Pythagorean Cosmology in The Secret Garden

Based on Pythagorean Cosmology, the thesis gives new interpretations of the image of garden in The Secret Garden from the perspective of time and space respectively. Garden, conveying profound meanings and combining macrocosmos and microcosmos, is one of the most important means to achieve harmony and order in infinite time and space in The Secret Garden.

Synthesis of graphene oxide–methacrylic acid–sodium allyl sulfonate copolymer and its tanning properties

AbstractGraphite oxide nanosheets (GONs) and the copolymer of GONs with methacrylic acid (MAA) and sodium allyl sulfonate (SAS) (poly(GON–MAA–SAS)) were prepared. The GONs in poly(GON–MAA–SAS) are smaller and uniformly dispersed, allowing them to penetrate into collagen fibers of leather and produce better tanning effects than current nano-tanning agents. Tanning effects due to chemical bonding and nanoeffects are elucidated by measuring the shrinkage temperature (Ts) of wet and dry leather. The results indicate that poly(GON–MAA–SAS) could be used alone as a tanning agent to provide excellent mechanical properties, especially good elasticity and softness, although the Ts is slightly lower than that of chrome-tanned leather. Poly(GON–MAA–SAS) in combination with a chrome tanning agent could allow the dosage of the latter to be halved. These results indicate the potential for new nano-tanning agents to reduce the pollution caused by tanning agents

Gamma-tocotrienol stimulates the proliferation, differentiation, and mineralization in osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cells

Gamma-tocotrienol, a major component of tocotrienol-rich fraction of palm oil, has been suggested to exhibit bone protective effects in vivo. However, the effects of γ-tocotrienol on osteoblast cells are still unclear. In this study, the effects of γ-tocotrienol on the proliferation, differentiation, and mineralization in osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cells were investigated. Our results showed that γ-tocotrienol (2–8 μmol/L) significantly improved the cell proliferation (), but it did not affect cell cycle progression. γ-Tocotrienol significantly increased alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity (), secretion levels of osteocalcin (OC) and osteonectin (ON), and mRNA levels of collagen type I (Col I) of MC3T3-E1 cells. Meanwhile, we found that γ-tocotrienol is promoted in differentiation MC3T3-E1 cells by upregulation of the expression of Runx2 protein. Moreover, the number of bone nodules increased over 2.5-fold in cells treated with γ-tocotrienol (2–8 μmol/L) for 24 d compared to control group. These results indicated that γ-tocotrienol at low dose levels, especially 4 μmol/L, could markedly enhance the osteoblastic function by increasing the proliferation, differentiation, and mineralization of osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cells. Moreover, our data also indicated that Runx2 protein may be involved in these effects. Further studies are needed to determine the potential of γ-tocotrienol as an antiosteoporotic agent

Electrical Tunable Spintronic Neuron with Trainable Activation Function

Spintronic devices have been widely studied for the hardware realization of artificial neurons. The stochastic switching of magnetic tunnel junction driven by the spin torque is commonly used to produce the sigmoid activation function. However, the shape of the activation function in previous studies is fixed during the training of neural network. This restricts the updating of weights and results in a limited performance. In this work, we exploit the physics behind the spin torque induced magnetization switching to enable the dynamic change of the activation function during the training process. Specifically, the pulse width and magnetic anisotropy can be electrically controlled to change the slope of activation function, which enables a faster or slower change of output required by the backpropagation algorithm. This is also similar to the idea of batch normalization that is widely used in the machine learning. Thus, this work demonstrates that the algorithms are no longer limited to the software implementation. They can in fact be realized by the spintronic hardware using a single device. Finally, we show that the accuracy of hand-written digit recognition can be improved from 88% to 91.3% by using these trainable spintronic neurons without introducing additional energy consumption. Our proposals can stimulate the hardware realization of spintronic neural networks.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure

M3PT: A Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging

POI tagging aims to annotate a point of interest (POI) with some informative tags, which facilitates many services related to POIs, including search, recommendation, and so on. Most of the existing solutions neglect the significance of POI images and seldom fuse the textual and visual features of POIs, resulting in suboptimal tagging performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging, namely M3PT, which achieves enhanced POI tagging through fusing the target POI's textual and visual features, and the precise matching between the multi-modal representations. Specifically, we first devise a domain-adaptive image encoder (DIE) to obtain the image embeddings aligned to their gold tags' semantics. Then, in M3PT's text-image fusion module (TIF), the textual and visual representations are fully fused into the POIs' content embeddings for the subsequent matching. In addition, we adopt a contrastive learning strategy to further bridge the gap between the representations of different modalities. To evaluate the tagging models' performance, we have constructed two high-quality POI tagging datasets from the real-world business scenario of Ali Fliggy. Upon the datasets, we conducted the extensive experiments to demonstrate our model's advantage over the baselines of uni-modality and multi-modality, and verify the effectiveness of important components in M3PT, including DIE, TIF and the contrastive learning strategy.Comment: Accepted by KDD 202

Aversive parenting in China: Associations with child physical and relational aggression

This study assessed the combined and differential contributions of Chinese mothers and fathers (in terms of spouse-reported physically coercive and psychologically controlling parenting) to the development of peerreported physical and relational aggression in their preschool-age children (mean age of 5 years). Results of the two-group (boys and girls) latent sum and difference structural equation model showed that combined parenting effects were slightly more prevalent than differential effects in predicting aggression. Furthermore, physical coercion was predictive of aggression in boys whereas psychological control was primarily associated with aggression in girls. Findings extend our understanding of relational aggression and the meaning of aversive parenting, particularly within the Chinese cultural context. © 2006 by the Society for Research in Child Development Inc. All rights reserved

Parenting and peer-group behavior in cultural context

© Cambridge University Press 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2009. Whether specific patterns of parenting are similarly associated with child peer group behavior in diverse cultural contexts has been a fascinating topic of inquiry. From classic anthropological studies dating back to the early twentieth century to the current interest in cross-cultural studies, knowledge concerning the question of universality and cultural variation in parenting linkages to childhood adjustment has expanded at an unprecedented rate (e.g., Harkness & Super, 2002). As the general field of parenting research has uncovered distinctions in parenting styles and practices (e.g., Darling & Steinberg, 1993; Hart, Newell, & Olsen, 2003), these concepts have increasingly been applied to other cultures as well. Furthermore, the study of peer relationships has also increased in complexity. For example, descriptions of social behavior have evolved to represent significant subtypes of childhood aggression (e.g., physical and relational) and peer withdrawal (e.g., reticence, solitary-passive, solitary-active). In this chapter, we highlight cultural commonalities and variations in parenting and certain child peer group behaviors that have emerged from recent studies conducted in a number of cultures around the world. For example, our own collaborative work represents cultures of Adelaide, Australia; Beijing, China; Voronezh, Russia; as well as Provo, Utah, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana (United States). As a whole, these research endeavors uniquely contribute to cross-cultural developmental science. More often than not, a relatively coherent picture regarding parenting and child outcomes is emerging from numerous cultural studies. The structure of this chapter is as follows