165 research outputs found
Virtue Ethics, Confucian Tradition and the General Predicament of Modern Society
This paper discusses the nature of Confucian ethics and its tense relations with modernity through analysing the arguments contained in Chen Laiâs éæ„ Confucian Theory of Virtue. The author points out that Confucian ethical theory is a kind of virtue ethics and that the distinction between public virtue and private virtue in modern moral projects necessarily leads to the elimination of the latter by the former. This is a general predicament of virtue ethics faced by modern societies
SDFE-LV: A Large-Scale, Multi-Source, and Unconstrained Database for Spotting Dynamic Facial Expressions in Long Videos
In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-source, and unconstrained
database called SDFE-LV for spotting the onset and offset frames of a complete
dynamic facial expression from long videos, which is known as the topic of
dynamic facial expression spotting (DFES) and a vital prior step for lots of
facial expression analysis tasks. Specifically, SDFE-LV consists of 1,191 long
videos, each of which contains one or more complete dynamic facial expressions.
Moreover, each complete dynamic facial expression in its corresponding long
video was independently labeled for five times by 10 well-trained annotators.
To the best of our knowledge, SDFE-LV is the first unconstrained large-scale
database for the DFES task whose long videos are collected from multiple
real-world/closely real-world media sources, e.g., TV interviews,
documentaries, movies, and we-media short videos. Therefore, DFES tasks on
SDFE-LV database will encounter numerous difficulties in practice such as head
posture changes, occlusions, and illumination. We also provided a comprehensive
benchmark evaluation from different angles by using lots of recent
state-of-the-art deep spotting methods and hence researchers interested in DFES
can quickly and easily get started. Finally, with the deep discussions on the
experimental evaluation results, we attempt to point out several meaningful
directions to deal with DFES tasks and hope that DFES can be better advanced in
the future. In addition, SDFE-LV will be freely released for academic use only
as soon as possible
Pathologically Activated Neuroprotection via Uncompetitive Blockade of \u3cem\u3eN\u3c/em\u3e-Methyl-d-aspartate Receptors with Fast Off-rate by Novel Multifunctional Dimer Bis(propyl)-cognitin
Uncompetitive N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists with fast off-rate (UFO) may represent promising drug candidates for various neurodegenerative disorders. In this study, we report that bis(propyl)-cognitin, a novel dimeric acetylcholinesterase inhibitor and Îł-aminobutyric acid subtype A receptor antagonist, is such an antagonist of NMDA receptors. In cultured rat hippocampal neurons, we demonstrated that bis(propyl)-cognitin voltage-dependently, selectively, and moderately inhibited NMDA-activated currents. The inhibitory effects of bis(propyl)-cognitin increased with the rise in NMDA and glycine concentrations. Kinetics analysis showed that the inhibition was of fast onset and offset with an off-rate time constant of 1.9 s. Molecular docking simulations showed moderate hydrophobic interaction between bis(propyl)-cognitin and the MK-801 binding region in the ion channel pore of the NMDA receptor. Bis(propyl)-cognitin was further found to compete with [3H]MK-801 with a Ki value of 0.27 ÎŒm, and the mutation of NR1(N616R) significantly reduced its inhibitory potency. Under glutamate-mediated pathological conditions, bis(propyl)-cognitin, in contrast to bis(heptyl)-cognitin, prevented excitotoxicity with increasing effectiveness against escalating levels of glutamate and much more effectively protected against middle cerebral artery occlusion-induced brain damage than did memantine. More interestingly, under NMDA receptor-mediated physiological conditions, bis(propyl)-cognitin enhanced long-term potentiation in hippocampal slices, whereas MK-801 reduced and memantine did not alter this process. These results suggest that bis(propyl)-cognitin is a UFO antagonist of NMDA receptors with moderate affinity, which may provide a pathologically activated therapy for various neurodegenerative disorders associated with NMDA receptor dysregulation
Mesoporous HighâSurfaceâArea CopperâTin MixedâOxide Nanorods: Remarkable for Carbon Monoxide Oxidation
Mesoporous, highâsurfaceâarea CuâSn mixedâoxide nanorods were fabricated for the first time by nanocasting with the use of mesoporous KITâ6 silica as the hard template. The CuâSn nanorods are significantly more active than 1â% Pd/SnO2 for the oxidation of CO and possesses longâterm durability and potent water resistance; they thus have the potential to replace noble metal catalysts for emissionâcontrol processes.In rod we trust: Mesoporous, highâsurfaceâarea CuâSn nanorods are successfully fabricated for the first time by nanocasting with the use of KITâ6 silica as the hard template; these nanomaterials are significantly more active than 1â% Pd/SnO2 for the oxidation of CO, and furthermore, they have the potential to replace noble metal catalysts for emission control.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137536/1/cctc201600221.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137536/2/cctc201600221-sup-0001-misc_information.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137536/3/cctc201600221_am.pd
HiHGNN: Accelerating HGNNs through Parallelism and Data Reusability Exploitation
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have emerged as powerful
algorithms for processing heterogeneous graphs (HetGs), widely used in many
critical fields. To capture both structural and semantic information in HetGs,
HGNNs first aggregate the neighboring feature vectors for each vertex in each
semantic graph and then fuse the aggregated results across all semantic graphs
for each vertex. Unfortunately, existing graph neural network accelerators are
ill-suited to accelerate HGNNs. This is because they fail to efficiently tackle
the specific execution patterns and exploit the high-degree parallelism as well
as data reusability inside and across the processing of semantic graphs in
HGNNs.
