bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Physiological quality of Urochloa brizantha seeds submitted to priming with calcium salts
Authors: Ribeiro Elizena Cristina Gomes , Reis Rodrigo de Góes Esperon , Vilar Cesar Crispim , Vilar Flavia Carolina Moreira
Published: August 2019

ABSTRACT Seed priming provides a variety of benefits, including seed invigoration and reduced dormancy. Urochloa brizantha seeds are typically primed with difficult-to-acquire potassium nitrate (KNO3). In this sense, calcium salts stand out as an alternative, but it is important to determine whether they provide the same benefits as potassium nitrate. This study aimed to evaluate the physiological quality of U. brizantha seeds after priming with calcium salts, and compare the results to those obtained with potassium nitrate. Seeds were submitted to priming with calcium nitrate [Ca(NO3)2] and calcium sulphate (CaSO4) at -0.55 MPa and -1.10 MPa, for 12 h and 24 h, and potassium nitrate (KNO3) at -1.10 MPa for 12 h, as well as to no priming (control). A completely randomized design, with ten treatments and four repetitions, was used. Priming promoted a higher germination percentage and lower seed dormancy, with a greater seedling emergence in a shorter time period. CaSO4 did not differ from KNO3 in shoot dry weight of seedlings, but reduced the electrical conductivity of seeds. Calcium nitrate and calcium sulfate show a promising potential for use in the osmotic priming of Urochloa brizantha (BRS Piatã cultivar) seeds, since they are as efficient as potassium nitrate, as well as less costly and easier to purchase. Calcium sulfate priming at -0.55 MPa for 12 h, at 25 ºC, is recommended to replace the potassium nitrate solution.
HELEN CALDWELL, CECIL HEMLEY AND THEIR DELIBERATIONS OVER DOM CASMURRO
Authors: GUIMARÃES HÉLIO DE SEIXAS
Published: August 2019

Resumo Entre setembro e dezembro de 1952, Helen Caldwell, que acabara de concluir a primeira tradução para o inglês de Dom Casmurro, e o editor Cecil Hemley, que preparava a publicação do livro pela Noonday Press, mantiveram intensa correspondência. Em meio à revisão de detalhes da tradução, expressaram também suas discordâncias em relação à interpretação até então dominante sobre o romance, lançando as bases para uma leitura alternativa da história de Bento Santiago e Capitu. Na correspondência entre Nova York e Los Angeles, formulava-se o dilema que se tornaria o maior lugar-comum produzido a partir da leitura de um texto literário no Brasil: "Afinal, Capitu traiu ou não traiu?" Tomando como base a correspondência entre Helen Caldwell e seu editor, e examinando especialmente quatro cartas traduzidas e incluídas em anexo, este artigo mostra como se forjou a interpretação que mudaria a leitura do livro e do autor mais canônicos da literatura brasileira.
Quando a Burocracia é Literatura: a literariedade em relatórios de Graciliano Ramos
Authors: Platt Adreana Dulcina , Balthazar Ubaldo Cesar , Fernandes Frederico Augusto Garcia
Published: August 2019

Resumo: O estudo se orienta ao uso pedagógico da expressão literária que aponte os elementos de literariedade em narrativas históricas. Para isso, verificamos a literariedade presente nos relatórios do prefeito Graciliano Ramos, produzidos entre 1929 e 1930. O resgate histórico da rotina administrativa revela a educação literária do autor, repleta de realidade poética e objetividade, ainda que burocrática. Preliminarmente, apresentamos os fundamentos da função pública municipal, sob a égide da Constituição de 1891, para reconhecer a resistência literária e estilística do autor. Consideramos os traços de verossimilhança, alegoria, metáforas, ironia, caricatos nos relatórios, suficientes para apontar as virtudes pedagógicas de um texto literário.
Entre o ativismo on e off-line: o Busão da Comunidade conquista o espaço urbano
Authors: Caetano Ana Maria Pereira , Castro Maria Luiza Almeida Cunha de , Rezende Marco Antônio Penido
Published: August 2019

Resumo O recurso ao ativismo digital, por parte de movimentos que discutem mobilidade na periferia das cidades, parece ilustrar um dos papéis desempenhados pelas inovações tecnológicas na reconfiguração urbana. Este artigo propõe a interpretação do movimento em torno da implantação de uma linha de transporte suplementar no Aglomerado da Serra, em Belo Horizonte – o “Busão da Comunidade” – à luz da análise da tecnologia em suas relações com questões de poder e ação coletiva. Utilizou, como suporte, entrevistas com atores-chave, análise das postagens nas mídias sociais, do uso do aplicativo whatsapp e do correio eletrônico. Conclui-se que os recursos digitais foram decisivos principalmente para determinadas dimensões de mobilização e comunicação, mais do que para uma ação conectiva, definida pelo aparato tecnológico.
Análise comparativa dos métodos prescritivos NAL-NL2 e DSL v5.0a na adaptação do AASI em idosos
Authors: Bertozzo Marília Cancian , Blasca Wanderléia Quinhoneiro
Published: August 2019

