bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The significance of hope as experienced by the next of kin to critically ill patients in the intensive care unit
Authors: Valle Marianne , Lohne Vibeke
Published: May 2020

Aim

To examine and increase understanding of diverse aspects of hope as experienced by the next of kin when someone close to them is critically ill in intensive care unit (ICU).

Design

A qualitative study with a phenomenological approach.

Method

The data were collected through five in‐depth interviews with next of kin at the ICU in Central Norway. Data were interpreted to gain a deeper understanding on hope in an acute and critical context.

Results

The analysis presents five main themes: (i) hope for survival, (ii) hope is fostered by signs of improvement, (iii) hope keeps fear for the worst at bay, (iv) hope that things will turn out well and (v) hope for the return to a normal life. Hope kept next of kin going during a difficult time and was strengthened when they saw their close family member responding positively to treatment provided by the ICU.
Differences of sexual development and their clinical implications
Authors: Davies Rhianna , Davies Lowri , Alleemudder Djavid , MacDougall Jane
Published: May 2020

Key content

The term ‘differences of sex development’ (DSD) defines a wide spectrum of conditions in which the development of chromosomal, gonadal or anatomical sex is atypical.

Presenting at birth or puberty, or as primary subfertility, the precise diagnosis is difficult, the clinical management is controversial and multidisciplinary team care is imperative.

Following reclassification of the nomenclature and numerous advances in the field of molecular genetics, our understanding of the aetiologies underpinning these conditions has expanded.

While optimal management of DSD remains controversial, it is clear that individualised, patient‐centred and multidisciplinary care is paramount.

Learning objectives

To understand the basic science of sex determination and gonadal development under hormonal, environmental and genetic control.

To understand the natural history, presentation and management options of DSD.

To understand the manifold psychosexual and reproductive ramifications of DSD.

Ethical issues

Gender assignment, the fate of the gonads and timing of genital surgery remain controversial.
A quantitative trait locus GW6 controls rice grain size and yield through the gibberellin pathway
Authors: Shi Chuan‐Lin , Dong Nai‐Qian , Guo Tao , Ye Wang‐Wei , Shan Jun‐Xiang , Lin Hong‐Xuan
Published: May 2020

Grain size is one of the essential components determining rice yield and is a target for both domestication and artificial breeding. Gibberellins (GAs) are diterpenoid phytohormones that influence diverse aspects of plant growth and development. Several quantitative trait loci (QTLs) have been identified that control grain size through phytohormone regulation. However, little is known about the role of GAs in the control of grain size. Here we report the cloning and characterization of a QTL, GW6 (GRAIN WIDTH 6), which encodes a GA‐regulated GAST family protein and positively regulates grain width and weight. GW6 is highly expressed in the young panicle and increases grain width by promoting cell expansion in the spikelet hull. Knockout of GW6 exhibits reduced grain size and weight, whereas overexpression of GW6 results in increased grain size and weight. GW6 is induced by GA and its knockout downregulates the expression of GA biosynthesis genes and decreases GA content in the young panicle. We found that a natural variation in the cis element CAAT‐box in the promoter of GW6 is associated with its expression level and grain width and weight. Furthermore, introduction of GW6 to Oryza indica variety HJX74 can lead to a 10.44% increase in rice grain yield, indicating that GW6 has great potential to improve grain yield in rice.
Contextualising coronavirus geographically
Authors: Sparke Matthew , Anguelov Dimitar
Published: May 2020

This editorial introduces a special virtual issue aimed at providing online access to articles that can contribute to the work of coming to geographical terms with the COVID‐19 pandemic. It outlines seven sub‐themes of enquiry and analysis that are especially useful for contextualising coronavirus geographically. These are explored in turn as geographies of: (1) infection, (2) vulnerability, (3) resilience, (4) blame, (5) immunisation, (6) interdependence, and (7) care. In each case, connections are made between publications that are included in the special virtual issue and other more recent writings related specifically to COVID‐19. In an effort to make these connections as useful as possible to geographers who have been drafted into online teaching in and about the pandemic, hyperlinks are used throughout to highlight additional online resources and reports.
Gender‐neutral donor deferral policies: experience in Argentina implementing individual risk‐assessment policies
Authors: Blanco Sebastián , Carrizo Luis Horacio , Moyano Rolando Walter , Mangeaud Arnaldo , Gallego Sandra Verónica
Published: May 2020

Background

In Argentina, with the aim of moving to a safe supportive and inclusive National Blood System, in September 2015 the Ministry of Health stipulated that eligibility criteria for blood donation should only take into account the so‐called 'risk practices', focusing on a 'gender‐neutral' policy. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the impact of such regulation on the prevalence of STI in the population of blood donors in Argentina, through the analysis of the scientific evidence obtained from 174 074 donors from a large central region of the country, focused on a regional Blood Bank for a 6‐year period (pre‐ and post‐entry into force of the regulations).

Materials and Methods

To analyse the evolution of prevalence rates of STI, two periods of 3 years each were evaluated: The first period (P1) lasted from 16 September 2012 to 15 September 2015 (prior to the entry into force of the law) and the second one (P2) from 16 September 2015 to 15 September 2018 (after the entry into force of the law).

