The Perceptions of Macao Undergraduates Regarding Help Websites for Problem Gambling

This study conducted a web-surfing exercise and a questionnaire survey among a group of Macao undergraduate students regarding the websites that offered help with problem gambling. The results of this study found that most help websites in Macao and Hong Kong provided basic information-sharing service. The students indicated that they would choose their preferred help organization based on factors such as trust, familiarity, and the characteristics of the websites. They also gave comments/suggestions related to the publicity, design, contents, and focus of the websites. This study discussed the results and their implications for future research and practice

Coordinated Multicasting with Opportunistic User Selection in Multicell Wireless Systems

Physical layer multicasting with opportunistic user selection (OUS) is examined for multicell multi-antenna wireless systems. By adopting a two-layer encoding scheme, a rate-adaptive channel code is applied in each fading block to enable successful decoding by a chosen subset of users (which varies over different blocks) and an application layer erasure code is employed across multiple blocks to ensure that every user is able to recover the message after decoding successfully in a sufficient number of blocks. The transmit signal and code-rate in each block determine opportunistically the subset of users that are able to successfully decode and can be chosen to maximize the long-term multicast efficiency. The employment of OUS not only helps avoid rate-limitations caused by the user with the worst channel, but also helps coordinate interference among different cells and multicast groups. In this work, efficient algorithms are proposed for the design of the transmit covariance matrices, the physical layer code-rates, and the target user subsets in each block. In the single group scenario, the system parameters are determined by maximizing the group-rate, defined as the physical layer code-rate times the fraction of users that can successfully decode in each block. In the multi-group scenario, the system parameters are determined by considering a group-rate balancing optimization problem, which is solved by a successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. To further reduce the feedback overhead, we also consider the case where only part of the users feed back their channel vectors in each block and propose a design based on the balancing of the expected group-rates. In addition to SCA, a sample average approximation technique is also introduced to handle the probabilistic terms arising in this problem. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by computer simulations.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Understanding Pure CLIP Guidance for Voxel Grid NeRF Models

We explore the task of text to 3D object generation using CLIP. Specifically, we use CLIP for guidance without access to any datasets, a setting we refer to as pure CLIP guidance. While prior work has adopted this setting, there is no systematic study of mechanics for preventing adversarial generations within CLIP. We illustrate how different image-based augmentations prevent the adversarial generation problem, and how the generated results are impacted. We test different CLIP model architectures and show that ensembling different models for guidance can prevent adversarial generations within bigger models and generate sharper results. Furthermore, we implement an implicit voxel grid model to show how neural networks provide an additional layer of regularization, resulting in better geometrical structure and coherency of generated objects. Compared to prior work, we achieve more coherent results with higher memory efficiency and faster training speeds

The Evolution and Functional Significance of Nested Gene Structures in Drosophila melanogaster

Nearly ten percent of the genes in the genome of Drosophila melanogaster are in nested structures, in which one gene is completely nested within the intron of another gene (nested and including gene, respectively). Even though the coding sequences and UTRs of these nested/including gene pairs do not overlap, their intimate structures and the possibility of shared regulatory sequences raise questions about the evolutionary forces governing the origination, and subsequent functional and evolutionary impacts of these structures. In this study, we show that nested genes experience weaker evolutionary constraint, have faster rates of protein evolution and are expressed in fewer tissues than other genes, while including genes show the opposite patterns. Surprisingly, despite completely overlapping with each other, nested and including genes are less likely to display correlated gene expression and biological function than the nearby yet non-overlapping genes. Interestingly, significantly fewer nested genes are transcribed from the same strand as the including gene. We found that same-strand nested genes are more likely to be single-exon genes. In addition, same-strand including genes are less likely to have known lethal or sterile phenotypes than opposite-strand including genes only when the corresponding nested genes have introns. These results support our hypothesis that selection against potential erroneous mRNA splicing when nested and including genes are on the same strand plays an important role in the evolution of nested gene structures