RESUMO Objetivo Analisar comparativamente os métodos prescritivos NAL-NL2 e DSL v5.0a de acordo com programação individualizada do AASI para o indivíduo idoso com deficiência auditiva. Método Participaram do estudo 60 indivíduos idosos com deficiência auditiva, submetidos à mensuração da RECD (Real Ear to Coupler Difference) e programação individualizada do AASI com os métodos prescritivos NAL-NL2 e DSL v5.0a. A verificação do desempenho com cada prescrição foi realizada por meio das medidas da REAR (Real Ear Aided Response), cálculo do SII (Speech Intelligibility Index) e teste HINT (Hearing In Noise Test). A análise estatística comparativa foi realizada por meio do teste “t” pareado. Resultados O método NAL-NL2 apresentou melhor desempenho na avaliação da REAR em frequências baixas e altas para sons de média e forte intensidade, em frequências altas para sons de fraca intensidade, e no cálculo do SII para sons fracos. O método DSL v5.0a apresentou melhores resultados na avaliação da REAR em frequências médias para sons médios, em frequências baixas e médias para sons fracos, no cálculo do SII para sons médios e fortes, e no teste HINT no silêncio e ruído. Conclusão Os achados deste estudo apontam para um desempenho equivalente entre os métodos DSL v5.0a e NAL-NL2 na adaptação do AASI em idosos com deficiência auditiva. A amplificação calculada pela DSL v5.0a forneceu melhor percepção de fala no silêncio.
Narrativas de mulheres escravizadas nos Estados Unidos do século XIX
Authors: SAMPAIO MARIA CLARA CARNEIRO , ARIZA MARÍLIA B. A.
Published: August 2019

resumo Nos Estados Unidos, bem como em outros países de língua inglesa, os relatos em primeira pessoa de ex-escravizados constituem um gênero literário de enorme importância histórica chamadoslave narrative, que abarca diferentes tipos de registros autobiográficos de sujeitos submetidos ao tráfico e/ou à escravidão atlântica. A partir da análise das trajetórias narradas por Harriet Jacobs e Harriet Tubman, duas ex-escravas fugidas na primeira metade do século XIX, buscou-se compreender como suas memórias convocaram autorrepresentações diferentes, mas igualmente potentes, em que trajetórias individuais de resistência e emancipação dialogam diretamente com o abolicionismo e as especificidades femininas da experiência da escravização.
“Le ceneri di Gramsci”, poema de Pier Paolo Pasolini: a crise de 1956 e a proposta da cultura extrema
Authors: Nosella Paolo
Published: August 2019

RESUMO A crise atual da esquerda levou-me a meditar sobre a crise dos comunistas, quando, no fatídico XX Congresso do Partido Comunista da União Soviética (PCUS), em fevereiro de 1956, Khrushchov denunciou oficialmente o estalinismo. A denúncia foi abafada pela burocracia partidária, mas Pasolini não se calou. Foi acusado de comunista herético, de extremista cultural. Hoje, quase todos reconhecem que seus versos tinham razão: “A dor / de vocês de não mais estarem na primeira frente / seria mais pura, se na hora / em que o erro, mesmo sendo puro, se paga, / tivessem a força de se confessarem culpados” (“As cinzas de Gramsci”). O poeta, diante do pobre e severo túmulo de Gramsci, não se envergonhou da acusação, mesmo discordando de certo misticismo cultural presente na fórmula da revista Ragionamenti. Cultura extrema ou máxima, para todo proletariado do campo e da cidade, é a estratégia gramsciana da hegemonia civil, integrando a luta política com a refinada cultura dos clássicos.
Avaliação de estação de tratamento de esgoto com reator anaeróbio recebendo lodo de estação de tratamento de água Actiflo®
Authors: Wagner Luiz Fernando , Wiechetech Giovana Kátie , Széliga Marcos Rogério
Published: August 2019

RESUMO O objetivo deste trabalho foi analisar a disposição do lodo do decantador de uma estação de tratamento de água (ETA) com sedimentação lastreada por microareia (Actiflo®) em uma estação de tratamento de esgoto (ETE) composta de upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) e lagoa de polimento, em Ponta Grossa, Paraná. A ETE Verde operou em condição estável, com uma vazão média afluente de 213,14 L.s-1. Os UASBs operaram com tempo de detenção hidráulica (TDH) de 9,9 horas, carga hidráulica volumétrica de 2,4 m3.m-3.d-1 e carga orgânica volumétrica (COV), em função da demanda química de oxigênio (DQO), variando entre 0,75 e 1,66 kgDQO.m-3.d-1. A lagoa operou com TDH de 4,5 dias, com taxa de aplicação superficial variando entre 765 e 2.872 kgDQO.ha-1.d-1 e COV variando entre 19 e 72 gDQO.m-3.d-1. A eficiência na remoção de DQO e sólidos suspensos totais (SST) foi mantida, mesmo com o lançamento do lodo da ETA. A eficiência da ETE variou entre 80 e 86% para a remoção de DQO e entre 92 e 96% para a remoção de SST. Concluiu-se que o lançamento na rede de esgotos é uma alternativa viável de disposição do lodo do decantador da ETA Actiflo®.
Modelagem de plumas de efluentes entre Praia Grande e Peruíbe, litoral do estado de São Paulo, Brasil
Authors: Yang Samuel Hora , Harari Joseph , Braga Elisabete de Santis
Published: August 2019