Results

A total of 82 838 subjects were enrolled in P1 and 91 236 in P2. The results show a significantly lower prevalence of HCV (P = 0·029), HBV (P = 0·028) and syphilis (P = 0·001) in P2, while no difference was observed for HIV infection (P = 0·60).

Conclusion

This study evidenced that the implementation of a 'gender‐neutral' policy based on individual risk‐assessment deferral criteria maintained the safety of blood supply and decreased the prevalence of STI among blood donors.
The Sensitivity Analysis of the Core Lower Head Molten Pool Model Based on Variance Decomposition
Authors: Li ZhiGang , Liu Wei , Ming PingZhou , An Ping , Lu Wei , Pan JunJie
Published: May 2020

The lower head molten pool model is an important model for the in-vessel retention (IVR) effectiveness evaluation. It has the characteristics of complex relationship, many input parameters, and large uncertainty. The traditional local sensitivity analysis method has the disadvantages of large amount of calculation and low efficiency when performing sensitivity analysis of complex models. Based on variance decomposition of the global sensitivity analysis method, the sensitivity analysis library (SALib) and IVR analysis code developed by Nuclear Power Institute of China (NPIC) are adopted to analyze the sensitivity of the input parameters for four key parameters, such as the lower head wall heat flux ratio. In this paper, the sensitivity coefficient and influence trend of input parameters on key results are obtained, which provides a reference for the optimization of the lower head molten pool model and severe accident mitigation strategies.
Thermomechanical Degradation of Thermal Interface Materials: Accelerated Test Development and Reliability Analysis
Authors: Carlton Hayden , Pense Dustin , Huitink David
Published: May 2020

Due to the inherently low adhesive strength and structural integrity of polymer thermal interface materials (TIMs), they present a likely point of failure when succumbed to thermomechanical stresses in electronics packaging. Herein, we present a methodology to quantify TIM degradation through an accelerated and repeatable mechanical cycling technique. The testing apparatus incorporated a steady-state thermal conductivity measurement system, consistent with ASTM 5470-06, with added displacement actuation and force sensing to provide controlled cyclic loading between −20 N and 20 N. Additionally, a novel optical technique was utilized to observe void formation, pump-out, and dry-out behavior during cycling, in order to correlate the thermal performance with physical behaviors of different TIMs under cyclic stress. Of the two different pastes analyzed, cyclic testing was found to degrade the thermal performance of the less viscous TIM by increasing its interfacial resistance. Optical qualitative measurements revealed the breakdown of the TIM structure at the interface, which indicated the formation of voids due to TIM degradation. Applying this testing method for future TIM development could help in optimizing TIM structure for particular package applications.
Firing voltage reduction in thermally annealed Ge–As–Te thin film with ovonic threshold switching
Authors: Kim Taeho , Lee Dayoon , Kim Jaeyeon , Sohn Hyunchul
Published: May 2020

Recently, chalcogenide materials have exhibited ovonic threshold switching characteristics, improving their suitability as selector devices to effectively depress the sneak current in the cross-point array (CPA) structures. However, chalcogenides must be subjected to a firing process before they can exhibit the threshold switching behavior. The firing process causes operation problems with respect to the memory operation process in the case of the CPA structure. Although the firing process is expected to be related to Joule heating with a high electric current, the physical nature of the changes during the firing process remains unclear. In this study, selector devices are fabricated by sandwiching amorphous Ge–As–Te thin films between the TiN and W layers. Furthermore, the authors examine the microstructure of the Ge–As–Te thin films before and after the electric firing process using transmittance electron microscopy (TEM, JEOL JEM-F200). The TEM analysis of the pristine Ge–As–Te thin films denotes the uniform contrast of the image, which implies the uniform chemical composition of the film. However, the Ge–As–Te thin films exhibit nonuniform contrast due to the effects of Joule heating after the electric firing process. The Ge–As–Te thin films were thermally annealed at 150 and 250 °C for 1 min via the rapid thermal annealing process to verify the effects of thermal treatment on the firing process in chalcogenide thin films. The effect of thermal annealing on the threshold switching behavior was also investigated by studying the compositional stability. Their results showed that the thermal annealing process caused the uniform compositions on the pristine Ge–As–Te films to be fluctuated with decreasing firing voltage for threshold switching.
A probabilistic approach for cross-spectral matrix denoising: Benchmarking with some recent methods
Authors: Dinsenmeyer Alice , Antoni Jérôme , Leclère Quentin , Pereira Antonio
Published: May 2020

