Search

This paper presents a method for creating orthoimage in the urban area of extremely high buildings. The proposed method in this paper is different from the traditional methods, which improved the accuracy by increasing the number and/or improved the geometric distribution of ground control points. This proposed method first established a mathematical model of constraint condition on the building edges, such as perpendicularity, and then the established constraint conditions are merged into the orthorectification model. A test field located in downtown of Denver, CO, has been used to evaluate our methods. The experiments of comparing the accuracy achieved by our method and other methods are conducted. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of 2-5 ft for those buildings of over 100 m high and even 5-7 ft for those buildings over 100 m high in the margin of imagery. Index Terms--Image orientation analysis, image registration, orthogonal functions, rectifiers.

Most studies regarding the relationship between multilingualism and cognitive control reduce linguistic diversity to a dichotomous comparison, viz., monolinguals vs. bilinguals, failing to capture the multifactorial nature of multilingualism. Language research is largely restricted to the Global North, albeit most of the world's population resides in the Global South, limiting the interpretability of the existing literature. Cognitive performance is assessed using very few tasks, yielding unreliable measurements. In this study, we identify the manner in which multilingual experiences influence cognitive performance in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. Young adults from the UK (n = 51, mean age = 24.0, SD = 3.18) and Singapore (n = 36, mean age = 21.3, SD = 2.15) were tested using an extensive battery of cognitive tasks, including cognitive flexibility (CF), working memory (WM), inhibition, and structure learning (SL). Information on language proficiency, use, age of acquisition, and frequency of switching was collected. The effects of various linguistic factors on the cognitive performance of each group were assessed using multiple linear regression models. The UK and Singapore samples exhibited significantly different linguistic profiles, which in turn dissimilarly influenced their cognitive performance. Our study underscores the necessity for more research in the Global South, challenging the prevailing Northern-centric focus on the multilingualism–cognition relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Railway Standard Design is the property of Railway Standard Design Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A substantial number of studies have been completed with respect to the use of English and social solidarity in broader contexts of cross-cultural communications including tourist–host interactions in tourism settings, but little, if any, is understood about the use of English and solidarity in hectic and tightly scheduled international airport settings. This study fills the gap by explicating how English is used by Tourist Information Center (TIC) staffs and incoming tourists at Lombok International Airport (LIA), Lombok, Indonesia, to contextually symbolize solidarity among them. Data were collected in more than a year of intensive participant and non-participant ethnographic observations of real-time interactions at the TIC in the LIA. Recordings, introspective, retrospective, and prospective interviews with the staff and the tourist respondents, as well as note takings of the contexts and the situations of communicative events, were the main means of data collection, and these data were analyzed using integration of sociological analyses of solidarity and ethnographic analyses of communicative interactions. The study elucidates ideological views on the service and explicates how speech accommodation, style convergence, code switching, and kinship terms have been employed as strategies for creating symbolic solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Janus Kinase 3 (JAK3) plays a key role in the development, proliferation, and differentiation of various immune cells. It regulates gene expression by phosphorylation of Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcriptions (STATs) via the JAK/STAT pathway. Recently, we found a new JAK3 phosphorylation site, tyrosine 841 (Y841). The results showed that pY841 helps the kinase domain flip around the pseudo kinase domain, which may cause JAK3 conformational changes. It also reduces the size of the cleft between the N-lobe and the C-lobe of the JAK3 kinase domain. However, pY841 was found to enlarge the cleft when ATP/ADP was bound to the kinase. The increase in the cleft size suggested that pY841 enhanced the elasticity of the kinase domain. For unphosphorylated JAK3 (JAK3-Y841), the binding forces between the kinase domain and ATP or ADP were similar. After phosphorylation of Y841, JAK3-pY841 exhibited more salt bridges and hydrogen bonds between ATP and the kinase than between ADP and the kinase. Consequently, the electrostatic binding force between ATP and the kinase was higher than that between ADP and the kinase. The result was that compared to ADP, ATP