RESUMO O presente trabalho teve como objetivo monitorar a dispersão de plumas de efluentes provenientes dos emissários submarinos de Praia Grande e do Rio Itanhaém, por meio do processamento do modelo Delft3D (módulos hidrodinâmico e de qualidade da água) e do modelo Visual Plumes (módulo UM3). A modelagem de campo próximo indicou que as correntes geradas pelo vento foram mais eficientes do que as correntes de maré na diluição inicial das plumas dos emissários; e a modelagem de campo distante, validada qualitativamente, demonstrou que as concentrações dos potenciais poluentes de todas as plumas simuladas não ultrapassam os limites máximos estabelecidos pelo Conselho Nacional do Meio Ambiente quando essas plumas atingem as praias da região de estudo.
Infância e urbanidade nos parques infantis de São Paulo
Authors: Ferreira Flávia Martinelli , Wiggers Ingrid Dittrich
Published: August 2019

Resumo Os parques infantis foram instituições implantadas na década de 1930, na cidade de São Paulo, que pretendiam promover a socialização de crianças em seu tempo livre, oferecendo especialmente atividades recreativas, artísticas e culturais. Esses parques estavam circunscritos nas mudanças de pensamento a respeito da vida na cidade, provocada por novos ideários educacionais e higiênicos daquele período. Para contribuir com o entendimento da temática, este trabalho teve como objetivo buscar compreender as noções de urbanidade e infância que nortearam esse projeto político-educacional, por meio de uma pesquisa bibliográfica sistemática de teses, dissertações e trabalhos de conclusão de curso desenvolvidos na USP e na Unicamp. Os parques infantis foram entendidos nas fontes analisadas como um espaço e um tempo de sociabilidades entre as crianças, bem como de encontros e desencontros entre as culturas produzidas no universo infantil e as culturas do mundo adulto. Esse caráter ambíguo é assinalado nas pesquisas que abrangeram tanto seu viés disciplinador quanto sua forma de expressão da cidadania e de difusão cultural. Sobretudo, é possível afirmar que os parques infantis se configuravam como importantes na construção da experiência corporal das crianças, considerando a ênfase em práticas educativas relacionadas ao corpo.
Desenvolvimento do pensamento teórico na educação profissional: em busca da superação dialética da prática
Authors: Arruda Fabio Pinto de , Moretti Vanessa Dias
Published: August 2019

Resumo As condições de uma cultura do trabalho permeada por avanços técnicos e tecnológicos tendem a ser apropriadas pelas instituições de formação técnica como forma de legitimar a negação, ao trabalhador, de conhecimentos teóricos produzidos historicamente. Visando contribuir para a superação dessa realidade, a pesquisa relatada neste artigo teve por objetivo investigar o desenvolvimento do pensamento teórico de estudantes, de uma escola da rede privada de ensino técnico profissionalizante, durante a elaboração de projetos técnicos. A partir da teoria histórico-cultural, compreende-se que a superação de uma aprendizagem pautada somente nas representações e classificações dos objetos permite a apropriação de conhecimentos científicos essenciais ao desenvolvimento do pensamento teórico dos estudantes. Como procedimento metodológico, adotou-se o experimento formativo e a coleta de dados buscou acompanhar o movimento de aprendizagem dos estudantes por meio de registros de áudio e acesso às produções escritas em diferentes momentos do processo de elaboração de projetos. A análise dos dados se deu por meio de três isolados: a realidade, a contradição e a consciência. As conclusões revelam que a organização do ensino de projetos e a orientação do professor em um curso técnico profissional podem vir a potencializar o pensar teórico com vistas a uma formação integral dos sujeitos que tome o trabalho como princípio ontológico na organização do ensino ao possibilitar ao estudante o contato com a realidade, oportunidades de reflexão frente às contradições e à tomada de consciência sobre o objeto de estudo em meio aos caminhos das soluções práticas e teóricas do problema.
Toxoplasma gondii in cetaceans of Brazil: a histopathological and immunohistochemical survey
Authors: Costa-Silva Samira , Sacristán Carlos , Gonzales-Viera Omar , Díaz-Delgado Josué , Sánchez-Sarmiento Angélica María , Marigo Juliana , Groch Kátia Regina , Carvalho Vitor Luz , Ewbank Ana Carolina , Colosio Adriana Castaldo , Marcondes Milton César Calzavara , Meirelles Ana Carolina Oliveira de , Bertozzi Carolina P. , Lailson-Brito José , Azevedo Alexandre de Freitas , Ruoppolo Valéria , Oliveira Larissa , Ott Paulo Henrique , Catão-Dias José Luiz
Published: August 2019

Abstract Toxoplasmosis is a parasitic disease caused by the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii. In cetaceans, T. gondii infection is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Despite the worldwide range and broad cetacean host record of T. gondii infection, there is limited information on toxoplasmosis in cetaceans from the Southern hemisphere. We investigated the occurrence of T. gondii by histopathology and immunohistochemistry in tissue samples of 185 animals comprising 20 different cetacean species from Brazil. Three out of 185 (1.6%) animals presented T. gondii-associated lesions: a captive killer whale Orcinus orca, a free-ranging common bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus and a free-ranging Guiana dolphin Sotalia guianensis. The main lesions observed in these animals were necrotizing hepatitis, adrenalitis and lymphadenitis associated with protozoal cysts or extracellular tachyzoites presenting immunolabeling with anti-T. gondii antibodies. This study widens the spectrum of species and the geographic range of this agent in Brazil, and provides the first reports of T. gondii infection in a captive killer whale and in a free-ranging common bottlenose dolphin in South America.
MVPNet: Multi-View Point Regression Networks for 3D Object Reconstruction from A Single Image
Authors: Wang Jinglu , Sun Bo , Lu Yan
Published: August 2019