Array measurements can be contaminated by strong noise, especially when dealing with microphones located near or in a flow. The denoising of these measurements is crucial to allow efficient data analysis or source imaging. In this paper, a denoising approach based on a Probabilistic Factor Analysis is proposed. It relies on a decomposition of the measured cross-spectral matrix (CSM) using the inherent correlation structure of the acoustical field and of the flow-induced noise. This method is compared with three existing approaches, aiming at denoising the CSM, without any reference or background noise measurements and without any information about the sources of interest. All these methods make the assumption that the noise is statistically uncorrelated over the microphones, and only one of them significantly impairs the off-diagonal terms of the CSM. The main features of each method are first reviewed, and the performances of the methods are then evaluated by way of numerical simulations along with measurements in a closed-section wind tunnel.
Type I Phosphatidylinositol-4-Phosphate 5-Kinases α and γ Play a Key Role in Targeting HIV-1 Pr55
Gag
to the Plasma Membrane
Authors: Gonzales Baptiste , de Rocquigny Hugues , Beziau Anne , Durand Stephanie , Burlaud-Gaillard Julien , Lefebvre Antoine , Krull Sandra , Emond Patrick , Brand Denys , Piver Eric
Published: May 2020

PM specificity of Pr55
Gag
membrane binding is mediated through the interaction of PI(4,5)P
2
with the matrix (MA) basic residues. It was shown that overexpression of a PI(4,5)P
2
-depleting enzyme strongly impaired PM localization of Pr55
Gag
. However, cellular factors that control PI(4,5)P
2
production required for Pr55
Gag
-PM targeting have not yet been characterized. In this study, by individually inhibiting PIP5K1 isoforms, we elucidated a correlation between PI(4,5)P
2
metabolism pathways mediated by PIP5K1 isoforms and the targeting of Pr55
Gag
to the PM of TZM-bl HeLa cells. Confocal microscopy analyses of cells depleted from PIP5K1α and PIP5K1γ show a rerouting of Pr55
Gag
to various intracellular compartments. Notably, Pr55
Gag
is degraded by the proteasome and/or by the lysosomes in PIP5K1α-depleted cells, while Pr55
Gag
is targeted to endosomal vesicles in PIP5K1γ-depleted cells. Thus, our results highlight, for the first time, the roles of PIP5K1α and PIP5K1γ as determinants of Pr55
Gag
targeting to the PM.
Kaposi’s Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus Fine-Tunes the Temporal Expression of Late Genes by Manipulating a Host RNA Quality Control Pathway
Authors: Ruiz Julio C. , Devlin Anne M. , Kim Jiwoong , Conrad Nicholas K.
Published: May 2020

Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is an oncogenic gammaherpesvirus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma and other lymphoproliferative disorders. Nuclear expression of KSHV genes results in exposure to at least two host-mediated nuclear RNA decay pathways, the PABPN1- and PAPα/γ-mediated RNA decay (PPD) pathway and an ARS2-mediated decay pathway. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we previously found that KSHV uses specific mechanisms to protect its transcripts from ARS2-mediated decay. In contrast, here we show that PPD is required to dampen the expression of viral late transcripts that are prematurely transcribed, presumably due to cryptic transcription early in infection. At the proper time for their expression, KSHV late transcripts evade PPD through the activity of the host factor NRDE2. We conclude that KSHV fine-tunes the temporal expression of its genes by modulating PPD activity. Thus, the virus both protects from and exploits the host nuclear RNA decay machinery for proper expression of its genes.
Lactoferrin-Hexon Interactions Mediate CAR-Independent Adenovirus Infection of Human Respiratory Cells
Authors: Persson B. David , Lenman Annasara , Frängsmyr Lars , Schmid Markus , Ahlm Clas , Plückthun Andreas , Jenssen Håvard , Arnberg Niklas
Published: May 2020

Many viruses enter target cells using cell adhesion molecules as receptors. Paradoxically, these molecules are abundant on the lateral and basolateral side of intact, polarized, epithelial target cells, but absent on the apical side that must be penetrated by incoming viruses to initiate infection. Our study provides a model whereby viruses use different mechanisms to infect polarized epithelial cells depending on which side of the cell—apical or lateral/basolateral—is attacked. This study may also be useful to understand the biology of other viruses that use cell adhesion molecules as receptors.
Supplemental material: Transport and biogeochemical reaction of metals in a physically and chemically heterogeneous aquifer
Authors: Scheibe Timothy D. , Fang Yilin , Murray Christopher J. , Roden Eric E. , Chen Jinsong , Chien Yi-Ju , Brooks Scott C. , Hubbard Susan S.
Published: May 2020

Geosphere, June 2006, v. 2, p. 220-235, doi: 10.1130/GES00029.1. Animation 1 - Animation of simulation results for U(VI) contamination period (22 yr) for the Geophys2 case. Upper panel—sorbed U(VI); lower panel—aqueous U(VI). All concentrations are in molar units (M). The file size is 1.4 MB.
Supplemental Material: Crustal and upper mantle structure beneath the South China Sea and Indonesia
Authors: Corchete V.
Published: May 2020

Figure S1: Geographical distribution of the 1-sigma errors arisen in computation of the S-velocities shown in Figure 3. The interval between isolines is 0.01 km/s; Figure S2. Resolution maps of the inversion process performed to calculate the S-velocities shown in Figure 3, plotted from 0 (not resolved) to 1 (perfect resolution). The interval between isolines is 0.1.
Supplemental Material: Transition from the lithospheric to asthenospheric mantle-derived magmatism in the Early Jurassic along eastern Bangong–Nujiang Suture, Tibet: Evidence for continental arc extension induced by slab rollback
Authors: Xu Wangchun
Published: May 2020

