Lifshitz holographic superconductor in Horava-Lifshitz gravity

We study the holographic phase transition of superconductor dual to a Lifshitz black brane probed by an anisotropic scalar field in the probe limit in Ho\u{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity. With the use of numerical and analytical method, we investigate how the critical temperature of the condensation is affected by the Lifshitz exponent $z$, $\alpha-$correction term in the action as well as the dimensions of the gravity. We also numerically explore the condensation of the dual operator and optical conductivity of the holographic system. Various interesting properties of the holographic condensation affected by the parameters of model are discussed

A study of early-late type S0-PCM signal bit synchronizers

The steady-state phase noise performances of an absolute value type and a squaring loop type of early-late gate S0-PCM signal bit synchronizers are developed using the Fokker-Planck method. The results are compared on the basis of the performance of two configurations with equal loop bandwidth at each input signal-to-noise ratio Rs. The probabilities of bit-detection error of the two configurations are compared. These comparisons are made as a function of Rs. The absolute value type of early-late gate S0-PCM signal bit synchronizater yields better performance than that of the squaring loop type of early-late gate S0-PCM signal bit synchronizer at every value of Rs --Abstract, page ii

DARTS-ASR: Differentiable Architecture Search for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Adaptation

In previous works, only parameter weights of ASR models are optimized under fixed-topology architecture. However, the design of successful model architecture has always relied on human experience and intuition. Besides, many hyperparameters related to model architecture need to be manually tuned. Therefore in this paper, we propose an ASR approach with efficient gradient-based architecture search, DARTS-ASR. In order to examine the generalizability of DARTS-ASR, we apply our approach not only on many languages to perform monolingual ASR, but also on a multilingual ASR setting. Following previous works, we conducted experiments on a multilingual dataset, IARPA BABEL. The experiment results show that our approach outperformed the baseline fixed-topology architecture by 10.2% and 10.0% relative reduction on character error rates under monolingual and multilingual ASR settings respectively. Furthermore, we perform some analysis on the searched architectures by DARTS-ASR.Comment: Accepted at INTERSPEECH 202

Professor Jeremiah Jenks of Cornell University and the 1903 Chinese Monetary Reform

The Boxer uprising in China (1900) killed quite a number of foreigners and missionaries, which induced the armies of eight Western powers to invade China and they imposed an indemnity of 400 million silver taels. The international silver price around the 1900s was slumping, and these indemnity-treaty powers (e.g. France, UK, Germany, and Belgium) strongly wished China to establish a silver monetary system that would be maintained at parity with gold. Professor Jeremiah Jenks (1856-1929) of Cornell University was mandated to establish a gold-exchange standard for China. This paper begins with Jenks's life and work and the background of his mission to China. Section 2 presents the basic principle of this reform project and its specific designs. Section 3 assesses reactions and criticisms on Jenks's proposal. Possible arbitrage activities between gold and silver are analyzed in Sections 4 in order to evaluate the sustainability of Jenks's system. We conclude that: (1) Jenks's new systemm ight have been stable in 1904-16 and 1928-30; (2) technically speaking, this was a remarkable design.Professor Jeremiah Jenks (1856-1929), Chinese monetary reform of 1903, gol-dexchange standard, silver standard

Revealing the dependence of cell spreading kinetics on its spreading morphology using microcontact printed fibronectin patterns.

Since the dawn of in vitro cell cultures, how cells interact and proliferate within a given external environment has always been an important issue in the study of cell biology. It is now well known that mammalian cells typically exhibit a three-phase sigmoid spreading on encountering a substrate. To further this understanding, we examined the influence of cell shape towards the second rapid expansion phase of spreading. Specifically, 3T3 fibroblasts were seeded onto silicon elastomer films made from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), and micro-contact printed with fibronectin stripes of various dimensions. PDMS is adopted in our study for its biocompatibility, its ease in producing very smooth surfaces, and in the fabrication of micro-contact printing stamps. The substrate patterns are compared with respect to their influence on cell spreading over time. Our studies reveal, during the early rapid expansion phase, 3T3 fibroblasts are found to spread radially following a t≃¹·⁸ law; meanwhile, they proliferated in a lengthwise fashion on the striped patterns, following a t≃¹ law. We account for the observed differences in kinetics through a simple geometric analysis which predicted similar trends. In particular, a t² law for radial spreading cells, and a t¹ law for lengthwise spreading cells.C-K. Huang thank the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, and the Cambridge Overseas Trust for funding his PhD.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Royal Society at http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/102/20141064