Nonminimal Lorentz-Violating Extensions of Gauge Field Theories

A general method is presented to build all gauge-invariant terms in gauge field theories, including quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics. It is applied to two experiments, light-by-light scattering and deep inelastic scattering, to extract first bounds on certain nonminimal coefficients for Lorentz violation.Comment: 4 pages, presented at the Eighth Meeting on CPT and Lorentz Symmetry, Bloomington, Indiana, May 12-16, 201

Smooth center-stable/unstable manifolds and foliations of stochastic evolution equations with non-dense domain

The current paper is devoted to the asymptotic behavior of a class of stochastic PDE. More precisely, with the help of the theory of integrated semigroups and a crucial estimate of the random Stieltjes convolution, we study the existence and smoothness of center-unstable invariant manifolds and center-stable foliations for a class of stochastic PDE with non-dense domain through the Lyapunov-Perron method. Finally, we give two examples about a stochastic age-structured model and a stochastic parabolic equation to illustrate our results.Comment: 46 page

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Large-Scale Point Cloud

Existing methods for large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation require expensive, tedious and error-prone manual point-wise annotations. Intuitively, weakly supervised training is a direct solution to reduce the cost of labeling. However, for weakly supervised large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation, too few annotations will inevitably lead to ineffective learning of network. We propose an effective weakly supervised method containing two components to solve the above problem. Firstly, we construct a pretext task, \textit{i.e.,} point cloud colorization, with a self-supervised learning to transfer the learned prior knowledge from a large amount of unlabeled point cloud to a weakly supervised network. In this way, the representation capability of the weakly supervised network can be improved by the guidance from a heterogeneous task. Besides, to generate pseudo label for unlabeled data, a sparse label propagation mechanism is proposed with the help of generated class prototypes, which is used to measure the classification confidence of unlabeled point. Our method is evaluated on large-scale point cloud datasets with different scenarios including indoor and outdoor. The experimental results show the large gain against existing weakly supervised and comparable results to fully supervised methods\footnote{Code based on mindspore: https://github.com/dmcv-ecnu/MindSpore\_ModelZoo/tree/main/WS3\_MindSpore}

Sustainable Food Systems Design and Education at a Multi-Use Site Site Design for the Kalamazoo Valley Community College Food Innovation Center

The Kalamazoo Valley Community College Food Innovation Center (FIC) is an institution dedicated to urban farming, sustainable agriculture, food systems education, and local food advocacy. They currently have a warehouse office, food processing center, greenhouse, and raised beds on their 5-acre campus. The FIC wishes to design the rest of that 5-acre site so that it can be an educational site that coordinates with KVCC’s food-related educational programing while also serving model for sustainable site design techniques. The FIC has enlisted the help of a team of landscape architecture master’s students at the University of Michigan to undertake this design. Utilizing precedent studies and site inventory and analysis techniques, the Design Team created a design for the FIC campus that minimizes maintenance practices that lead to greenhouse gas production, maximizes ecosystem services including habitat creation, pollinator support, and stormwater management, addresses existing environmental contamination, supports the FIC’s mission and educational programming plan, prioritizes stages of implementation in accordance with the FIC’s access to resources and capacity for expansion, and reflects the FIC’s vision for their campus.Master of Landscape ArchitectureSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148808/5/KVCC_MastersReport.pd

Ag nanoparticles/PPV composite nanofibers with high and sensitive opto-electronic response

The novel Ag nanoparticles/poly(p-phenylene vinylene) [PPV] composite nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning. The transmission electron microscope image shows that the average diameter of composite fibers is about 500 nm and Ag nanoparticles are uniformly dispersed in the PPV matrix with an average diameter of about 25 nm. The Fourier transform infrared spectra suggest that there could be a coordination effect to a certain extent between the Ag atom and the π system of PPV, which is significantly favorable for the dissociation of photoexcitons and the charge transfer at the interface between the Ag nanoparticle and the PPV. The Au top electrode device of the single Ag/PPV composite nanofiber exhibits high and sensitive opto-electronic responses. Under light illumination of 5.76 mW/cm2 and voltage of 20 V, the photocurrent is over three times larger than the dark current under same voltage, which indicates that this kind of composite fiber is an excellent opto-electronic nanomaterial

Efficient Phytase Secretion and Phytate Degradation by Recombinant Bifidobacterium longum JCM 1217

Genetic engineering of probiotics, like bifidobacteria, may improve their microbial cell factory economy. This work designed a novel shuttle plasmid pBPES, which bears exogenous appA and is stable within Bifidobacterium longum JCM 1217. Cloning of three predicted promoters into pBPES proved that all of them drive appA expression in B. longum JCM 1217. Transformation of plasmids pBPES-tu and pBPES-groEL into B. longum JCM1217 resulted in much more phytase secretion suggests Ptu and PgroEL are strong promoters. Further in vitro and in vivo experiments suggested B. longum JCM 1217/pBPES-tu degrades phytate efficiently. In conclusion, the study screened two stronger promoters and constructed a recombinant live probiotic strain for effectively phytase secretion and phytate degradation in gut. The strategy used in the study provided a novel technique for improving the bioaccessibility of phytate and decreasing phosphorus excretion