Table S1: Zircon LA-ICP-MS U-Pb data of the early Jurassic mafic rocks from the Kaqiong microblock; Table S2: Zircon LA-ICP-MS REE (ppm) data of the early Jurassic mafic rocks from the Kaqiong microblock; Table S3: Whole-rock major (%) and trace (ppm) element data of the early Jurassic mafic rocks from the Kaqiong microblock; Table S4: Zircon LA-MC-ICP-MS Lu-Hf data of the early Jurassic mafic rocks from the Kaqiong microblock; Table S5: Whole-rock Sr-Nd isotopic data of the early Jurassic mafic rocks from the Kaqiong microblock.
Hospital deaths dashboard: care indicators
Authors: Minton Ollie , Ede Charlotte , Bass Stephen , Tavabie Simon , Bourne Amy , Hiresche Andreas
Published: May 2020

Objectives

We wanted to create a medical/nursing led data collection tool to allow for an ongoing audit of the quality of deaths in a teaching hospital. We wanted to be able to produce a visual summary to monitor our involvement, use of PRN medication, recognition of death, treatment escalation plans and communication aspects. We feel these are good surrogate indicators for quality end-of-life care.

Methods

We designed a purpose built spreadsheet which we have designed as an abbreviated version of the UK national audit tools. We involved a number of our core medical trainees to iterate the data collection so it could be done in a timely manner with a simple training guide. Our collective approach meant we have made this as straightforward as possible to roll out and maintain data collection.

Results

We collected 100 cases over a period of 6 months (August 2019 to January 2020). We created a dashboard looking at the core elements of end-of-life care and found bar treatment escalation planning all aspects were completed the majority of the time with near 100% communication to relevant family and friends.

Conclusions

Our sample collection tool provides a useful ongoing indicator for the quality of end-of-life care in the trust and to provide a timely infographic quarterly to feedback to interested members of the trust. We hope to be able to continue over some years to collate themes and trends. We would encourage other hospital teams to adopt our approach.
L1 cell adhesion molecule (L1CAM) in stage IB cervical cancer: distinct expression in squamous cell carcinomas and adenocarcinomas
Authors: Mancusi de Carvalho Joao Paulo , Salim Rafael C , Carvalho Filomena Marino , Nogueira Dias Genta Maria Luiza , Baracat Edmund Chada , Carvalho Jesus Paula
Published: May 2020

Aims

L1 cell adhesion molecule (L1CAM) has been shown to be correlated with tumour progression, attributed to its possible association with epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), characterised by the expression of vimentin and loss of e-cadherin. Herein, we investigate the associations between L1CAM and clinicopathological parameters, as well as the expression of vimentin and e-cadherin, in carcinomas restricted to the cervix.

Methods

The study was retrospective observational and included 45 squamous cell carcinomas (63.4%) and 26 adenocarcinomas (36.6%) submitted to primary surgical treatment. Patient age, FIGO (International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics) stage, tumour size and follow-up were obtained from the medical records. All the slides were revised to evaluate histological differentiation, lymphovascular space invasion, depth of infiltration, disease-free cervical wall thickness, pattern of invasion front, Silva pattern (for adenocarcinomas) and the percentage of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes. Tissue microarrays were constructed for immunohistochemical staining for L1CAM, e-cadherin and vimentin.

Results

Adenocarcinomas were associated with lower disease-free and overall survival. L1CAM and vimentin expressions were more frequent among adenocarcinomas, although loss of e-cadherin expression was more common among squamous carcinomas. L1CAM expression was associated with larger tumours, vimentin expression and lower disease-free survival. No association was observed between the expression of either L1CAM or vimentin and loss of e-cadherin. High levels of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes were more frequent in squamous cell carcinoma, high-grade tumours, destructive pattern at front of invasion and loss of e-cadherin expression.

Conclusions

Our results confirm the prognostic role of L1CAM in cervical carcinomas, but suggest a role for mechanisms other than EMT.
Blockchain, consent and prosent for medical research
Authors: Porsdam Mann Sebastian , Savulescu Julian , Ravaud Philippe , Benchoufi Mehdi
Published: May 2020

Recent advances in medical and information technologies, the availability of new types of medical data, the requirement of increasing numbers of study participants, as well as difficulties in recruitment and retention, all present serious problems for traditional models of specific and informed consent to medical research. However, these advances also enable novel ways to securely share and analyse data. This paper introduces one of these advances—blockchain technologies—and argues that they can be used to share medical data in a secure and auditable fashion. In addition, some aspects of consent and data collection, as well as data access management and analysis, can be automated using blockchain-based smart contracts. This paper demonstrates how blockchain technologies can be used to further all three of the bioethical principles underlying consent requirements: the autonomy of patients, by giving them much greater control over their data; beneficence, by greatly facilitating medical research efficiency and by reducing biases and opportunities for errors; and justice, by enabling patients with rare or under-researched conditions to pseudonymously aggregate their data for analysis. Finally, we coin and describe the novel concept of prosent, by which we mean the blockchain-enabled ability of all stakeholders in the research process to pseudonymously and proactively consent to data release or exchange under specific conditions, such as trial completion.
Experiment on identical siblings separated at birth: ethical implications for researchers, universities, and archives today
Authors: Klitzman Robert L. , Kelmenson Adam M.
Published: May 2020