In this paper, we address the problem of reconstructing an object’s surface from a single image using generative networks. First, we represent a 3D surface with an aggregation of dense point clouds from multiple views. Each point cloud is embedded in a regular 2D grid aligned on an image plane of a viewpoint, making the point cloud convolution-favored and ordered so as to fit into deep network architectures. The point clouds can be easily triangulated by exploiting connectivities of the 2D grids to form mesh-based surfaces. Second, we propose an encoder-decoder network that generates such kind of multiple view-dependent point clouds from a single image by regressing their 3D coordinates and visibilities. We also introduce a novel geometric loss that is able to interpret discrepancy over 3D surfaces as opposed to 2D projective planes, resorting to the surface discretization on the constructed meshes. We demonstrate that the multi-view point regression network outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a significant improvement on challenging datasets.
Learning to Compose Topic-Aware Mixture of Experts for Zero-Shot Video Captioning
Authors: Wang Xin , Wu Jiawei , Zhang Da , Su Yu , Wang William Yang
Published: August 2019

Although promising results have been achieved in video captioning, existing models are limited to the fixed inventory of activities in the training corpus, and do not generalize to open vocabulary scenarios. Here we introduce a novel task, zeroshot video captioning, that aims at describing out-of-domain videos of unseen activities. Videos of different activities usually require different captioning strategies in many aspects, i.e. word selection, semantic construction, and style expression etc, which poses a great challenge to depict novel activities without paired training data. But meanwhile, similar activities share some of those aspects in common. Therefore, we propose a principled Topic-Aware Mixture of Experts (TAMoE) model for zero-shot video captioning, which learns to compose different experts based on different topic embeddings, implicitly transferring the knowledge learned from seen activities to unseen ones. Besides, we leverage external topic-related text corpus to construct the topic embedding for each activity, which embodies the most relevant semantic vectors within the topic. Empirical results not only validate the effectiveness of our method in utilizing semantic knowledge for video captioning, but also show its strong generalization ability when describing novel activities.
What and Where the Themes Dominate in Image
Authors: Xiao Xinyu , Wang Lingfeng , Xiang Shiming , Pan Chunhong
Published: August 2019

The image captioning is to describe an image with natural language as human, which has benefited from the advances in deep neural network and achieved substantial progress in performance. However, the perspective of human description to scene has not been fully considered in this task recently. Actually, the human description to scene is tightly related to the endogenous knowledge and the exogenous salient objects simultaneously, which implies that the content in the description is confined to the known salient objects. Inspired by this observation, this paper proposes a novel framework, which explicitly applies the known salient objects in image captioning. Under this framework, the known salient objects are served as the themes to guide the description generation. According to the property of the known salient object, a theme is composed of two components: its endogenous concept (what) and the exogenous spatial attention feature (where). Specifically, the prediction of each word is dominated by the concept and spatial attention feature of the corresponding theme in the process of caption prediction. Moreover, we introduce a novel learning method of Distinctive Learning (DL) to get more specificity of generated captions like human descriptions. It formulates two constraints in the theme learning process to encourage distinctiveness between different images. Particularly, reinforcement learning is introduced into the framework to address the exposure bias problem between the training and the testing modes. Extensive experiments on the COCO and Flickr30K datasets achieve superior results when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Semantic Adversarial Network with Multi-Scale Pyramid Attention for Video Classification
Authors: Xie De , Deng Cheng , Wang Hao , Li Chao , Tao Dapeng
Published: August 2019

Two-stream architecture have shown strong performance in video classification task. The key idea is to learn spatiotemporal features by fusing convolutional networks spatially and temporally. However, there are some problems within such architecture. First, it relies on optical flow to model temporal information, which are often expensive to compute and store. Second, it has limited ability to capture details and local context information for video data. Third, it lacks explicit semantic guidance that greatly decrease the classification performance. In this paper, we proposed a new two-stream based deep framework for video classification to discover spatial and temporal information only from RGB frames, moreover, the multi-scale pyramid attention (MPA) layer and the semantic adversarial learning (SAL) module is introduced and integrated in our framework. The MPA enables the network capturing global and local feature to generate a comprehensive representation for video, and the SAL can make this representation gradually approximate to the real video semantics in an adversarial manner. Experimental results on two public benchmarks demonstrate our proposed methods achieves state-of-the-art results on standard video datasets.
Scene Text Detection with Supervised Pyramid Context Network
Authors: Xie Enze , Zang Yuhang , Shao Shuai , Yu Gang , Yao Cong , Li Guangyao
Published: August 2019

Scene text detection methods based on deep learning have achieved remarkable results over the past years. However, due to the high diversity and complexity of natural scenes, previous state-of-the-art text detection methods may still produce a considerable amount of false positives, when applied to images captured in real-world environments. To tackle this issue, mainly inspired by Mask R-CNN, we propose in this paper an effective model for scene text detection, which is based on Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and instance segmentation. We propose a supervised pyramid context network (SPCNET) to precisely locate text regions while suppressing false positives.Benefited from the guidance of semantic information and sharing FPN, SPCNET obtains significantly enhanced performance while introducing marginal extra computation. Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that our SPCNET clearly outperforms start-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it achieves an F-measure of 92.1% on ICDAR2013, 87.2% on ICDAR2015, 74.1% on ICDAR2017 MLT and 82.9% on
ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering
Authors: Yu Zhou , Xu Dejing , Yu Jun , Yu Ting , Zhao Zhou , Zhuang Yueting , Tao Dacheng
Published: August 2019

