METS-Based Cataloging Toolkit for Digital Library Management System

This toolkit is designed for the Digital Library Management System of Tsinghua University (TH-DLMS). The aim of TH-DLMS is to build up a platform to preserve various kinds of digitalized resources, manage distributed repositories and provide kinds of service for research and education. This toolkit fulfills the cataloging and preservation functions of TH-DLMS. METS (Metadata Encoding and T ransmission Standard) encoded documents are used as the final storage format of metadata, including descriptive metadata, structural metadata and administrative metadata, and submitted to a management system based on Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture)

Easily Tunable Membrane Thickness of Microcapsules by Using a Coordination Assembly on the Liquid-Liquid Interface

A model solvent, 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene, was encapsulated using coordination assembly between metal ions and tannic acid to reveal the deposition of coordination complexes on the liquid-liquid interface. The deposition was confirmed by zeta potential, energy dispersive spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy were integrated to characterize the microcapsules (MCs). According to atomic force microscopy height analysis, membrane thickness of the MCs increased linearly with sequential deposition. For MCs prepared using the Fe3+-TA system, the average membrane thicknesses of MCs prepared with 2, 4, 6, and 8 deposition cycles were determined as 31.3 ± 4.6, 92.4 ± 15.0, 175.4 ± 22.1, and 254.8 ± 24.0 nm, respectively. Dissolution test showed that the release profiles of all the four tested MCs followed Higuchi kinetics. Membrane thicknesses of MCs prepared using the Ca2+-TA system were much smaller. We can easily tune the membrane thickness of the MCs by adjusting metal ions or deposition cycles according to the application requirements. The convenient tunability of the membrane thickness can enable an extensive use of this coordination assembly strategy in a broad range of applications

D3G: Exploring Gaussian Prior for Temporal Sentence Grounding with Glance Annotation

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to locate a specific moment from an untrimmed video with a given natural language query. Recently, weakly supervised methods still have a large performance gap compared to fully supervised ones, while the latter requires laborious timestamp annotations. In this study, we aim to reduce the annotation cost yet keep competitive performance for TSG task compared to fully supervised ones. To achieve this goal, we investigate a recently proposed glance-supervised temporal sentence grounding task, which requires only single frame annotation (referred to as glance annotation) for each query. Under this setup, we propose a Dynamic Gaussian prior based Grounding framework with Glance annotation (D3G), which consists of a Semantic Alignment Group Contrastive Learning module (SA-GCL) and a Dynamic Gaussian prior Adjustment module (DGA). Specifically, SA-GCL samples reliable positive moments from a 2D temporal map via jointly leveraging Gaussian prior and semantic consistency, which contributes to aligning the positive sentence-moment pairs in the joint embedding space. Moreover, to alleviate the annotation bias resulting from glance annotation and model complex queries consisting of multiple events, we propose the DGA module, which adjusts the distribution dynamically to approximate the ground truth of target moments. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks verify the effectiveness of the proposed D3G. It outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods by a large margin and narrows the performance gap compared to fully supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/solicucu/D3G.Comment: ICCV202

Unified and Dynamic Graph for Temporal Character Grouping in Long Videos

Video temporal character grouping locates appearing moments of major characters within a video according to their identities. To this end, recent works have evolved from unsupervised clustering to graph-based supervised clustering. However, graph methods are built upon the premise of fixed affinity graphs, bringing many inexact connections. Besides, they extract multi-modal features with kinds of models, which are unfriendly to deployment. In this paper, we present a unified and dynamic graph (UniDG) framework for temporal character grouping. This is accomplished firstly by a unified representation network that learns representations of multiple modalities within the same space and still preserves the modality's uniqueness simultaneously. Secondly, we present a dynamic graph clustering where the neighbors of different quantities are dynamically constructed for each node via a cyclic matching strategy, leading to a more reliable affinity graph. Thirdly, a progressive association method is introduced to exploit spatial and temporal contexts among different modalities, allowing multi-modal clustering results to be well fused. As current datasets only provide pre-extracted features, we evaluate our UniDG method on a collected dataset named MTCG, which contains each character's appearing clips of face and body and speaking voice tracks. We also evaluate our key components on existing clustering and retrieval datasets to verify the generalization ability. Experimental results manifest that our method can achieve promising results and outperform several state-of-the-art approaches

Does afforestation deteriorate haze pollution in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), China?

