Post-Gated Era: Towards Integrated Urban Communities in China

Gated communities, which typically refer to residential compounds that have strict boundaries with entrances guarded by securities and other technology appliances for surveillance, are the most common developments in Chinese cities over the past few decades. These enclosures of isolated city blocks have caused heated discussion since The CPC (Central Committee and State Council) published a guildline in 2016 to prohibit the construction of Gated communities in Chinese cities. For unique historical and social-cultural reasons, “Gated” has been deeply embedded in Chinese traditional dwelling ideology for a long time, and it is still widely accepted by the vast majority as a symbol of security as well as proprietorship, driven by the real estate market to date. However, contemporary China is now entering a more complex phase of privatization, and the previous living pattern is hardly meeting the needs of different hierarchies and is becoming one of the causal factors triggering a series of urban issues in people’s ever-changing lives, such as traffic, the environment, and social well-being. Practices towards an integrated urban community are starting to appear by following western patterns, but merely copying these patterns will very easily lead to contextual failures. This paper will discuss a new framework for designing a future integrated urban community in cities of China and provide a design proposal for an integrated community based on a site in Beijing. By developing the prototype, this paper will attempt to establish the tone for sustainable community practice in a bigger realm, in particular, the concern of social sustainability and resiliency. Several outstanding urban projects are taken as precedents, e.g., POTSDAMER PLATZ, LINKED HYBRID, BARBICAN center, Coop Housing at River Spreefeld, which are evaluated mainly from the perspectives of their design strategy and implementation. The final design proposal aims to advocate physical interaction in a walkable, bikeable community without eliminating the sense of security, and to enhance people\u27s sense of community

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

Probing the Diffuse Lyman-alpha Emission on Cosmological Scales: Ly{\alpha} Emission Intensity Mapping Using the Complete SDSS-IV eBOSS Survey

Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 16, we have detected the large-scale structure of Ly$\alpha$ emission in the Universe at redshifts $z = 2$--3.5 by cross-correlating quasar positions and Ly$\alpha$ emission imprinted in the residual spectra of luminous red galaxies. We apply an analytical model to fit the corresponding Ly$\alpha$ surface brightness profile and multipoles of the redshift-space quasar-Ly$\alpha$ emission cross-correlation function. The model suggests an average cosmic Ly$\alpha$ luminosity density of ${6.6_{-3.1}^{+3.3}}\times 10^{40} {\rm erg\, s^{-1} cMpc^{-3}}$, a $\sim 2\sigma$ detection with a median value about 8--9 times those estimated from deep narrowband surveys of Ly$\alpha$ emitters at similar redshifts. Although the low signal-to-noise ratio prevents us from a significant detection of the Ly$\alpha$ forest-Ly$\alpha$ emission cross-correlation, the measurement is consistent with the prediction of our best-fit model from quasar-Ly$\alpha$ emission cross-correlation within current uncertainties. We rule out the scenario that these Ly$\alpha$ photons mainly originate from quasars. We find that Ly$\alpha$ emission from star-forming galaxies, including contributions from that concentrated around the galaxy centers and that in the diffuse Ly$\alpha$ emitting halos, is able to explain the bulk of the the Ly$\alpha$ luminosity density inferred from our measurements. Ongoing and future surveys can further improve the measurements and advance our understanding of the cosmic Ly$\alpha$ emission field.Comment: Accepted for Publication in ApJS; 21 pages, 15 figures, 2 table

DI-Net : Decomposed Implicit Garment Transfer Network for Digital Clothed 3D Human

3D virtual try-on enjoys many potential applications and hence has attracted wide attention. However, it remains a challenging task that has not been adequately solved. Existing 2D virtual try-on methods cannot be directly extended to 3D since they lack the ability to perceive the depth of each pixel. Besides, 3D virtual try-on approaches are mostly built on the fixed topological structure and with heavy computation. To deal with these problems, we propose a Decomposed Implicit garment transfer network (DI-Net), which can effortlessly reconstruct a 3D human mesh with the newly try-on result and preserve the texture from an arbitrary perspective. Specifically, DI-Net consists of two modules: 1) A complementary warping module that warps the reference image to have the same pose as the source image through dense correspondence learning and sparse flow learning; 2) A geometry-aware decomposed transfer module that decomposes the garment transfer into image layout based transfer and texture based transfer, achieving surface and texture reconstruction by constructing pixel-aligned implicit functions. Experimental results show the effectiveness and superiority of our method in the 3D virtual try-on task, which can yield more high-quality results over other existing methods

