9,184 research outputs found
Theoretical Expectations for Rare and Forbidden Tau Decays
Given the experimental evidence for oscillations, the
existence of lepton flavor violation in decays is a theoretical
certainty. In this brief review, I consider the connection between models of
neutrino mass and the expected observability of some decays.Comment: Talk at TAU 02 (Santa Cruz, CA
Learning to Dress {3D} People in Generative Clothing
Three-dimensional human body models are widely used in the analysis of human
pose and motion. Existing models, however, are learned from minimally-clothed
3D scans and thus do not generalize to the complexity of dressed people in
common images and videos. Additionally, current models lack the expressive
power needed to represent the complex non-linear geometry of pose-dependent
clothing shapes. To address this, we learn a generative 3D mesh model of
clothed people from 3D scans with varying pose and clothing. Specifically, we
train a conditional Mesh-VAE-GAN to learn the clothing deformation from the
SMPL body model, making clothing an additional term in SMPL. Our model is
conditioned on both pose and clothing type, giving the ability to draw samples
of clothing to dress different body shapes in a variety of styles and poses. To
preserve wrinkle detail, our Mesh-VAE-GAN extends patchwise discriminators to
3D meshes. Our model, named CAPE, represents global shape and fine local
structure, effectively extending the SMPL body model to clothing. To our
knowledge, this is the first generative model that directly dresses 3D human
body meshes and generalizes to different poses. The model, code and data are
available for research purposes at https://cape.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: CVPR-2020 camera ready. Code and data are available at
https://cape.is.tue.mpg.d
Portal control of viral prohead expansion and DNA packaging
AbstractBacteriophage T4 terminase packages DNA in vitro into empty small or large proheads (esps or elps). In vivo maturation of esps yields the more stable and voluminous elps required to contain the 170 kb T4 genome. Functional proheads can be assembled containing portal–GFP fusion proteins. In the absence of terminase activity these accumulated in esps in vivo, whereas wild-type portals were found in elps. By nuclease protection assay dsDNAs of lengths 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 5, 11, 20, 40 or 170 kb were efficiently packaged into wild-type elps in vitro, but less so into esps and gp20–GFP elps; particularly with DNAs shorter than 11 kb. However, 0.1 kb substrates were equally efficiently packaged into all types of proheads as judged by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. These data suggest the portal controls the expansion of the major capsid protein lattice during prohead maturation, and that this expansion is necessary for DNA protection but not for packaging
PLACE: Proximity Learning of Articulation and Contact in 3D Environments
High fidelity digital 3D environments have been proposed in recent years,
however, it remains extremely challenging to automatically equip such
environment with realistic human bodies. Existing work utilizes images, depth
or semantic maps to represent the scene, and parametric human models to
represent 3D bodies. While being straightforward, their generated human-scene
interactions are often lack of naturalness and physical plausibility. Our key
observation is that humans interact with the world through body-scene contact.
To synthesize realistic human-scene interactions, it is essential to
effectively represent the physical contact and proximity between the body and
the world. To that end, we propose a novel interaction generation method, named
PLACE (Proximity Learning of Articulation and Contact in 3D Environments),
which explicitly models the proximity between the human body and the 3D scene
around it. Specifically, given a set of basis points on a scene mesh, we
leverage a conditional variational autoencoder to synthesize the minimum
distances from the basis points to the human body surface. The generated
proximal relationship exhibits which region of the scene is in contact with the
person. Furthermore, based on such synthesized proximity, we are able to
effectively obtain expressive 3D human bodies that interact with the 3D scene
naturally. Our perceptual study shows that PLACE significantly improves the
state-of-the-art method, approaching the realism of real human-scene
interaction. We believe our method makes an important step towards the fully
automatic synthesis of realistic 3D human bodies in 3D scenes. The code and
model are available for research at
https://sanweiliti.github.io/PLACE/PLACE.html.Comment: Accepted by 3DV 2020, camera ready version with appendi
An assessment of various blood collection and transfer methods used for malaria rapid diagnostic tests
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Four blood collection and transfer devices commonly used for malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) were assessed for their consistency, accuracy and ease of use in the hands of laboratory technicians and village health workers.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Laboratory technicians and village health workers collected blood from a finger prick using each device in random order, and deposited the blood either on filter paper or into a suitable casette-type RDT. Consistency and accuracy of volume delivered was determined by comparing the measurements of the resulting blood spots/heights with the measurements of laboratory-prepared pipetted standard volumes. The effect of varying blood volumes on RDT sensitivity and ease of use was also observed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There was high variability in blood volume collected by the devices, with the straw and the loop, the most preferred devices, usually transferring volumes greater than intended, while the glass capillary tube and the plastic pipette transferring less volume than intended or none at all. Varying the blood volume delivered to RDTs indicated that this variation is critical to RDT sensitivity only when the transferred volume is very low.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>None of the blood transfer devices assessed performed consistently well. Adequate training on their use is clearly necessary, with more development efforts for improved designs to be used by remote health workers, in mind.</p
Electromagnetically-Induced-Transparency-Like Effect in the Degenerate Triple-Resonant Optical Parametric Amplifier