Several films, includingThree Identical Strangers, examined ethical problems in an experiment that involved identical siblings who were adopted as infants and separated into different families to examine the effects of nature versus nurture. The study was primarily designed and directed by Dr Peter Neubauer. The experiment, conducted in the 1960’s through 1980’s, serves as an important cautionary case study, raising several critical and ongoing ethical issues faced by researchers, universities and archives today. The organisation coordinating the study donated the research records to Yale University under the condition that they remain sealed until 2065, and has impeded study participants’ full access to research material. This case raises questions of what investigators, their descendants, research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs), universities and archives should do with study records when researchers retire or die—whether universities should accept researchers’ donations of archival records that may contain patient or participant data, and if so, under what conditions. This study also poses crucial issues for IRBs—for example, whether researchers themselves or their designates should control all access to study records, particularly if controversy or lawsuits ensue. These questions will become increasingly crucial since the amount of research has burgeoned over recent decades, and investigators, on retirement or death, may want to donate their archives to universities. This experiment thus highlights ethical questions to which researchers, IRBs, universities, healthcare institutions, archivists and libraries should attend.
Characterising HIV and STIs among transgender female sex workers: a longitudinal analysis
Authors: Poteat Tonia , White Rebecca Hamilton , Footer Katherine H A , Park Ju Nyeong , Galai Noya , Huettner Steven , Silberzahn Brad E , Allen Sean T , Glick Jennifer , Beckham S Wilson , Gaydos Charlotte A , Sherman Susan G
Published: May 2020

Objectives

Though highly vulnerable to HIV and STIs, transgender female sex workers (TFSWs) are understudied in the US HIV and STI response. This study examined the correlates of laboratory-confirmed STIs among a cohort of 62 TFSWs followed over the course of 1 year and explored associations between specimen site and self-reported engagement in insertive and receptive anal intercourse.

Methods

Participants completed an interviewer-administered computer-assisted personal interview at baseline, 3-, 6-, 9- and 12-month visits where self-administered anal swabs and urine samples for gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis were also collected. HIV testing was conducted at baseline, 6-month and 12-month visits.

Results

Baseline HIV prevalence was 40.3% with no HIV seroconversions over follow-up. Baseline prevalence of gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis was 9.7%, 17.7% and 14.5%, respectively. In the multivariable regression modelling, recent arrest was significantly associated with testing positive for any STI (adjusted risk ratio (RR) 1.77; 95% CI: 1.10 to 2.84). Insertive anal sex with clients was associated with increased risk of testing positive for an STI via urine specimen (RR 3.48; 95% CI: 1.14 to 10.62), while receptive anal sex was not significantly associated with specimen site.

Conclusion

Our findings confirm a high prevalence of STIs among TFSWs and highlight the importance of addressing structural drivers such as criminal justice involvement as well as the need to ensure screening for STIs at all anatomical sites regardless of self-reported sites of potential exposure. More research is needed to better understand HIV and STI vulnerabilities and appropriate interventions for TFSWs in the USA.
Advances in the cytogenetics of Annonaceae, the case of Annona cherimola L.
Authors: Falistocco Egizia , Ferradini Nicoletta
Published: May 2020

Annonaceae represent the largest extant family among the early divergent angiosperms. Despite the long-standing interest in its evolutionary and taxonomic aspects, cytogenetic studies on this family remain extremely few even on economically important species. With this study, we realized a detailed characterization of the chromosomes of Annona cherimola (2n = 14) by a combination of in situ hybridization techniques, fluorochrome banding, and karyomorphological analysis. FISH revealed that 45S and 5S rDNA sites are co-localized in correspondence to the secondary constrictions of the SAT-chromosome pair. Some hypotheses on the organization of the linked 45S and 5S rDNA repeats have been made. FISH with Arabidopsis-type telomeric arrays demonstrated that the A. cherimola telomeres are constituted by TTTAGGG sequences and that they are exclusively localized at the extremities of chromosomes. An insight into the chromosome structure of A. cherimola was obtained by the self-GISH procedure which revealed highly repeated DNA sequences localized in the centromeric regions of all chromosomes. The correspondence of s-GISH signals with DAPI banding suggests that these sequences are the principal component of the centromeric heterochromatin of this species. The karyotype of A. cherimola here described is proposed as the basic reference karyotype for successive investigations in Annonaceae.
High energy QCD Lipatov’s effective action in Euclidean space
Authors: Bondarenko S.
Published: May 2020