Although aggressive emission control strategies have been implemented recently in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area (BTH), China, pervasive and persistent haze still frequently engulfs the region during wintertime. Afforestation in BTH, primarily concentrated in the Taihang and Yan Mountains, has constituted one of the controversial factors exacerbating the haze pollution due to its slowdown of the surface wind speed. We report here an increasing trend of forest cover in BTH during 2001-2013 based on long-term satellite measurements and the impact of the afforestation on the fine-particle (PM2.5) level. Simulations using the Weather Research and Forecast model with chemistry reveal that afforestation in BTH since 2001 has generally been deteriorating the haze pollution in BTH to some degree, enhancing PM2.5 concentrations by up to 6% on average. Complete afforestation or deforestation in the Taihang and Yan Mountains would increase or decrease the PM2.5 level within 15% in BTH. Our model results also suggest that implementing a large ventilation corridor system would not be effective or beneficial to mitigate the haze pollution in Beijing

Association between prospective registration and overall reporting and methodological quality of systematic reviews: a meta-epidemiological study

Objective: To investigate the differences in main characteristics, reporting and methodological quality between prospectively registered and non-registered systematic reviews. Methods: PubMed was searched to identify systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials published in 2015 in English. After title and abstract screening, potentially relevant reviews were divided into three groups: registered non-Cochrane reviews, Cochrane reviews, and non-registered reviews. For each group, random number tables were generated in Microsoft Excel, and the first 50 eligible studies from each group were randomly selected. Data of interest from systematic reviews were extracted. Regression analyses were conducted to explore the association between total R-AMSTAR or PRISMA scores and the selected characteristics of systematic reviews. Results: The conducting and reporting of literature search in registered reviews were superior to non-registered reviews. Differences in nine of the 11 R-AMSTAR items were statistically significant between registered and non-registered reviews. The total R-AMSTAR score of registered reviews was higher than non-registered reviews (MD=4.82, 95%CI: 3.70, 5.94). Sensitivity analysis by excluding the registration related item presented similar result (MD=4.34, 95%CI: 3.28, 5.40). Total PRISMA scores of registered reviews were significantly higher than non-registered reviews (all reviews: MD=1.47, 95%CI: 0.64-2.30; non-Cochrane reviews: MD=1.49, 95%CI: 0.56-2.42). However, the difference in the total PRISMA score was no longer statistically significant after excluding the item related to registration (item 5). Regression analyses showed similar results. Conclusions: Prospective registration may at least indirectly improve the overall methodological quality of systematic reviews, although its impact on the overall reporting quality was not significant

1,4-Bis(1H-benzimidazol-2-yl)benzene methanol monosolvate

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C20H14N4·CH4O, contains two independent half-mol­ecules, each located on an inversion centre, and a methanol solvent mol­ecule. The benzimidazolyl groups form different dihedral angles [24.0 (1) and 11.6 (1)°] with the plane of the central benzene ring in the two mol­ecules. In the crystal, a two-dimensional network is formed through N—H⋯ N, N—H⋯O and O—H⋯N hydrogen-bonding inter­actions between the benzimidazole units and methanol solvent mol­ecules. π–π stacking inter­actions also occur between the benzimidazole rings of adjacent mol­ecules, with centroid–centroid distances of 3.720 (14) Å and inter­planar distances of 3.53 (1) Å