In this work, we first quantitatively characterize a set of representative
HGNN models on GPU to disclose the execution bound of each stage,
inter-semantic-graph parallelism, and inter-semantic-graph data reusability in
HGNNs. Guided by our findings, we propose a high-performance HGNN accelerator,
HiHGNN, to alleviate the execution bound and exploit the newfound parallelism
and data reusability in HGNNs. Specifically, we first propose a bound-aware
stage-fusion methodology that tailors to HGNN acceleration, to fuse and
pipeline the execution stages being aware of their execution bounds. Second, we
design an independency-aware parallel execution design to exploit the
inter-semantic-graph parallelism. Finally, we present a similarity-aware
execution scheduling to exploit the inter-semantic-graph data reusability.
Compared to the state-of-the-art software framework running on NVIDIA GPU T4
and GPU A100, HiHGNN respectively achieves an average 41.5 and
8.6 speedup as well as 106 and 73 energy efficiency
with quarter the memory bandwidth of GPU A100
A genetic variation map for chicken with 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms
We describe a genetic variation map for the chicken genome containing 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms ( SNPs). This map is based on a comparison of the sequences of three domestic chicken breeds ( a broiler, a layer and a Chinese silkie) with that of their wild ancestor, red jungle fowl. Subsequent experiments indicate that at least 90% of the variant sites are true SNPs, and at least 70% are common SNPs that segregate in many domestic breeds. Mean nucleotide diversity is about five SNPs per kilobase for almost every possible comparison between red jungle fowl and domestic lines, between two different domestic lines, and within domestic lines - in contrast to the notion that domestic animals are highly inbred relative to their wild ancestors. In fact, most of the SNPs originated before domestication, and there is little evidence of selective sweeps for adaptive alleles on length scales greater than 100 kilobases
Panorama Phylogenetic Diversity and Distribution of Type A Influenza Virus
Type A influenza virus is one of important pathogens of various animals, including humans, pigs, horses, marine mammals and birds. Currently, the viral type has been classified into 16 hemagglutinin and 9 neuraminidase subtypes, but the phylogenetic diversity and distribution within the viral type largely remain unclear from the whole view.The panorama phylogenetic trees of influenza A viruses were calculated with representative sequences selected from approximately 23000 candidates available in GenBank using web servers in NCBI and the software MEGA 4.0. Lineages and sublineages were classified according to genetic distances, topology of the phylogenetic trees and distributions of the viruses in hosts, regions and time.Here, two panorama phylogenetic trees of type A influenza virus covering all the 16 hemagglutinin subtypes and 9 neuraminidase subtypes, respectively, were generated. The trees provided us whole views and some novel information to recognize influenza A viruses including that some subtypes of avian influenza viruses are more complicated than Eurasian and North American lineages as we thought in the past. They also provide us a framework to generalize the history and explore the future of the viral circulation and evolution in different kinds of hosts. In addition, a simple and comprehensive nomenclature system for the dozens of lineages and sublineages identified within the viral type was proposed, which if universally accepted, will facilitate communications on the viral evolution, ecology and epidemiology
- âŠ