Le Couple

LE COUPLE is an animated graduate thesis film with a total timescale of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The intent of LE COUPLE is to talk about a story of love, but not in a clichéd manner. Since Jieting Chen and I worked together before, we have a very strong personal connection. As usual, we wanted to make the film into a comedy. The film is a hand-drawn animation that was produced primarily in TVPaint Animation Software. This paper outlines the entire film creation process from my point of view. It details the very beginning of the story development to the final moments of finishing the film. It describes all my intentions, obstacles, failures and successes, as well as technical specifics of process

Study on the relationship between industrialization level, economic development and environmental pollution in China

With the development of economy, environmental problems gradually outstanding in China. This article adopts the method of empirical study, have collected the data of China\u27s industrial added value, per capita GDP and emissions of the three major pollutants from 2004 to 2015. The VAR model was established on the basis of the logarithm values of the three factors mentioned above, so as to conduct impulse- response analysis to discuss the relationship between industrialization level, economic development and environmental pollution. The conclusion is as follows: (1) At present, the increase of China\u27s industrial added value can promote the decline of China\u27s environmental pollution emissions to a certain extent; (2) China is now at the left of the turning point of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, and the increase of per capita GDP will aggravate environmental pollution

IMPROVING XIAOMI’S PRESENCE IN THE SWEDISH MARKET BY UNDERSTANDING YOUNG CONSUMERS

The main purpose of this study is to define how Xiaomi can improve its market share in Sweden by understanding young consumers’ preferences for smartphone brands. The purpose is to let the case company know more about the Swedish market. This study uses the method of online questionnaire and quantitative method is being used for creating development suggestions for the case company. The main data in this study was collected through the responses of the respondents in the Swedish area. The theoretical part of this study consists of global marketing strategies, such as SWOT, PEST analysis, and combines with the customer buying decision strategy in order to analyze purchasing behavior and interests of consumers. In addition, internal and external analysis tools are introduced to support the theoretical results. The thesis presents steps on how the case company can enter the Swedish market. Moreover, the thesis presents how the case company can make its smartphone products more attractive to young Swedish customers

Research on optimal environmental tax, sub-optimal selection and influencing factors in China

Considering the definition of the optimal environment tax, according to the sub-optimal choice under real conditions, Marginal cost of emission reduction is regarded as environmental tax payable and listed as a dependent variable. Through setting the independent variables, selecting samples and making empirical analysis, the conclusions of the paper are as follows: The actual environmental tax charged is positively correlated with government supervision and public participation, and negatively correlated with enterprise environmental investment, government environmental expenditure, upgrading of industrial structure and size of enterprise. At last, the paper puts forward some suggestions: strictly enforce the environmental tax, encourage public participation and increase the investment on environmental protection

CD-1 mice Show Individual Differences in Nicotine Preference in a Modified Two-Bottle Oral Self-Administration Model

Although both animal and human studies reveal significant contributions of genetics to smoking addiction, many human studies were underpowered or biased by potential confounding variables, and animal genetic studies are challenged by limited genetic variations and lack of convincing phenotypes. To address these concerns, we used non-sibling outbred CD-1 mice to evaluate individual differences in nicotine preference with a modified two-bottle oral self-administration model. Animals were first given free access to two bottles, one filled with nicotine dissolved in 2% saccharin and the other with saccharin only. Under this regular two-bottle choice condition, the majority of animals avoided the nicotine solution with limited individual differences. However, when we modified the model by introducing 4 days of exposure to 5% saccharin in the drinking water, the animals significantly increased nicotine consumption in the two-bottle choice test, with about 30% animals showing a nicotine preference. Nicotine preference after 5% saccharin treatment remained elevated throughout the 28 days of the experiment. Further, we found there existed striking individual differences in nicotine consumption after exposure to 5% saccharin, with a range of 0–100% of total liquid consumption. The enhanced individual differences and the ratio of nicotine consumption were observed at different concentrations of nicotine (10–80 μg/ml) and in both adolescents and adults. Further examination on the induction mechanism showed that the long-lasting nicotine preference was not correlated with nicotine consumption before the induction, 5% saccharin consumption, or weight gain during the induction. Although liquid consumption during the 4 days of 5% saccharin exposure was decreased by about 30%, comparable liquid restriction alone for 4 days did not induce nicotine preference. Together, this study showed a strong and stable nicotine preference in CD-1 mice, which was induced by a short-term high concentration of saccharin in the drinking water. Considering the nature and heterogeneity of CD-1 mice, the striking individual differences imply that genetics plays an important role in nicotine preference observed in these animals

VegaProf: Profiling Vega Visualizations

Vega is a popular domain-specific language (DSL) for visualization specification. At runtime, Vega's DSL is first transformed into a dataflow graph and then functions to render visualization primitives. While the Vega abstraction of implementation details simplifies visualization creation, it also makes Vega visualizations challenging to debug and profile without adequate tools. Our formative interviews with three practitioners at Sigma Computing showed that existing developer tools are not suited for visualization profiling as they are disconnected from the semantics of the Vega DSL specification and its resulting dataflow graph. We introduce VegaProf, the first performance profiler for Vega visualizations. VegaProf effectively instruments the Vega library by associating the declarative specification with its compilation and execution. Using interactive visualizations, VegaProf enables visualization engineers to interactively profile visualization performance at three abstraction levels: function, dataflow graph, and visualization specification. Our evaluation through two use cases and feedback from five visualization engineers at Sigma Computing shows that VegaProf makes visualization profiling tractable and actionable.Comment: Submitted to EuroVis'2

SEGA: Structural Entropy Guided Anchor View for Graph Contrastive Learning

In contrastive learning, the choice of ``view'' controls the information that the representation captures and influences the performance of the model. However, leading graph contrastive learning methods generally produce views via random corruption or learning, which could lead to the loss of essential information and alteration of semantic information. An anchor view that maintains the essential information of input graphs for contrastive learning has been hardly investigated. In this paper, based on the theory of graph information bottleneck, we deduce the definition of this anchor view; put differently, \textit{the anchor view with essential information of input graph is supposed to have the minimal structural uncertainty}. Furthermore, guided by structural entropy, we implement the anchor view, termed \textbf{SEGA}, for graph contrastive learning. We extensively validate the proposed anchor view on various benchmarks regarding graph classification under unsupervised, semi-supervised, and transfer learning and achieve significant performance boosts compared to the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: ICML'2

Abiotic processes are insufficient for fertile island development: A ten‐year artificial shrub experiment in a desert grassland

The relative importance of biotic and abiotic processes in the development of “fertile islands” in dryland systems has rarely been investigated. Here we approached this question by using artificial shrubs, which exclude plant litter production and soil nutrient uptake, but retain the functions of trapping windblown material, funneling of stemflow, and differential rain splash. We conducted a vegetation manipulation study more than a decade ago in the desert grassland of southern New Mexico and subsequently revisited the site in 2012 and 2015. The results show that no notable soil mounds were observed under the artificial shrubs; however, soil texture under the artificial shrubs has gradually changed to resemble the patterns of soil particle-size distribution under natural shrubs. Our results highlight that with the exclusion of direct biotic additions, soils captured by shrub canopies are not necessarily fertile and thus do not themselves contribute to the development of fertile islands