PO-206 Effects of chemerin/CMKLR1 on aerobic exercise-induced improvement of glycolipid metabolism in atherosclerosis rats: There is no full text article associated whit this abstract

Objective As an adipokine and inflammatory cytokines, chemerin plays an vital role in the occurrence and severity of obesity and its related disease such as atherosclerosis (AS), type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease, among which the regulation of chemerin on glycolipid metabolism is of great important. Chemerin exerts its main biological functions through binding to its receptor: G protein-coupled receptor chemokine-like receptor (CMKLR1). Chemerin/CMKLR1 has become potential targets for diabetes treatment. For AS, the serum level of chemerin is also related to the disorders of glycolipid metabolism as well as the size and fibrous cap maturity of AS plaques. Exercise decreased the serum level of chemerin in AS, accompanied with the improvement of glucose and lipid metabolism, which indicated the possible relation between decrease of chemerin and improvement of glycolipid metabolism. However, it is still unclear whether exercise-induced improvements of glycolipid metabolism is associated with the changes of chemerin and CMKLR1 in tissue such as livers and gastrocnemius (play key roles in the modulation of glycolipid metabolism) and the mechanism by which chemerin/CMKLR1 modulated glycolipid metabolism. Recent studies reported that chemerin is a target gene of nuclear transcription factor- peroxisome proliferator activated receptor γ (PPARγ). PPARγ links glycolipid metabolism and inflammation through its target gene-adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL) and lipoprotein lipase (LPL), gate-keeping enzymes hydrolyzing lipids in intracellular triglyceride and plasma lipoproteins respectively. Our previous work has found that aerobic exercise decreased the level of chemerin/CMKLR1 in serum and tissues of type 2 diabetes rats by the mediation of PPARγ-ATGL and LPL. So the purposes of this study were to clarify if exercise-modulated improvement of glycolipid metabolism of atherosclerosis rats was also associated with the changes of chemerin and CMKLR1 in serum and tissues (liver and gastrocnemius), similar as in diabetes, and further its mechanisms.  Methods Twenty-seven male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats aged 6 weeks were randomly divided into control group (Con, n=9) and atherosclerosis (AS, n=18) model rats. AS model rats were established by intraperitoneal injection of Vitamin D3 (600,000 IU/kg body weight in the first week, 100,000 IU/kg body weight in the third week and six week) in combination with 8-week high fat diet feeding. For verifying the successful establishment of AS rats, one rat from Con group and two rats from AS model group were taken randomly to determine the levels of blood glucose and lipid as well as the morphological and pathological alterations of the aorta. Then, 16 successfully established AS rats were randomly divided into AS group (n=8) and exercised AS group (EAS, n=8). EAS group rats experience 4-week moderate intensity aerobic exercise on treadmill with gradually increasing intensity, while the Con and AS rats were kept sedentary life, with all of the rats were fed with common diet during the experiments. Before and after 4-week exercise, the blood sample of the three group rats were drawn to measure the circulating levels of fasting blood glucose (FBG), triglyceride (TC), total cholesterol (TG), LDL and HDL. The serum fasting insulin (FINS) and serum chemerin were measured by ELISA. The protein levels of chemerin, CMKLR1, PPARγ, ATGL and LPL in livers and gastrocnemius were detected by Western blot. And the full-length aorta of the rats were separated to determine AS arteriosclerosis plaques with oil red O staining and histopathological examination with HE staining.   Results  1) Compared with AS rats, the disorder of glycolipid metabolism (reflected by increases in TC, TG, LDL and FINS as well as decrease in HDL in blood although no difference in serum level of FBG) were all improved in EAS rats. 2) Compared with AS rats, the atherosclerotic plaque in the aoras and the enhanced proliferation and arrangement disorder of smooth muscle cells in aorta membrane were all alleviated in EAS rats. 3) Compared with AS rats, the increased chemerin in serum and the enhancements of chemerin and CMKLR1 in liver and gastrocnemius at protein levels were all significantly decreased in EAS rats. 4) Compared with AS rats, the protein levels of PPARγ, ATGL and LPL in the livers and gastrocnemius were all increased in EAS rats. Conclusions This study verified that: 1) the exercise-induced improvement of glycolipid metabolism in AS rats was likely to be associated with the decreases of chemerin in serum as well as of chemerin and CMKLR1 in tissues (liver and gastrocnemius). To our knowledge, it is the first report that exercise down-regulated chemerin/CMKLR1 in tissues in AS rats, and the decreases of chemerin/CMKLR1 might be related to the improvement of glycolipid metabolism in AS rats. 2) the exercise-induced decreases of chemerin/CMKLR1 in AS rats might be mediated by PPARγ and its target genes- ATGL and LPL, which need further investigations

