Design for Street Markets in Mainland China: Study of Current Street Markets, the Ideal Model of Formalized Street Markets, and Worktable Design

Street vendors are a cultural icon and have a long history in the cities of Mainland China (abbreviated as China henceforth). However, with the development and modernization of Chinese cities, the relationship between street vendors and city managers has become increasingly tense and delicate, and conflicts between vendors and urban management are occurring at an increasing rate. This paper intends to illustrate the irreplaceability of the street markets and identify a solution for street vendors to thrive in tandem with modernization through research and design. In many large Chinese cities, the number of food vendors has been insufficient to support the increasing urbanization, and a large proportion of food consumption has shifted to supermarkets as traditional street markets have been banned. This article briefly introduces several major types of food consumption locations in Chinese cities and finds that the street market plays an important role in cities. However, street markets have their own problems, including polluting the environment and creating congestion. Also, as a semi-urbanized group, most street vendors rarely enjoy the same rights and interests as other people in the cities because of the ‘Hukou’ household registration system and other cultural differences. These vendors are marginalized in urban life and guaranteeing their rights and benefits is problematic. In contrast, although Hong Kong and Taiwan share many culture aspects with China, there exists a level of respect and tacit understanding that allows street vendors to thrive, and many prefer to purchase food at street markets instead of supermarkets because of the unique atmosphere that they provide. This paper also discusses the Chinese urban garbage disposal system and explores possible solutions to remedy the primary issues of pollution facing street markets in China. Through the investigation of Chinese consumers\u27 perceptions of street markets, this paper concludes that people in fact enjoy street markets and believe that street markets can provide convenience and unique value. They welcome standardized street markets. Finally, this paper proposes the idea of standardizing the implementation of the street market; from rules, to promotion as a brand, to designing worktable for aquatic products vendors. The product can help aquatic product vendors maintain environmental sanitation and achieve harmonious coexistence within the city

POLAR: A Polynomial Arithmetic Framework for Verifying Neural-Network Controlled Systems

We propose POLAR, a \textbf{pol}ynomial \textbf{ar}ithmetic framework that leverages polynomial overapproximations with interval remainders for bounded-time reachability analysis of neural network-controlled systems (NNCSs). Compared with existing arithmetic approaches that use standard Taylor models, our framework uses a novel approach to iteratively overapproximate the neuron output ranges layer-by-layer with a combination of Bernstein polynomial interpolation for continuous activation functions and Taylor model arithmetic for the other operations. This approach can overcome the main drawback in the standard Taylor model arithmetic, i.e. its inability to handle functions that cannot be well approximated by Taylor polynomials, and significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of reachable states computation for NNCSs. To further tighten the overapproximation, our method keeps the Taylor model remainders symbolic under the linear mappings when estimating the output range of a neural network. We show that POLAR can be seamlessly integrated with existing Taylor model flowpipe construction techniques, and demonstrate that POLAR significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art techniques on a suite of benchmarks

ReachNN: Reachability Analysis of Neural-Network Controlled Systems

Applying neural networks as controllers in dynamical systems has shown great promises. However, it is critical yet challenging to verify the safety of such control systems with neural-network controllers in the loop. Previous methods for verifying neural network controlled systems are limited to a few specific activation functions. In this work, we propose a new reachability analysis approach based on Bernstein polynomials that can verify neural-network controlled systems with a more general form of activation functions, i.e., as long as they ensure that the neural networks are Lipschitz continuous. Specifically, we consider abstracting feedforward neural networks with Bernstein polynomials for a small subset of inputs. To quantify the error introduced by abstraction, we provide both theoretical error bound estimation based on the theory of Bernstein polynomials and more practical sampling based error bound estimation, following a tight Lipschitz constant estimation approach based on forward reachability analysis. Compared with previous methods, our approach addresses a much broader set of neural networks, including heterogeneous neural networks that contain multiple types of activation functions. Experiment results on a variety of benchmarks show the effectiveness of our approach

REGLO: Provable Neural Network Repair for Global Robustness Properties

We present REGLO, a novel methodology for repairing pretrained neural networks to satisfy global robustness and individual fairness properties. A neural network is said to be globally robust with respect to a given input region if and only if all the input points in the region are locally robust. This notion of global robustness also captures the notion of individual fairness as a special case. We prove that any counterexample to a global robustness property must exhibit a corresponding large gradient. For ReLU networks, this result allows us to efficiently identify the linear regions that violate a given global robustness property. By formulating and solving a suitable robust convex optimization problem, REGLO then computes a minimal weight change that will provably repair these violating linear regions.</jats:p

POLAR-Express: Efficient and Precise Formal Reachability Analysis of Neural-Network Controlled Systems

Neural networks (NNs) playing the role of controllers have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems. However, the potential adoption of NN controllers in real-life applications has been significantly impeded by the growing concerns over the safety of these neural-network controlled systems (NNCSs). In this work, we present POLAR-Express, an efficient and precise formal reachability analysis tool for verifying the safety of NNCSs. POLAR-Express uses Taylor model arithmetic to propagate Taylor models (TMs) layer-by-layer across a neural network to compute an over-approximation of the neural network. It can be applied to analyze any feed-forward neural networks with continuous activation functions, such as ReLU, Sigmoid, and Tanh activation functions that cover the common benchmarks for NNCS reachability analysis. Compared with its earlier prototype POLAR, we develop a novel approach in POLAR-Express to propagate TMs more efficiently and precisely across ReLU activation functions, and provide parallel computation support for TM propagation, thus significantly improving the efficiency and scalability. Across the comparison with six other state-of-the-art tools on a diverse set of common benchmarks, POLAR-Express achieves the best verification efficiency and tightness in the reachable set analysis. POLAR-Express is publicly available at https://github.com/ChaoHuang2018/POLAR&#x005F;Tool

