China’s “New Normal” and Its Quality of Development

China’s new normal means a new higher stage of development, when an alternative is to improve the quality of economic development instead of accelerating growth rate by expansion policies. And the quality of development is the quality of living of most people. This study is to examine the current situations of China’s quality of development by comparing China’s human development index, inequality indices (Gini, quintile, and Palma), and development potential (human capital index) with the developed countries in Europe, North America, and Oceania, as well as countries with typical traits, such as the Latin American countries, Japan, and Czech Republic; further to put forward China’s policy focuses in the new normal stage according to the concluded research results

Noisy Correspondence Learning with Meta Similarity Correction

Despite the success of multimodal learning in cross-modal retrieval task, the remarkable progress relies on the correct correspondence among multimedia data. However, collecting such ideal data is expensive and time-consuming. In practice, most widely used datasets are harvested from the Internet and inevitably contain mismatched pairs. Training on such noisy correspondence datasets causes performance degradation because the cross-modal retrieval methods can wrongly enforce the mismatched data to be similar. To tackle this problem, we propose a Meta Similarity Correction Network (MSCN) to provide reliable similarity scores. We view a binary classification task as the meta-process that encourages the MSCN to learn discrimination from positive and negative meta-data. To further alleviate the influence of noise, we design an effective data purification strategy using meta-data as prior knowledge to remove the noisy samples. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the strengths of our method in both synthetic and real-world noises, including Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 202

Poly[(μ3-camphorato-κ3 O:O′:O′′)(2-methyl-1H-imidazole-κN 3)zinc(II)]

In the title compound, [Zn(C10H14O4)(C4H6N2)]n, each ZnII ion is coordinated by one N atom from one 2-methyl-1H-imidazole ligand and three O atoms from two camphorate (cap) ligands in a distorted tetra­hedral geometry. In one of the cap ligands, one methyl group is disordered between positions 1 and 3 in a 0.518 (12):0.482 (12) ratio. Each cap ligand bridges three ZnII ions, forming two-dimensional layers, which inter­act further via N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds

Noise-Tolerant Learning for Audio-Visual Action Recognition

Recently, video recognition is emerging with the help of multi-modal learning, which focuses on integrating distinct modalities to improve the performance or robustness of the model. Although various multi-modal learning methods have been proposed and offer remarkable recognition results, almost all of these methods rely on high-quality manual annotations and assume that modalities among multi-modal data provide semantically relevant information. Unfortunately, the widely used video datasets are usually coarse-annotated or collected from the Internet. Thus, it inevitably contains a portion of noisy labels and noisy correspondence. To address this challenge, we use the audio-visual action recognition task as a proxy and propose a noise-tolerant learning framework to find anti-interference model parameters against both noisy labels and noisy correspondence. Specifically, our method consists of two phases that aim to rectify noise by the inherent correlation between modalities. First, a noise-tolerant contrastive training phase is performed to make the model immune to the possible noisy-labeled data. To alleviate the influence of noisy correspondence, we propose a cross-modal noise estimation component to adjust the consistency between different modalities. As the noisy correspondence existed at the instance level, we further propose a category-level contrastive loss to reduce its interference. Second, in the hybrid-supervised training phase, we calculate the distance metric among features to obtain corrected labels, which are used as complementary supervision to guide the training. Extensive experiments on a wide range of noisy levels demonstrate that our method significantly improves the robustness of the action recognition model and surpasses the baselines by a clear margin.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

catena-Poly[[[bis­(thio­cyanato-κN)zinc(II)]-μ-1,2-bis­{[2-(2-pyrid­yl)-1H-imidazol-1-yl]meth­yl}benzene] 0.28-hydrate]

The title one-dimensional coordination polymer, {[Zn(NCS)2(C24H20N6)2]·0.28H2O}n, was obtained by the reaction of Zn(OAc)2·2H2O, KSCN and 1,2-bis­{[2-(2-pyrid­yl)-1H-imid­azol-1-yl]meth­yl}benzene (hereafter L). The ZnII ion shows a distorted octa­hedral coordination geometry and is coordin­ated by two N atoms from two SCN− anions and four N atoms from two organic ligands. The L ligands act as bridging bis-chelating ligands with cis coordination modes at the ZnII ion. One-dimensional coordination polymers are arranged into layers by π–π stacking inter­actions between the imidazole rings of adjacent chains, with an inter­planar distance of 3.46 (1) Å and centroid–centroid distances of 3.8775 (16) Å. One of the thio­cyanate ligands is disordered over two positions with an occupancy factor of 0.564 (3) for the major component. The partially occupied water mol­ecule forms an O—H⋯S hydrogen bond with the disordered thio­cyanate group

