226 research outputs found
Genesis
Genesis is a feature-length science fiction/fantasy screenplay written for partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA degree in Imaging Arts/Film. The script tells the story of two parentless children and their rescuer as they journey across a barren landscape in a world disintegrating before an impending catastrophic event. Their goal is to reach a generation ship called Genesis designed to save only a portion of humankind. Along the way they encounter rebels and misfits who threaten and assist the three along their way. This submission includes: a thesis report which contains an analysis of the conception and writing process; the complete third draft script; the original proposal, and various early story-development documents
GW25-e0737 The influence of depressive symptoms on plasma levels of soluble ST2, NT-pro BNP and ghrelin in patients with systolic heart failure
Analysis of two pheromone-responsive conjugative multiresistance plasmids carrying the novel mobile optrA locus from Enterococcus faecalis
Background: The acquired optrA gene, which encodes a ribosomal protection protein of the ABC-F family, can confer cross-resistance to linezolid and florfenicol, posing a serious therapeutic challenge to both human and veterinary medicine.
Purpose: The objective of this study was to investigate the two Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis) plasmids for their fine structure, their transferability and the presence of mobile antimicrobial resistance loci.
Methods: To elucidate their fine structure, the two plasmids were completely sequenced and the sequences analysed. Besides conjugation experiments, inverse PCR assays were conducted to see whether minicircles are produced from the mobile antimicrobial resistance loci.
Results: Two pheromone-responsive conjugative optrA-carrying plasmids from E. faecalis, pE211 and pE508 were identified, which can transfer with frequencies of 2.6 ×10−2 and 3.7 ×10−2 (transconjugant per donor), respectively. In both plasmids, optrA was located on the novel mobile optrA locus with different sizes (12,834 bp in pE211 and 7,561 bp in pE508, respectively), flanked by two copies of IS1216 genes in the same orientation. Inverse PCR revealed that circular forms can be generated, consisting of optrA and one copy of IS1216, indicating they are all active. The 77,562 bp plasmid pE211 also carried Tn558 and a mobile bcrABDR locus, and the 84,468 bp plasmid pE508 also harbored the genes fexA, tet(L), tet(O/W/32/O) and a mobile aac(A)-aph(D) locus.
Conclusion: The presence of mobile genetic elements in these plasmids renders them flexible and these elements will aid to the persistence and dissemination of these plasmids among enterococci and potentially also other gram-positive bacteria
Research on Trust Propagation Models in Reputation Management Systems
Feedback based reputation systems continue to gain popularity in eCommerce and social media systems today and reputation management in large social networks needs to manage cold start and sparseness in terms of feedback. Trust propagation has been widely recognized as an effective mechanism to handle these problems. In this paper we study the characterization of trust propagation models in the context of attack resilience. We characterize trust propagation models along three dimensions: (i) uniform propagation and conditional propagation, (ii) jump strategies for breaking unwanted cliques, and (iii) decay factors for differentiating recent trust history from remote past history. We formally and experimentally show that feedback similarity is a critical measure for countering colluding attacks in reputation systems. Without feedback similarity guided control, trust propagations are vulnerable to different types of colluding attacks
Rank-Aware Negative Training for Semi-Supervised Text Classification
Semi-supervised text classification-based paradigms (SSTC) typically employ
the spirit of self-training. The key idea is to train a deep classifier on
limited labeled texts and then iteratively predict the unlabeled texts as their
pseudo-labels for further training. However, the performance is largely
affected by the accuracy of pseudo-labels, which may not be significant in
real-world scenarios. This paper presents a Rank-aware Negative Training (RNT)
framework to address SSTC in learning with noisy label manner. To alleviate the
noisy information, we adapt a reasoning with uncertainty-based approach to rank
the unlabeled texts based on the evidential support received from the labeled
texts. Moreover, we propose the use of negative training to train RNT based on
the concept that ``the input instance does not belong to the complementary
label''. A complementary label is randomly selected from all labels except the
label on-target. Intuitively, the probability of a true label serving as a
complementary label is low and thus provides less noisy information during the
training, resulting in better performance on the test data. Finally, we
evaluate the proposed solution on various text classification benchmark
datasets. Our extensive experiments show that it consistently overcomes the
state-of-the-art alternatives in most scenarios and achieves competitive
performance in the others. The code of RNT is publicly available
at:https://github.com/amurtadha/RNT.Comment: TACL 202
Habitat Elevation Shapes Microbial Community Composition and Alter the Metabolic Functions in Wild Sable (Martes zibellina) Guts
In recent decades, wild sable (Carnivora Mustelidae Martes zibellina) habitats, which are often natural forests, have been squeezed by anthropogenic disturbances such as clear-cutting, tilling and grazing. Sables tend to live in sloped areas with relatively harsh conditions. Here, we determine effects of environmental factors on wild sable gut microbial communities between high and low altitude habitats using Illumina Miseq sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. Our results showed that despite wild sable gut microbial community diversity being resilient to many environmental factors, community composition was sensitive to altitude. Wild sable gut microbial communities were dominated by Firmicutes (relative abundance 38.23%), followed by Actinobacteria (30.29%), and Proteobacteria (28.15%). Altitude was negatively correlated with the abundance of Firmicutes, suggesting sable likely consume more vegetarian food in lower habitats where plant diversity, temperature and vegetation coverage were greater. In addition, our functional genes prediction and qPCR results demonstrated that energy/fat processing microorganisms and functional genes are enriched with increasing altitude, which likely enhanced metabolic functions and supported wild sables to survive in elevated habitats. Overall, our results improve the knowledge of the ecological impact of habitat change, providing insights into wild animal protection at the mountain area with hash climate conditions