Prospektywne, trwające 6 miesięcy badanie poświęcone ocenie skuteczności i bezpieczeństwa stosowania walproinianu o przedłużonym uwalnianiu oraz jakości życia chorych na padaczkę stosujących ten lek

Celem tego prospektywnego, wieloośrodkowego badania, przeprowadzonego metodą otwartej próby, była ocena skuteczności i bezpieczeństwa stosowania walproinianu o przedłużonym uwalnianiu(ER, extender-release) oraz jego wpływu na jakość życia u chorych na padaczkę. Do badania włączono osoby z potwierdzonym rozpoznaniem padaczki. Uczestnikom przez 6 miesięcy podawano walproinian ER jako pierwszy lek w monoterapii lub w połączeniu z dotychczas stosowanym lekiem. Ocenę skuteczności i bezpieczeństwa leczenia przeprowadzono po 1 (V1), 3 (V3) i 6 miesiącach (V6) od rozpoczęcia badania. Do oceny jakości życia przed terapią i po 6 miesiącach leczenia użyto kwestionariusza QOLIE-31. W analizie uwzględniono 958 chorych na padaczkę. Wyjściowa częstość napadów padaczkowych wynosiła 8,56 na miesiąc. Średnia dawka podtrzymująca walproinianu ER wynosiła 750 mg na dobę. Liczba napadów padaczkowych w miesiącu, oszacowana podczas ostatniej wizyty, zmniejszyła się o 88,3% w stosunku do wartości wyjściowych. Nastąpiła poprawa jakości życia w zakresie następujących kategorii: &#8222;obawa przed napadami&#8221; (p = 0,000), &#8222;ogólna jakość życia&#8221; (p = 0,000), &#8222;funkcjonowanie społeczne&#8221; (p < 0,01) i &#8222;pytanie 31.&#8221; (ocena ogólnego stanu zdrowia) (p = 0,000). Odnotowano pogorszenie w zakresie aktywności życiowej (p = 0,000). We wczesnej fazie leczenia najczęstszymi działaniami niepożądanymi były suchość w jamie ustnej, zawroty głowy i jadłowstręt. Po 6 miesiącach pacjenci najczęściej skarżyli się na zwiększenie masy ciała, łysienie plackowate i drżenie. Wyniki badania dowodzą, że stosowanie walproinianu ER w monoterapii lub w terapii skojarzonej przez 6 miesięcy wiąże się z istotnie większym procentowym ograniczeniem częstości wszystkich rodzajów napadów w stosunku do wartości wyjściowych i z istotnie większym odsetkiem odpowiedzi na leczenie oraz odsetkiem chorych bez napadów. Ponadto terapia była dobrze tolerowana przez chorych i powodowała poprawę jakości życia. Polski Przegląd Neurologiczny 2010; 6 (4): 212&#8211;21

Regional features and seasonality of land – atmosphere coupling over Eastern China

Land–atmosphere coupling is a key process of the climate system, and various coupling mechanisms have been proposed before based on observational and numerical analyses. The impact of soil moisture (SM) on evapotranspiration (ET) and further surface temperature (ST) is an important aspect of such coupling. Using ERA-Interim data and CLM4.0 offline simulation results, this study further explores the relationships between SM/ST and ET to better understand the complex nature of the land–atmosphere coupling (i.e., spatial and seasonal variations) in eastern China, a typical monsoon area. It is found that two diagnostics of land–atmosphere coupling (i.e., SM–ET correlation and ST–ET correlation) are highly dependent on the climatology of SM and ST. By combining the SM–ET and ST–ET relationships, two “hot spots” of land–atmosphere coupling over eastern China are identified: Southwest China and North China. In Southwest China, ST is relatively high throughout the year, but SM is lowest in spring, resulting in a strong coupling in spring. However, in North China, SM is relatively low throughout the year, but ST is highest in summer, which leads to the strongest coupling in summer. Our results emphasize the dependence of land–atmosphere coupling on the seasonal evolution of climatic conditions and have implications for future studies related to land surface feedbacks