Culture shapes how we look: Comparison between Chinese and African university students

Previous cross-cultural studies find that cultures can shape how we look during scene perception, but don’t mention its condition and limited to the East and West. This study recruited Chinese and African students to testify the cultural effects on two phases. In free-viewing phase: Africans fixated more on the focal objects than Chinese, while Chinese payed more attention to the backgrounds than Africans especially on the first fourth and fifth fixations. In recognition phase, there was no cultural difference on perception, but Chinese recognized more objects than Africans. Based on chosen subjects, we conclude that cultural differences exit on scene perception under conditions of no task and more clearly in its later period, but that differences may be hidden in a deeper way (e.g. memory) in task condition

Resource Allocation for Capacity Optimization in Joint Source-Channel Coding Systems

Benefited from the advances of deep learning (DL) techniques, deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) has shown its great potential to improve the performance of wireless transmission. However, most of the existing works focus on the DL-based transceiver design of the JSCC model, while ignoring the resource allocation problem in wireless systems. In this paper, we consider a downlink resource allocation problem, where a base station (BS) jointly optimizes the compression ratio (CR) and power allocation as well as resource block (RB) assignment of each user according to the latency and performance constraints to maximize the number of users that successfully receive their requested content with desired quality. To solve this problem, we first decompose it into two subproblems without loss of optimality. The first subproblem is to minimize the required transmission power for each user under given RB allocation. We derive the closed-form expression of the optimal transmit power by searching the maximum feasible compression ratio. The second one aims at maximizing the number of supported users through optimal user-RB pairing, which we solve by utilizing bisection search as well as Karmarka' s algorithm. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation method in terms of the number of satisfied users with given resources.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Clinical Features and Visual Acuity Outcomes in Culture-Positive Endogenous Fungal Endophthalmitis in Southern China

Purpose. To report the causative organisms, management strategies, and visual outcomes of culture-proven endogenous fungal endophthalmitis in a case series from southern China. Methods. We reviewed the microbiological and medical records of patients with culture-positive endogenous fungal endophthalmitis visiting the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center, Guangzhou, China, between January 1, 2006, and March 31, 2016. Results. The inclusion criteria were met in 32 eyes of 29 patients. Molds were a common causative organism in 15 patients (51.7%), while yeasts appeared in 14 patients (48.3%). Initial visual acuity (VA) at the level of finger counting or better was significantly related to a good visual outcome (P=0.002). Molds as a causative agent were significantly associated with worse visual outcome than yeasts (P=0.020). Conclusion. Molds were a common cause of culture-proven fungal endophthalmitis. Endogenous fungal endophthalmitis is generally associated with poor VA outcomes, especially if caused by molds and if the patient’s initial VA is too low to permit finger counting

An extended finite element model for modelling localised fracture of reinforced concrete beams in fire

Open Access funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under a Creative Commons license.A robust finite element procedure for modelling the localised fracture of reinforced concrete beams at elevated temperatures is developed. In this model a reinforced concrete beam is represented as an assembly of 4-node quadrilateral plain concrete, 3-node main reinforcing steel bar, and 2-node bond-link elements. The concrete element is subdivided into layers for considering the temperature distribution over the cross-section of a beam. An extended finite element method (XFEM) has been incorporated into the concrete elements in order to capture the localised cracks within the concrete. The model has been validated against previous fire test results on the concrete beams.The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of Great Britain under Grant No. EP/I031553/1

Carbon Nanotubes Enhance Cytotoxicity Mediated by Human Lymphocytes In Vitro

With the expansion of the potential applications of carbon nanotubes (CNT) in biomedical fields, the toxicity and biocompatibility of CNT have become issues of growing concern. Since the immune system often mediates tissue damage during pathogenesis, it is important to explore whether CNT can trigger cytotoxicity through affecting the immune functions. In the current study, we evaluated the influence of CNT on the cytotoxicity mediated by human lymphocytes in vitro. The results showed that while CNT at low concentrations (0.001 to 0.1 µg/ml) did not cause obvious cell death or apoptosis directly, it enhanced lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity against multiple human cell lines. In addition, CNT increased the secretion of IFN-γ and TNF-α by the lymphocytes. CNT also upregulated the NF-κB expression in lymphocytes, and the blockage of the NF-κB pathway reduced the lymphocyte-mediated cytotoxicity triggered by CNT. These results suggest that CNT at lower concentrations may prospectively initiate an indirect cytotoxicity through affecting the function of lymphocytes

Behaviour of continuous reinforced concrete floor slabs subjected to different compartment fires

Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Mining and Technolog

An Adaptive Data Traffic Control Scheme with Load Balancing in a Wireless Network

The symmetric wireless network has been expected to be a revolutionary technology for mobile communications. Due to the limited resources of the microbase stations in the wireless network, the way to jointly optimize resource allocation, traffic throughput, latency, and other key performances is a hot research issue. In this paper, we introduce a joint optimization algorithm for improving the performance and balancing the traffic load of the wireless network. For the optimal traffic routing scheme, we transfer the problem to a mixed mathematical programming model. The model contains multiple traffic constraints and a single joint objective; the objective of the joint optimization are data transmission latency, energy consumption of wireless microbase stations, and throughput of links. Moreover, in order to approximately solve the optimization problem, we propose an efficient heuristic traffic transmission and migration scheme with load balancing, called an adaptive data traffic control scheme. The main idea of the proposed scheme is to split the traffic of overloaded microbase stations and links in the symmetric wireless network, so as to achieve load balancing and reduce the energy consumption of microbase stations. At last, the evaluations and simulations verify the proposed algorithm can efficiently optimize the energy allocation of microbase stations, and the network lifetime is increased to 210 rounds. Meanwhile, the network latency is reduced to 2–3 ms, and the network throughput is increased to 1000 Mb in our simulation environment. The constructed traffic control system for the traffic engineering-based wireless network in this paper can serve the intelligent system in the future

An Adaptive Data Traffic Control Scheme with Load Balancing in a Wireless Network

The symmetric wireless network has been expected to be a revolutionary technology for mobile communications. Due to the limited resources of the microbase stations in the wireless network, the way to jointly optimize resource allocation, traffic throughput, latency, and other key performances is a hot research issue. In this paper, we introduce a joint optimization algorithm for improving the performance and balancing the traffic load of the wireless network. For the optimal traffic routing scheme, we transfer the problem to a mixed mathematical programming model. The model contains multiple traffic constraints and a single joint objective; the objective of the joint optimization are data transmission latency, energy consumption of wireless microbase stations, and throughput of links. Moreover, in order to approximately solve the optimization problem, we propose an efficient heuristic traffic transmission and migration scheme with load balancing, called an adaptive data traffic control scheme. The main idea of the proposed scheme is to split the traffic of overloaded microbase stations and links in the symmetric wireless network, so as to achieve load balancing and reduce the energy consumption of microbase stations. At last, the evaluations and simulations verify the proposed algorithm can efficiently optimize the energy allocation of microbase stations, and the network lifetime is increased to 210 rounds. Meanwhile, the network latency is reduced to 2–3 ms, and the network throughput is increased to 1000 Mb in our simulation environment. The constructed traffic control system for the traffic engineering-based wireless network in this paper can serve the intelligent system in the future