Few-Shot Infrared Ship Detections via Improved TFA with Similarity Contrast and VOVNetv2

The low resolution of infrared images makes it more difficult to detect objects, and the quality of detection results obtained by the CNN based object detection model are worse for few-shot problems. Two-stage Fine-tune Approach (TFA) is effective to improve the precision of detection for few-shot problems. Because of the category imbalance of training samples, TFA has the problem of misclassification. To solve this problem, TFA with similarity contrast (SC-TFA) is proposed. The VOVNetv2 is used as the backbone network to improve the detection accuracy. The similarity contrast detection head is added to the detection module to improving the classify performance. And both cosine similarity and Euclidean distance are used as the similarity measure in the contrast loss function. The effectiveness of the improved TFA for the few-shot problem is verified on the VOC dataset and the infrared ship dataset. The average precision of the novel categories (nAP) of SC-TFA on VOC dataset and the infrared ship dataset reaches 54.92% and 41.1% respectively, which is 4.7% and 3.4% higher than TFA.</p

Numerical analysis of lateral – Moment capacity of bucket foundations for offshore wind turbine in sand

This paper reports the lateral – moment bearing capacity of bucket foundations under lateral loading in sand. The Modified Mohr-Coulomb (MMC) model is adopted to capture the hardening – softening behaviour in medium dense and dense sands within a finite element (FE) modelling framework. The FE model performance is assessed against available field test data as well as analytical solutions showing a relatively good agreement. A series of parametric study is conducted to investigate the effects of bucket aspect ratio, bucket diameter, load eccentricity, vertical load and relative density of sand on the lateral - moment bearing capacity of the bucket. Comparisons are drawn between the conventional Mohr-Coulomb (MC) model and the stress dependent MMC model highlighting the role of sand dilatancy in mobilising the lateral moment capacity. Based on the FE results, a simple stepwise calculation framework is proposed for two scenarios: (i) to predict the lateral - moment bearing capacity of the bucket if the bucket dimensions are known, and (ii) to design the bucket dimensions for a known required bucket capacity

Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me: The Long-Term Impact of Arthur Andersen's Demise on Partners' Audit Quality*

Although recent evidence suggests that individual audit partners explain a substantial portion of the variation in audit quality proxies, much less is known about what determines an audit partner's quality. Psychology and behavioral economics theories hold that an individual's experiences can have enduring impacts on subsequent behavior. We examine whether auditors' direct exposure to Arthur Andersen's collapse has a long-term impact on the quality of their audits. Our evidence implies that audit partners who directly experienced Andersen's demise impose stricter monitoring evident in their clients exhibiting a lower propensity for misstatements and small profits, and paying higher audit fees. Importantly, these findings reconcile with research in finance and economics implying that firsthand experiences matter more to subsequent behavior than general economic conditions or secondhand or thirdhand experiences. Collectively, the results shed light on one facet of how partners' audit quality evolves over time. Our findings suggest that major failures associated with the audit firm in which an auditor works can ultimately result in these affected individuals later delivering higher audit quality, which should benefit audit committees in partner selection decisions and audit firms in designing partner assignment policies

East Asian methane emissions inferred from high-resolution inversions of GOSAT and TROPOMI observations: a comparative and evaluative analysis

We apply atmospheric methane column retrievals from two different satellite instruments (Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite - GOSAT; TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument - TROPOMI) to a regional inversion framework to quantify East Asian methane emissions for 2019 at 0.5ĝĝĝ0.625ĝ horizontal resolution. The goal is to assess if GOSAT (relatively mature but sparse) and TROPOMI (new and dense) observations inform consistent methane emissions from East Asia with identically configured inversions. Comparison of the results from the two inversions shows similar correction patterns to the prior inventory in central northern China, central southern China, northeastern China, and Bangladesh, with less than 2.6ĝTgĝa-1 differences in regional posterior emissions. The two inversions, however, disagree over some important regions, particularly in northern India and eastern China. The methane emissions inferred from GOSAT observations are 7.7ĝTgĝa-1 higher than those from TROPOMI observations over northern India but 6.4ĝTgĝa-1 lower over eastern China. The discrepancies between the two inversions are robust against varied inversion configurations (i.e., assimilation window and error specifications). We find that the lower methane emissions from eastern China inferred by the GOSAT inversion are more consistent with independent ground-based in situ and total column (TCCON) observations, indicating that the TROPOMI retrievals may have high XCH4 biases in this region. We also evaluate inversion results against tropospheric aircraft observations over India during 2012-2014 by using a consistent GOSAT inversion of earlier years as an intercomparison platform. This indirect evaluation favors lower methane emissions from northern India inferred by the TROPOMI inversion. We find that in this case the discrepancy in emission inference is contributed by differences in data coverage (almost no observations by GOSAT vs. good spatial coverage by TROPOMI) over the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The two inversions also differ substantially in their posterior estimates for northwestern China and neighboring Kazakhstan, which is mainly due to seasonally varying biases between GOSAT and TROPOMI XCH4 data that correlate with changes in surface albedo.</p

Global, regional, and national levels of maternal mortality, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

Global, regional, and national levels of maternal mortality, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 201

Sex differences in stroke incidence, prevalence,mortality and disability-adjusted life years: Results from the global burden of disease study 2013

Background: Accurate information on stroke burden in men and women are important for evidence-based healthcare planning and resource allocation. Previously, limited research suggested that the absolute number of deaths from stroke in women was greater than in men, but the incidence and mortality rates were greater in men. However, sex differences in various metrics of stroke burden on a global scale have not been a subject of comprehensive and comparable assessment for most regions of the world, nor have sex differences in stroke burden been examined for trends over time. Methods: Stroke incidence, prevalence, mortality, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and healthy years lost due to disability were estimated as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2013 Study. Data inputs included all available information on stroke incidence, prevalence and death and case fatality rates. Analysis was performed separately by sex and 5-year age categories for 188 countries. Statistical models were employed to produce globally comprehensive results over time. All rates were age-standardized to a global population and 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs) were computed. Findings: In 2013, global ischemic stroke (IS) and hemorrhagic stroke (HS) incidence (per 100,000) in men (IS 132.77 (95% UI 125.34-142.77); HS 64.89 (95% UI 59.82-68.85)) exceeded those of women (IS 98.85 (95% UI 92.11-106.62); HS 45.48 (95% UI 42.43-48.53)). IS incidence rates were lower in 2013 compared with 1990 rates for both sexes (1990 male IS incidence 147.40 (95% UI 137.87-157.66); 1990 female IS incidence 113.31 (95% UI 103.52-123.40)), but the only significant change in IS incidence was among women