Regularity and Exponential Growth of Pullback Attractors for Semilinear Parabolic Equations Involving the Grushin Operator

Considered here is the first initial boundary value problem for a semilinear degenerate parabolic equation involving the Grushin operator in a bounded domain Ω. We prove the regularity and exponential growth of a pullback attractor in the space S02(Ω)∩L2p−2(Ω) for the nonautonomous dynamical system associated to the problem. The obtained results seem to be optimal and, in particular, improve and extend some recent results on pullback attractors for reaction-diffusion equations in bounded domains

Wideband characteristics of density tapered array antennas

In this paper, wideband characteristics of density tapered arrays are clarified by comparing directly the array factors and radiation patterns of 3 tapered arrays structures with array factors and radiation patterns of equally spaced arrays. Calculated results for a density tapered distribution array consisting of 30 elements claims that the array can perform within a bandwidth of 2.5:1 with grating lobe levels lower than -7.8 dB. Additionally, this paper shows a method of determining the effectiveness of unequal spacing arrays in the design of actual antennas. The method is based on calculation and analysis of input impedance of array elements caused by mutual coupling effects among array elements

TISE: Bag of Metrics for Text-to-Image Synthesis Evaluation

In this paper, we conduct a study on the state-of-the-art methods for text-to-image synthesis and propose a framework to evaluate these methods. We consider syntheses where an image contains a single or multiple objects. Our study outlines several issues in the current evaluation pipeline: (i) for image quality assessment, a commonly used metric, e.g., Inception Score (IS), is often either miscalibrated for the single-object case or misused for the multi-object case; (ii) for text relevance and object accuracy assessment, there is an overfitting phenomenon in the existing R-precision (RP) and Semantic Object Accuracy (SOA) metrics, respectively; (iii) for multi-object case, many vital factors for evaluation, e.g., object fidelity, positional alignment, counting alignment, are largely dismissed; (iv) the ranking of the methods based on current metrics is highly inconsistent with real images. To overcome these issues, we propose a combined set of existing and new metrics to systematically evaluate the methods. For existing metrics, we offer an improved version of IS named IS* by using temperature scaling to calibrate the confidence of the classifier used by IS; we also propose a solution to mitigate the overfitting issues of RP and SOA. For new metrics, we develop counting alignment, positional alignment, object-centric IS, and object-centric FID metrics for evaluating the multi-object case. We show that benchmarking with our bag of metrics results in a highly consistent ranking among existing methods that is well-aligned with human evaluation. As a by-product, we create AttnGAN++, a simple but strong baseline for the benchmark by stabilizing the training of AttnGAN using spectral normalization. We also release our toolbox, so-called TISE, for advocating fair and consistent evaluation of text-to-image models.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 2022; TISE toolbox is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/tise-toolbo

The strategic adjustments of China, India, and the US in the Indo-Pacific geopolitical context

Since the beginning of the XXI century, the Indo-Pacific region has become the "focus" of strategic competition between the world's great powers. This area included many "choke points" on sea routes that are strategically important for the development of international trade, playing an important role in transporting oil, gas, and goods around the world from the Middle East to Australia and East Asia. The article analyzed the geostrategic position of the Indo-Pacific region and the strategic adjustments in foreign affairs of some major powers in this region, specifically the US, China, and India. To achieve this goal, the authors used research methods in international relations to analyze the main issues of the study. In addition to reviewing previous scholarly research and reviews, the authors used a comparative approach to assess the interactions between theory and data. The authors believed that these data are important for accurately assessing the strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, and this area was an important trigger for the US, China, and India to make adjustments to its foreign policy. If the US proposed a strategy called "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" (FOIP), India's strategy was called the Indo-Pacific Initiative. China's Indo-Pacific strategy was clearly expressed through the "String of Pearls" strategy and the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI). As a result, in the geopolitical context of the Indo-Pacific region, the competition between major powers (the US, China, India...) is also becoming fiercer and more complex. It has a significant impact on other countries in the region

Parental microbiota modulates offspring development, body mass and fecundity in a polyphagous fruit fly

Funding Information: Funding: Project Raising Q-fly Sterile Insect Technique to World Standard (HG14033) is funded by the Hort Frontiers Fruit Fly Fund, part of the Hort Frontiers strategic partnership initiative developed by Hort Innovation, with co-investment from Macquarie University (NSW, Australia) and contributions from the Australian Government. BN is funded by the international Research Training Program (iRTP) scholarship from Macquarie University and the Australian Government. HD was supported by Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship and AT was supported by MQ-VIED Joint Scholarship. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Attractors for Nonautonomous Parabolic Equations without Uniqueness

Using the theory of uniform global attractors of multivalued semiprocesses, we prove the existence of a uniform global attractor for a nonautonomous semilinear degenerate parabolic equation in which the conditions imposed on the nonlinearity provide the global existence of a weak solution, but not uniqueness. The Kneser property of solutions is also studied, and as a result we obtain the connectedness of the uniform global attractor

Effects of Crossbreeding and Feed Supplementation on Meat Productivity of Goats in Laos: 2. Body Composition and Meat Quality

A 5 month long 2x2 factorial feeding trial was carried out to determine effects of crossbreeding and feed supplementation on meat productivity of goats in Laos. The indigenous goat breed (Lat) was used as the control to compare with the F1 (BT x L) as a result of crossbreeding Lat does with bucks of Bach Thao, an improved goat breed imported from Vietnam. For each genotype, 30 growing male goats at 7 months of age were chosen and equally divided into 2 groups, each being raised under either the traditional feeding regime (free grazing only) or an improved feeding regime including dried cassava hay and mineral block provided ad libitum in addition to the free grazing regime. Observations included feed intake, live weight gain, dressing percentage, body composition, carcass parts, and meat quality. This paper presents body composition and meat quality of the goats as affected by crossbreeding and feed supplementation. Results showed that although there existed significant differences in weight percentage of some organs (legs, lungs and liver) in the body, no significant diferences were observed for meat quality (tenderness, color, pH, drip loss and cooking loss) between Lat and F1 goats under the two different feeding regimes. It was therefore concluded that crossbreeding with Bach Thao bucks imported from Vietnam and feed supplementation (cassava hay and mineral block) well improved meat yield without negative effects on meat quality of goats in Laos.Peer reviewe

The direct and indirect impacts of factors on the use of QR code payment during the Covid-19 pandemic: Empirical research in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The QR code payment is a service that allows customers to use their smartphone’s camera and mobile banking application to scan the QR code to quickly pay for many transactions by money being transferred from the account of the customer to the account of the point of sale. The objective paper is to identify factors influencing customers’ use of QR code payment in Ho Chi Minh (HCM) City, Vietnam, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our proposed model extended based on combining the TAM and UTAUT2. We had an online survey with the participation of 567 customers who used the QR code payment in HCM City from June 2020 to January 2021 and applied Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test hypotheses. The results were analyzed by SPSS 25 and AMOS 24 software, indicating that the total effect of perceived Covid-19 on the use of QR code payment was the strongest, with the second rank on the direct impact and the first rank on the indirect impact. Intention to use plays the strongest role in the direct effects of the use of QR code payment, while the effects of attitude, facilitating conditions, personal innovativeness, security, trust, and perceived ease of use on the use of QR code payment were indirect and positive. These results will help providers of QR code payment have some recommendations to increase the use of customers about the QR code payment to develop and exploit their potential market for this service