Recent developments in modeling language and vision have been successfully applied to image question answering. It is both crucial and natural to extend this research direction to the video domain for video question answering (VideoQA). Compared to the image domain where large scale and fully annotated benchmark datasets exists, VideoQA datasets are limited to small scale and are automatically generated, etc. These limitations restrict their applicability in practice. Here we introduce ActivityNet-QA, a fully annotated and large scale VideoQA dataset. The dataset consists of 58,000 QA pairs on 5,800 complex web videos derived from the popular ActivityNet dataset. We present a statistical analysis of our ActivityNet-QA dataset and conduct extensive experiments on it by comparing existing VideoQA baselines. Moreover, we explore various video representation strategies to improve VideoQA performance, especially for long videos.
Spatial Mixture Models with Learnable Deep Priors for Perceptual Grouping
Authors: Yuan Jinyang , Li Bin , Xue Xiangyang
Published: August 2019

Humans perceive the seemingly chaotic world in a structured and compositional way with the prerequisite of being able to segregate conceptual entities from the complex visual scenes. The mechanism of grouping basic visual elements of scenes into conceptual entities is termed as perceptual grouping. In this work, we propose a new type of spatial mixture models with learnable priors for perceptual grouping. Different from existing methods, the proposed method disentangles the representation of an object into “shape” and “appearance” which are modeled separately by the mixture weights and the conditional probability distributions. More specifically, each object in the visual scene is modeled by one mixture component, whose mixture weights and the parameter of the conditional probability distribution are generated by two neural networks, respectively. The mixture weights focus on modeling spatial dependencies (i.e., shape) and the conditional probability distributions deal with intra-object variations (i.e., appearance). In addition, the background is separately modeled as a special component complementary to the foreground objects. Our extensive empirical tests on two perceptual grouping datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the stateof-the-art methods under most experimental configurations. The learned conceptual entities are generalizable to novel visual scenes and insensitive to the diversity of objects.
Learning a Key-Value Memory Co-Attention Matching Network for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Zhang Yaqing , Li Xi , Zhang Zhongfei
Published: August 2019

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is typically cast as the problem of semantic representation and alignment, which requires precisely discovering and modeling the inherent spatial structure information on person images. Motivated by this observation, we propose a Key-Value Memory Matching Network (KVM-MN) model that consists of key-value memory representation and key-value co-attention matching. The proposed KVM-MN model is capable of building an effective local-position-aware person representation that encodes the spatial feature information in the form of multi-head key-value memory. Furthermore, the proposed KVM-MN model makes use of multi-head co-attention to automatically learn a number of cross-person-matching patterns, resulting in more robust and interpretable matching results. Finally, we build a setwise learning mechanism that implements a more generalized query-to-gallery-image-set learning procedure. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model against the state-of-the-art.
Learning Incremental Triplet Margin for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Zhang Yingying , Zhong Qiaoyong , Ma Liang , Xie Di , Pu Shiliang
Published: August 2019

Person re-identification (ReID) aims to match people across multiple non-overlapping video cameras deployed at different locations. To address this challenging problem, many metric learning approaches have been proposed, among which triplet loss is one of the state-of-the-arts. In this work, we explore the margin between positive and negative pairs of triplets and prove that large margin is beneficial. In particular, we propose a novel multi-stage training strategy which learns incremental triplet margin and improves triplet loss effectively. Multiple levels of feature maps are exploited to make the learned features more discriminative. Besides, we introduce global hard identity searching method to sample hard identities when generating a training batch. Extensive experiments on Market-1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMCreID show that our approach yields a performance boost and outperforms most existing state-of-the-art methods.
The Rensselaer Mandarin Project — A Cognitive and Immersive Language Learning Environment
Authors: Allen David , Divekar Rahul R. , Drozdal Jaimie , Balagyozyan Lilit , Zheng Shuyue , Song Ziyi , Zou Huang , Tyler Jeramey , Mou Xiangyang , Zhao Rui , Zhou Helen , Yue Jianling , Kephart Jeffrey O. , Su Hui
Published: August 2019

The Rensselaer Mandarin Project enables a group of foreign language students to improve functional understanding, pronunciation and vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese through authentic speaking situations in a virtual visit to China. Students use speech, gestures, and combinations thereof to navigate an immersive, mixed reality, stylized realism game experience through interaction with AI agents, immersive technologies, and game mechanics. The environment was developed in a black box theater equipped with a human-scale 360◦ panoramic screen (140h, 200r), arrays of markerless motion tracking sensors, and speakers for spatial audio.
FRIDAYS: A Financial Risk Information Detecting and Analyzing System
Authors: Du Chi-Han , Chiang Yi-Shyuan , Tsai Kun-Che , Liu Liang-Chih , Tsai Ming-Feng , Wang Chuan-Ju
Published: August 2019

We present FRIDAYS, a financial risk information detecting and analyzing system that enables financial professionals to efficiently comprehend financial reports in terms of risk and domain-specific sentiment cues. Our system is designed to integrate multiple NLP models trained on financial reports but on different levels (i.e., word, multi-word, and sentence levels) and to illustrate the prediction results generated by the models. The system is available online at https://cfda.csie.org/FRIDAYS/.
QADiver: Interactive Framework for Diagnosing QA Models
Authors: Lee Gyeongbok , Kim Sungdong , Hwang Seung-won
Published: August 2019

