The Photometric Investigation of V921 Her using the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope of Chang'e-3 mission

The light curve of V921 Her in ultraviolet band observed by the Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) is analyzed by the Wilson-Devinney code. Our solutions conclude that V921 Her is an early type marginal contact binary system with an additional close-in component. The binary system is under poor thermal contact with a temperature difference of nearly $700K$ between the two components. The close-in component contributes about $19\,\%$ of the total luminosity in the triple system. Combining the radial velocity study together with our photometric solutions, the mass of the primary star and secondary one are calculated to be $M_1 = 1.784(\pm0.055)M_\odot$, $M_2 = 0.403(\pm0.012)M_\odot$. The evolutionary scenario of V921 Her is discussed. All times of light minimum of V921 Her available in the bibliography are taken into account and the $O - C$ curve is analyzed for the first time. The most probable fitting results are discussed in the paper, which also confirm the existence of a third component ($P_3=10.2$ year) around the binary system. The period of V921 Her is also undergoing a continuously rapid increase at a rate of $dP/dt=+2.79\times{10^{-7}}day\cdot year^{-1}$, which may due to mass transfer from the less massive component to the more massive one

Adopting French Names as Identity Markers among Second Foreign Language (L3) Learners in China

Using foreign names has become common practice for Chinese students who are learning a foreign language to develop a special identity in multilingual contexts. French is one of the most studied foreign languages in China. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the practices learners follow when adopting French names as their identity markers. The current study addresses this gap by investigating twenty-nine French names adopted by Chinese university students who are learning French as the second foreign language (L3) in a Chinese university. Drawing on data collected through interviews, the motivations, and features behind the respondents’ name choices were examined. The qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the practice of adopting French names for these L3 students was primarily motivated by phonetic features and the study participants’ positive associations. The L3 learners  deliberately selected a French name to create a multilingual and multicultural identity for themselves. The pedagogical implications regarding teachers’ development of  cultural instruction materials as well as teachers’ potential influence on French language instruction overall are also discussed

Marriage, Conflict, and Communication: Pragmatic Inquiry into Impoliteness in the Marital Relationship

The issue of impoliteness has long been a matter of interest in linguistic investigations. Considerable research has been conducted to uncover factors and features regarding the realizations of impoliteness in multiple social contexts. This study engages in a pragmatic inquiry into impoliteness in the marital relationship. The data of this study consisted of a TV episode from one famous on-site mediation reality program in China. Primarily drawing on Bousfield’s (2008) model of impoliteness realizations, this study used a qualitative approach to examine the means by which the couple in a marital relationship causes face-attacking effects and ultimately arouses conflicts. The primary findings of this study indicate that couples might struggle with various communicative challenges. A problematic marital relationship tends to be signaled in some practices of impoliteness. This study has identified thirteen realizations of impoliteness linguistically and behaviorally that indicate gender variations concerning the couple’s frequent impoliteness practices

SGAT4PASS: Spherical Geometry-Aware Transformer for PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation

As an important and challenging problem in computer vision, PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation (PASS) gives complete scene perception based on an ultra-wide angle of view. Usually, prevalent PASS methods with 2D panoramic image input focus on solving image distortions but lack consideration of the 3D properties of original $360^{\circ}$ data. Therefore, their performance will drop a lot when inputting panoramic images with the 3D disturbance. To be more robust to 3D disturbance, we propose our Spherical Geometry-Aware Transformer for PAnoramic Semantic Segmentation (SGAT4PASS), considering 3D spherical geometry knowledge. Specifically, a spherical geometry-aware framework is proposed for PASS. It includes three modules, i.e., spherical geometry-aware image projection, spherical deformable patch embedding, and a panorama-aware loss, which takes input images with 3D disturbance into account, adds a spherical geometry-aware constraint on the existing deformable patch embedding, and indicates the pixel density of original $360^{\circ}$ data, respectively. Experimental results on Stanford2D3D Panoramic datasets show that SGAT4PASS significantly improves performance and robustness, with approximately a 2% increase in mIoU, and when small 3D disturbances occur in the data, the stability of our performance is improved by an order of magnitude. Our code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/SGAT4PASS.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 202

