Imaging Neural Activity in the Primary Somatosensory Cortex Using Thy1-GCaMP6s Transgenic Mice

The mammalian brain exhibits marked symmetry across the sagittal plane. However, detailed description of neural dynamics in symmetric brain regions in adult mammalian animals remains elusive. In this study, we describe an experimental procedure for measuring calcium dynamics through dual optical windows above bilateral primary somatosensory corticies (S1) in Thy1-GCaMP6s transgenic mice using 2-photon (2P) microscopy. This method enables recordings and quantifications of neural activity in bilateral mouse brain regions one at a time in the same experiment for a prolonged period in vivo. Key aspects of this method, which can be completed within an hour, include minimally invasive surgery procedures for creating dual optical windows, and the use of 2P imaging. Although we only demonstrate the technique in the S1 area, the method can be applied to other regions of the living brain facilitating the elucidation of structural and functional complexities of brain neural networks

“Reporting or Interpreting?”—A Discoursal Study of Broadcasts on NBA Games in China

From the perspective of empirical discourse analysis, this paper identifies the site broadcasters’ roles and cognitive blending process in NBA (National Basketball Association) broadcasts in China. The authors find that NBA broadcasters chiefly interpret the information they have obtained from sports sites and interviews with the coaches and players, employing various interpreting strategies, such as commentary, amplification, supplementation and restructure. Cognitively, the language that NBA broadcasters applied reveals their cognitive blending process of interpreting techniques, strategies, sports knowledge and attitudes towards the games, of who take up different roles to fulfill different communicating purposes, all of which project various cognitions on NBA games. Despite the fact that one role might make certain linguistic behaviors prevail over the others, especially their interpreting role, NBA site broadcasters coordinate it with other roles properly through which they present different levels of translational and constructional schematicity, thus yielding a coherent and constructional working mode of NBA broadcasting practice in China

Automatically learning topics and difficulty levels of problems in online judge systems

Online Judge (OJ) systems have been widely used in many areas, including programming, mathematical problems solving, and job interviews. Unlike other online learning systems, such as Massive Open Online Course, most OJ systems are designed for self-directed learning without the intervention of teachers. Also, in most OJ systems, problems are simply listed in volumes and there is no clear organization of them by topics or difficulty levels. As such, problems in the same volume are mixed in terms of topics or difficulty levels. By analyzing large-scale users’ learning traces, we observe that there are two major learning modes (or patterns). Users either practice problems in a sequential manner from the same volume regardless of their topics or they attempt problems about the same topic, which may spread across multiple volumes. Our observation is consistent with the findings in classic educational psychology. Based on our observation, we propose a novel two-mode Markov topic model to automatically detect the topics of online problems by jointly characterizing the two learning modes. For further predicting the difficulty level of online problems, we propose a competition-based expertise model using the learned topic information. Extensive experiments on three large OJ datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in three different tasks, including skill topic extraction, expertise competition prediction and problem recommendation

Huge enhancement of electronmechanical responses in compositionally modulated PZT

Monte Carlo simulations based on a first-principles-derived Hamiltonian are conducted to study the properties of PZT alloys compositionally modulated along the [100] pseudocubic direction near the morphotropic phase boundary (MPB). It is shown that compositional modulation causes the polarization to continuously rotate away from the modulation direction, resulting in the unusual triclinic and C-type monoclinic ground states and huge enhancement of electromechanical responses (the peak of piezoelectric coefficient is as high as 30000 pC/N). The orientation dependence of dipole-dipole interaction in modulated structure is revealed as the microscopic mechanism to be responsible for these anomalies.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Analysis of vibration characteristics of rotating parallel flexible manipulator considering joint elastic constraints

The bolt joint is the key component connecting the rigid moving base body and the flexible manipulator. The dynamic characteristics of the flexible manipulator under the elastic constraint of the joint are analyzed, and the action mechanism of the elastic constraint of the bolt joint on the frequency and vibration mode is revealed. Considering the effects of line constraint and torsion constraint, the elastic constraint model of the joint is established. Based on the principle of virtual work, the boundary constraints of the joint end and the free end are established, and the analytical equation of frequency and the expression of vibration mode function are derived. The first three frequencies and vibration mode characteristics of the flexible manipulator under elastic constraints are analyzed numerically. The sensitivity method is used to analyze the effect of linear constraints and torsional constraints on the frequency, and the elastic constraint region is established to characterize the functional relationship between the binding stiffness and the natural frequency. It is found that under elastic constraints, the influence of torsional stiffness of bolt joint is mainly concentrated in the low-order modal frequency, while the linear stiffness has a great influence on each order modal frequency of the manipulator; With the decrease of elastic constraint stiffness, its influence on modal shapes gradually increases, especially on high-order modal shapes. The research results prove the internal mechanism of the influence of elastic constraints on vibration characteristics, which provide a theoretical basis for improving the dynamic characteristics of flexible manipulator

The evolution of the day-of-the-week effect and the implications in the crude oil market

The movement of prices in the crude oil market are important to the international economy and financial asset returns. Day-of- the-week effect is a great challenge to the market's effectiveness. We examine the evolution of day-of-the-week and investigate its implications based on the West Texas Intermediate crude oil return from 14 May 2007 to 14 May 2021. We have obtained convincing findings that there is abnormal positive return on Wednesdays because the inventory shock schedule. Abnormal negative return on Mondays disappears sometimes, because bad sentiment is not the only decisive factor, as it is also determined by reactions to good sentiment. The results provide implication for the day-of-the-week effect and new evidence that crude oil market's efficiency changes over time. Policy makers, investors and producers can benefit from this

ELSI: A Unified Software Interface for Kohn-Sham Electronic Structure Solvers

Solving the electronic structure from a generalized or standard eigenproblem is often the bottleneck in large scale calculations based on Kohn-Sham density-functional theory. This problem must be addressed by essentially all current electronic structure codes, based on similar matrix expressions, and by high-performance computation. We here present a unified software interface, ELSI, to access different strategies that address the Kohn-Sham eigenvalue problem. Currently supported algorithms include the dense generalized eigensolver library ELPA, the orbital minimization method implemented in libOMM, and the pole expansion and selected inversion (PEXSI) approach with lower computational complexity for semilocal density functionals. The ELSI interface aims to simplify the implementation and optimal use of the different strategies, by offering (a) a unified software framework designed for the electronic structure solvers in Kohn-Sham density-functional theory; (b) reasonable default parameters for a chosen solver; (c) automatic conversion between input and internal working matrix formats, and in the future (d) recommendation of the optimal solver depending on the specific problem. Comparative benchmarks are shown for system sizes up to 11,520 atoms (172,800 basis functions) on distributed memory supercomputing architectures.Comment: 55 pages, 14 figures, 2 table

Neo-sex chromosomes in the black muntjac recapitulate incipient evolution of mammalian sex chromosomes

The nascent neo-sex chromosomes of black muntjacs show that regulatory mutations could accelerate the degeneration of the Y chromosome and contribute to the further evolution of dosage compensation