Observation of Many-body Dynamical Delocalization in a Kicked Ultracold Gas
Contrary to a driven classical system that exhibits chaos phenomena and
diffusive energy growth, a driven quantum system can exhibit dynamical
localization that features energy saturation. However, the evolution of the
dynamically localized state in the presence of many-body interactions has long
remained an open question. Here we experimentally study an interacting 1D
ultracold gas periodically kicked by a pulsed optical lattice, and observe the
interaction-driven emergence of dynamical delocalization and many-body quantum
chaos. The observed dynamics feature a sub-diffusive energy growth manifest
over a broad parameter range of interaction and kick strengths, and shed light
on an area where theoretical approaches are extremely challenging.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures including supplementary material
Habitat Elevation Shapes Microbial Community Composition and Alter the Metabolic Functions in Wild Sable (Martes zibellina) Guts
In recent decades, wild sable (Carnivora Mustelidae Martes zibellina) habitats, which are often natural forests, have been squeezed by anthropogenic disturbances such as clear-cutting, tilling and grazing. Sables tend to live in sloped areas with relatively harsh conditions. Here, we determine effects of environmental factors on wild sable gut microbial communities between high and low altitude habitats using Illumina Miseq sequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA genes. Our results showed that despite wild sable gut microbial community diversity being resilient to many environmental factors, community composition was sensitive to altitude. Wild sable gut microbial communities were dominated by Firmicutes (relative abundance 38.23%), followed by Actinobacteria (30.29%), and Proteobacteria (28.15%). Altitude was negatively correlated with the abundance of Firmicutes, suggesting sable likely consume more vegetarian food in lower habitats where plant diversity, temperature and vegetation coverage were greater. In addition, our functional genes prediction and qPCR results demonstrated that energy/fat processing microorganisms and functional genes are enriched with increasing altitude, which likely enhanced metabolic functions and supported wild sables to survive in elevated habitats. Overall, our results improve the knowledge of the ecological impact of habitat change, providing insights into wild animal protection at the mountain area with hash climate conditions
RF Characterization of Self-Interference Cancellation Using Phase Modulation and Optical SideBand Filtering
Full-Duplex scheme transmitting and receiving signals simultaneously in the same frequency band can significantly improve the throughput and the spectrum efficiency, and is considered as a candidate technology for the fifth generation (5G) wireless communication. However, the high power transmitted signal will interfere with the in-band weak received signal, which is called as RF self-interference. It cannot be simply removed by a notch filter or a narrow bandpass filter because the same frequency band is used for both transmitter and receiver. An optical approach to implement RF self-interference cancellation is proposed. Based on the inherent out-of-phase property between the left and right sidebands of phase-modulated signal and optical sideband filtering, the RF self-interference cancellation is achieved by tuning the delay time and amplitude in the optical domain. The cancellation depth of the system was measured for different frequencies and bandwidths. The cancellation performance affected by the time delay deviation, the amplitude deviation and phase response is analyzed according to experimental results. It gives the direction for the improvement of system performance. Finally, the full-duplex communication by using the optical SIC approach was also investigated. Signal of interest is recovered and the constellation diagram was also shown
Evidence for a Many-Body Anderson Metal-Insulator Transition using Kicked Quantum Gases
Understanding the interplay of interactions and disorder in quantum transport
poses long-standing fundamental challenges for theory and experiment. Despite
remarkable advances using ultracold atomic platforms combining atomic
interactions with spatially disordered lattices, many-body effects on quantum
transport phenomena in high-dimensional disordered systems, such as the
three-dimensional (d = 3) Anderson metal-insulator transition (MIT), have
largely remained unexplored. Here we utilize a momentum space lattice platform
using quasi-periodically kicked ultracold atomic gases as a quantum simulator
to experimentally investigate the role of many-body interactions in the d = 3
Anderson MIT. We observe interaction-driven sub-diffusive delocalization and
find a divergence of the delocalization onset time as kick strength approaches
the many-body phase boundary. By modifying the kick quasi-periodicity, we
demonstrate interaction-driven sub-diffusion in d = 2 and d = 4. Our numerical
simulations using a mean-field treatment exhibit an interaction-induced shift
of the d = 3 transition boundary and many-body delocalization dynamics, that
are both in qualitative agreement with experimental observations. However,
there are significant quantitative deviations between experiment and mean-field
theory which increase with higher interaction strengths, calling for further
study of the underlying many-body physics.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, including supplementary material
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