165 research outputs found
Forgiveness from Emotion Fit: Emotional Frame, Consumer Emotion, and Feeling-Right in Consumer Decision to Forgive
Three studies examine an emotion fit effect in the crisis communication, namely, the interaction between emotional frames of guilt and shame and consumer emotions of anger and fear on consumer forgiveness. Guilt-framing communication results in higher forgiveness than shame-framing for angry consumers, whereas shame-framing communication results in higher forgiveness than guilt-framing for fearful consumers. These effects are driven by consumers’ accessible regulatory foci associated with anger/fear and guilt/shame. Specifically, feelings of anger activate a promotion focus that is represented by guilt frames, while feelings of fear activate a prevention focus that is enacted by shame frames. Compared with emotion nonfit (i.e., anger to shame and fear to guilt), emotion fit (i.e., anger to guilt and fear to shame) facilitates greater feeling-right and consumer forgiveness. The findings offer novel insights for extant literature on emotion, crisis communication, and regulatory focus theory, as well as practical suggestions regarding the emotional frames
A Tale of Two Latent Flows: Learning Latent Space Normalizing Flow with Short-run Langevin Flow for Approximate Inference
We study a normalizing flow in the latent space of a top-down generator
model, in which the normalizing flow model plays the role of the informative
prior model of the generator. We propose to jointly learn the latent space
normalizing flow prior model and the top-down generator model by a Markov chain
Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based maximum likelihood algorithm, where a short-run
Langevin sampling from the intractable posterior distribution is performed to
infer the latent variables for each observed example, so that the parameters of
the normalizing flow prior and the generator can be updated with the inferred
latent variables. We show that, under the scenario of non-convergent short-run
MCMC, the finite step Langevin dynamics is a flow-like approximate inference
model and the learning objective actually follows the perturbation of the
maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). We further point out that the learning
framework seeks to (i) match the latent space normalizing flow and the
aggregated posterior produced by the short-run Langevin flow, and (ii) bias the
model from MLE such that the short-run Langevin flow inference is close to the
true posterior. Empirical results of extensive experiments validate the
effectiveness of the proposed latent space normalizing flow model in the tasks
of image generation, image reconstruction, anomaly detection, supervised image
inpainting and unsupervised image recovery.Comment: The Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
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The similar and different evolutionary trends of MATE family occurred between rice and Arabidopsis thaliana
Expression profiles of Arabidopsis MATE genes under various stress. (TIFF 5235 kb
CoopHash: Cooperative Learning of Multipurpose Descriptor and Contrastive Pair Generator via Variational MCMC Teaching for Supervised Image Hashing
Leveraging supervised information can lead to superior retrieval performance
in the image hashing domain but the performance degrades significantly without
enough labeled data. One effective solution to boost the performance is to
employ generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), to
generate synthetic data in an image hashing model. However, GAN-based methods
are difficult to train and suffer from mode collapse issue, which prevents the
hashing approaches from jointly training the generative models and the hash
functions. This limitation results in sub-optimal retrieval performance. To
overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework, the generative
cooperative hashing network (CoopHash), which is based on the energy-based
cooperative learning. CoopHash jointly learns a powerful generative
representation of the data and a robust hash function. CoopHash has two
components: a top-down contrastive pair generator that synthesizes contrastive
images and a bottom-up multipurpose descriptor that simultaneously represents
the images from multiple perspectives, including probability density, hash
code, latent code, and category. The two components are jointly learned via a
novel likelihood-based cooperative learning scheme. We conduct experiments on
several real-world datasets and show that the proposed method outperforms the
competing hashing supervised methods, achieving up to 10% relative improvement
over the current state-of-the-art supervised hashing methods, and exhibits a
significantly better performance in out-of-distribution retrieval
Machine learning reveals neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio as a crucial prognostic indicator in severe Japanese encephalitis patients
Japanese encephalitis (JE) is a severe infectious disease affecting the central nervous system (CNS). However, limited risk factors have been identified for predicting poor prognosis (PP) in adults with severe JE. In this study, we analyzed clinical data from thirty-eight severe adult JE patients and compared them to thirty-three patients without organic CNS disease. Machine learning techniques employing branch-and-bound algorithms were used to identify clinical risk factors. Based on clinical outcomes, patients were categorized into two groups: the PP group (mRs ≥ 3) and the good prognosis (GP) group (mRs ≤ 2) at three months post-discharge. We found that the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and the percentage of neutrophilic count (N%) were significantly higher in the PP group compared to the GP group. Conversely, the percentage of lymphocyte count (L%) was significantly lower in the PP group. Additionally, elevated levels of aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and blood glucose were observed in the PP group compared to the GP group. The clinical parameters most strongly correlated with prognosis, as indicated by Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), were NLR (PCC 0.45) and blood glucose (PCC 0.45). In summary, our findings indicate that increased serum NLR, N%, decreased L%, abnormal glucose metabolism, and liver function impairment are risk factors associated with poor prognosis in severe adult JE patients
Characterization of the fertilization independent endosperm (FIE) gene from soybean
