Bioprocess Evaluation of Water Soaking-Based Microbiological Biodegradation with Exposure of Cellulosic Microfibers Relevant to Bioconversion Efficiency

To verify the interconnective relationship between biodegradation efficiency and microfibril structure, recalcitrant rice straw (RS) was depolymerized using water soaking-based microbiological biodegradation (WSMB). This eco-friendly biosystem, which does not predominantly generate inhibitory metabolites, could increase both the hydrolytic accessibility and fermentation efficiency of RS. In detail, when swollen RS (with Fenton cascades) was simultaneously bio-treated with Phanerochaete chrysosporium for 12 days, the biodegradability was 65.0 % of the theoretical maximum at the stationary phase. This value was significantly higher than the 30.3 % measured from untreated RS. Similarly, the WSMB platform had an effect on the yield enhancement of ethanol productivity of 32.5 %. However, uniform exposure of fibril polymers appeared to have little impact on bioconversion yields. Additionally, the proteomic pools of the WSMB system were analyzed to understand either substrate-specific or nonspecific biocascades based on the change in microcomposite materials. Remarkably, regardless of modified microfibril chains, the significant pattern of 14 major proteins (|fold| > 2) was reasonably analogous in both systems, especially for lignocellulolysis-related targets.Korea (South). Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST

A Novel On-chip Three-dimensional Micromachined Calorimeter with Fully Enclosed and Suspended Thin-film Chamber for Thermal Characterization of Liquid Samples

A microfabricated calorimeter (μ-calorimeter) with an enclosed reaction chamber is presented. The 3D micromachined reaction chamber is capable of analyzing liquid samples with volume of 200 nl. The thin film low-stress silicon nitride membrane is used to reduce thermal mass of the calorimeter and increase the sensitivity of system. The μ-calorimeter has been designed to perform DC and AC calorimetry, thermal wave analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry. The μ-calorimeter fabricated with an integrated heater and a temperature sensor on opposite sides of the reaction chamber allows to perform thermal diffusivity and specific heat measurements on liquid samples with same device. Measurement results for diffusivity and heat capacitance using time delay method and thermal wave analysis are presented

The Contractile Vacuole and Related Structures in Tetrahymena pyriformis *

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100178/1/j.1550-7408.1964.tb01752.x.pd

Elliptic supertube and a Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield D2-brane--anti-D2-brane Pair

An exact solution, in which a D2-brane and an anti-D2-brane are connected by an elliptically tubular D2-brane, is obtained without any junction condition. The solution is shown to preserve one quarter of the supersymmetries of the type-IIA Minkowski vacuum. We show that the configuration cannot be obtained by "blowing-up" from some inhomogeneously D0-charged superstrings. The BPS bound tells us that it is rather composed of D0-charged D2-brane-anti-D2-brane pair and a strip of superstrings connecting them. We obtain the correction to the charges of the string end points in the constant magnetic background.Comment: v3. 12 pages, journal version; title changed, length trimmed to fit for Rapid Communication forma

PEMA: Plug-in External Memory Adaptation for Language Models

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various downstream NLP tasks. Nevertheless, the resource requirements of pre-training large language models in terms of memory and training compute pose significant challenges. Furthermore, due to the substantial resources required, many PLM weights are confidential. Consequently, users are compelled to share their data with model owners for fine-tuning on specific tasks. To overcome the limitations, we introduce Plug-in External Memory Adaptation (PEMA), a Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) approach designed for fine-tuning PLMs without the need for all weights. PEMA can be integrated into the context representation of test data during inference to execute downstream tasks. It leverages an external memory to store context representations generated by a PLM, mapped with the desired target word. Our method entails training LoRA-based weight matrices within the final layer of the PLM for enhanced efficiency. The probability is then interpolated with the next-word distribution from the PLM to perform downstream tasks. To improve the generation quality, we propose a novel interpolation strategy named Gradual Unrolling. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of PEMA with a syntactic dataset and assess its performance on machine translation and style transfer tasks using real datasets. PEMA outperforms other PEFT methods in terms of memory and latency efficiency for training and inference. Furthermore, it outperforms other baselines in preserving the meaning of sentences while generating appropriate language and styles

