Electromagnetically induced transparency in an atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate

We propose a new measurement scheme for the atom-molecule dark state by using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) technique. Based on a density-matrix formalism, we calculate the absorption coefficient numerically. The appearance of the EIT dip in the spectra profile gives clear evidence for the creation of the dark state in the atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate.Comment: 3.7pages, 4 figure

Modulational instability of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical lattice

We study modulational instability of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical lattice, which is modelled as a coupled discrete nonlinear Schr \"{o}dinger equation. The excitation spectrum and the modulational instability condition of the total system are presented analytically. In the long-wavelength limit, our results agree with the homogeneous two-component Bose-Einstein condensates case. The discreteness effects result in the appearance of the modulational instability for the condensates in miscible region. The numerical calculations confirm our analytical results and show that the interspecies coupling can transfer the instability from one component to another.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures (to be published in Phys. Rev. A

THE EFFECT OF EXCHANGE RATE VOLATILITY ON WHEAT TRADE WORLDWIDE

A modified gravity-type model was employed to evaluate the effect of exchange rate volatility on wheat exports worldwide. Special attention was given to the econometric properties of the gravity model within panel framework. Short and long-term measures of exchange rate volatility were constructed and compared. Both measures of exchange rate volatility have exhibited a negative effect on world wheat trade and the long-term effect was even larger. This result implies that exchange rate volatility is an important factor in explaining the trade pattern of wheat trade worldwide. Keywords: wheat, export, exchange rate, volatility, gravity model, and panel data.wheat, export, exchange rate, volatility, gravity model, and panel data., International Relations/Trade,

NOMINAL EXCHANGE RATE MISALIGNMENT: IS IT PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT TO AGRICULTURAL TRADE?

This paper examines whether exchange rate misalignment negatively affects agricultural trade, compared to other industry sectors. Nominal exchange rate misalignment is obtained from the percentage deviation of real exchange rates from their long-run equilibrium based on the theory of purchasing power parity. In order to explore this issue, a bilateral trade matrix involving trade flows between 10 developed countries is constructed. Using panel data analysis, a gravity model is estimated for 4 industry sectors over the period 1974-1999. The study finds that over-valuation (under-valuation) of the nominal exchange rate negatively (positively) affects export performance of the agricultural sector in particular. In the large-scale manufacturing sectors considered in this paper, exports are not significantly affected by exchange rate misalignment.exchange rate misalignment, agricultural trade, gravity model, International Relations/Trade,

THE EFFECT OF EXCHANGE RATE VOLATILITY ON WHEAT TRADE WORLDWIDE

A modified gravity-type model was employed to evaluate the effect of exchange rate volatility on wheat exports worldwide. Special attention was given to the econometric properties of the gravity model within a panel framework. Short and long-term measures of exchange rate volatility were constructed and compared. Both measures of exchange rate volatility exhibited negative effects on world wheat trade, with even greater effects in the long-term measure. This result implies that exchange rate volatility is an important factor in explaining the trade pattern of wheat worldwide.wheat, export, exchange rate, volatility, gravity model, and panel data., International Relations/Trade,

Representation Selective Self-distillation and wav2vec 2.0 Feature Exploration for Spoof-aware Speaker Verification

Text-to-speech and voice conversion studies are constantly improving to the extent where they can produce synthetic speech almost indistinguishable from bona fide human speech. In this regrad, the importance of countermeasures (CM) against synthetic voice attacks of the automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems emerges. Nonetheless, most end-to-end spoofing detection networks are black box systems, and the answer to what is an effective representation for finding artifacts still remains veiled. In this paper, we examine which feature space can effectively represent synthetic artifacts using wav2vec 2.0, and study which architecture can effectively utilize the space. Our study allows us to analyze which attribute of speech signals is advantageous for the CM systems. The proposed CM system achieved 0.31% equal error rate (EER) on ASVspoof 2019 LA evaluation set for the spoof detection task. We further propose a simple yet effective spoofing aware speaker verification (SASV) methodology, which takes advantage of the disentangled representations from our countermeasure system. Evaluation performed with the SASV Challenge 2022 database show 1.08% of SASV EER. Quantitative analysis shows that using the explored feature space of wav2vec 2.0 advantages both spoofing CM and SASV.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202

Mammalian EAK-7 activates alternative mTOR signaling to regulate cell proliferation and migration.