The continuation of high energy QCD Lipatov’s effective action to Euclidean space is performed. The resulting Euclidean QCD RFT action is considered separately in Euclidean “light-cone” coordinates and axial gauge suitable for the numerical and analytical calculations correspondingly. The further application of the obtained results is also discussed.
Perturbative ground states of the 1+1d double-well
Authors: Liu Hui , Zhou Yao , Evslin Jarah
Published: May 2020

At second order in perturbation theory, we find the ground states of the $$\phi ^4$$ϕ4 double-well quantum field theory in 1+1 dimensions. The operators which create these ground states from the free vacuum are constructed explicitly at this order, as is the operator which interpolates between the ground states. As a warmup we perform the analogous calculation in quantum mechanics, where the true ground state is unique but in perturbation theory there are also two ground states.
Tight Bounds on the Upload Capacity to Enable Two-Hop Delivery in Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Systems
Authors: Ando Hironori , Fujita Satoshi
Published: May 2020

In multi-tree-structured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video streaming, video streams are delivered from the source peer to subscribing peers in such a way that each stream is divided into several sub-streams and those sub-streams are delivered through different spanning trees. In this paper, we focus on the delivery of all sub-streams to [Formula: see text] subscribers through spanning trees of depth two each, which will be referred to as the 2-hop delivery of sub-streams. The main contribution of the current paper is the derivation of a tight lower bound on the upload capacity of homogeneous peers so that 2-hop delivery is possible if and only if the upload capacity of each peer is greater than or equal to the derived bound.
Unpaired Many-to-Many Disjoint Path Covers on Bipartite k-Ary n-Cube Networks with Faulty Elements
Authors: Li Jing , Melekian Chris , Zuo Shurong , Cheng Eddie
Published: May 2020

The [Formula: see text]-ary [Formula: see text]-cube network is known as one of the most attractive interconnection networks for parallel and distributed systems. A many-to-many [Formula: see text]-disjoint path cover ([Formula: see text]-DPC for short) of a graph is a set of [Formula: see text] vertex-disjoint paths joining two disjoint vertex sets [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] of equal size [Formula: see text] that altogether cover every vertex of the graph. The many-to-many [Formula: see text]-DPC is classified as paired if each source in [Formula: see text] is further required to be paired with a specific sink in [Formula: see text], or unpaired otherwise. In this paper, we consider the unpaired many-to-many [Formula: see text]-DPC problem of faulty bipartite [Formula: see text]-ary [Formula: see text]-cube networks [Formula: see text], where the sets [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are chosen in different parts of the bipartition. We show that, every bipartite [Formula: see text], under the condition that [Formula: see text] or less faulty edges are removed, has an unpaired many-to-many [Formula: see text]-DPC for any [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] subject to [Formula: see text]. The bound [Formula: see text] is tight here.
THE NON-SPECTRAL PROPERTY OF A CLASS OF PLANAR SELF-SIMILAR MEASURES
Authors: XU YANG-YANG , LIU JING-CHENG
Published: May 2020

Let the self-similar measure [Formula: see text] be generated by an expanding real matrix [Formula: see text] and a digit set [Formula: see text] in space [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we only consider [Formula: see text] and the case [Formula: see text] is similar. We show that there exists an infinite orthogonal set of exponential functions in [Formula: see text] if and only if [Formula: see text] for some [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text]. Furthermore, for the cases that [Formula: see text] does not admit any infinite orthogonal set of exponential functions, the exact cardinality of orthogonal exponential functions in [Formula: see text] is given.
DECODING OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMPLEX STRUCTURES OF MACHINED SURFACE AND TOOL WEAR IN MILLING OPERATION
Authors: QADRI MUHAMMAD OWAIS , NAMAZI HAMIDREZA
Published: May 2020

Surface finish of machined workpiece is one of the factors to evaluate the performance of machining operations. There are different factors such as machining parameters that affect the surface finish of machined workpiece. Tool wear is an unwanted machining issue that highly affects the surface finish of machined workpiece. In a similar way, different parameters (e.g. cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut) also affect tool wear. In this research, we investigated how the complex structure of machined workpiece is related to the complex structure of tool wear. For this purpose, we benefited from the fractal analysis. The experiments were conducted based on the variations of machining parameters (depth of cut, feed rate and spindle speed), and accordingly the fractal dimension of machined surface was analyzed versus the fractal dimension of tool wear. Based on the obtained results, the complexity of machined surface is related to the complexity of tool wear. Fractal analysis could be applied to other machining operations to analyze the complex structures of machined surface and tool and potentially make a relationship between them.
Intramolecular photoinduced electron transfer reactions of zinc(II) porphyrin dyads studied with a sub-ns time resolution
Authors: Sakakibara Kei , Tomida Kenta , Nakagawa Tatsuo , Yagyu Takeyoshi , Takagi Hideo D. , Inamo Masahiko
Published: May 2020