Spin Coherence and Spin Relaxation in Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Lead and Mixed Lead-Tin Perovskites

Metal halide perovskites make up a promising class of materials for semiconductor spintronics. Here we report a systematic investigation of coherent spin precession, spin dephasing and spin relaxation of electrons and holes in two hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites MA0.3FA0.7PbI3 and MA0.3FA0.7Pb0.5Sn0.5I3 using time-resolved Faraday rotation spectroscopy. With applied in-plane magnetic fields, we observe robust Larmor spin precession of electrons and holes that persists for hundreds of picoseconds. The spin dephasing and relaxation processes are likely to be sensitive to the defect levels. Temperature-dependent measurements give further insights into the spin relaxation channels. The extracted electron Land\'e g-factors (3.75 and 4.36) are the biggest among the reported values in inorganic or hybrid perovskites. Both the electron and hole g-factors shift dramatically with temperature, which we propose to originate from thermal lattice vibration effects on the band structure. These results lay the foundation for further design and use of lead- and tin-based perovskites for spintronic applications

Senescence: novel insight into DLX3 mutations leading to enhanced bone formation in Tricho-Dento-Osseous syndrome

The homeodomain transcription factor distal-less homeobox 3 gene (DLX3) is required for hair, tooth and skeletal development. DLX3 mutations have been found to be responsible for Tricho-Dento-Osseous (TDO) syndrome, characterized by kinky hair, thin-pitted enamel and increased bone density. Here we show that the DLX3 mutation (c.533 A>G; Q178R) attenuates osteogenic potential and senescence of bone mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) isolated from a TDO patient, providing a molecular explanation for abnormal increased bone density. Both DLX3 mutations (c.533 A>G and c.571_574delGGGG) delayed cellular senescence when they were introduced into pre-osteoblastic cells MC3T3-E1. Furthermore, the attenuated skeletal aging and bone loss in DLX3 (Q178R) transgenic mice not only reconfirmed that DLX3 mutation (Q178R) delayed cellular senescence, but also prevented aging-mediated bone loss. Taken together, these results indicate that DLX3 mutations act as a loss of function in senescence. The delayed senescence of BMSCs leads to increased bone formation by compensating decreased osteogenic potentials with more generations and extended functional lifespan. Our findings in the rare human genetic disease unravel a novel mechanism of DLX3 involving the senescence regulation of bone formation

Reciprocal facilitation between annual plants and burrowing crabs:Implications for the restoration of degraded saltmarshes

Increasing evidence shows that facilitative interactions between species play an essential role in coastal wetland ecosystems. However, there is a lack of understanding of how such interactions can be used for restoration purposes in saltmarsh ecosystems. We therefore studied the mechanisms of reciprocal facilitative interactions between native annual plants, Suaeda salsa, and burrowing crabs, Helice tientsinensis, in a middle-elevation saltmarsh (with generally high plant density and moderate tides) in the Yellow River Delta of China. We investigated the relationship between the densities of the plants and crab burrows in different seasons. Then, we tested whether and how saltmarsh plants and crabs indeed facilitate each other in a series of field and laboratory experiments. Finally, we applied the results by creating a field-scale artificial approach for microtopographic modification to restore a degraded saltmarsh. We found that the density of plant seedlings in spring was positively correlated with the density of crab burrows in the previous autumn; moreover, the density of crab burrows was correlated with the density of plants in summer. The concave-convex surface microtopography created by crabs promoted seed retention and seedling establishment of saltmarsh plants in winter and spring. These plants in turn facilitated crabs by inhibiting predators, providing food and reducing physical stresses for crabs in summer and autumn. The experimental removal of saltmarsh plants decreased crab burrow density, while both transplanting and simulating plants in bare patches promoted crabs. The microtopographic modification, inspired by our new understanding of the interactions between saltmarsh plants and crabs, showed that these degraded saltmarsh ecosystems can be restored by a single ploughing intervention. Synthesis. Our results suggest a reciprocal facilitation between annual plants and burrowing crabs in a middle-elevation saltmarsh ecosystem. This knowledge yielded new restoration options for degraded coastal saltmarshes through the one-time ploughing initiation of microtopographic variation, which could promote the re-establishment of ecosystem engineers and lead to the efficient recovery of pioneer coastal vegetation and associated fauna