Reproduction of angiosperm plants initiates from two fertilization events: an egg fusing with a sperm to form an embryo and a second sperm fusing with the central cell to generate an endosperm. The tryptophan-aspartate (WD) domain polycomb protein encoded by fertilization independent endosperm (FIE) gene, has been known as a repressor of hemeotic genes by interacting with other polycomb proteins, and suppresses endosperm development until fertilization. In this study, one Glycine max FIE (GmFIE) gene was cloned and its expression in different tissues, under cold and drought treatments, was analyzed using both bioinformatics and experimental methods. GmFIE showed high expression in reproductive tissues and was responsive to stress treatments, especially induced by cold. GmFIE overexpression lines of transgenic Arabidopsis were generated and analyzed. Delayed flowering was observed from most transgenic lines compared to that of wild type. Overexpression of GmFIE in Arabidopsis also leads to semi-fertile of the plants.Keywords: Polycomb proteins, fertilization independent endosperm (FIE), Glycine max, Arabidopsis thalian
Genome-scale identification of Soybean BURP domain-containing genes and their expression under stress treatments
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Multiple proteins containing BURP domain have been identified in many different plant species, but not in any other organisms. To date, the molecular function of the BURP domain is still unknown, and no systematic analysis and expression profiling of the gene family in soybean (<it>Glycine max</it>) has been reported.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study, multiple bioinformatics approaches were employed to identify all the members of BURP family genes in soybean. A total of 23 BURP gene types were identified. These genes had diverse structures and were distributed on chromosome 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 18. Phylogenetic analysis suggested that these BURP family genes could be classified into 5 subfamilies, and one of which defines a new subfamily, BURPV. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis of transcript levels showed that 15 of the 23 genes had no expression specificity; 7 of them were specifically expressed in some of the tissues; and one of them was not expressed in any of the tissues or organs studied. The results of stress treatments showed that 17 of the 23 identified BURP family genes responded to at least one of the three stress treatments; 6 of them were not influenced by stress treatments even though a stress related <it>cis</it>-element was identified in the promoter region. No stress related <it>cis</it>-elements were found in promoter region of any BURPV member. However, qRT-PCR results indicated that all members from BURPV responded to at least one of the three stress treatments. More significantly, the members from the RD22-like subfamily showed no tissue-specific expression and they all responded to each of the three stress treatments.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We have identified and classified all the BURP domain-containing genes in soybean. Their expression patterns in different tissues and under different stress treatments were detected using qRT-PCR. 15 out of 23 BURP genes in soybean had no tissue-specific expression, while 17 out of them were stress-responsive. The data provided an insight into the evolution of the gene family and suggested that many BURP family genes may be important for plants responding to stress conditions.</p
The Exploration and Evaluation of Generating Affective 360 Panoramic VR Environments Through Neural Style Transfer
Affective virtual reality (VR) environments with varying visual style can
impact users' valence and arousal responses. We applied Neural Style Transfer
(NST) to generate 360 VR environments that elicited users' varied
valence and arousal responses. From a user study with 30 participants, findings
suggested that generative VR environments changed participants' arousal
responses but not their valence levels. The generated visual features, e.g.,
textures and colors, also altered participants' affective perceptions. Our work
contributes novel insights about how users respond to generative VR
environments and provided a strategy for creating affective VR environments
without altering content
Enclave-Reinforced Inequality during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from University Campus Lockdowns in Wuhan, China
From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-11-23, pub-electronic 2021-11-26Publication status: PublishedFunder: China Prosperity Fund Programme; Grant(s): PF3051 CH-WS3HBUE YR1Funder: Ministry of Education; Grant(s): 20YJC630149The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted urban life and created spatial and social inequalities in cities. The impacts of lifting full lockdown restrictions once fast-spreading and community-acquired infection waves were under control are still not fully understood. This study aims to explore spatial inequality reinforced in the intervals between the waves of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Enclave-reinforced inequality resulting from enclave-based lockdown policies in Chinese cities was investigated through an analysis of the impacts of university campus enclave closures on the accessibility and crowdedness of urban green spaces. Using a modified two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) and inversed 2SFCA (i2SFCA) method, accessibility and crowdedness were calculated and compared under two different scenarios. Additionally, the Lorenz curve, Gini coefficient, and Theil index were used to measure and compare intra-city global and local inequalities under each scenario. The results indicate that the lockdown of university campus enclaves decreased the supply of urban green spaces. Campus closures not only exacerbated the unequal distribution of urban green space, but also reduced the inequality of crowdedness in urban parks due to increased crowdedness in parks near the closed enclaves. Moreover, both accessibility and crowdedness worsened when the calculations were weighted for population size and the total supply of green space. Enclave-based lockdown in cities reinforced spatial inequality, and it is highly complex and has multidimensional impacts on urban inequalities and environmental injustice which should be considered by urban planners and decision-makers hoping to create healthy, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities in the “new normal” of the COVID-19 pandemic
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