Question answering (QA) extracting answers from text to the given question in natural language, has been actively studied and existing models have shown a promise of outperforming human performance when trained and evaluated with SQuAD dataset. However, such performance may not be replicated in the actual setting, for which we need to diagnose the cause, which is non-trivial due to the complexity of model. We thus propose a web-based UI that provides how each model contributes to QA performances, by integrating visualization and analysis tools for model explanation. We expect this framework can help QA model researchers to refine and improve their models.
DBA: Dynamic Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithm
Authors: Nobari Sadegh
Published: August 2019

We introduce Dynamic Bandit Algorithm (DBA), a practical solution to improve the shortcoming of the pervasively employed reinforcement learning algorithm called Multi-Arm Bandit, aka Bandit. Bandit makes real-time decisions based on the prior observations. However, Bandit is heavily biased to the priors that it cannot quickly adapt itself to a trend that is interchanging. As a result, Bandit cannot, quickly enough, make profitable decisions when the trend is changing. Unlike Bandit, DBA focuses on quickly adapting itself to detect these trends early enough. Furthermore, DBA remains as almost as light as Bandit in terms of computations. Therefore, DBA can be easily deployed in production as a light process similar to The Bandit. We demonstrate how critical and beneficial is the main focus of DBA, i.e. the ability to quickly finding the most profitable option in real-time, over its stateof-the-art competitors. Our experiments are augmented with a visualization mechanism that explains the profitability of the decisions made by each algorithm in each step by animations. Finally we observe that DBA can substantially outperform the original Bandit by close to 3 times for a set Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in a case of having 3 arms.
Sustaining Calcutta for 150 years: Pulta–Tallah water supply system, India
Authors: Dey Ayanangshu , Patra Parthajit
Published: August 2019

Asia’s first surface-water-based supply system became operational in 1868 to quench the increasing demand of Calcutta, India, an emerging commercial hub of the nineteenth century. Although the city was next to the River Hooghly, its original supply was framed to draw water from 22 km upstream at Pulta. Raw water was treated and then transferred to Tallah, near the northern fringe of the city, for subsequent distribution by pumping. Thus, the Pulta–Tallah system started operation with a 27·3 million litres per day (mld) capacity with slow sand filters. Later, a giant 41 million litre overhead reservoir with 29·6 m staging was introduced at Tallah in 1911, the largest in the world. It acted as a balancing reservoir, receiving water during off-peak hours, storing and then supplying during maximum demand, to insulate the pumps against fluctuating downstream demand. There are six transmission mains transferring water from Pulta to Tallah. Now, this water system has an installed capacity of 1182 mld and employs advanced treatment technologies. This paper summarises the history of the inception and progressive development of the Pulta–Tallah system, which still serves more than half of Calcutta and stands out as an epitome of a sustainable urban supply system.
Life-cycle assessment of carbon dioxide emissions of asphalt pavements in China
Authors: Huang Yingli , Qiao Zhenhua , Zhang Ying , Zhang Haitao
Published: August 2019

An evaluation system has been established for assessing carbon dioxide emissions associated with asphalt pavement construction in China. As described in this paper, the system is based on the European driving force–pressure–state–impact–response model and uses the analytic hierarchy process combined with subjective and objective weighting and the comprehensive index method. It shows that state, response and pressure are the decisive factors. As such, the key factors that promote lower carbon dioxide construction of asphalt pavements are expressway construction investment, asphalt consumption, greenhouse gas effects, environmental quality and energy-saving and emissions-reduction technology. It is suggested that energy-saving and emissions-reduction technologies, such as warm mixing and geothermal regeneration, should be adopted in the construction of asphalt pavements and the concept of low carbon dioxide approaches should be promoted. The findings can provide technical support for decreasing the energy consumption and emissions in asphalt pavement construction.
Relating shaft friction of buried piles and CPT resistance in clayey sands
Authors: Doan L. V. , Lehane B. M.
Published: August 2019

This paper examines factors controlling the ultimate shaft friction developed on buried piles in normally consolidated clay–sand mixtures and explores the relationship between this friction and the cone penetration test (CPT) end resistance. Results from tension load tests on buried piles in a laboratory pressure chamber and geotechnical centrifuge are presented. Variable rate CPTs combined with Rowe cell, undrained simple shear and interface direct shear tests are used to characterise the mixtures. It is shown that the measured drained CPT end resistances could be predicted using parameters assessed from the laboratory tests and a simple expression derived from cavity expansion theory in an elastic Mohr–Coulomb soil. The tension pile tests indicate how changes in radial effective stresses during loading can be inferred from interface shear tests and these combined with the cavity expansion analysis allow derivation of a relationship between shaft friction (τf) and CPT end resistance (qt). This expression reveals the significant effects on the qt/τf(= βc) ratio of soil stiffness, stress level, dilation and drainage during cone penetration and is shown to be consistent with a recently proposed empirical formula for bored piles.
Stormwater runoff quality on an urban highway in South Africa
Authors: Robertson A , Armitage N , Zuidgeest M
Published: August 2019

