Change and continuity: a morphological investigation of the creation of gated communities in post-reform Beijing

Alongside the socio-economic restructuring from a central planning system to a free market system, Beijing is being transformed into a “gated city of tomorrow” by building massive gated communities as a new form of private neighborhood planning and design. Although certain scholarly attentions have been received through the international debate over gated communities, there is a lack of systematic research on how these private urban landscapes are actually created at the micro-level and how their creation is related with historical development and social process. Therefore, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the origin and nature of the creation of gated communities in the setting of Beijing through a careful morphological investigation. More exactly, a set of private gated community schemes and a set of public produced neighborhood schemes of the early socialist period will be cross compared according to the major neighborhood morphological components in order to reveal the differences and similarities in their morphology, or in another sense the change and continuity in their planning and design. Meanwhile, the ideas and logics underpinning the changes will be accounted. Finally, design origins and the links between the morphological changes and the broad social process will be discussed in light of the research findings

Breathers and kinks in a simulated crystal experiment

We develop a simple 1D model for the scattering of an incoming particle hitting the surface of mica crystal, the transmission of energy through the crystal by a localized mode, and the ejection of atom(s) at the incident or distant face. This is the first attempt to model the experiment described in Russell and Eilbeck in 2007 (EPL, v. 78, 10004). Although very basic, the model shows many interesting features, for example a complicated energy dependent transition between breather modes and a kink mode, and multiple ejections at both incoming and distant surfaces. In addition, the effect of a heavier surface layer is modelled, which can lead to internal reflections of breathers or kinks at the crystal surface.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, based on a talk given at the conference "Localized Excitations in Nonlinear Complex Systems (LENCOS)", Sevilla (Spain) July 14-17, 200

The qq-log-convexity of Domb's polynomials

In this paper, we prove the $q$-log-convexity of Domb's polynomials, which was conjectured by Sun in the study of Ramanujan-Sato type series for powers of $\pi$. As a result, we obtain the log-convexity of Domb's numbers. Our proof is based on the $q$-log-convexity of Narayana polynomials of type $B$ and a criterion for determining $q$-log-convexity of self-reciprocal polynomials.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1308.273

On the qq-log-convexity conjecture of Sun

In his study of Ramanujan-Sato type series for $1/\pi$, Sun introduced a sequence of polynomials $S_n(q)$ as given by $$S_n(q)=\sum\limits_{k=0}^n{n\choose k}{2k\choose k}{2(n-k)\choose n-k}q^k,$$ and he conjectured that the polynomials $S_n(q)$ are $q$-log-convex. By imitating a result of Liu and Wang on generating new $q$-log-convex sequences of polynomials from old ones, we obtain a sufficient condition for determining the $q$-log-convexity of self-reciprocal polynomials. Based on this criterion, we then give an affirmative answer to Sun's conjecture

Unpaired multi-modal segmentation via knowledge distillation

Multi-modal learning is typically performed with network architectures containing modality-specific layers and shared layers, utilizing co-registered images of different modalities. We propose a novel learning scheme for unpaired cross-modality image segmentation, with a highly compact architecture achieving superior segmentation accuracy. In our method, we heavily reuse network parameters, by sharing all convolutional kernels across CT and MRI, and only employ modality-specific internal normalization layers which compute respective statistics. To effectively train such a highly compact model, we introduce a novel loss term inspired by knowledge distillation, by explicitly constraining the KL-divergence of our derived prediction distributions between modalities. We have extensively validated our approach on two multi-class segmentation problems: i) cardiac structure segmentation, and ii) abdominal organ segmentation. Different network settings, i.e., 2D dilated network and 3D U-net, are utilized to investigate our method's general efficacy. Experimental results on both tasks demonstrate that our novel multi-modal learning scheme consistently outperforms single-modal training and previous multi-modal approaches

Temperature dependence of electron-spin relaxation in a single InAs quantum dot at zero applied magnetic field

The temperature-dependent electron spin relaxation of positively charged excitons in a single InAs quantum dot (QD) was measured by time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy at zero applied magnetic fields. The experimental results show that the electron-spin relaxation is clearly divided into two different temperature regimes: (i) T < 50 K, spin relaxation depends on the dynamical nuclear spin polarization (DNSP) and is approximately temperature-independent, as predicted by Merkulov et al. (ii) T > about 50 K, spin relaxation speeds up with increasing temperature. A model of two LO phonon scattering process coupled with hyperfine interaction is proposed to account for the accelerated electron spin relaxation at higher temperatures.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Chemical composition and antioxidant properties of the essential oil and methanol extracts of rhizoma Alpinia officinarum from China in vitro

This study was designed to examine the in vitro antioxidant activities of the essential oil and methanol extracts of rhizoma Alpinia officinarum (small galanga) from China. The essential oil was analyzed by gas chromatography/ mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and 46 constituents were identified. Methanol extract from rhizoma A. officinarum was fractionated by chromatography of silica gel using ethyl acetate, acetone-methanol (8:1, V/V) and methanol, respectively. The antioxidant activities of essential oil and methanol extracts were evaluated with reducing power, diphenylpicrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assay and ferric thiocyanate test. In the above three assays, the essential oil and methanol extracts showed antioxidant potential to varying degrees; and acetone-methanol (8:1, V/V) subfraction exhibited better antioxidant potency than others. Owing to having antioxidative components, the essential oil exhibited satisfying antioxidant activities. A positive correlation was observed between the antioxidant activity potential and total phenolic contents of the extracts

Editorial: Unravelling Copper-Regulatory Systems and Copper-Affected Pathways in Cancer Cells to Improve Current Therapies

Unravelling Copper-Regulatory Systems and Copper-Affected Pathways in Cancer Cells to Improve Current Therapie