Position of phonetic components may influence how written words are processed in the brain: Evidence from Chinese phonetic compound pronunciation

Previous studies have shown a right-visual-field (RVF)/left-hemisphere (LH) advantage in Chinese phonetic compound pronunciation. Here, we contrast the processing of two phonetic compound types: a dominant structure in which a semantic component appears on the left and a phonetic component on the right (SP characters), and a minority structure with the opposite arrangement (PS characters). We show that this RVF/LH advantage was observed only in SP character pronunciation, but not in PS character pronunciation. This result suggests that SP character processing is more LH lateralized than is PS character processing and is consistent with corresponding ERP N170 data. This effect may be due to the dominance of SP characters in the lexicon, which makes readers opt to obtain phonological information from the right of the characters. This study thus shows that the overall information distribution of word components in the lexicon may influence how written words are processed in the brain. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://cabn.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.postprin

Optimal manufacturing/remanufacturing policies with fixed investment for the underdeveloped remanufacturing system

© 2017, Strojarski Facultet. All rights reserved. In an underdeveloped remanufacturing system, poor infrastructure and low technical level impede further development of remanufacturing. To overcome this obstacle, a huge amount of fixed investment is required to improve the remanufacturing system. However, this investment inevitably influences the manufacturer’s manufacturing/remanufacturing decision-making economically. The relationship between fixed investment and recycling ratio was investigated, and the two- and multi-period manufacturing/remanufacturing mixed optimization models were developed. Based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, the optimal manufacturing/remanufacturing and fixed investment policies were obtained in closed-form expressions. Moreover, the influences of the fixed investment were analysed. Results show that the optimal policies are significantly influenced by the degree of underdevelopment of the remanufacturing system. When the remanufacturing system is underdeveloped, the manufacturer shows a lack of enthusiasm in remanufacturing, thereby resulting in the decrease of the investment and the recycling ratio. The manufacturer raises the sale price to alleviate the loss caused by fixed investment, but the total manufacturing quantity and profit decrease. In the multi-period case, the manufacturer gradually increases the investment for continuously improving the remanufacturing system to increase the recycling ratio and obtain additional profits from remanufacturing. The proposed models can effectively provide the reference for determining the reasonable manufacturing/remanufacturing and fixed investment policies in the underdeveloped remanufacturing system

ADVISE: Symbolism and External Knowledge for Decoding Advertisements

In order to convey the most content in their limited space, advertisements embed references to outside knowledge via symbolism. For example, a motorcycle stands for adventure (a positive property the ad wants associated with the product being sold), and a gun stands for danger (a negative property to dissuade viewers from undesirable behaviors). We show how to use symbolic references to better understand the meaning of an ad. We further show how anchoring ad understanding in general-purpose object recognition and image captioning improves results. We formulate the ad understanding task as matching the ad image to human-generated statements that describe the action that the ad prompts, and the rationale it provides for taking this action. Our proposed method outperforms the state of the art on this task, and on an alternative formulation of question-answering on ads. We show additional applications of our learned representations for matching ads to slogans, and clustering ads according to their topic, without extra training.Comment: To appear, Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV

Heroes and villains of world history across cultures

© 2015 Hanke et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedEmergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.This research was supported by grant RG016-P-10 from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (http://www.cckf.org.tw/). Religion Culture Entropy China Democracy Economic histor

A quasi-Monte Carlo method for computing areas of point-sampled surfaces

A novel and efficient quasi-Monte Carlo method for computing the area of a point-sampled surface with associated surface normal for each point is presented. Our method operates directly on the point cloud without any surface reconstruction procedure. Using the Cauchy–Crofton formula, the area of the point-sampled surface is calculated by counting the number of intersection points between the point cloud and a set of uniformly distributed lines generated with low-discrepancy sequences. Based on a clustering technique, we also propose an effective algorithm for computing the intersection points of a line with the point-sampled surface. By testing on a number of point-based models, experiments suggest that our method is more robust and more efficient than those conventional approaches based on surface reconstruction.postprin