was more attractive to JAK3 when Y841 was phosphorylated. Therefore, JAK3-pY841 tended to bind ATP rather than ADP. This work provides new insights into the role of phosphorylation in kinase activation and ATP hydrolysis and sheds light on the importance of understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate the kinase function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diffuse and specular components of leaf reflection are both important to determine the leaf optical properties as well as to describe the leaf bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). However, the specular component is usually ignored in practice in numerous canopy reflectance models that describe the interaction between solar light and vegetated scene components. To evaluate the impact of leaf-specular reflection on canopy bidirectional reflectance factor (BRF) characteristics, we introduce a leaf BRDF model into the radiosity-graphics combined model (RGM; a 3-D scene model) to calculate canopy BRFs with nondiffuse leaves. The modified RGM is validated by comparing simulated BRFs against in situ measured BRFs over real maize canopies. The results show that ignorance of leaf-specular reflection can result in up to 50% of relative error in the blue band (435.8 nm). A series of maize canopies with different leaf angle distributions (LADs) is reconstructed to investigate the effect of five major biophysical/geometrical parameters such as leaf area index, LAD, leaf surface property, view direction, and solar zenith angle on leaf-specular reflection contributions to the canopy BRF. It is demonstrated that increasing the incident solar zenith angle and decreasing the mean leaf angle impact the angular distribution of the canopy BRF more significantly than other factors. The cumulative hemispherical relative and absolute errors of canopy BRF caused by the leaf-specular reflection are often too large to be ignored, even for canopies with rough surface leaves. Moreover, the relative error of BRF in visible waveband shows that, in general, leaf-specular reflection has a large impact than that in near-infrared waveband. However, such impact can be sufficiently accounted for by even just consideration of the first-order leaf-specular reflection in canopy reflectance calculation, leading to a substantial improvement in simulation accuracy for most vegetation canopies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For China's brilliant ancient architecture, China needs to use modern information technology for the protection and development. First of all, the establishment of an ancient general component library system framework. Ancient building surveying and mapping, and then research the drawings as a starting point, the semantics of the ancient architectural drawings entity elements, dimensioning semantics, implied semantic description method of the schema information for related parameters. In turn, this parameter is known as the three dimensional structure of 3 d component libraries, so as to realize the rapid reconstruction of ancient building 3 d project model. At the same time, based on the clustering characteristics of planar point cloud data to streamline algorithm and basic voxel reverse projection reconstruction algorithm based on 3 d coordinates. Finally through a concrete building modeling practice prove that this method is effective, and can be more accurate, simple and convenient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has been threatening human health since the late 2019, and has a significant impact on human health and economy. Understanding SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses is important to develop effective treatments for COVID-19 and other coronavirus-caused diseases. In this work, we applied multi-scale computational approaches to study the electrostatic features of spike (S) proteins for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. From our results, we found that SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 have similar charge distributions and electrostatic features when binding with the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (hACE2). Energy pH-dependence calculations revealed that the complex structures of hACE2 and the S proteins of SARS-CoV/SARS-CoV-2 are stable at pH values ranging from 7.5 to 9. Three independent 100 ns molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed using NAMD to investigate the hydrogen bonds between S proteins RBD and hACE2 RBD. From MD simulations, we found that SARS-CoV-2 forms 19 pairs (average of three simulations) of hydrogen bonds with high occupancy (>50%) to hACE2, compared to 16 pairs between SARS-CoV and hACE2. Additionally, SARS-CoV viruses prefer sticking to the same hydrogen bond pairs, while SARS-CoV-2 tends to have a larger range of selections on hydrogen bonds acceptors. We also labelled key residues involved in forming the top five hydrogen bonds that were found in all three independent 100 ns simulations. This identification is important to potential drug designs for COVID-19 treatments. Our work will shed the light on current and future coronavirus-caused diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]