LayoutDiffusion: Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation

Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in image synthesis. However, when it comes to the layout-to-image generation where an image often has a complex scene of multiple objects, how to make strong control over both the global layout map and each detailed object remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a diffusion model named LayoutDiffusion that can obtain higher generation quality and greater controllability than the previous works. To overcome the difficult multimodal fusion of image and layout, we propose to construct a structural image patch with region information and transform the patched image into a special layout to fuse with the normal layout in a unified form. Moreover, Layout Fusion Module (LFM) and Object-aware Cross Attention (OaCA) are proposed to model the relationship among multiple objects and designed to be object-aware and position-sensitive, allowing for precisely controlling the spatial related information. Extensive experiments show that our LayoutDiffusion outperforms the previous SOTA methods on FID, CAS by relatively 46.35%, 26.70% on COCO-stuff and 44.29%, 41.82% on VG. Code is available at https://github.com/ZGCTroy/LayoutDiffusion.Comment: Accepted by CVPR202

CoreDiff: Contextual Error-Modulated Generalized Diffusion Model for Low-Dose CT Denoising and Generalization

Low-dose computed tomography (CT) images suffer from noise and artifacts due to photon starvation and electronic noise. Recently, some works have attempted to use diffusion models to address the over-smoothness and training instability encountered by previous deep-learning-based denoising models. However, diffusion models suffer from long inference times due to the large number of sampling steps involved. Very recently, cold diffusion model generalizes classical diffusion models and has greater flexibility. Inspired by the cold diffusion, this paper presents a novel COntextual eRror-modulated gEneralized Diffusion model for low-dose CT (LDCT) denoising, termed CoreDiff. First, CoreDiff utilizes LDCT images to displace the random Gaussian noise and employs a novel mean-preserving degradation operator to mimic the physical process of CT degradation, significantly reducing sampling steps thanks to the informative LDCT images as the starting point of the sampling process. Second, to alleviate the error accumulation problem caused by the imperfect restoration operator in the sampling process, we propose a novel ContextuaL Error-modulAted Restoration Network (CLEAR-Net), which can leverage contextual information to constrain the sampling process from structural distortion and modulate time step embedding features for better alignment with the input at the next time step. Third, to rapidly generalize to a new, unseen dose level with as few resources as possible, we devise a one-shot learning framework to make CoreDiff generalize faster and better using only a single LDCT image (un)paired with NDCT. Extensive experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our CoreDiff outperforms competing methods in denoising and generalization performance, with a clinically acceptable inference time. Source code is made available at https://github.com/qgao21/CoreDiff.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 202

Benzyl (E)-3-(2-methyl­benzyl­idene)dithio­carbazate

The title compound, C16H16N2S2, was obtained from the condensation reaction of benzyl dithio­carbazate and 2-methyl­benzaldehyde. The asymmetric unit contains two independent mol­ecules. In both mol­ecules, the methyl­phenyl ring and the dithio­carbazate fragment are located on opposite sides of the C=N bond, showing an E conformation. In each mol­ecule, the dithio­carbazate fragment is approximately planar, the r.m.s deviations being 0.018 and 0.025 Å. The mean plane of dithio­carbazate group is oriented at dihedral angles of 7.9 (3) and 68.24 (12)°, respectively, to the methyl­phenyl and phenyl rings in one mol­ecule, while the corresponding angles in the other mol­ecule are 10.9 (3) and 69.76 (16)°. Inter­molecular N—H⋯S hydrogen bonding occurs in the crystal structure to generate inversion dimers for both molecules

Effects of glutamate on distortion–product otoacoustic emissions and auditory brainstem responses in guinea pigs

AbstractObjectivesTo investigate changes in evoked potentials and structure of the guinea pig cochleae during whole cochlear perfusion with glutamate.MethodsCM, CAP, DPOAE, and ABR were recorded as indicators of cochlear functions during whole cochlear perfusion. The morphology of the cochlea was studied via transmission electron microscopy.ResultsThere were no significant changes in DPOAE amplitude before and after glutamate perfusion. CM I/O function remained nonlinear during perfusion. ABR latencies were delayed following glutamate perfusion. The average CAP threshold was elevated 35 dB SPL following glutamate perfusion.. The OHCs appeared normal, but the IHCs and afferent dendrites showed cytoplasmic blebs after glutamate perfusion.ConclusionsWhile being a primary amino acid neurotransmitter at the synapses between hair cells and spiral ganglion neurons, excessive glutamate is neurotoxic and can destroy IHCs and spiral ganglion neurons. The technique used in this study can also be used to build an animal model of auditory neuropathy