SARA: Controllable Makeup Transfer with Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive Normalization

Makeup transfer is a process of transferring the makeup style from a reference image to the source images, while preserving the source images' identities. This technique is highly desirable and finds many applications. However, existing methods lack fine-level control of the makeup style, making it challenging to achieve high-quality results when dealing with large spatial misalignments. To address this problem, we propose a novel Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive normalization method (SARA) in this paper. Our method generates detailed makeup transfer results that can handle large spatial misalignments and achieve part-specific and shade-controllable makeup transfer. Specifically, SARA comprises three modules: Firstly, a spatial alignment module that preserves the spatial context of makeup and provides a target semantic map for guiding the shape-independent style codes. Secondly, a region-adaptive normalization module that decouples shape and makeup style using per-region encoding and normalization, which facilitates the elimination of spatial misalignments. Lastly, a makeup fusion module blends identity features and makeup style by injecting learned scale and bias parameters. Experimental results show that our SARA method outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets

High-Performance Multi-Mode Ptychography Reconstruction on Distributed GPUs

Ptychography is an emerging imaging technique that is able to provide wavelength-limited spatial resolution from specimen with extended lateral dimensions. As a scanning microscopy method, a typical two-dimensional image requires a number of data frames. As a diffraction-based imaging technique, the real-space image has to be recovered through iterative reconstruction algorithms. Due to these two inherent aspects, a ptychographic reconstruction is generally a computation-intensive and time-consuming process, which limits the throughput of this method. We report an accelerated version of the multi-mode difference map algorithm for ptychography reconstruction using multiple distributed GPUs. This approach leverages available scientific computing packages in Python, including mpi4py and PyCUDA, with the core computation functions implemented in CUDA C. We find that interestingly even with MPI collective communications, the weak scaling in the number of GPU nodes can still remain nearly constant. Most importantly, for realistic diffraction measurements, we observe a speedup ranging from a factor of $10$ to $10^3$ depending on the data size, which reduces the reconstruction time remarkably from hours to typically about 1 minute and is thus critical for real-time data processing and visualization.Comment: work presented in NYSDS 201

A meta-analysis of Pemetrexed plus Platinum Chemotherapy versus Gemcitabine plus Platinum Chemotherapy for Advanced Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Background and objective Whether pemetrexed plus platinum (PP) regimen is superior to gemcitabine plus platinum (GP) regimen for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is unclear. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of PP versus GP regimens for patients with NSCLC. Methods We searched relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) from Pubmed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, Chinese Journal Full-text Database, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, Chinese Scientific Journals Full-text Database, and traced the related references to obtain the information that has not been found. We made quality assessment of qualified RCTs assessed by the exclusion and inclusion criteria and used RevMan 5.0 provided by the Cochrane Collaboration to perform meta-analysis. Results Four RCTs involving 2,235 patients were identified. There were no statistical differences between PP and GP regimens in one-year survival rate (OR=1.09, 95%CI: 0.91-1.29), the efficiency of disease (OR=1.00, 95%CI: 0.40-2.52), but overall survival (MD=0.26, 95%CI: 0.21-0.30), alopecia (OR=0.51, 95%CI: 0.39-0.66) and hematologic toxicity were significantly different. Conclusion The clinical efficiency of PP and GP regimens for advanced NSCLC was similar, but the side effects were different. The toxicity of PP regimen has the tendency to be more tolerable