Roadway sediment and stormwater runoff were sampled from a 15 km section of the R300 freeway located in the greater Cape Town area, South Africa. Grab samples were collected over a four-month period in 2016 and analysed for metals, hydrocarbons and nutrients. The metal concentration profiles were similar in sediment and runoff samples. The primary pollutants identified in the highway runoff were aluminium, copper, lead, manganese, nitrogen, phosphorus, zinc, total suspended solids (TSS), and oil and grease. The concentrations of each of these elements, barring lead, exceeded the national effluent water quality guidelines. Large volumes of macro pollutants such as cigarettes, plastic and packaging were also observed. The results of this research indicate that Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) should be used in conjunction with highways, particularly where runoff may influence a sensitive or valuable aquatic ecosystem, as it can be a significant non-point source of pollution.
Neuropathy Phentoyping Protocols - Intra-Epidermal Fiber Density Determination of Rodent Foot Pad Biopsies v1
Authors: Feldman Eva
Published: August 2019

Summary: Phenotyping of Rodents for the Presence of Diabetic Neuropathy In man, the development of diabetic neuropathy is dependent on both the degree of glycemic control and the duration of diabetes. Diabetic neuropathy is a progressive disorder, with signs and symptoms that parallel the loss of nerve fibers over time. Consequently, assessments of neuropathy in mice are not performed at one time point, but are characterized at multiple time points during a 6 month period of diabetes. The degree of diabetes is evaluated in 2 ways: tail blood glucose measured following a 6 hour fast and glycated hemoglobin levels. The initial degree of neuropathy is screened using the methods discussed below. Detailed measures of neuropathy are employed when the initial screening instruments indicate a profound or unique phenotypic difference. This document contains protocols used by the DiaComp staff to examine and measure diabetic neuropathy at the whole animal, tissue and cellular levels. Diabetic Complication:
Neuropathy Phentoyping Protocols - Streptozotocin Treatment For Rats v1
Authors: Feldman Eva
Published: August 2019

Summary: Phenotyping of Rodents for the Presence of Diabetic Neuropathy In man, the development of diabetic neuropathy is dependent on both the degree of glycemic control and the duration of diabetes. Diabetic neuropathy is a progressive disorder, with signs and symptoms that parallel the loss of nerve fibers over time. Consequently, assessments of neuropathy in mice are not performed at one time point, but are characterized at multiple time points during a 6 month period of diabetes. The degree of diabetes is evaluated in 2 ways: tail blood glucose measured following a 6 hour fast and glycated hemoglobin levels. The initial degree of neuropathy is screened using the methods discussed below. Detailed measures of neuropathy are employed when the initial screening instruments indicate a profound or unique phenotypic difference. This document contains protocols used by the DiaComp staff to examine and measure diabetic neuropathy at the whole animal, tissue and cellular levels. Diabetic Complication:
New possibilities to diagnose pulmonary tuberculosis at a pulmonology inpatient department
Authors: Borodulina E. A. , Borodulin B. E. , In’kova A. T. , Vdoushkina E. S. , Povalyayeva L. V.
Published: August 2019

The aim of the study was to investigate new methods for pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) detection at a pulmonology inpatient department.

Methods. Pulmonary TB cases (n = 49) newly diagnosed at a pulmonology department of a hospital were involved in the study; among them, 69.4% of patients were infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). All patients were asked if he/she had previously contacted with other TB patients, and if he/she was diagnosed with TB previously. The patients were also about family history. Posteroanterior and lateral chest X-ray and laboratory analyses were performed in all patients. Mycobacteria tuberculosis (MBT) were searched using smear microscopy, GeneXpert MTB/RIF molecular method and culturing (BACTEC MGIT) of sputum and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) obtained during bronchoscopy. Patients with positive results only were included in the analysis in order to investigate and to compare diagnostic value of the methods.

Results. Questioning patients at admission was useful to diagnose TB in 4% of patients. Sputum smears were positive in 12 patients (27.3%). BALF was obtained in 18 patients (36.7%); among them, MBT was identified in 52 (5%). Molecular testing was positive in all 49 patients (100%); among them, BACTEC MGIT culturing yielded MBT in 48 patients (97.9%). In patients with negative sputum smears during the first 3 days after admission, GeneXpert required 10.4 ± 5.3 days.

Conclusion. GeneXpert method was highly useful to diagnose TB and was comparable with BACTEC. Routine sputum and BALF smear microscopy was significantly less rapid and less sensitive method. The diagnostic accuracy could be increased with the use of molecular methods in patients with negative sputum smears obtained at a general hospital. Therefore, molecular methods could be used in patients highly suspected for TB.
Withdrawal of inhaled corticosteroids in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Authors: Avdeev S. N. , Aisanov Z. R. , Arkhipov V. V. , Belevskiy A. S. , Leshchenko I. V. , Ovcharenko S. I. , Shmelev E. I. , Miravitls M.
Published: August 2019

According to current clinical guidelines, a role of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) in the management of patients with COPD is limited. The optimal benefit/risk ratio could be achieved only in specific populations of patients with COPD. In a real life, physicians often do not follow clinical guidelines, and ICS are overprescribed. In addition to the lack of effectiveness, there are possible risks of ICS use. Regarding to this, there is a need to develop a simple and convenient algorithm for ICS withdrawal in the population of COPD patients who do not fit criteria for therapy with ICS. Clinical studies on efficacy and safety of ICS and available data on ICS withdrawal in patients with COPD are analyzed in this article. An international expert panel developed a simple and convenient algorithm for withdrawal of ICS in patients with COPD based on published data.
Yellow nail syndrome as a rare reason for pleural effusion
Authors: Balionis O. I. , Trushenko N. V. , Larchenko Yu. A. , Sukhorukova A. G.
Published: August 2019