Nematode EAK-7 (enhancer-of-akt-1-7) regulates dauer formation and controls life span; however, the function of the human ortholog mammalian EAK-7 (mEAK-7) is unknown. We report that mEAK-7 activates an alternative mechanistic/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway in human cells, in which mEAK-7 interacts with mTOR at the lysosome to facilitate S6K2 activation and 4E-BP1 repression. Despite interacting with mTOR and mammalian lethal with SEC13 protein 8 (mLST8), mEAK-7 does not interact with other mTOR complex 1 (mTORC1) or mTOR complex 2 (mTORC2) components; however, it is essential for mTOR signaling at the lysosome. This phenomenon is distinguished by S6 and 4E-BP1 activity in response to nutrient stimulation. Conventional S6K1 phosphorylation is uncoupled from S6 phosphorylation in response to mEAK-7 knockdown. mEAK-7 recruits mTOR to the lysosome, a crucial compartment for mTOR activation. Loss of mEAK-7 results in a marked decrease in lysosomal localization of mTOR, whereas overexpression of mEAK-7 results in enhanced lysosomal localization of mTOR. Deletion of the carboxyl terminus of mEAK-7 significantly decreases mTOR interaction. mEAK-7 knockdown decreases cell proliferation and migration, whereas overexpression of mEAK-7 enhances these cellular effects. Constitutively activated S6K rescues mTOR signaling in mEAK-7-knocked down cells. Thus, mEAK-7 activates an alternative mTOR signaling pathway through S6K2 and 4E-BP1 to regulate cell proliferation and migration

PG-RCNN: Semantic Surface Point Generation for 3D Object Detection

One of the main challenges in LiDAR-based 3D object detection is that the sensors often fail to capture the complete spatial information about the objects due to long distance and occlusion. Two-stage detectors with point cloud completion approaches tackle this problem by adding more points to the regions of interest (RoIs) with a pre-trained network. However, these methods generate dense point clouds of objects for all region proposals, assuming that objects always exist in the RoIs. This leads to the indiscriminate point generation for incorrect proposals as well. Motivated by this, we propose Point Generation R-CNN (PG-RCNN), a novel end-to-end detector that generates semantic surface points of foreground objects for accurate detection. Our method uses a jointly trained RoI point generation module to process the contextual information of RoIs and estimate the complete shape and displacement of foreground objects. For every generated point, PG-RCNN assigns a semantic feature that indicates the estimated foreground probability. Extensive experiments show that the point clouds generated by our method provide geometrically and semantically rich information for refining false positive and misaligned proposals. PG-RCNN achieves competitive performance on the KITTI benchmark, with significantly fewer parameters than state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/quotation2520/PG-RCNN.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202

mEAK-7 Forms an Alternative mTOR Complex with DNA-PKcs in Human Cancer.

MTOR associated protein, eak-7 homolog (mEAK-7), activates mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling in human cells through an alternative mTOR complex to regulate S6K2 and 4E-BP1. However, the role of mEAK-7 in human cancer has not yet been identified. We demonstrate that mEAK-7 and mTOR signaling are strongly elevated in tumor and metastatic lymph nodes of patients with non-small-cell lung carcinoma compared with those of patients with normal lung or lymph tissue. Cancer stem cells, CD44+/CD90+ cells, yield elevated mEAK-7 and activated mTOR signaling. mEAK-7 is required for clonogenic potential and spheroid formation. mEAK-7 associates with DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit isoform 1 (DNA-PKcs), and this interaction is increased in response to X-ray irradiation to regulate S6K2 signaling. DNA-PKcs pharmacologic inhibition or genetic knockout reduced S6K2, mEAK-7, and mTOR binding with DNA-PKcs, resulting in loss of S6K2 activity and mTOR signaling. Therefore, mEAK-7 forms an alternative mTOR complex with DNA-PKcs to regulate S6K2 in human cancer cells

Effects of aiming lines and visual function on the golf putting alignment

Background: In golf, a player hits a ball with a club, aiming to transfer the ball successively into a series of hole cups in a course consisting of 18 (or fewer) holes. This study aimed to compare the impact of visual function and the presence and number of aiming lines on golf putting alignment between beginner and expert golfers. Methods: In this prospective comparative study, 43 participants with a mean ± standard deviation (SD) of corrected distance binocular visual acuity of –0.07 ± 0.74 logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution, who knew their average golf scores, were divided into beginner and expert golfers. Six visual function tests were conducted to assess heterotropia, dominant eye, verification of current spectacles, static visual acuity, stereopsis, and fixation disparity. At the putting distances of 1.5 m and 3 m, alignment errors were measured five times each, using golf balls with 1 and 3 aiming line(s) and putters with 1 and 3 aiming line(s). Results: The mean ± SD of age was 48.33 ± 10.07 years for study participants overall. The accuracy of ball alignment was not affected by the career or number of aiming lines, but the putter alignment was higher for the 3-lines putter than for the 1-line putter (P < 0.05). When the number and shape of the aiming line were the same for both the ball and putter, the aiming accuracy was found to be higher. In both stereopsis and fixation disparity, the combination of putting distance and a 3-lines ball showed negative values; all other combinations showed positive values, but no statistically significant correlation was detected (all P > 0.05). Conclusions: The accuracy of golf ball alignment did not depend on the number of aiming lines and the golfer’s career. However, the predicted putting success rate and subjective satisfaction were increased when three-line golf balls and putters were used, as compared to when one-line golf balls and putters were used. How to cite this article: Kim YJ, Jin YG, Koo BY, Jang JU, Mah KC. Effects of aiming lines and visual function on the golf putting alignment. Med Hypothesis Discov Innov Optom.2021 Spring; 2(1): 41-49. DOI: https://doi.org/10.51329/mehdioptometry12