The Effects of Linguistic Labels on Object Categorization and Perception

The linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) claims that speakers of different languages perceive and conceptualize the world differently. Language-thought interaction is likely to be more complex in bilinguals because they have two languages that could influence their cognitive and perceptual processes.Lupyan’s (2012) Label-feedback Hypothesis proposes a mechanism underpinning language-thought interactions, arguingthat linguistic labels affect our conceptual and perceptual representations through top-down feedback.This thesis tested the Label-feedback Hypothesis by capitalizing on an interesting feature of Chinese. In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories (an exception issunflower), whereas in Chinese, some nouns provide explicit category information morphologically (e.g., ostrichand robinhave the morpheme bird embedded in their Chinese names), while some nouns do not (e.g., penguin and pigeon). In Chapter 2, I investigated the effects of Chinese word structure on bilinguals’ categorization processes in either a Chinese or English-speaking environment with ERP. Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals judged the membership of atypical (e.g., ostrich, penguin) vs. typical (e.g., robin,pigeon) pictorial and word exemplars of various categories (e.g., bird). Half of the exemplars in each group had a category clue in their Chinese name and half did not. English monolinguals showed typicality effects in categorization RT data, the N300 and N400 of ERP data, regardless of whether the object name had a category clue in Chinese. In contrast, Chinese-English bilinguals showed a larger typicality effect for objects without category clues in their name (e.g., penguin, pigeon) than objects with clues (e.g., ostrich, robin), even when Chinese-English bilinguals were tested in English. These results demonstrate that linguistic information embedded in object names has an effect on people’s categorization processes. Furthermore, linguistic information in bilinguals’ L1 has an effect on their categorization processes even when they are using their L2. In Chapter 3, I investigated the effects of Chinese word structure on bilinguals’ object perception. A visual oddball detection task with ERP was used where pictures of four birds (robin, ostrich, pigeon, and penguin) were used as standards and deviants. In Chinese-English bilinguals that have lived in Canada for a short period of time, the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) elicited by deviant stimuli was larger for pairs without category clues (pigeon-penguin) than pairs with clues (robin-ostrich). In contrast, long-stay bilinguals and English monolinguals showed similar vMMN for the two pairs. These results demonstrate that linguistic information embedded in object names affects people’s object perception. The influences of L1 word structure on object perception diminish as bilinguals live in the L2 country for a longer time

A study on investigating the thermal and energy saving performances of flat plate heat exchanges (FPHE) with different corrugated channels configurations

Du to scarce conventional energy resources, energy consumptions in the buildings occupied a large proportion of the overall energy consumptions. Therefore, many researchers pay more attentions to energy conservation in the buildings, including the heat recovery of air ventilation systems. Previous studies investigated the application of the plate heat exchangers in the heat recovery of air ventilation systems. The objective of this paper is to offer new methods to improve the thermal performance of heat recovery system and provide a guidance for the optimization design of a novel plate heat exchanger. This paper firstly compared the relevant results of numerical simulations with previous experimental results and verified the validation of the numerical simulations. Then, this paper used the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method to investigate the heat transfer characteristics and the pressure drop as well as the flow distributions in plate heat exchangers with two different corrugated surfaces (triangular and trapezoidal) and different heights of the channel spacing. In the paper, the numerical studies were carried out at a uniform wall heat flux, 580W/m2, for air as the working fluid. The Reynolds (Re) number varied from 500 to 2500 under three different channel heights and corrugated surfaces. The numerical results showed that, corrugated surfaces not only had a significant positive impact on heat transfer enhancement, but also led to an increase in the pressure drop through the channel. It can be seen that the effects of the corrugation patterns on the heat transfer and pressure drop were various for different channels with different Re numbers. In addition, the comparisons of comprehensive heat transfer factors identified that when the height of the channel spacing is larger, it is more appropriate to choose a triangular corrugated channel at a lower Re number. However, at a higher Re number, selecting the trapezoidal corrugated channel may be more suitable. Based on this study, it can be found that the plate heat exchangers with corrugated surfaces are of high efficiency and compactness. Therefore, a large amount of energy can be saved by using corrugated plate heat exchangers to recover heat

Cloud Computing for Detecting High-Order Genome-Wide Epistatic Interaction via Dynamic Clustering

Backgroud: Taking the advan tage of high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping technology, large genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been considered to hold promise for unravelling complex relationships between genotype and phenotype. At present, traditional single-locus-based methods are insufficient to detect interactions consisting of multiple-locus, which are broadly existing in complex traits. In addition, statistic tests for high order epistatic interactions with more than 2 SNPs propose computational and analytical challenges because the computation increases exponentially as the cardinality of SNPs combinations gets larger. Results: In this paper, we provide a simple, fast and powerful method using dynamic clustering and cloud computing to detect genome-wide multi-locus epistatic interactions. We have constructed systematic experiments to compare powers performance against some recently proposed algorithms, including TEAM, SNPRuler, EDCF and BOOST. Furthermore, we have applied our method on two real GWAS datasets, Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) datasets, where we find some novel potential disease-related genetic factors which are not shown up in detections of 2-loci epistatic interactions. Conclusions: Experimental results on simulated data demonstrate that our method is more powerful than some recently proposed methods on both two- and three-locus disease models. Our method has discovered many novel high-order associations that are significantly enriched in cases from two real GWAS datasets. Moreover, the running time of the cloud implementation for our method on AMD dataset and RA dataset are roughly 2 hours and 50 hours on a cluster with forty small virtual machines for detecting two-locus interactions, respectively. Therefore, we believe that our method is suitable and effective for the full-scale analysis of multiple-locus epistatic interactions in GWAS

