Event-Guided Procedure Planning from Instructional Videos with Text Supervision

In this work, we focus on the task of procedure planning from instructional videos with text supervision, where a model aims to predict an action sequence to transform the initial visual state into the goal visual state. A critical challenge of this task is the large semantic gap between observed visual states and unobserved intermediate actions, which is ignored by previous works. Specifically, this semantic gap refers to that the contents in the observed visual states are semantically different from the elements of some action text labels in a procedure. To bridge this semantic gap, we propose a novel event-guided paradigm, which first infers events from the observed states and then plans out actions based on both the states and predicted events. Our inspiration comes from that planning a procedure from an instructional video is to complete a specific event and a specific event usually involves specific actions. Based on the proposed paradigm, we contribute an Event-guided Prompting-based Procedure Planning (E3P) model, which encodes event information into the sequential modeling process to support procedure planning. To further consider the strong action associations within each event, our E3P adopts a mask-and-predict approach for relation mining, incorporating a probabilistic masking scheme for regularization. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 202

Search for the Migdal effect in liquid xenon with keV-level nuclear recoils

The Migdal effect predicts that a nuclear recoil interaction can be accompanied by atomic ionization, allowing many dark matter direct detection experiments to gain sensitivity to sub-GeV masses. We report the first direct search for the Migdal effect for M- and L-shell electrons in liquid xenon using 7.0$\pm$1.6 keV nuclear recoils produced by tagged neutron scatters. Despite an observed background rate lower than that of expected signals in the region of interest, we do not observe a signal consistent with predictions. We discuss possible explanations, including inaccurate predictions for either the Migdal rate or the signal response in liquid xenon. We comment on the implications for direct dark-matter searches and future Migdal characterization efforts.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

A Multi-Stage Decision Framework for Optimal Energy Efficiency Measures of Educational Buildings: A Case Study of Chongqing

Buildings consume large amounts of energy resources and emit considerable amounts of greenhouse gases, especially existing buildings that do not meet energy standards. Building retrofitting is considered one of the most promising and significant solutions to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. However, finding suitable energy efficiency measures for existing buildings is extremely difficult due to the existence of thousands of retrofit measures and the need to meet various objectives. In this paper, a multi-stage decision framework, including a multi-objective optimization model, and a ranking method are proposed to help decision-makers select the optimal energy efficiency measures. The multi-objective optimization model considers the economic and environmental objectives, expressed as the retrofit cost and energy consumption, respectively. The entropy weight ideal point ranking method, an evaluation and ranking method that combines the entropy weight method and ideal point method, is adopted to sort the Pareto front and make a final decision. Then, the proposed decision framework was implemented for the retrofit planning of an educational building in Chongqing, China. The results show that decision-makers can quickly identify near-optimal energy efficiency measures through multi-objective optimization and can select suitable energy efficiency measures using the ranking method. Moreover, energy consumption can be reduced by building retrofitting. The energy consumption of the case building was 64.20 kWh/m2 before retrofitting, and the value can be reduced by 6.79% through retrofitting. Furthermore, the reduction in building energy consumption was significantly improved by applying the decision framework. The highest value of energy consumption was 59.84 kWh/m2, while the lowest value was 27.11 kWh/m2 when implementing the multi-stage decision framework. Thus, this paper provides a useful decision framework for decision-makers to formulate suitable energy efficiency measures

Epiophlebia sinensis Li & Nel 2011 in Li et al. (2012) (Odonata) newly recorded in North Korea

A male of Epiophlebia sinensis was collected in June 2012 in North Korea. The record is briefly documented and discussed

Policy Endorsement and Booster Shot: Exploring Politicized Determinants for Acceptance of a Third Dose of COVID-19 Vaccine in China

China’s recent termination of strict COVID-19 control necessitates taking a booster vaccine shot as a precaution against the pandemic as quickly as possible. A large body of research has examined people’s attitudes toward and intentions for the booster shot. However, most studies failed to explore how China’s sociopolitical context has shaped their attitude regarding the booster jab take-up. The current study utilizes data from a national survey adopting quota sampling to analyze the Chinese public’s medical and non-medical considerations to determine their intention for the third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The study found that thanks to China’s initial successful lockdown policies, personal risk and benefit perceptions did not dominate their views regarding booster vaccination. Instead, respondents’ gender, nationalism, endorsement of the zero-COVID policy, self-efficacy regarding vaccination, and perceived infection severity were the major factors underlying their booster shot intention. The situation highlights how the politicized context of China’s COVID-19 control has impacted people’s plans to practice preventive behaviors. It is necessary to offset the negative consequences. One strategy is to educate the Chinese public with more medically relevant information to help them make rational choices regarding vaccination and other protective measures. On the other hand, such education can utilize this nationalistic mental status to enhance the persuasion effect

