Plant diversity of Southeast Asia-II

The special issue of plant diversity in Southeast Asia will focus on the documentation of new discoveries in SE Asia. There are four global biodiversity hotspots in Southeast Asia. Although there are many plans to protect this rich biodiversity, however, the rich biodiversity in SE Asia is under threat due to economic development and population growth. There is a huge gap between our knowledge and biodiversity in SE Asia. During the last six investigations, many new taxa, including new species, new genera, have been discovered. This special issue will bring the rich but little known biodiversity to the public and protect them

Manual discrimination of force

Optimal design of human-machine interfaces for teleoperators and virtual-environment systems which involve the tactual and kinesthetic modalities requires knowledge of the human's resolving power in these modalities. The resolution of the interface should be appropriately matched to that of the human operator. We report some preliminary results on the ability of the human hand to distinguish small differences in force under a variety of conditions. Experiments were conducted on force discrimination with the thumb pushing an interface that exerts a constant force over the pushing distance and the index finger pressing against a fixed support. The dependence of the sensitivity index d' on force increment can be fit by a straight line through the origin and the just-noticeable difference (JND) in force can thus be described by the inverse of the slope of this line. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) was measured by varying the a priori probabilities of the two alternatives, reference force and reference force plus an increment, in one-interval, two-alternative, forced-choice experiments. When plotted on normal deviate coordinates, the ROC's were roughly straight lines of unit slope, thus supporting the assumption of equal-variance normal distributions and the use of the conventional d' measure. The JND was roughly 6-8 percent for reference force ranging from 2.5 to 10 newtons, pushing distance from 5 to 30 mm, and initial finger-span from 45 to 125 mm. Also, the JND remained the same when the subjects were instructed to change the average speed of pushing from 23 to 153 mm/sec. The pushing was terminated by reaching either a wall or a well, and the JND's were essentially the same in both cases

Whole Grain Food Standard System Construction Status and Development Direction

Existing studies have clearly demonstrated that people eating more whole grains have reduced risks of many chronic metabolic diseases compared to those eating less. In the past 20 years, the whole grain industry has developed so rapidly in major developed countries and regions. In recent years, whole grains have also attracted extensive attention in our country. The research and development efforts of the whole grain standards in China have been strengthened. This paper introduced the progress of the global definition consensus of whole grain and whole grain food, summarized the international development status of whole grain raw materials and whole grain food related standards in many countries and institutions, such as the Working Group of ISO Whole Grain, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Codex Alimentarius Commission, and so on. This paper also reviewed the present situation of definition of the whole grain and whole grain food related standards in China. More than 20 relevant raw materials, food related standards and production technical regulations and the publishment situation of other whole grain standards in China, including national standards and industry standards and local standards and group standards, were summarized, and some whole grain related standards under formulation were also introduced. Finally, the paper puts forward the development direction and suggestions for the construction of whole grain standard system in China, including fully combining with the actual production situation of China’s whole grain food industry, integrating with international standards, and combining standard testing and certification. On the whole, the gradual improvement of the standard system of the whole grain food industry will help guide and regulate the high-quality and healthy development of the whole grain industry in China, and promote the creation of a diversified and healthy grain food ecology, and provide a technical basis for the development of the whole grain industry

Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping for 100-kernel weight of maize (Zea mays L.) under different nitrogen regimes

100-kernel weight (KW) is one of the most important agronomic traits in maize (Zea mays L.), related to yield. To realize its genetic basis, in this study, a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population derived from the cross between Mo17 and Huangzao4 was used for quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping for KW under high and low nitrogen (N) regimes. As a result, five QTLs were identified on chromosomes 3, 4, 7 and 9, of which three were detected under both N environments, while the other two QTLs were respectively detected under high and low N regimes. These QTLs could explain phenotypic variance rom 4.47 to 14.47%. Due to additive effects, the three QTLs from Mo17, including two on chromosome 3 and one on chromosome 4, could increase KW from 0.64 to 1.01 g, while the other two from Huangzao4 on chromosomes 7 and 9 could decrease KW from 0.62 to 1.07 g. These results are beneficial for understanding the genetic basis of KW and developing the markers linked with KW for marker-assisted selection breeding in maize.Key words: Maize (Zea mays L.), 100-kernel weight, quantitative trait locus (QTL), recombinant inbred line (RIL), nitrogen regime

Towards the AlexNet Moment for Homomorphic Encryption: HCNN, theFirst Homomorphic CNN on Encrypted Data with GPUs

Deep Learning as a Service (DLaaS) stands as a promising solution for cloud-based inference applications. In this setting, the cloud has a pre-learned model whereas the user has samples on which she wants to run the model. The biggest concern with DLaaS is user privacy if the input samples are sensitive data. We provide here an efficient privacy-preserving system by employing high-end technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). FHE, with its widely-known feature of computing on encrypted data, empowers a wide range of privacy-concerned applications. This comes at high cost as it requires enormous computing power. In this paper, we show how to accelerate the performance of running CNNs on encrypted data with GPUs. We evaluated two CNNs to classify homomorphically the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Our solution achieved a sufficient security level (> 80 bit) and reasonable classification accuracy (99%) and (77.55%) for MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively. In terms of latency, we could classify an image in 5.16 seconds and 304.43 seconds for MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively. Our system can also classify a batch of images (> 8,000) without extra overhead

1-(4-Methyl­benzo­yl)-3-[5-(4-pyrid­yl)-1,3,4-thia­diazol-2-yl]urea

In the title compound, C16H13N5O2S, the five non-H atoms of the urea linkage adopt a planar configuration owing to the presence of an intra­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond. The maximum deviation from planarity is 0.022 (2) Å. The thia­diazole and pyridine heterocyclic rings are close to being coplanar, with a dihedral angle of 6.7 (2)° between their mean planes. Inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link two neighbouring mol­ecules into centrosymmetric R 2 2(8) dimers. Four C atoms and the attached H atoms of the benzene ring are disordered over two positions of equal occupancy

Gender Gaps in the Measurement of Public Opinion About Homosexuality in Cross-national Surveys: A Question-Wording Experiment

Measures of attitudes towards homosexuality in cross-national studies have received criticism for not being ‘gender-sensitive’. The current study used a split-ballot design allowing for separate analyses of the attitudes towards ‘gay men and lesbian women’, ‘gay men’, and ‘lesbian women’ in a pooled sample of 3,381 participants from Great Britain, Hungary, and Portugal. Analyses controlling for sociodemographics showed that differences in attitudes towards male and female targets were generally small and did not interact with the gender of the rater. In addition, results showed that men’s attitudes towards homosexuality were more strongly related to their gender ideology than women’s attitudes. Implications of these findings for cross-national studies measuring attitudes towards homosexuality are discussed

Impact of Body Mass Index on Prognosis for Breast Cancer Patients

This study investigates the impact of body mass index (BMI) on the prognosis for patients with breast cancer within the context of race (African-American versus Caucasian) and ethnicity (Hispanic versus Non-Hispanic). Overall, this study included 1,368 female breast cancer patients diagnosed between 2007 and 2010 with electronic medical record data accrued from a large Florida hospital network. Non-Hispanic black patients comprised 8.77% of the cohort and Hispanic patients made up 7.56%. Multivariate analysis revealed that breast cancer death rate was increased over 2.6-fold for underweight patients ubiquitously, regardless of race or ethnicity. Patients overweight or obese did not have an increased hazard rate compared to those of normal weight. Importantly, the mechanism for the poorer prognosis for underweight patients needs to be defined. We suggest the use of a low BMI as a high-risk factor for breast-cancer mortality in all racial and ethnic populations