Citrus sinensis MYB Transcription Factor CsMYB85 Induce Fruit Juice Sac Lignification Through Interaction With Other CsMYB Transcription Factors

Varieties of Citrus are commercially important fruits that are cultivated worldwide and are valued for being highly nutritious and having an appealing flavor. Lignification of citrus fruit juice sacs is a serious physiological disorder that occurs during postharvest storage, for which the underlying transcriptional regulatory mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we identified and isolated a candidate MYB transcription factor, CsMYB85, that is involved in the regulation of lignin biosynthesis in Citrus sinensis, which has homologs in Arabidopsis and other plants. We found that during juice sac lignification, CsMYB85 expression levels increase significantly, and therefore, suspected that this gene may control lignin biosynthesis during the lignification process. Our results indicated that CsMYB85 binds the CsMYB330 promoter, regulates its expression, and interacts with CsMYB308 in transgenic yeast and tobacco. A transient expression assay indicated that Cs4CL1 expression levels and lignin content significantly increased in fruit juice sacs overexpressing CsMYB85. At4CL1 expression levels and lignin content were also significantly increased in Arabidopsis overexpressing CsMYB85. We accordingly present convincing evidence for the participation of the CsMYB85 transcription factor in fruit juice sac lignification, and thereby provide new insights into the transcriptional regulation of this process in citrus fruits

比利时

peer reviewedUltra-performance convergence chromatography is an environmentally-friendly analytical method that uses dramatically reduced amounts of organic solvents. In addition, a robust and highly sensitive chiral separation method was developed for the novel chiral acaricide cyflumetofen by using ultra-performance convergence chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry, which shows that stereoisomer recoveries determined for various apple parts ranged from 78.3% to 119.9%, with the relative standard deviations being lower than 14.0%. The half-lives of (-)-cyflumetofen and (+)-cyflumetofen obtained under 5-fold applied dosage equal to 22.13 and 22.23 days, respectively. For 1.5-fold applied dosage, the respective values were determined as 22.42 and 23.64 days, i.e., the degradation of (-)-cyflumetofen was insignificantly favored over that of its enantiomer. Importantly, cyflumetofen was unevenly distributed in apples, with its relative contents in apple peel, peduncle, and pomace equal to 50%, 22%, and 16%, respectively. The proposed method can be used to efficiently separate and quantify chiral pesticide with advantages of a shorter analysis time, greater sensitivity, and better environmental compatibility. Additionally, the consumption of apples with residue of cyflumetofen did not pose a health risk to the population if the cyflumetofen applied under satisfactory agricultural practices after the long-term dietary risk assessment

Genomic traits of multidrug resistant enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli isolates from diarrheic pigs

Diarrhea caused by enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) infections poses a significant challenge in global pig farming. To address this issue, the study was conducted to identify and characterize 19 ETEC isolates from fecal samples of diarrheic pigs sourced from large-scale farms in Sichuan Province, China. Whole-genome sequencing and bioinformatic analysis were utilized for identification and characterization. The isolates exhibited substantial resistance to cefotaxime, ceftriaxone, chloramphenicol, ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, ampicillin, tetracycline, florfenicol, and sulfadiazine, but were highly susceptible to amikacin, imipenem, and cefoxitin. Genetic diversity among the isolates was observed, with serotypes O22:H10, O163orOX21:H4, and O105:H8 being dominant. Further analysis revealed 53 resistance genes and 13 categories of 195 virulence factors. Of concern was the presence of tet(X4) in some isolates, indicating potential public health risks. The ETEC isolates demonstrated the ability to produce either heat-stable enterotoxin (ST) alone or both heat-labile enterotoxin (LT) and ST simultaneously, involving various virulence genes. Notably, STa were linked to human disease. Additionally, the presence of 4 hybrid ETEC/STEC isolates harboring Shiga-like toxin-related virulence factors, namely stx2a, stx2b, and stx2e-ONT-2771, was identified. IncF plasmids carrying multiple antimicrobial resistance genes were prevalent, and a hybrid ETEC/STEC plasmid was detected, highlighting the role of plasmids in hybrid pathotype emergence. These findings emphasized the multidrug resistance and pathogenicity of porcine-origin ETEC strains and the potential risk of epidemics through horizontal transmission of drug resistance, which is crucial for effective control strategies and interventions to mitigate the impact on animal and human health

DeePMD-kit v2: A software package for Deep Potential models

DeePMD-kit is a powerful open-source software package that facilitates molecular dynamics simulations using machine learning potentials (MLP) known as Deep Potential (DP) models. This package, which was released in 2017, has been widely used in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, and material science for studying atomistic systems. The current version of DeePMD-kit offers numerous advanced features such as DeepPot-SE, attention-based and hybrid descriptors, the ability to fit tensile properties, type embedding, model deviation, Deep Potential - Range Correction (DPRc), Deep Potential Long Range (DPLR), GPU support for customized operators, model compression, non-von Neumann molecular dynamics (NVNMD), and improved usability, including documentation, compiled binary packages, graphical user interfaces (GUI), and application programming interfaces (API). This article presents an overview of the current major version of the DeePMD-kit package, highlighting its features and technical details. Additionally, the article benchmarks the accuracy and efficiency of different models and discusses ongoing developments.Comment: 51 pages, 2 figure