Co-Benefits Analysis of Buildings Based on Different Renewal Strategies: The Emergy-Lca Approach

Many cities have encountered challenges associated with rapid urban development, population growth and aging, in which urban renewal has become a promising option. Different renewal strategies, such as redevelopment, refurbishment and conservation, not only contributes to quality improvement and energy consumption reduction of dilapidated urban area, but also to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions mitigation. Such integrated benefits are often termed as co-benefits. However, choosing the most co-benefits strategy to adopt requires a holistic understanding of social-economic and environmental aspects, which has been less reported in the existing literature. Under such circumstance, this article aims to shed light on the co-benefits of different renewal strategies by adopting the Emergy-Life cycle assessment method. Then, the method is applied to one case study of the refurbishment of an educational building located in Chongqing, China. Resource allocation, CO2 emissions and emergy-based indicators are calculated to assess the co-benefits during a 60-year research period, to compare the impacts of the complete demolition followed by a new one (rebuilding strategy) and the refurbishing of the existing building (refurbishment strategy). The case study shows that the annual emergy in the O&M phase of rebuilding strategy and refurbishment strategy were lower than existing building. Rebuilding and refurbishment strategies released approximately 59.1% and 80.6%, respectively, of the total CO2 emissions that would be produced by the existing building. The results reveal that substantial environmental benefits can be obtained in both the refurbishment and rebuilding strategies. On the other hand, it can be concluded that the emergy yield ratio (EYR) for the rebuilding strategy is higher than refurbishment strategy, which demonstrate the better performance of refurbishment considering that less resources are required to generate greater benefits. In addition, the value of environmental loading ratio (ELR) and emergy sustainability index (ESI) also suggests that the refurbishment strategy performs better from the perspective of the environment. Thereby, the refurbishment strategy is more suitable than the rebuilding strategy. Findings from this study can be useful to urban planners and decision-makers in choosing the most suitable strategy to improve the quality of existing buildings

Nationalism, conspiracy theories and vaccine mandates: Exploring the statism determinants for attitudes to COVID-19 control in China

Introduction: China’s loosening its COVID-19 controls highlighted its insufficiency in vaccination protection. Mandatory vaccination might be necessary if the gap cannot be filled over a short time. However, few studies have explored how Chinese people view the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, let alone placing such views in the country’s highly politicized context. Material and methods: The current study utilizes data from a national survey adopting quota sampling to analyze the Chinese public's medical and non-medical considerations when judging compulsory COVID-19 vaccination (n = 1,523). The survey was conducted between 1 and 8 April 2021. All adults aged 18 years and older were eligible to take part. The survey included sociodemographic details, perceived susceptibility to infection, perceived vaccine benefit, attitudes to vaccination policies, nationalism, beliefs in various conspiracy theories and science literacy. Multiple regression analyses were done to examine factors associated with the attitude to COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Results: The study reveals that personal risk and benefit perceptions did not dominate the Chinese public’s attitude toward vaccination mandates. Instead, nationalism was relatively strongly associated with their willingness to accept mandatory vaccination. Contrary to studies in the West, various conspiracy beliefs and conspiratorial thinking were robustly related to the support for mandatory vacciniation. Science literacy didn’t link to the attitude to vaccination mandates. It only had a weak moderating effect on the influence of conspiratorial thinking on attitudes to the vaccination policies. Conclusions: The results indicated that Chinese people’s attitude to the COVID-19 vaccination policy is highly politicized and influenced by conspiracy theories. Given the potentially massive impacts of the COVID-19 infection, we need to educate the Chinese public with more medically valuable and relevant information to help them make sound decisions regarding vaccination. Meanwhile, we can adopt nationalistic tones to improve the persuasion effect, but misinformation during the process must be overcome