We investigate experimentally the absorptive and dispersive properties of
triple-resonant optical parametric amplifier OPA for the degenerate subharmonic
field. In the experiment, the subharmonic field is utilized as the probe field
and the harmonic wave as the pump field. We demonstrate that EIT-like effect
can be simulated in the triple-resonant OPA when the cavity line-width for the
harmonic wave is narrower than that for the subharmonic field. However, this
phenomenon can not be observed in a double-resonant OPA. The narrow
transparency window appears in the reflected field. Especially, in the measured
dispersive spectra of triple-resonant OPA, a very steep variation of the
dispersive profile of the subharmonic field is observed, which can result in a
slow light as that observed in atomic EIT medium.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, appear in Opt. Let
Evaluation of the potential of retrofitting a coal power plant to oxy-firing using CFD and process co-simulation
A new approach has been developed in order to estimate the potential of retrofitting an existing power plant to oxy-firing and the safe operation regime of the retrofitted boiler under oxy-combustion condition has been determined. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques have been employed to simulate the coal combustion and heat transfer to the furnace water walls and heat exchangers under air-firing and oxy-firing conditions. A set of reduced order models (ROM) has been developed to link the CFD predictions to the whole plant process model in order to simulate the performance of the power plant under different load and oxygen enrichment conditions in an efficient manner. Simulation results of a 500° MWe power plant unit indicate that it is possible to retrofit it to oxy-firing without affecting its overall performance. Further, the feasible range of oxygen enrichment for different power loads is identified to be between 25% and 27%. However, the peak temperature on the superheater platen 2 may increase in the oxy-coal mode at a high power load beyond 450° MWe
Detection of Vacuum Birefringence with Intense Laser Pulses
We propose a novel technique that promises hope of being the first to
directly detect a polarization in the quantum electrodynamic (QED) vacuum. The
technique is based upon the use of ultra-short pulses of light circulating in
low dispersion optical resonators. We show that the technique circumvents the
need for large scale liquid helium cooled magnets, and more importantly avoids
the experimental pitfalls that plague existing experiments that make use of
these magnets. Likely improvements in the performance of optics and lasers
would result in the ability to observe vacuum polarization in an experiment of
only a few hours duration.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur
Delegating Quantum Computation in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
A delegation scheme allows a computationally weak client to use a server's
resources to help it evaluate a complex circuit without leaking any information
about the input (other than its length) to the server. In this paper, we
consider delegation schemes for quantum circuits, where we try to minimize the
quantum operations needed by the client. We construct a new scheme for
delegating a large circuit family, which we call "C+P circuits". "C+P" circuits
are the circuits composed of Toffoli gates and diagonal gates. Our scheme is
non-interactive, requires very little quantum computation from the client
(proportional to input length but independent of the circuit size), and can be
proved secure in the quantum random oracle model, without relying on additional
assumptions, such as the existence of fully homomorphic encryption. In practice
the random oracle can be replaced by an appropriate hash function or block
cipher, for example, SHA-3, AES.
This protocol allows a client to delegate the most expensive part of some
quantum algorithms, for example, Shor's algorithm. The previous protocols that
are powerful enough to delegate Shor's algorithm require either many rounds of
interactions or the existence of FHE. The protocol requires asymptotically
fewer quantum gates on the client side compared to running Shor's algorithm
locally.
To hide the inputs, our scheme uses an encoding that maps one input qubit to
multiple qubits. We then provide a novel generalization of classical garbled
circuits ("reversible garbled circuits") to allow the computation of Toffoli
circuits on this encoding. We also give a technique that can support the
computation of phase gates on this encoding.
To prove the security of this protocol, we study key dependent message(KDM)
security in the quantum random oracle model. KDM security was not previously
studied in quantum settings.Comment: 41 pages, 1 figures. Update to be consistent with the proceeding
versio
Quality of Life Changes Following Peripheral Blood Stem Cell Transplantation and Participation in a Mixed-Type, Moderate-intensity, Exercise Program
Summary:The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the impact of undertaking peripheral blood stem cell transplantation (PBST) on quality of life (QoL), and to determine the effect of participating in a mixed-type, moderate-intensity exercise program on QoL. It was also an objective to determine the relationship between peak aerobic capacity and QoL in PBST patients. QoL was assessed via the CARES questionnaire and peak aerobic capacity by a maximal graded treadmill test, pretransplant (PI), post transplant (PII) and following a 12-week intervention period (PIII). At PII, 12 patients were divided equally into a control or exercise intervention group. Undergoing a PBST was associated with a statistically but not clinically significant decline in QoL (P<0.05). Following the intervention, exercising patients demonstrated an improved QoL when compared with pretransplant ratings (P<0.01) and nonexercising transplant patients (P<0.05). Moreover, peak aerobic capacity and QoL were correlated (P<0.05). The findings demonstrated that exercise participation following oncology treatment is associated with a reduction in the number and severity of endorsed problems, which in turn leads to improvements in global, physical and psychosocial QoL. Furthermore, a relationship between fitness and QoL exists, with those experiencing higher levels of fitness also demonstrating higher QoL.Bone Marrow Transplantation (2004) 33, 553-558. doi:10.1038/sj.bmt.1704378 Published online 12 January 200
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