The DKU-OPPO System for the 2022 Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification Challenge

This paper describes our DKU-OPPO system for the 2022 Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification (SASV) Challenge. First, we split the joint task into speaker verification (SV) and spoofing countermeasure (CM), these two tasks which are optimized separately. For ASV systems, four state-of-the-art methods are employed. For CM systems, we propose two methods on top of the challenge baseline to further improve the performance, namely Embedding Random Sampling Augmentation (ERSA) and One-Class Confusion Loss(OCCL). Second, we also explore whether SV embedding could help improve CM system performance. We observe a dramatic performance degradation of existing CM systems on the domain-mismatched Voxceleb2 dataset. Third, we compare different fusion strategies, including parallel score fusion and sequential cascaded systems. Compared to the 1.71% SASV-EER baseline, our submitted cascaded system obtains a 0.21% SASV-EER on the challenge official evaluation set.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech202

Gob Spontaneous Combustion in a Fully Mechanized Long-wall Top-Coal Caving Face

Geological conditions allow, underground coal mines in China tend to use comprehensively mechanized roof-coal caving technique in an effort to gain a higher degree of mechanization at coal faces as well as higher coal production rates. As a face advances, a large amount of coal will be left behind in its gob area which may experience a self-enhancing process of coal oxidation and heat accumulation, ultimately leading to open fire. Such a self-enhancing coal spontaneous combustion process is a significantly impeding mine safety and productivity. A sound mathematical model is an important step to predict the probability of spontaneous combustion so that measures against coal self-heating can be adopted in time and at comparatively low cost. This paper analyzes main factors in coal spontaneous combustion process and proposes a mathematical model to describe the dynamic process of coal self-heating in the gob. This model has been applied to a coal production face in Datong Coal Region in Shangdong Province to satisfactorily predict the spontaneous combustion probability

Expression of androgen and estrogen receptors in the testicular tissue of chickens, quails and chicken-quail hybrids

36 New Roman cocks, 30 Korean male quails and 30 chicken-quail hybrids of different day-age were selected and their body weight and testes weights were measured and as well, their testes were collected. Real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was performed to evaluate the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) expression patterns of androgen receptors (AR) and estrogen receptors (ER) genes in testicular tissue of chickens, quails and chicken-quail hybrids at different growth stages. The results show that the testes of chickens and quails grew and developed normally with body weight gain, but the testes of chicken-quail hybrids had a slower growth rate and stunted growth. Real-time PCR showed AR and ER mRNA expression patterns in testes of chickens and quails at different growth stages were similar. AR mRNA expression in chickens and quails reached a significant peak at 80 and 30 days of age, respectively and their ER gene expression showed fluctuation slightly. The AR and ER expression of chicken-quail hybrids were different from the above expression patterns; the hybrids AR gene expression showed a gradual decline and ER gene expression gradually increased. The chickenquail hybrids AR and ER gene expression was abnormal and we speculate this is an important molecular factor for the testicular dysplasia of chicken-quail hybrids. Our results show that AR gene expression was upregulated by ER gene and we suggest that the synergetic effect of AR and ER gene regulated the normal testis growth and development of chicken and quail.Keywords: Chicken, quail, chicken-quail hybrid, testis, androgen receptors (AR), estrogen receptors (ER) expressionAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 11(29), pp. 7344-7353, 10 April, 201

Urban public transport and air quality: Empirical study of China cities

Abstract(#br)To analyze the impact of the increase of public transport on the urban air quality will contribute to the sustainable development of urbanization. But many existing studies have not paid attention to the potential endogeneity of estimation, which comes from the fact that the deterioration of air quality would in turn affect the policies of public transport investment. This paper attempts to control this endogeneity by introducing an instrument variable of the urban built-up area into the empirical models. Using city-level data from China, our study adopts 2SLS method and conducts a series of robustness tests to ensure the estimation results more convincing and robust. The results show that the urban air quality could be improved if the city provides more buses for public transport. Moreover, after controlling the endogeneity, the marginal improving effect of increasing the public transport on urban air quality could be larger from 0.082 to 0.678. This finding indicates that the endogeneity bias is likely to cause the underestimation of the improving effect, and may result in some errors of the policy decisions of urban investment

Transcriptome Phase Distribution Analysis Reveals Diurnal Regulated Biological Processes and Key Pathways in Rice Flag Leaves and Seedling Leaves

Plant diurnal oscillation is a 24-hour period based variation. The correlation between diurnal genes and biological pathways was widely revealed by microarray analysis in different species. Rice (Oryza sativa) is the major food staple for about half of the world's population. The rice flag leaf is essential in providing photosynthates to the grain filling. However, there is still no comprehensive view about the diurnal transcriptome for rice leaves. In this study, we applied rice microarray to monitor the rhythmically expressed genes in rice seedling and flag leaves. We developed a new computational analysis approach and identified 6,266 (10.96%) diurnal probe sets in seedling leaves, 13,773 (24.08%) diurnal probe sets in flag leaves. About 65% of overall transcription factors were identified as flag leaf preferred. In seedling leaves, the peak of phase distribution was from 2:00am to 4:00am, whereas in flag leaves, the peak was from 8:00pm to 2:00am. The diurnal phase distribution analysis of gene ontology (GO) and cis-element enrichment indicated that, some important processes were waken by the light, such as photosynthesis and abiotic stimulus, while some genes related to the nuclear and ribosome involved processes were active mostly during the switch time of light to dark. The starch and sucrose metabolism pathway genes also showed diurnal phase. We conducted comparison analysis between Arabidopsis and rice leaf transcriptome throughout the diurnal cycle. In summary, our analysis approach is feasible for relatively unbiased identification of diurnal transcripts, efficiently detecting some special periodic patterns with non-sinusoidal periodic patterns. Compared to the rice flag leaves, the gene transcription levels of seedling leaves were relatively limited to the diurnal rhythm. Our comprehensive microarray analysis of seedling and flag leaves of rice provided an overview of the rice diurnal transcriptome and indicated some diurnal regulated biological processes and key functional pathways in rice

Fifty-year climate change and its effect on annual runoff in the Tarim River Basin, China

Based on the hydrologic and meteorological data in the Tarim River basin from 1958 to 2004, the trend, characteristics and spatial variation of climate change in the upper reaches of the Tarim River were examined in the study. The long-term trend of climate change and hydrological variations were determined by using both Mann-Kendall and Mann-Whitney nonparametric tests. The results showed that the temperature and precipitation had significantly increased in the drainage basin in the mid-1980s. The climate was the warmest in 1990s among the recent 50 years. The increase of temperature in the tributaries of the Aksu River and Kaidu-Kongque River is higher than that in the tributaries of the Yarkand River and Hotan River. The streamflow at Aksu River showed a significant increasing monotonic trend. The annual runoff in the Aksu River had increased by 10.9% since 1990. The independence test of temperature and precipitation with chi(2) of the El Nino event reveals that there is no significant effect of the El Nino and La Nina events on the annual temperature and annual precipitation in the drainage basin. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved