Santorini

This look was inspired by the city of Santorini in Greece. The buildings in this city are very close together, almost like overlapping, have rectangular shapes and are painted in happy and bright colors. Also, the ocean proximity next to these buildings, the blue color of the water, fading from darker to lighter, inspired me to choose the color blocking technique. The challenge was to create a structured over garment inspired by such a destination, rather than a casual look. I decided to use color blocking with square shapes, so the added challenge was to sew perfect interior corners on all the pieces. Moreover, the innovative 3-D pocket on the front of the jacket was created based on inseam concealed pocket construction and it required a few tries on a muslin. Working with white satin squares required extra interfacing to hide the pressed open seam allowances from the neighboring colored squares. This project benefited my construction skills and can be a viable ready to wear product design

Influence of Cr content on the microstructure and mechanical properties of CrxFeNiCu high entropy alloys

© 2020 Chinese Materials Research Society The effect of Cr content on the microstructure and mechanical properties of CrxFeNiCu high entropy alloys (HEAs) was firstly studied by first-principles calculations. The calculated results show that the hardness of the alloys increased with the expense of its plasticity decrease, if the content of Cr in the alloy increased. In order to verify the calculated results, CrxFeNiCu (x = 0.8, 1, 1.5 and 2) high entropy alloys were synthesized by vacuum induction melting in the present study. The results show that as the value of x increased from 0.8 to 2, the crystal structure changed from single phase face centered cubic (FCC) phase to a mixture of FCC and body centered cubic (BCC) phases. For the single phase FCC (x = 0.8) structure, both the tensile strength and hardness values were low, which were 491.6 MPa and 322.2 HV respectively, however, the plasticity was high, reaching 33.2%. With the formation and growth of BCC phase (x = 2) the tensile strength and hardness of the alloy were significantly improved, which were 872.6 MPa and 808 HV, respectively

Influence of Cr content on the microstructure and mechanical properties of CrxFeNiCu high entropy alloys

© 2020 Chinese Materials Research Society The effect of Cr content on the microstructure and mechanical properties of CrxFeNiCu high entropy alloys (HEAs) was firstly studied by first-principles calculations. The calculated results show that the hardness of the alloys increased with the expense of its plasticity decrease, if the content of Cr in the alloy increased. In order to verify the calculated results, CrxFeNiCu (x = 0.8, 1, 1.5 and 2) high entropy alloys were synthesized by vacuum induction melting in the present study. The results show that as the value of x increased from 0.8 to 2, the crystal structure changed from single phase face centered cubic (FCC) phase to a mixture of FCC and body centered cubic (BCC) phases. For the single phase FCC (x = 0.8) structure, both the tensile strength and hardness values were low, which were 491.6 MPa and 322.2 HV respectively, however, the plasticity was high, reaching 33.2%. With the formation and growth of BCC phase (x = 2) the tensile strength and hardness of the alloy were significantly improved, which were 872.6 MPa and 808 HV, respectively

Optimal Stirring Strategies for Passive Scalars in a Domain with a General Shape and No-Flux Boundary Condition

Multiscale metrics such as negative Sobolev norms are effective for quantifying the degree of mixedness of a passive scalar field advected by an incompressible flow in the absence of diffusion. In this paper we introduce a mix norm that is motivated by Sobolev norm $H^{-1}$ for a general domain with a no-flux boundary. We then derive an explicit expression for the optimal flow that maximizes the instantaneous decay rate of the mix norm under fixed energy and enstrophy constraints. Numerical simulations indicate that the mix norm decays exponentially or faster for various initial conditions and geometries and the rate is closely related to the smallest non-zero eigenvalue of the Laplace operator. These results generalize previous findings restricted for a periodic domain for its analytical and numerical simplicity. Additionally, we observe that periodic boundaries tend to induce a faster decay in mix norm compared to no-flux conditions under the fixed energy constraint, while the comparison is reversed for the fixed enstrophy constraint. In the special case of even initial distributions, two types of boundary conditions yield the same optimal flow and mix norm decay

Effect of Si and C additions on the reaction mechanism and mechanical properties of FeCrNiCu high entropy alloy

FeCrNiCu based high entropy alloy matrix composites were fabricated with addition of Si and C by vacuum electromagnetic induction melting. The primary goal of this research was to analyze the reaction mechanism, microstructure, mechanical properties at room temperature and strengthening mechanism of the composites with addition of Si and C. The reaction mechanism of powders containing (Si, Ni and C) was analyzed, only one reaction occurred (i.e., Si + C → SiC) and its activation energy is 1302.8 kJ/mol. The new composites consist of a face centered cubic (FCC) structured matrix reinforced by submicron sized SiC particles. The addition of Si and C enhances the hardness from 351.4 HV to 626.4 HV and the tensile strength from 565.5 MPa to 846.0 MPa, accompanied by a slight decrease in the plasticity. The main strengthening mechanisms of SiC/FeCrNiCu composites were discussed based on dislocation strengthening, load bearing effect, Orowan mechanism and solid solution hardening, whose contributions to the tensile strength increase are 58.6%, 6.3%, 14.3% and 20.8%, respectively

Effect of Si and C additions on the reaction mechanism and mechanical properties of FeCrNiCu high entropy alloy

FeCrNiCu based high entropy alloy matrix composites were fabricated with addition of Si and C by vacuum electromagnetic induction melting. The primary goal of this research was to analyze the reaction mechanism, microstructure, mechanical properties at room temperature and strengthening mechanism of the composites with addition of Si and C. The reaction mechanism of powders containing (Si, Ni and C) was analyzed, only one reaction occurred (i.e., Si + C → SiC) and its activation energy is 1302.8 kJ/mol. The new composites consist of a face centered cubic (FCC) structured matrix reinforced by submicron sized SiC particles. The addition of Si and C enhances the hardness from 351.4 HV to 626.4 HV and the tensile strength from 565.5 MPa to 846.0 MPa, accompanied by a slight decrease in the plasticity. The main strengthening mechanisms of SiC/FeCrNiCu composites were discussed based on dislocation strengthening, load bearing effect, Orowan mechanism and solid solution hardening, whose contributions to the tensile strength increase are 58.6%, 6.3%, 14.3% and 20.8%, respectively

Autocrine regulation of root hair size by the RALF-FERONIA-RSL4 signaling pathway

Root hair (RH) size has vital physiological implications, since it influences the surface area of the root and thus the ability of the plant to absorb water and nutrients from the soil. Arabidopsis ROOT HAIR DEFECTIVE 6-LIKE 4 (RSL4), a bHLH transcription factor, controls the expression of hundreds of RH genes, and RSL4 expression itself can trigger ectopic RH growth. Recent studies reveal an autocrine mechanism governing plant RH cell growth in which the extracellular peptide RAPID ALKALINIZATION FACTOR 1 (RALF1) and receptor FERONIA (FER) act as a central hub between the cell surface and downstream signaling events. RALF1-FER promotes the phosphorylation of eIF4E1. Then, phosphorylated eIF4E1 further regulates the synthesis of RH proteins, including RSL4, to promote RH growth. High levels of RSL4 exert a negative feedback on RALF1 expression via directly binding to the RALF1 gene promoter, slowing RH growth and determining final RH cell size.Fil: Zhu, Sirui. Hunan University; ChinaFil: Martinez Pacheco, Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Estevez, Jose Manuel. Universidad Andrés Bello; Chile. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Yu, Feng. State Key Laboratory Of Hybrid Rice; China. Hunan University; Chin

Learning non-Markovian Decision-Making from State-only Sequences

Conventional imitation learning assumes access to the actions of demonstrators, but these motor signals are often non-observable in naturalistic settings. Additionally, sequential decision-making behaviors in these settings can deviate from the assumptions of a standard Markov Decision Process (MDP). To address these challenges, we explore deep generative modeling of state-only sequences with non-Markov Decision Process (nMDP), where the policy is an energy-based prior in the latent space of the state transition generator. We develop maximum likelihood estimation to achieve model-based imitation, which involves short-run MCMC sampling from the prior and importance sampling for the posterior. The learned model enables \textit{decision-making as inference}: model-free policy execution is equivalent to prior sampling, model-based planning is posterior sampling initialized from the policy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in a prototypical path planning task with non-Markovian constraints and show that the learned model exhibits strong performances in challenging domains from the MuJoCo suite

Controllable Multi-Objective Re-ranking with Policy Hypernetworks

Multi-stage ranking pipelines have become widely used strategies in modern recommender systems, where the final stage aims to return a ranked list of items that balances a number of requirements such as user preference, diversity, novelty etc. Linear scalarization is arguably the most widely used technique to merge multiple requirements into one optimization objective, by summing up the requirements with certain preference weights. Existing final-stage ranking methods often adopt a static model where the preference weights are determined during offline training and kept unchanged during online serving. Whenever a modification of the preference weights is needed, the model has to be re-trained, which is time and resources inefficient. Meanwhile, the most appropriate weights may vary greatly for different groups of targeting users or at different time periods (e.g., during holiday promotions). In this paper, we propose a framework called controllable multi-objective re-ranking (CMR) which incorporates a hypernetwork to generate parameters for a re-ranking model according to different preference weights. In this way, CMR is enabled to adapt the preference weights according to the environment changes in an online manner, without retraining the models. Moreover, we classify practical business-oriented tasks into four main categories and seamlessly incorporate them in a new proposed re-ranking model based on an Actor-Evaluator framework, which serves as a reliable real-world testbed for CMR. Offline experiments based on the dataset collected from Taobao App showed that CMR improved several popular re-ranking models by using them as underlying models. Online A/B tests also demonstrated the effectiveness and trustworthiness of CMR

Mutation analysis of the WNT4 gene in Han Chinese women with premature ovarian failure

BACKGROUND: The WNT4 gene plays an important role in female sex determination and differentiation. It also contributes to maintaining of the ovaries and the survival of follicles. METHODS: We sequenced the coding region and splice sites of WNT4 in 145 Han Chinese women with premature ovarian failure (POF) and 200 healthy controls. RESULTS: Only one novel variation, in Exon 2 (195C > T), was detected among the women with POF. However, this synonymous variation did not result in a change in amino acid sequence (65 Asp > Asp). No further variants were found in any of the samples. CONCLUSION: Although we cannot provide any evidence that it is a possible disease-causing gene, this study is the first attempt to investigate the possible role of WNT4 in Han Chinese women with POF