We report the dynamics of a intramolecular photoinduced electron transfer reaction of Zn(II)-porphyrin dyads that have a 2,2[Formula: see text]-bipyridine moiety at the periphery in the presence of Cu[Formula: see text] in methanol studied using laser flash photolysis with a sub-nanosecond time resolution. The photoinduced electron transfer reactions were observed from the excited [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] states of the Zn(II)-porphyrin to the Cu(II)-2,2[Formula: see text]-bipyridine moiety, and the structural dependence of the reactivity were discussed in terms of the distance between the electron donating and accepting centers.
Italy in East Asia: Colonial Ambitions, Power Politics and Failures
Authors: Mavropoulos Nikolaos
Published: May 2020

The demographic-migration issue was to become a key alibi in Rome’s effort to take colonies, in which Italians were promised cultivable land, opportunities, social stature and advancement. The channeling of the surplus population in other areas constituted one of the pillars of Italian colonial policy and, by extension, reinforced the rhetoric linking the demographic issue with the quest for colonies. This justification of Italian colonialism as an alternative solution to the population problem had a more logical basis compared to the potential economic and raw material benefits of Africa or Asia.
Quantifying mass changes during hydrothermal alteration in listwaenite-type mercury mineralization, Tavreh area, northwestern Iran
Authors: Imamalipour Ali , Barak Samaneh , Khalifani Farzaneh Mami
Published: May 2020

The Tavreh mercury prospect, a listwaenite-type alteration/mineralization system, is located
c
. 90 km west of Khoy in northwestern Iran. Tavreh is hosted within the Khoy ophiolite zone. Three types of listwaenites have been recognized in the Khoy ophiolite: silica, silica-carbonate and carbonate. Of these three, Hg mineralization at Tavreh is spatially and genetically associated with the silica-type listwaenite, also known as berberite. Alteration and mineralization at Tavreh are restricted to a faulted contact between shale and serpentinite. The Tavreh listwaenite is inferred to form from the hydrothermal alteration of brecciated serpentinite. Major mineralogical changes resulting from this alteration include the decomposition of serpentine-group minerals and the formation of silica phases. In this study, the mass changes of 18 listwaenites from Tavreh were assessed relative to the least altered serpentinites. To illustrate these changes quantitatively a comparative analysis of three different methods of calculating mass change was undertaken using Grant's isocon analysis, MacLean's equation and Gresens’ equation. Results from the three methods are similar. Listwaenite alteration was associated with a large increase in SiO
2
(44.4, 36.2, 63.9%, respectively). MgO and loss on ignition were depleted (−34.8, −36.9, −36.6; −8.5, −9.3, −8.3%, respectively) and Al
2
O
3
was relatively unchanged (0.7, 0.6, 0.9%). Mercury is the most enriched rare element in altered rock (375.1, 346.8, 474.6 ppm). Arsenic, Pb, Au and Sb were also enriched. The intensity of mass changes of the various alteration components increases significantly from the serpentinite wall rock towards the listwaenite alteration and the ore-bearing zone. Therefore, the mass balance method can probably be used to locate mineral deposits from a few hundred metres and to explore for blind mineral deposits.
Machine Learning Techniques for the Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease
Authors: Tanveer M. , Richhariya B. , Khan R. U. , Rashid A. H. , Khanna P. , Prasad M. , Lin C. T.
Published: May 2020

Alzheimer’s disease is an incurable neurodegenerative disease primarily affecting the elderly population. Efficient automated techniques are needed for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Many novel approaches are proposed by researchers for classification of Alzheimer’s disease. However, to develop more efficient learning techniques, better understanding of the work done on Alzheimer’s is needed. Here, we provide a review on 165 papers from 2005 to 2019, using various feature extraction and machine learning techniques. The machine learning techniques are surveyed under three main categories: support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN), and deep learning (DL) and ensemble methods. We present a detailed review on these three approaches for Alzheimer’s with possible future directions.
Action Recognition Using Form and Motion Modalities
Authors: Meng Quanling , Zhu Heyan , Zhang Weigang , Piao Xuefeng , Zhang Aijie
Published: May 2020

Action recognition has attracted increasing interest in computer vision due to its potential applications in many vision systems. One of the main challenges in action recognition is to extract powerful features from videos. Most existing approaches exploit either hand-crafted techniques or learning-based methods to extract features from videos. However, these methods mainly focus on extracting the dynamic motion features, which ignore the static form features. Therefore, these methods cannot fully capture the underlying information in videos accurately. In this article, we propose a novel feature representation method for action recognition, which exploits hierarchical sparse coding to learn the underlying features from videos. The learned features characterize the form and motion simultaneously and therefore provide more accurate and complete feature representation. The learned form and motion features are considered as two modalities, which are used to represent both the static and motion features. These modalities are further encoded into a global representation via a pairwise dictionary learning and then fed to an SVM classifier for action classification. Experimental results on several challenging datasets validate that the proposed method is superior to several state-of-the-art methods.
AMIL
Authors: Shamsolmoali Pourya , Zareapoor Masoumeh , Zhou Huiyu , Yang Jie
Published: May 2020