EXERCISE UNDER DEATH-ANXIETY: INVESTIGATING INDIVIDUAL EXERCISE PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR FROM PERSPECTIVE OF TERROR MANAGEMENT AND BEHAVIORAL IMMUNE SYSTEM INTRODUCTION

The outbreak of COVID-19 has spread worldwide and become the world’s leading health concern. Individuals are advised to stay inside and do exercise at home to avoid exposure to the disease and their psychological state is concerned. This study aims to investigate physical exercise behavior and psychological states during COVID-19, and to provide helpful suggestions for making right policies or designing effective intervention programs to help the mass respond to the pandemic. Methods: we tested the hypotheses by conducting a national survey among 542 individuals, the data covered 28 provinces in China. Information about physical exercise habits, psychological states, perceived infection likelihood, perceived threat, attitudes towards exercise, and demographics was collected. A series of T-tests were applied to test the hypotheses. Results: The individuals who do exercise both before and during COVID-19 outbreak increased the physical exercise frequency and reduced the categories of physical activities during COVID-19. Individuals who perceive high-level threat increased future exercise time and consumption, whereas individuals surrounded by more confirmed cases (high-level objective threat) increased current exercise frequency and intensity. With the company of family members, individuals’ exercise intention, frequency, intensity and the possibility of future exercise time and activities was significantly higher. Conclusion: Under the threat of COVID-19, proximal defense (self-preservation) and distal defense (self-esteem enhancement) motivate individuals to increase exercise frequency. Individuals reduce types of physical activities and do exercise with family members to receive psychological security. Terror management theory and behavioral immune system provide theoretical explanations on individuals’ exercise behavior and psycholog

Cosmological investigation of multi-frequency VLBI observations of ultra-compact structure in z∼3z\sim 3 radio quasars

In this paper, we use multi-frequency angular size measurements of 58 intermediate-luminosity quasars reaching the redshifts $z\sim 3$ and demonstrate that they can be used as standard rulers for cosmological inference. Our results indicate that, for the majority of radio-sources in our sample their angular sizes are inversely proportional to the observing frequency. From the physical point of view it means that opacity of the jet is governed by pure synchrotron self-absorption, i.e. external absorption does not play any significant role in the observed angular sizes at least up to 43 GHz. Therefore, we use the value of the intrinsic metric size of compact milliarcsecond radio quasars derived in a cosmology independent manner from survey conducted at 2 GHz and rescale it properly according to predictions of the conical jet model. This approach turns out to work well and produce quite stringent constraints on the matter density parameter $\Omega_m$ in the flat $\Lambda$CDM model and Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati braneworld model. The results presented in this paper pave the way for the follow up engaging multi-frequency VLBI observations of more compact radio quasars with higher sensitivity and angular resolution.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 2 table, accepted for publication in European Physical Journal

CFI2P: Coarse-to-Fine Cross-Modal Correspondence Learning for Image-to-Point Cloud Registration

In the context of image-to-point cloud registration, acquiring point-to-pixel correspondences presents a challenging task since the similarity between individual points and pixels is ambiguous due to the visual differences in data modalities. Nevertheless, the same object present in the two data formats can be readily identified from the local perspective of point sets and pixel patches. Motivated by this intuition, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework that emphasizes the establishment of correspondences between local point sets and pixel patches, followed by the refinement of results at both the point and pixel levels. On a coarse scale, we mimic the classic Visual Transformer to translate both image and point cloud into two sequences of local representations, namely point and pixel proxies, and employ attention to capture global and cross-modal contexts. To supervise the coarse matching, we propose a novel projected point proportion loss, which guides to match point sets with pixel patches where more points can be projected into. On a finer scale, point-to-pixel correspondences are then refined from a smaller search space (i.e., the coarsely matched sets and patches) via well-designed sampling, attentional learning and fine matching, where sampling masks are embedded in the last two steps to mitigate the negative effect of sampling. With the high-quality correspondences, the registration problem is then resolved by EPnP algorithm within RANSAC. Experimental results on large-scale outdoor benchmarks demonstrate our superiority over existing methods

Learning from Indigenous knowledge for improved natural resource management in the Barmah-Millewa in a changing and variable climate

The integration of different forms of knowledge of the relationships between climate, people and natural resources is an important issue in adapting to climate change. With some of the longest continuing cultures on earth, the indigenous communities of Australia hold valuable knowledge that has not generally been used effectively or equitably in environmental decision making. Indigenous people have not been empowered to participate in decision making processes due, in part, to lack of mutual understanding of western science and indigenous knowledge systems and lack of capacity to capture, manage and present traditional knowledge in indigenous communities. This project explored how the deep knowledge of country of the Yorta Yorta people on the Murray River could be used to strengthen their participation and influence in regional natural resource management processes affecting the Barmah-Millewa Forest. We undertook a community mapping process to collect Yorta Yorta knowledge and combine it in a GIS framework with conventional environmental and other data. This framework is the basis for producing integrated maps and analyses to support decision making in the region. In addition, we undertook an appraisal of institutional barriers and bridges to sustainable management of the Barmah-Millewa. The project arose as a community-led initiative following several years of conversation between the Yorta Yorta community and university academics on the threats climate change poses for the community and possible community responses. As a unique partnership, a key principle of this project was ethical and respectful relations among Western researchers and Indigenous partners, and hence authentic engagement with traditional knowledge keepers both within and beyond the research team was embedded in all stages of this project