDepartment of Hepatobiliary Surgery, The Hospital Affiliated to Guizhou Medical University, No.28, Guiyi Street, Guiyang, Guizhou 550004, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail haiyangli666@sohu.comJian-Nan FanDepartment of Sports Medicine, The Hospital Affiliated to Guizhou Medical University, No.28, Guiyi Street, Guiyang, Guizhou 550004, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail publetscientific@126.comObjective: Osteoarthritis (OA) is characterized by progressive matrix destruction of articular cartilage. This study aimed to investigate the potential antioxidative and chondroprotective effects and underlying mechanism of Icariin (ICA) in interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β)-induced extracellular matrix (ECM) degradation of OA cartilage.Methods: Human chondrocyte cell line HC-A was treated with different doses of ICA, and then MTT assay and PI staining were used to estimate ICA-induced chondrocyte apoptosis. Intracellular ROS and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GPX) were measured after treatment by IL-1β with or without ICA. The mRNA and protein expression levels of redox transcription factor Nrf2 and the downstream effector SOD-1, SOD-2, NQO-1 and HO-1 were assayed to explore the detailed mechanism by which ICA alleviates ECM degradation. Finally, to expound the role of Nrf2 in ICA-mediated chondroprotection, we specifically depleted Nrf2 in human chondrocytes and then pretreated them with ICA followed by IL-1β.Results: ICA had no cytotoxic effects on human chondrocytes and 10−9 M was selected as the optimum concentration. ROS induced by IL-1β could drastically activate matrix-degrading proteases and ICA could significantly rescue the matrix degradation and excess ROS generation caused by IL-1β. We observed that ICA activated the Nrf2/ARE pathway, consequently upregulating the generation of GPX and SOD. Ablation of Nrf2 abrogated the chondroprotective and antioxidative effects of ICA in IL-1β-treated chondrocytes.Conclusion: ICA alleviates IL-1β-induced matrix degradation and eliminates ROS by activating the Nrf2/ARE pathway.Keywords: icariin, Nrf2 signaling, ROS, human chondrocyte, ECM degradation &nbsp

Speech recognition technologies are gaining enormous popularity in various industrial applications. However, building a good speech recognition system usually requires large amounts of transcribed data, which is expensive to collect. To tackle this problem, an unsupervised pre-training method called Masked Predictive Coding is proposed, which can be applied for unsupervised pre-training with Transformer based model. Experiments on HKUST show that using the same training data, we can achieve CER 23.3%, exceeding the best end-to-end model by over 0.2% absolute CER. With more pre-training data, we can further reduce the CER to 21.0%, or a 11.8% relative CER reduction over baseline., Submitted to ICASSP 2020

This study focuses on China’s coastal area and its marine economic development. Applying the information diffusion method, the study establishes a kernel density function and its decomposition using a marine economic per capita as the index of the model to depict the dynamic evolution law and the internal influential factors of the Chinese marine economy during 1996–2013. The relative development rate was introduced to analyze the spatial differences in the marine economy’s development. In this way, space and time dimensions fully characterized the evolution of the Chinese marine economy. Additionally, the influence of growth and inequality in the process of its development can be analyzed. The study shows that the Chinese marine economy as a whole has been growing, and regional marine economic development is relatively coordinated. In addition, the marine economy began to develop even more rapidly after 2004. There are three factors affecting the dynamic evolution of China’s marine economy: first, the most influential mean effect, followed by, second, the variance effect, and third, the least influential residual effect. The biggest influence on the dynamic evolution of the marine economy is the improvement of the development level of the marine economy in the coastal area. Meanwhile, due to the existence of inequality, provinces at higher development levels are more dispersed. Furthermore, the existence of the residual effect weakens the influence of the mean effect, and the influence on the dynamic evolution of the marine economy continuously increases. In the analysis of the influencing factors of the evolution and spatial difference of marine economic development, the level of opening to the outside world, the level of investment in fixed assets and the industrial structure have a positive role in promoting economic development. However, capital investment in scientific human research has a negative correlation with economic development, and does not pass the significant test. The difference in regional development levels and development speed is also very apparent; namely, the provinces with higher development levels generally displayed faster development speeds while those with lower development levels showed slower development speeds across the four periods analyzed.

The potential of fluorescence measurement and circular dichroism spectroscopy (CDSP) to evaluate the interaction between cyclodextrins (CDs) (CD cavity size, concentration, pH, reaction time, and temperature as well as different side chain groups) and α-galactosidase was evaluated. A strong relationship was observed between α-galactosidase fluorescence intensity and CD cavity size, concentration, pH, reaction time, and temperature as well as different side chain groups. Therefore, it can be concluded that fluorescence intensity measurement can be a promising tool to ascertain β-CD-α-galactosidase interactions. CDSP is also an interesting tool to understand β-CD-α-galactosidase interactions as well as to evaluate the stability of α-galactosidase secondary structure. For instance, CDSP results showed that among three different types of CDs studied (α-CD, β-CD and γ-CD), β-CD promoted the most important α-helix transformation into β-sheet, thus reducing α-galactosidase secondary structure stability and showing the highest inhibitory effect on α-galactosidase fluorescence.

A 3-D mathematical model of regular wave flume is conducted to investigate the heaving performance of a cylindrical floater. The results show that the transverse velocities near the floater distribute symmetrically at the wave crest and trough times, its symmetry axis is the longitudinal straight line across the floater center, and 4 extreme regions distribute near the floater. With the increase of relative width of wave flume, the trapped wave energy and the relative response amplitude increase firstly. Then, they decreases and appear to be stable for the relative width of wave flume higher than 10. The trapped wave energy and the relative response amplitude increase with the increase of incident wave height, respectively. With the increase of wave period, the trapped wave energy decreases, however, the relative response amplitude increases.