MEETING-BASED RESOURCE CONSUMPTION INTELLIGENCE

In an online meeting involving multiple users, the performance of the devices (e.g., personal computers, laptops, tablets, etc.) utilized by meeting attendees can vary drastically such that, when audio/video material is shared among the attendees, those attendees that are utilizing lower performance devices can experience resource shortages or choppiness in shared material, which can impact the expectations of the meeting attendees. In order to address such issues, meeting-based resource consumption intelligence techniques are described herein in which the resource consumption of devices utilized by participants involved in an online meeting can be monitored and balanced by porting workloads from a media sender\u27s device to any combination of a data center service and/or one or more media receiver\u27s devices

Ecophysiological responses of two poplar species to intraspecific and interspecific competition under different nitrogen levels

Aims Populus deltoides and P. euramericana are widely used in China as major forestry species. At present, little is known about their responses to nitrogen (N) deficiency when grown in monocultures or mixed plantations. The aim of this investigation was to analyze the growth, and morphological and physiological responses of P. deltoides and P. euramericana to different N levels under competition conditions. Methods We employed two Populus species (P. deltoides and P. euramericana) to discover how N deficiency affects plant traits under different competition types (P. deltoides x P. deltoides, intraspecific competition; P. euramericana x P. euramericana, intraspecific competition; P. deltoides x P. euramericana, interspecific competition). Potted seedlings were exposed to two N levels (normal N, N deficiency), and nitrogen- and competition-driven differences in growth, morphology and physiology were examined. Important Findings Under normal N conditions, interspecific competition significantly decreased the total root weight, root mass fraction (RMF), root-shoot ratio (R/S) and carbon/nitrogen ratio (C/N), and increased the leaf dry weight, leaf mass fraction and total leaf area of P. euramericana compared with intraspecific competition. The same conditions significantly affected the growth and morphological variables of P. deltoides, except for the dry weight of fine roots, R/S, specific leaf area, RMF, total nitrogen content and C/N compared with intraspecific competition. In addition, chlorophyll a (Chla), total chlorophyll (Tchl), carotenoid contents (Caro) and the carbon isotope composition (delta C-13) of P. deltoides were significantly lower in interspecific competition than in intraspecific competition, but no difference was detected in P. euramericana. The effects of N deficiency on P. deltoides under intraspecific competition were stronger than under interspecific competition. In contrast, the effects of N deficiency on P. euramericana between intraspecific and interspecific competition were not significantly different. These results suggest that under normal N condition, P. deltoides is expected to gain an advantage in monocultures rather than in mixtures with P. euramericana. Under N deficiency, the growth performance of P. euramericana was more stable than that of P. deltoides under both cultivation modes.Peer reviewe

The impact of board characteristics and corporate ownership on corporate risk-taking: the case of Chinese listed companies

Risk-taking can trace back as far as the entrepreneurial spirit of adventure. This paper refers to a company's willingness to invest, reflecting its choice of high-risk investment projects. As the central decision-making body linking shareholders and management, the board of directors has greater autonomy to make decisions while ensuring the rights and interests of shareholders. Therefore, there is a specific link between the board of directors and the risk-taking of the enterprise. In recent years, with the development of the economy, the participation of women in the labor market has gradually increased, and more women are entering the management organization of companies. And there may be significant differences in their risk appetite compared to men. For independent directors, independence and professionalism can provide good oversight and thus reduce the company's risk. Government intervention and policies can make a difference in the management and decision-making of the company due to the different nature of ownership. While most past studies have focused on the financial sector, this paper selects non-financial institutions listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets in China from 2008 to 2020 as the subject of study. The impact of board characteristics and ownership on corporate risk-taking is explored through empirical analysis. We find that China and the world have been affected to varying degrees in the past two years because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on this background, this paper presents an extensive study of the factors that influence corporate risk-taking. The findings of this paper enrich the current phase of corporate risk research and have practical implications for both corporate management and national reform

Performance Evaluation of Heat Transfer Enhancement in Plate-fin Heat Exchangers with Offset Strip Fins

AbstractGenerally, the Offset Strip Fin (OSF) in a plate-fin heat exchanger provides a greater heat transfer coefficient than plain plate-fin, but it also leads to an increase in flow friction. A new parameter, called relative entropy generation distribution factor, Ψ*, is proposed to evaluate the thermodynamic advantages of OSFs. This parameter presents a ratio of relative changes of entropy generation. The relative effects of the geometrical parameters α, γ and δ are discussed. The results show that there exist the optimum values of α and γ at a certain flow condition, which obviously maximize the degree of the heat transfer enhancement of OSFs

SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in Social Commonsense Reasoning Models

A common limitation of diagnostic tests for detecting social biases in NLP models is that they may only detect stereotypic associations that are pre-specified by the designer of the test. Since enumerating all possible problematic associations is infeasible, it is likely these tests fail to detect biases that are present in a model but not pre-specified by the designer. To address this limitation, we propose SODAPOP (SOcial bias Discovery from Answers about PeOPle) in social commonsense question-answering. Our pipeline generates modified instances from the Social IQa dataset (Sap et al., 2019) by (1) substituting names associated with different demographic groups, and (2) generating many distractor answers from a masked language model. By using a social commonsense model to score the generated distractors, we are able to uncover the model's stereotypic associations between demographic groups and an open set of words. We also test SODAPOP on debiased models and show the limitations of multiple state-of-the-art debiasing algorithms.Comment: EACL 202

Are males and females of Populus cathayana differentially sensitive to Cd stress?

This study clarifies the mechanisms of Cd uptake, translocation and detoxification in Populus cathayana Rehder females and males, and reveals a novel strategy for dioecious plants to cope with Cd contamination. Females exhibited a high degree of Cd uptake and root-to-shoot translocation, while males showed extensive Cd accumulation in roots, elevated antioxidative capacity, and effective cellular and bark Cd sequestration. Our study also found that Cd is largely located in epidermal and cortical tissues of male roots and leaves, while in females, more Cd was present in vascular tissues of roots and leaves, as well as in leaf mesophyll. In addition, the distributions of sulphur (S) and phosphorus (P) were very similar as that of Cd in males, but the associations were weak in females. Scanning electron microscopy and energy spectroscopy analyses suggested that the amounts of tissue Cd were positively correlated with P and S amounts in males, but not in females (a weak correlation between S and Cd). Transcriptional data suggested that Cd stress promoted the upregulation of genes related to Cd uptake and translocation in females, and that of genes related to cell wall biosynthesis, metal tolerance and secondary metabolism in males. Our results indicated that coordinated physiological, microstructural and transcriptional responses to Cd stress endowed superior Cd tolerance in males compared with females, and provided new insights into mechanisms underlying sexually differential responses to Cd stress.Peer reviewe

Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning

Semantic parsing converts natural language queries into structured logical forms. The paucity of annotated training samples is a fundamental challenge in this field. In this work, we develop a semantic parsing framework with the dual learning algorithm, which enables a semantic parser to make full use of data (labeled and even unlabeled) through a dual-learning game. This game between a primal model (semantic parsing) and a dual model (logical form to query) forces them to regularize each other, and can achieve feedback signals from some prior-knowledge. By utilizing the prior-knowledge of logical form structures, we propose a novel reward signal at the surface and semantic levels which tends to generate complete and reasonable logical forms. Experimental results show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance on ATIS dataset and gets competitive performance on Overnight dataset.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2019 Long Pape