Wind pressure on a single building immersed in a low-jet wind profile

This paper for the first time discuss the wind pressure distribution on the building surface immersed in wind profile of low-level jet rather than a logarithmic boundary-layer profile. Two types of building models are considered, low-rise and high-rise building, relative to the low-level jet height. CFD simulation is carried out. The simulation results show that the wind pressure distribution immersed in a low-jet wine profile is very different from the typical uniform and boundary-layer flow. For the low-rise building, the stagnation point is located at the upper level of windward façade for the low-level jet wind case, and the separation zone above the roof top is not as obvious as the uniform case. For the high-rise building model, the height of stagnation point is almost as high as the low-level jet height

Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation

Talking face generation aims to synthesize a sequence of face images that correspond to a clip of speech. This is a challenging task because face appearance variation and semantics of speech are coupled together in the subtle movements of the talking face regions. Existing works either construct specific face appearance model on specific subjects or model the transformation between lip motion and speech. In this work, we integrate both aspects and enable arbitrary-subject talking face generation by learning disentangled audio-visual representation. We find that the talking face sequence is actually a composition of both subject-related information and speech-related information. These two spaces are then explicitly disentangled through a novel associative-and-adversarial training process. This disentangled representation has an advantage where both audio and video can serve as inputs for generation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach generates realistic talking face sequences on arbitrary subjects with much clearer lip motion patterns than previous work. We also demonstrate the learned audio-visual representation is extremely useful for the tasks of automatic lip reading and audio-video retrieval.Comment: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019) Oral Presentation. Code, models, and video results are available on our webpage: https://liuziwei7.github.io/projects/TalkingFace.htm

Blockchain architecture and its applications in a bank risk mitigation framework

This study proposes a simple two-period model to consider consumers’ borrowing behaviour in a decentralised consensus and information distribution platform. Based on this model, we develop a bank risk mitigation framework and find that decentralised digital identity and encryption technology are the most important factors for attaining market equilibrium between decentralised consensus and information distribution. Specifically, the greater the scope of digital identity construction and the more blockchain consensus records there are, the less likely the borrower will default. Our study provides meaningful practical implications for bankers and policy regulators to help them better understand consumers’ borrowing behaviour and decisions to default

Myofibrillar protein gel properties are influenced by oxygen concentration in modified atmosphere packaged minced beef

Minced beef was stored for 8 days and myofibrillar protein (MP) was extracted to investigate the effect of oxygen concentration (0, 20, 40, 60, and 80%) in modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) on heat-induced gel properties. Compression force of gels was lower when prepared from beef packaged in 0% oxygen, intermediate in 20 to 60% oxygen and greater in 80% oxygen. Total water loss of gels prepared from beef packaged with oxygen (20-80%) was higher and rheology measurements presented higher G' and G '' values. Additionally, gels from beef packaged without oxygen exhibited higher J (t) values during creep and recovery tests, demonstrating that oxygen exposure of meat during storage in MAP affect MP in such a way that heat-induced protein gels alter their characteristics. Generally, storage with oxygen in MAP resulted in stronger and more elastic MP gels, which was observed already at a relative low oxygen concentration of 20%. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Inhibition effects of paeonol on mice bearing EMT6 breast cancer through inducing rumor cell apoptosis

Paeonol, a phenolic component from the root bark of Paeonia moutan, has been identified to possess antitumor effects on mice bearing EMT6 breast cancer in our previous studies. However, the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. In the present study the molecular mechanisms of paeonol were further investigated in EMT6 mice model. The results showed that treatment of mice with 175 and 350 mg/kg/day of paeonol significantly inhibited the growth of the EMT6 tumor in mice, and induced tumor cell apoptosis which were demonstrated by light microscopy after hematoxylin and eosin staining and apoptosis analysis by flow cytometry. In addition, compared with the control group, paeonol increased the number of tumor cells in G0/G1 phase but decreased the number of cells in S and G2/M phase. Paeonol treatment (350 mg/kg body weight) also resulted in a decrease of Bcl-2 and an increase in Bax and caspase-3 expressions, which were demonstrated by immunohistochemical and western blot analysis. These results indicate that the antitumor effects of paeonol might be associated with arresting tumor cells in the G0/G1 phase, inducing cell apoptosis and regulation of the expression of Bcl-2, Bax and activation of caspase-3

Test Generation Algorithm Based on SVM with compressing Sample Space Methods

Test generation algorithm based on the SVM (support vector machine) generates test signals derived from the sample space of the output responses of the analog DUT. When the responses of the normal circuits are similar to those of the faulty circuits (i.e., the latter have only small parametric faults), the sample space is mixed and traditional algorithms have difficulty distinguishing the two groups. However, the SVM provides an effective result. The sample space contains redundant data, because successive impulse-response samples may get quite close. The redundancy will waste the needless computational load. So we propose three difference methods to compress the sample space. The compressing sample space methods are Equidistant compressional method, k-nearest neighbors method and maximal difference method. Numerical experiments prove that maximal difference method can ensure the precision of the test generation