Equality and urbanism : an inquiry on egalitarian ethics in planning with a particular reference to the public consultation policy and the overdale approach to equal land-use opportunities of the Montreal Citizen's movement

In this normative inquiry, we will assess two planning policies that the Montreal Citizen's Movement (MCM), a municipal party of the left, experimented with while in power at the City of Montreal, from 1986 to 1994. The MCM implemented an unprecedented public consultation policy and it also wished to put in place a compensation policy for equal housing and land-use opportunities, which, effectively, it tried in a redevelopment project known as 'Overdale' in 1987. These two experiments were an attempt to tame the land-use market and to make it ethical. In assessing these experiments, we will first propose planning principles built on egalitarian ethics and, then, apply those egalitarian planning principles as evaluation criteria in the assessment. We will also examine similar experiments carried out elsewhere; we will compare the MCM public consultation policy with the Participative Budget of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the Overdale experience of compensation with a case from Santa Monica, California. The MCM public consultation experiment was, without doubt, an exciting start that brought the politics of public deliberation to planning; however, we will argue that we need to put egalitarian constraints on planning deliberation if we want that deliberation to be not only a source of good planning but also of community building. We will also argue that the Overdale experiment of compensation is indeed a good source of heuristic learning on how to plan for equal land-use opportunities in a city of market liberalism such as Montreal. In this thesis we will persistently argue that we should appeal to egalitarian reason, in order to build a good and beautiful city

A self-organizing random immigrants genetic algorithm for dynamic optimization problems

This is the post-print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright @ 2007 SpringerIn this paper a genetic algorithm is proposed where the worst individual and individuals with indices close to its index are replaced in every generation by randomly generated individuals for dynamic optimization problems. In the proposed genetic algorithm, the replacement of an individual can affect other individuals in a chain reaction. The new individuals are preserved in a subpopulation which is defined by the number of individuals created in the current chain reaction. If the values of fitness are similar, as is the case with small diversity, one single replacement can affect a large number of individuals in the population. This simple approach can take the system to a self-organizing behavior, which can be useful to control the diversity level of the population and hence allows the genetic algorithm to escape from local optima once the problem changes due to the dynamics.This work was supported by FAPESP (Proc. 04/04289-6)

Translating Hanja Historical Documents to Contemporary Korean and English

The Annals of Joseon Dynasty (AJD) contain the daily records of the Kings of Joseon, the 500-year kingdom preceding the modern nation of Korea. The Annals were originally written in an archaic Korean writing system, `Hanja', and were translated into Korean from 1968 to 1993. The resulting translation was however too literal and contained many archaic Korean words; thus, a new expert translation effort began in 2012. Since then, the records of only one king have been completed in a decade. In parallel, expert translators are working on English translation, also at a slow pace and produced only one king's records in English so far. Thus, we propose H2KE, a neural machine translation model, that translates historical documents in Hanja to more easily understandable Korean and to English. Built on top of multilingual neural machine translation, H2KE learns to translate a historical document written in Hanja, from both a full dataset of outdated Korean translation and a small dataset of more recently translated contemporary Korean and English. We compare our method against two baselines: a recent model that simultaneously learns to restore and translate Hanja historical document and a Transformer based model trained only on newly translated corpora. The experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU scores for both contemporary Korean and English translations. We further conduct extensive human evaluation which shows that our translation is preferred over the original expert translations by both experts and non-expert Korean speakers.Comment: 2022 EMNLP Finding

Lineal Trails of D2-D2bar Superstrings

We study the superstrings suspended between a D2- and an anti-D2-brane. We quantize the string in the presence of some general configuration of gauge fields over the (anti-)D-brane world volumes. The interstring can move only in a specific direction that is normal to the difference of the electric fields of each (anti-)D-branes. Especially when the electric fields are the same, the interstring cannot move. We obtain the condition for the tachyons to disappear from the spectrum.Comment: 15 pages with 4 figures, referenced added, Sec. 5 on the spectrum made cleare