Human pose estimation has an important impact on a wide range of applications, from human-computer interface to surveillance and content-based video retrieval. For human pose estimation, joint obstructions and overlapping upon human bodies result in departed pose estimation. To address these problems, by integrating priors of the structure of human bodies, we present a novel structure-aware network to discreetly consider such priors during the training of the network. Typically, learning such constraints is a challenging task. Instead, we propose generative adversarial networks as our learning model in which we design two residual Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) models with identical architecture—one is used as the generator, and the other one is used as the discriminator. The discriminator task is to distinguish the actual poses from the fake ones. If the pose generator generates results that the discriminator is not able to distinguish from the real ones, then the model has successfully learned the priors. In the proposed model, the discriminator differentiates the ground-truth heatmaps from the generated ones, and later the adversarial loss back-propagates to the generator. Such procedure assists the generator to learn reasonable body configurations and is proved to be advantageous to improve the pose estimation accuracy. Meanwhile, we propose a novel function for MIL. It is an adjustable structure for both instance selection and modeling to appropriately pass the information between instances in a single bag. In the proposed residual MIL neural network, the pooling action adequately updates the instance contribution to its bag. The proposed adversarial residual multi-instance neural network that is based on pooling has been validated on two datasets for the human pose estimation task and successfully outperforms the other state-of-the-art models. The code will be made available on https://github.com/pshams55/AMIL.
Textual Entailment--Based Figure Summarization for Biomedical Articles
Authors: Saini Naveen , Saha Sriparna , Bhattacharyya Pushpak , Tuteja Himanshu
Published: May 2020

This article proposes a novel unsupervised approach (FigSum++) for automatic figure summarization in biomedical scientific articles using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. The problem is treated as an optimization problem where relevant sentences in the summary for a given figure are selected based on various sentence scoring features (or objective functions), such as the textual entailment score between sentences in the summary and a figure’s caption, the number of sentences referring to that figure, semantic similarity between sentences and a figure’s caption, and the number of overlapping words between sentences and a figure’s caption. These objective functions are optimized simultaneously using multi-objective binary differential evolution (MBDE). MBDE consists of a set of solutions, and each solution represents a subset of sentences to be selected in the summary. MBDE generally uses a single differential evolution variant, but in the current study, an ensemble of two different differential evolution variants measuring diversity among solutions and convergence toward global optimal solution, respectively, is employed for efficient search. Usually, in any summarization system, diversity among sentences (called
anti-redundancy
) in the summary is a very critical feature, and it is calculated in terms of similarity (like cosine similarity) among sentences. In this article, a new way of measuring diversity in terms of textual entailment is proposed. To represent the sentences of the article in the form of numeric vectors, the recently proposed BioBERT pre-trained language model in biomedical text mining is utilized. An ablation study has also been presented to determine the importance of different objective functions. For evaluation of the proposed technique, two benchmark biomedical datasets containing 91 and 84 figures are considered. Our proposed system obtains 5% and 11% improvements in terms of the
F
-measure metric over two datasets, compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.
ACMNet
Authors: Chen Hui , Ding Guiguang , Lin Zijia , Zhao Sicheng , Gu Xiaopeng , Xu Wenyuan , Han Jungong
Published: May 2020

Cross-modality human behavior analysis has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. In this article, we focus on the cross-modality image-text retrieval problem for human behavior analysis, which can learn a common latent space for cross-modality data and thus benefit the understanding of human behavior with data from different modalities. Existing state-of-the-art cross-modality image-text retrieval models tend to be fine-grained region-word matching approaches, where they begin with measuring similarities for each image region or text word followed by aggregating them to estimate the global image-text similarity. However, it is observed that such fine-grained approaches often encounter the similarity bias problem, because they only consider matched text words for an image region or matched image regions for a text word for similarity calculation, but they totally ignore unmatched words/regions, which might still be salient enough to affect the global image-text similarity. In this article, we propose an Adaptive Confidence Matching Network (ACMNet), which is also a fine-grained matching approach, to effectively deal with such a similarity bias. Apart from calculating the local similarity for each region(/word) with its matched words(/regions), ACMNet also introduces a confidence score for the local similarity by leveraging the global text(/image) information, which is expected to help measure the semantic relatedness of the region(/word) to the whole text(/image). Moreover, ACMNet also incorporates the confidence scores together with the local similarities in estimating the global image-text similarity. To verify the effectiveness of ACMNet, we conduct extensive experiments and make comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets, i.e., Flickr30k and MS COCO. Experimental results show that the proposed ACMNet can outperform the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin, which well demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed ACMNet in human behavior analysis and the reasonableness of tackling the mentioned similarity bias issue.
Octahedral Frames for Feature-Aligned Cross Fields
Authors: Zhang Paul , Vekhter Josh , Chien Edward , Bommes David , Vouga Etienne , Solomon Justin
Published: May 2020

We present a method for designing smooth cross fields on surfaces that automatically align to sharp features of an underlying geometry. Our approach introduces a novel class of energies based on a representation of cross fields in the spherical harmonic basis. We provide theoretical analysis of these energies in the smooth setting, showing that they penalize deviations from surface creases while otherwise promoting intrinsically smooth fields. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to quad meshing and include an extensive benchmark comparing our fields to other automatic approaches for generating feature-aligned cross fields on triangle meshes.