Comparison of three topologies for VRM fast transient application

This paper compares three topologies for voltage regulator module VRM for fast transient application. The topologies are the most popular multi-phase converter, a synchronous rectifier buck converter topology and a recently introduced new stepping inductor converter. Analysis and simulation show that the stepping inductor topology gives the fastest response with minimal amount of output filter capacitance.published_or_final_versio

Meteor trail characteristics observed by high time resolution lidar

We report and analyse the characteristics of 1382 meteor trails based on a sodium data set of ∼680 h. The observations were made at Yanqing (115.97° E, 40.47° N), China by a ground-based Na fluorescence lidar. The temporal resolution of the raw profiles is 1.5 s and the altitude resolution is 96 m. We discover some characteristics of meteor trails different from those presented in previous reports. The occurrence heights of the trails follow a double-peak distribution with the peaks at ∼83.5 km and at ∼95.5 km, away from the peak height of the regular Na layer. 4.7% of the trails occur below 80 km, and 3.25% above 100 km. 75% of the trails are observed in only one 1.5 s profile, suggesting that the dwell time in the laser beam is not greater than 1.5 s. The peak density of the trails as a function of height is similar to that of the background sodium layer. The raw occurrence height distribution is corrected taking account of three factors which affect the relative lifetime of a trail as a function of height: the meteoroid velocity (which controls the ratio of Na / Na+ ablated); diffusional spreading of the trail; and chemical removal of Na. As a result, the bi-modal distribution is more pronounced. Modelling results show that the higher peak corresponds to a meteoroid population with speeds between 20 and 30 km s?1, whereas the lower peak should arise from much slower particles in a near-prograde orbit. It is inferred that most meteoroids in this data set have masses of ∼1 mg, in order for ablation to produce sufficient Na atoms to be detected by lidar. Finally, the evolution of longer-duration meteor trails is investigated. Signals at each altitude channel consist of density enhancement bursts with the growth process usually faster than the decay process, and there exists a progressive phase shift among these altitude channels

Wavelength-multiplexed duplex transceiver based on III-V/Si hybrid integration for off-chip and on-chip optical interconnects

A six-channel wavelength-division-multiplexed optical transceiver with a compact footprint of 1.5 x 0.65 mm(2) for off-chip and on-chip interconnects is demonstrated on a single silicon-on-insulator chip. An arrayed waveguide grating is used as the (de)multiplexer, and III-V electroabsorption sections fabricated by hybrid integration technology are used as both modulators and detectors, which also enable duplex links. The 30-Gb/s capacity for each of the six wavelength channels for the off-chip transceiver is demonstrated. For the on-chip interconnect, an electrical-to-electrical 3-dB bandwidth of 13 GHz and a data rate of 30 Gb/s per wavelength are achieved

Evolution of superconductivity in K2-xFe4+ySe5: Spectroscopic studies of X-ray absorption and emission.

This study investigates the evolution of superconductivity in K2-xFe4+ySe5 using temperature-dependent X-ray absorption and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering techniques. Magnetization measurements show that polycrystalline superconducting (SC) K1.9Fe4.2Se5 has a critical temperature (T c) of ∼31 K with a varying superconducting volume fraction, which strongly depends on its synthesis temperature. An increase in Fe-structural/vacancy disorder in SC samples with more Fe atoms occupying vacant 4d sites is found to be closely related to the decrease in the spin magnetic moment of Fe. Moreover, the nearest-neighbor Fe-Se bond length in SC samples exceeds that in the non-SC (NS) sample, K2Fe4Se5, which indicates a weaker hybridization between the Fe 3d and Se 4p states in SC samples. These results clearly demonstrate the correlations among the local electronic and atomic structures and the magnetic properties of K2-xFe4+ySe5 superconductors, providing deeper insight into the electron pairing mechanisms of superconductivity