Constitutively active G-protein-gated inwardly rectifying K+ channels in dendrites of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons

Author Posting. © Society for Neuroscience, 2005. This article is posted here by permission of Society for Neuroscience for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2005): 3782-3792, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5312-04.2005.A diversity of ion channels contributes to the active properties of neuronal dendrites. From the apical dendrites of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons, we recorded inwardly rectifying K+ channels with a single-channel conductance of 33 pS. The inwardly rectifying K+ channels were constitutively active at the resting membrane potential. The amount of constitutive channel activity was significantly larger in the apical dendrites than in the soma. Activities of these inwardly rectifying K+ channels were inhibited by Ba2+ (200 µM) and tertiapin (10 nM), both of which are believed to block G-protein-coupled inwardly rectifying K+ (GIRK) channels. Intracellularly applied GTP{gamma}S (20 µM) during dual dendritic recordings significantly increased constitutive channel activity. Baclofen (20 µM), an agonist for the G-protein-coupled GABAB receptor, also significantly increased the level of channel activity. Therefore, these channels are GIRK channels, which are constitutively active at rest in the apical dendrites of CA1 pyramidal neurons and can be further activated via G-protein-coupled neurotransmitter receptors.This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants NS37444, MH48432, and MH44754 and a fellowship from the Dart Foundation for summer research at the Marine Biology Laboratory

Mix and Localize: Localizing Sound Sources in Mixtures

We present a method for simultaneously localizing multiple sound sources within a visual scene. This task requires a model to both group a sound mixture into individual sources, and to associate them with a visual signal. Our method jointly solves both tasks at once, using a formulation inspired by the contrastive random walk of Jabri et al. We create a graph in which images and separated sounds correspond to nodes, and train a random walker to transition between nodes from different modalities with high return probability. The transition probabilities for this walk are determined by an audio-visual similarity metric that is learned by our model. We show through experiments with musical instruments and human speech that our model can successfully localize multiple sounds, outperforming other self-supervised methods. Project site: https://hxixixh.github.io/mix-and-localizeComment: CVPR 202

Corporate adoption and implementation of innovative environmental policy measures in China

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-86).Since the 1970s, the governments in many countries including China have begun to implement systematic environmental policies aimed at curtailing industrial pollution. During the past three decades, the traditional environmental policies have evolved from simple directives regarding emission limitations into comprehensive packages using various market-based economic instruments, such as taxes and emissions trading. However, with the environmental degradation becoming more and more serious, these traditional approaches have become inadequate. Several innovative measures, including voluntary action, collaborations between stakeholders, and dissemination of information regarding industry behavior, have emerged in recent years in many countries. This study explores how these three innovative measures have been implemented in China. The thesis focuses on how these measures have encouraged private corporations in China to improve their environmental practices. Three case studies are conducted to show how these three policies work to overcome the inefficiencies of the traditional policy approaches.(cont.) This study also examines the limitations inherent in these measures. Corporate collaborations with environmental non-governmental organizations, the International Standards Organization 14000-an environmental management systems certificate program- and the China Environmental Labeling Program, are studied in detail to provide examples of the limitations and what they imply for the future. This study finds that the inherent demands have motivated these enterprises to adopt the innovative measures are different. At the same time, these measures have various levels of effectiveness, challenges and social benefits.by Xixi Chen.M.C.P

Optimization of emergency supplies paths based on dynamic real-time split deliver

A multi-objective dynamic demand split delivery emergency material distribution model is developed to enhance the efficiency of emergency material distribution and facilitate the smooth progress of safety rescue operations during unconventional emergencies. This model incorporates the psychological view of those affected by disasters. The issue of dynamic demand may be transformed into a static demand problem by dividing the distribution time window into time domains of equal length. The optimization process is thereafter executed in real-time with the timed batch methodology. A refined ant colony method has been developed to address the model by integrating the attributes of the mathematical model, followed by doing an arithmetic case analysis. The findings indicate that the algorithm and mathematical model suggested in this study are efficacious in addressing the emergency material distribution issue, offering valuable decision-making advice and reference

Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study

The flourishing blossom of deep learning has witnessed the rapid development of text recognition in recent years. However, the existing text recognition methods are mainly proposed for English texts. As another widely-spoken language, Chinese text recognition (CTR) in all ways has extensive application markets. Based on our observations, we attribute the scarce attention on CTR to the lack of reasonable dataset construction standards, unified evaluation protocols, and results of the existing baselines. To fill this gap, we manually collect CTR datasets from publicly available competitions, projects, and papers. According to application scenarios, we divide the collected datasets into four categories including scene, web, document, and handwriting datasets. Besides, we standardize the evaluation protocols in CTR. With unified evaluation protocols, we evaluate a series of representative text recognition methods on the collected datasets to provide baselines. The experimental results indicate that the performance of baselines on CTR datasets is not as good as that on English datasets due to the characteristics of Chinese texts that are quite different from the Latin alphabet. Moreover, we observe that by introducing radical-level supervision as an auxiliary task, the performance of baselines can be further boosted. The code and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/FudanVI/benchmarking-chinese-text-recognitionComment: Code is available at https://github.com/FudanVI/benchmarking-chinese-text-recognitio

Efficiency Measurement and Spatial Spillover Effect of Green Agricultural Development in China

Green agriculture is mainstream for the sustainable development of agriculture. Based on the Chinese provincial agriculture panel data from 2010 to 2019, we adopted the slack-based measure (SBM) super-efficiency model, sales force automation (SFA) model, and global malmquist–luenberger (GML) production index to measure the efficiency of agricultural green development (AGD). Moreover, Moran’s I and spatial econometric model were applied to analyze factors influencing AGD. The threshold model was used to analyze the relationship between the scale of AGD and gross domestic product (GDP). The results show that 1) Chinese green agricultural development efficiency is on a rising trend, reducing the impact of environmental factors and random interference on the AGD. 2) The analysis of AGD in the spatial effect showed a direct positive effect from agricultural mechanization, science and technology innovation, industrial agglomeration, income level, and environmental rule and a direct negative effect from agricultural yield structure, farmland pollution, and agricultural disasters. Furthermore, industrial structure optimization and environmental rule evoke a demonstration effect, but technical innovation, income level, and agricultural industrial agglomeration triggered a siphonic effect. 3) The threshold model was used to analyze the scale of AGD to realize sustainable development between agriculture and economy