Culture shapes how we look: Comparison between Chinese and African university students

Previous cross-cultural studies find that cultures can shape how we look during scene perception, but don’t mention its condition and limited to the East and West. This study recruited Chinese and African students to testify the cultural effects on two phases. In free-viewing phase: Africans fixated more on the focal objects than Chinese, while Chinese payed more attention to the backgrounds than Africans especially on the first fourth and fifth fixations. In recognition phase, there was no cultural difference on perception, but Chinese recognized more objects than Africans. Based on chosen subjects, we conclude that cultural differences exit on scene perception under conditions of no task and more clearly in its later period, but that differences may be hidden in a deeper way (e.g. memory) in task condition

Well-dispersed sulfur anchored on interconnected polypyrrole nanofiber network as high performance cathode for lithium-sulfur batteries

Abstract Preparation of novel sulfur/polypyrrole (S/PPy) composite consisting well-dispersed sulfur particles anchored on interconnected PPy nanowire network was demonstrated. In such hybrid structure, the as-prepared PPy clearly displays a three-dimensionally cross-linked and hierarchical porous structure, which was utilized in the composite cathode as a conductive network trapping soluble polysulfide intermediates and enhancing the overall electrochemical performance of the system. Benefiting from this unique structure, the S/PPy composite demonstrated excellent cycling stability, resulting in a discharge capacity of 931 mAh g−1 at the second cycle and retained about 54% of this value over 100 cycles at 0.1 C. Furthermore, the S/PPy composite cathode exhibits a good rate capability with a discharge capacity of 584 mAh g−1 at 1  C

Experimental study on propagation and attenuation regularity of landslide surge

On the basis of landslide surge model test by adopting generalized simulation of waterways, this paper, for the first time, established a four-dimensional mathematical model between wave height transmissibility rate and the initial wave height, water depth, azimuth angle as well as propagation distance through utilizing the method of tensor space mapping. Using the new model, we proposed an empirical wave field covering all areas of the channel including the attenuation area within the width of a landslide mass, the straight channel attenuation area outside the width of the landslide mass, the curved channel attenuation area and the after-curve attenuation area, which comprehensively reflects the progressive changes of surge wave factors. The transmissibility of wave height and propagation distance are in a bivariate negative exponential distribution, and the wave height gradually reduces and the attenuation also slows down as the propagation distance increases; wave height transmissibility rate, azimuth and propagation distance are in a trivariate negative exponential distribution, the attenuation of the wave height in the straight channel within the width of the landslide mass was the slowest, followed by that of wave in the straight channel outside the width of the landslide mass, and the attenuation of the wave height in the curved channel is the greatest. This empirical wave field was based on test data, scientifically abstracted the general regularity of the propagation and attenuation of landslide surge, which can be applied to similar analyses and forecasts on landslide surge and can scientifically and accurately determine the damage range of landslide surge

Alkali-earth metal bridges formed in biofilm matrices regulate the uptake of fluoroquinolone antibiotics and protect against bacterial apoptosis

Bacterially extracellular biofilms play a critical role in relieving toxicity of fluoroquinolone antibiotic (FQA) pollutants, yet it is unclear whether antibiotic attack may be defused by a bacterial one-two punch strategy associated with metal-reinforced detoxification efficiency. Our findings help to assign functions to specific structural features of biofilms, as they strongly imply a molecularly regulated mechanism by which freely accessed alkali–earth metals in natural waters affect the cellular uptake of FQAs at the water-biofilm interface. Specifically, formation of alkali-earth-metal (Ca2+ or Mg2+) bridge between modeling ciprofloxacin and biofilms of Escherichia coli regulates the trans-biofilm transport rate of FQAs towards cells (135-nm-thick biofilm). As the addition of Ca2+ and Mg2+ (0–3.5 mmol/L, CIP: 1.25 μmol/L), the transport rates were reduced to 52.4% and 63.0%, respectively. Computational chemistry analysis further demonstrated a deprotonated carboxyl in the tryptophan residues of biofilms acted as a major bridge site, of which one side is a metal and the other is a metal girder jointly connected to the carboxyl and carbonyl of a FQA. The bacterial growth rate depends on the bridging energy at anchoring site, which underlines the environmental importance of metal bridge formed in biofilm matrices in bacterially antibiotic resistance

Audio is all in one: speech-driven gesture synthetics using WavLM pre-trained model

The generation of co-speech gestures for digital humans is an emerging area in the field of virtual human creation. Prior research has made progress by using acoustic and semantic information as input and adopting classify method to identify the person's ID and emotion for driving co-speech gesture generation. However, this endeavour still faces significant challenges. These challenges go beyond the intricate interplay between co-speech gestures, speech acoustic, and semantics; they also encompass the complexities associated with personality, emotion, and other obscure but important factors. This paper introduces "diffmotion-v2," a speech-conditional diffusion-based and non-autoregressive transformer-based generative model with WavLM pre-trained model. It can produce individual and stylized full-body co-speech gestures only using raw speech audio, eliminating the need for complex multimodal processing and manually annotated. Firstly, considering that speech audio not only contains acoustic and semantic features but also conveys personality traits, emotions, and more subtle information related to accompanying gestures, we pioneer the adaptation of WavLM, a large-scale pre-trained model, to extract low-level and high-level audio information. Secondly, we introduce an adaptive layer norm architecture in the transformer-based layer to learn the relationship between speech information and accompanying gestures. Extensive subjective evaluation experiments are conducted on the Trinity, ZEGGS, and BEAT datasets to confirm the WavLM and the model's ability to synthesize natural co-speech gestures with various styles.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Micro-Spherical Sulfur/Graphene Oxide Composite via Spray Drying for High Performance Lithium Sulfur Batteries

An efficient, industry-accepted spray drying method was used to synthesize microspherical sulfur/graphene oxide (S/GO) composites as cathode materials within lithium sulfur batteries. The as-designed wrapping of the sulfur-nanoparticles, with wrinkled GO composites, was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The unique morphological design of this material enabled superior discharge capacity and cycling performance, demonstrating a high initial discharge capacity of 1400 mAh g1 at 0.1 C. The discharge capacity remained at 828 mAh g1 after 150 cycles. The superior electrochemical performance indicates that the S/GO composite improves electrical conductivity and alleviates the shuttle effect. This study represents the first time such a facile spray drying method has been adopted for lithium sulfur batteries and used in the fabrication of S/GO composite

Corn stalk-derived activated carbon with a stacking sheet-like structure as sulfur cathode supporter for lithium/sulfur batteries

A novel stacking sheet-like carbon (SSC) has been synthesized by carbonizing the corn stalks and composited with sulfur to prepare a cathode for lithium/sulfur batteries. Scanning electronic microscopy observations showed the formation of irregularly interlaced nanosheet-like structure consisting SSC with uniform sulfur coating on its surface. The SSC nanoflakes in the composite act as nanocurrent collectors, favoring the charge carrier ion transport and electrolyte diffusion. The interlaced SSC nanoflakes irregularly stack together and form a three-dimensional network, which is beneficial for both trapping soluble polysulfide intermediates and rendering the electrical conductivity of the composite electrode..

Replication: Contrastive Learning and Data Augmentation in Traffic Classification Using a Flowpic Input Representation

Over the last years we witnessed a renewed interest toward Traffic Classification (TC) captivated by the rise of Deep Learning (DL). Yet, the vast majority of TC literature lacks code artifacts, performance assessments across datasets and reference comparisons against Machine Learning (ML) methods. Among those works, a recent study from IMC22 [16] is worth of attention since it adopts recent DL methodologies (namely, few-shot learning, self-supervision via contrastive learning and data augmentation) appealing for networking as they enable to learn from a few samples and transfer across datasets. The main result of [16] on the UCDAVIS19, ISCX-VPN and ISCX-Tor datasets is that, with such DL methodologies, 100 input samples are enough to achieve very high accuracy using an input representation called "flowpic" (i.e., a per-flow 2d histograms of the packets size evolution over time). In this paper (i) we reproduce [16] on the same datasets and (ii) we replicate its most salient aspect (the importance of data augmentation) on three additional public datasets (MIRAGE19, MIRAGE22 and UTMOBILENET21). While we confirm most of the original results, we also found a 20% accuracy drop on some of the investigated scenarios due to a data shift in the original dataset that we uncovered. Additionally, our study validates that the data augmentation strategies studied in [16] perform well on other datasets too. In the spirit of reproducibility and replicability we make all artifacts (code and data) available to the research community at https://tcbenchstack.github.io/tcbench/Comment: to appear at ACM Internet Traffic Measurement (IMC) 2023, replication trac

Resistance mechanisms adopted by a Salmonella Typhimurium mutant against bacteriophage

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. Bacteriophages have key roles in regulating bacterial populations in most habitats. A Salmonella Typhimurium mutant (N18) with impaired sensitivity to phage fmb-p1 was obtained and examined, the adsorption efficiency of fmb-p1 to N18 was reduced to 6%, compared to more than 97% for wild type S. Typhimurium CMCC50115. Reduced adsorption was accompanied by a reduction of 90% in the LPS content compared to wild type. Electron microscopy showed phage scattered around N18 with minimal engagement, while the phage were efficiently adsorbed to the wild type with tails oriented towards the bacterial surface. Evidence suggests fmb-p1 can slightly infect N18 and this does not give rise to an increase of phage titer. RT-qPCR data show that several Salmonella genes involved in lipopolysaccharide synthesis and five virulence related genes were down-regulated upon exposure of N18 to phage fmb-p1. In contrast, phage resistance related genes such as the SOS response, restriction-modification (RM), and Cas1 gene were up-regulated in N18. These data suggest that although inefficient adsorption and entry is the primary mechanism of resistance, transcriptional responses to phage exposure indicate that alternative resistance mechanisms against phage infection are also brought to bear, including digestion of phage nucleic acids and activation of the SOS. These findings may help develop strategies for biocontrol of Salmonella where multi-resistant bacteria are encountered or emerge in applications for food production, bioremediation or wastewater treatment