Eurasian entanglements: notes towards a planetary perspective of popular music histories

In recent years, music scholars have argued for a shift towards writing and researching world history, in line with other planetary impulses that invite a more inclusive, de-centred, and less parochial view of cultural life. This intervention argues for a focus on the exchanges, influences, and dialogues of popular music across Eurasia, as just one dynamic cultural space of creative dialogues stretched across and entangled with many other places and peoples around the planet

Relightful Harmonization: Lighting-aware Portrait Background Replacement

Portrait harmonization aims to composite a subject into a new background, adjusting its lighting and color to ensure harmony with the background scene. Existing harmonization techniques often only focus on adjusting the global color and brightness of the foreground and ignore crucial illumination cues from the background such as apparent lighting direction, leading to unrealistic compositions. We introduce Relightful Harmonization, a lighting-aware diffusion model designed to seamlessly harmonize sophisticated lighting effect for the foreground portrait using any background image. Our approach unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce a lighting representation module that allows our diffusion model to encode lighting information from target image background. Second, we introduce an alignment network that aligns lighting features learned from image background with lighting features learned from panorama environment maps, which is a complete representation for scene illumination. Last, to further boost the photorealism of the proposed method, we introduce a novel data simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training pairs from a diverse range of natural images, which are used to refine the model. Our method outperforms existing benchmarks in visual fidelity and lighting coherence, showing superior generalization in real-world testing scenarios, highlighting its versatility and practicality.Comment: CVPR 2024 camera read

Autoinducer-2 Quorum Sensing Influences Viability of Escherichia coli O157:H7 under Osmotic and In Vitro Gastrointestinal Stress Conditions

Bacteria use autoinducer molecules to communicate both at intra-species and inter-species levels by quorum sensing. One such cell density-dependent signaling system is the luxS-mediated universal quorum sensing using autoinducer-2 (AI-2). Virulence of several pathogens is determined by an AI-2 system and is related to colonization and infection of the host. From this concept, numerous papers have suggested that AI-2 inhibition is an important strategy toward designing of new antimicrobial agents. However, recent studies indicate that the AI-2 system is also involved in adaptation and survival under environmental stress conditions. Therefore, we hypothesized that interaction between quorum sensing and environmental conditions may be critical in influencing predicted results in a control and when combating of target pathogens. We investigated the growth of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli O157:H7 (EHEC) and its luxS-deficient (non AI-2 producing) mutant strain under various stress conditions, and found significant differences in the growth rate under osmotic stress. Moreover, we could also show the impact of the AI-2 molecule on viability in the gastrointestinal tract model representing a complex environmental condition. Differences in vital responses of the strains suggest that AI-2 quorum sensing has a significant influence on the viability of EHEC under environmental stress conditions

Selective Growth and Structural Analysis of Regular MnO Nanooctapods Bearing Multiple High-Index Surface Facets

Although numerous morphologies of MnO nanostructures have been reported, an exact structural analysis and mechanistic study has been lacking. In the present study, the formation of regular MnO octapods was demonstrated in a simple procedure, comprising the thermal decomposition of manganese oleate. Because of their structural uniformity, an ideal three-dimensional model was successfully constructed. The eight arms protruded from the cubic center with tip angles of 38°and surface facets of {311} and {533} with rounded edges. The concentrations of oleate and chloride ions were the determining factors for the octapod formation. Selective coordination of the oleate ions to the {100} faces led to edge growth along the direction, which was then limited by the chloride ions bound to the high-index surface facets. These structural and mechanistic analyses should be helpful for understanding the complex nanostructures and for tuning their structure-related properties. © 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim1111sciescopu

Selective formation of Ag domains on MnO nanooctapods for potential dual imaging probes

In the present study, the growth of Ag domains on the surface of MnO octapods yielded a uniform MnO octapod-Ag heterodimer structure by a phase-transfer protocol in toluene. The Ag domains were selectively formed on one of the high index surfaces of the MnO octapods. The resulting MnO-Ag heterodimers have basically two independent domains. On this basis, multiple functions are expected, including plasmon light scattering from the Ag domains and magnetic resonance from the MnO domains. Notably, the heterodimers strongly scattered visible light at 420 nm, and even a single particle signal could be detected in a dark-field spectroscopy image. The scattering peak was extended to the near-IR range by the formation of MnO octapod-AgAu hollow heterodimers via a galvanic replacement reaction. The heterodimers also showed weak ferromagnetism at low temperature, and exhibited a positive T1 signal in magnetic resonance imaging. These properties demonstrate that the MnO-Ag heterodimers can potentially serve as dual imaging probes for biological systems. © 2016 The Royal Society of Chemistry101sciescopu

A highly Lewis-acidic Pd(iv) surface on Pd@SiO2 nanocatalysts for hydroalkoxylation reactions

The Pd(IV) species, known to be critical intermediates in homogeneous catalysis, were successfully generated on the surface of Pd nanocatalysts via oxidation with iodobenzene dichloride (PhICl2) or N-chlorosuccinimide (NCS). In particular, the Pd@SiO2 yolk–shell nanocatalyst activated by PhICl2 showed high reactivity and superior stability to the other Pd-based catalysts for hydroalkoxylation reactions even at 25 8C.114131sciescopu

IDAR: Fast Supergraph Search Using DAG Integration

Supergraph search is one of fundamental graph query processing problems in many application domains. Given a query graph and a set of data graphs, supergraph search is to find all the data graphs contained in the query graph as subgraphs. In existing algorithms, index construction or filtering approaches are computationally expensive, and search methods can cause redundant computations. In this paper, we introduce four new concepts to address these limitations: (1) DAG integration, (2) dynamic programming between integrated DAG and graph, (3) active-first search, and (4) relevance-size order, which together lead to a much faster and scalable algorithm for supergraph search. Extensive experiments with real datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by up to orders of magnitude in terms of indexing time and query processing time.1

Fast subgraph query processing and subgraph matching via static and dynamic equivalences

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.Subgraph query processing (also known as subgraph search) and subgraph matching are fundamental graph problems in many application domains. A lot of efforts have been made to develop practical solutions for these problems. Despite the efforts, existing algorithms showed limited running time and scalability in dealing with large and/or many graphs. In this paper, we propose a new subgraph search algorithm using equivalences of vertices in order to reduce search space: (1) static equivalence of vertices in a query graph that leads to an efficient matching order of the vertices and (2) dynamic equivalence of candidate vertices in a data graph, which enables us to capture and remove redundancies in search space. These techniques for subgraph search also lead to an improved algorithm for subgraph matching. Experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art subgraph search and subgraph matching algorithms by up to several orders of magnitude with respect to query processing time.11Nsciescopu