Yellow nail syndrome is a rare disorder of unknown etiology that usually affects older adults. The classic clinical presentation includes nail discoloration, lymphedema and pulmonary manifestations (e.g. pleural effusion, sinusitis, bronchitis, bronchiectasia, recurrent pneumonia). Although the diagnosis of yellow nail syndrome is essentially a clinical one and based on the presence of characteristic findings, the disorder often remains undiagnosed for many years due to occasional occurrence. The present article describes the clinical case of yellow nail syndrome and a brief literature review on this issue.
Issues of triple therapy of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Comments to the algorithm. A resolution of expert panel, June 13, 2018, Vladivostok
Authors: Avdeev S. N. , Nevzorova V. A. , Kudelya L. M. , Kondrashova N. M. , Sukhanova G. I. , Kinyaykin M. F. , Naumova I. V. , Shkuratov A. G.
Published: August 2019

Minimizing the risk of exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) along with symptoms control are the most important therapeutic tasks in COPD. The effective solution of this problem is still being discussed. The prevention of COPD exacerbations is of social and economic importance and should be the primary concern in the treatment of this disease. Unresolved problems in the treatment of COPD are low patient compliance to therapy and side effects of medication. According to recent guidelines, in case of persistent COPD exacerbations with patients receiving long-acting bronchodilators (LABA), the use of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) must be considered; this reduces the incidence of moderate and severe COPD exacerbations, especially if a patient has a history of bronchial asthma or blood and/or sputum eosinophilia. Availability of LABA/LAMA and ICS/LABA fixed combinations in Russia provides two possible options to administer a free triple combination consisting of a single LAMA plus ICS/LABA or ICS plus LAMA/LAMA. According to multiple trials, the use of fixed combinations could provide twice improvement in the patient adherence to the therapy, which therefore leads to higher efficiency. The main complaint about ICS with COPD patients is an increased risk of pneumonia as well as the development of systemic adverse reactions typical for corticosteroids. However, the use of extra-fine ICS could significantly reduce the risk of pneumonia compared with fine-particle inhalators and also increases the effectiveness of therapy as the pathological process in COPD mainly involves the small airways.
Drug utilization pattern of antimicrobials in OPD of ENT in teaching hospital
Authors: K. Ravi Shankar , K. Krishnakanth , Alla Jagadeesh
Published: August 2019

Background: A drug utilization study may be helpful to identify the problems, suggest the remedial measures and promote rational use. Antimicrobials are commonly used to treat infections caused by bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi, evidently require huge prescriptions in India.Methods: A prospective, observational study was carried out for a period of four months from February to May 2019 in the Department of ENT (OPD) at NRI Medical College and General Hospital. Prescriptions were collected randomly from around 300 patients attending the ENT outpatient department after obtaining informed consent. The data were collected in the predesigned proforma for analysis.Results: 300 ENT patients were selected for the study, 62% were male and 38% were female. Out of 300 patients 190 ear disorders, 50 nasal, and 60 throat infections. Antimicrobial therapy were most commonly instituted in ear diseases (67.66%), nose (16.95%) and throat (15.37%) respectively. The most commonly used agents were amoxicillin with clavulanic acid- n=295, cefixime- n=1260, gentamicin- n=200, ciprofloxacin- n=157, azithromycin- n=199, nitroimidazoles (metronidazole- n=111).Conclusions: Cefixime and amoxicillin+clavulanic acid combination was the most commonly prescribed antibiotic in our study. Interventions to rectify the use of brand names are necessary to promote rational drug use. An antibiotic policy has to be developed for the doctors in treating infections so that rationality in using the antibiotics will be developed and the occurrence of antibiotic resistance can be reduced.
A importância do bem receber no espaço público: estudo de caso da empresa RIOTUR e seu serviço de informações turísticas
Authors: Santiago Patrícia Elizabeth De Souza , Lança Viviane Soares
Published: August 2019

A hospitalidade é primordial para o turismo e, no âmbito da cidade, se traduz na disponibilidade de serviços, estruturas e equipamentos turísticos eficientes. O visitante, por meio de sua percepção subjetiva, avalia o destino como hospitaleiro ou inospitaleiro, o que pode acarretar no seu retorno ou em uma propaganda negativa do local visitado. Entre os serviços hospitaleiros proporcionados ao turista na cidade do Rio de Janeiro está o de informações turísticas, prestado pela Empresa de Turismo do Município do Rio de Janeiro (Riotur). Nesse contexto, o objetivo deste trabalho foi apresentar a realidade da empresa em relação à qualidade e eficiência de suas informações, baseando-se em opiniões de turistas e dos próprios funcionários da empresa. Trata-se de uma pesquisa descritiva de cunho qualitativo, em que se adotou como método a investigação bibliográfica e documental, além de entrevistas semiestruturadas a turistas usuários do serviço e aos trabalhadores da empresa. Por meio da análise realizada constatouse que, apesar do serviço de informações ser bem avaliado e eficiente na visão do turista, existem lacunas e melhorias que apenas o agente de informações consegue identificar.