July 2011 Environmental management and policy report, no. 1

July 2011.Includes bibliographical references

Expedited Training of Visual Conditioned Language Generation via Redundancy Reduction

In this paper, we introduce $\text{EVL}_{\text{Gen}}$, a streamlined framework designed for the pre-training of visually conditioned language generation models with high computational demands, utilizing frozen pre-trained large language models (LLMs). The conventional approach in vision-language pre-training (VLP) typically involves a two-stage optimization process: an initial resource-intensive phase dedicated to general-purpose vision-language representation learning, focused on extracting and consolidating relevant visual features. This is followed by a subsequent phase that emphasizes end-to-end alignment between visual and linguistic modalities. Our novel one-stage, single-loss framework bypasses the computationally demanding first training stage by gradually merging similar visual tokens during training, while avoiding model collapse caused by single-stage training of BLIP-2 type models. The gradual merging process effectively condenses visual information while preserving semantic richness, resulting in rapid convergence without compromising performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our approach accelerates the training of vision-language models by a factor of 5 without a noticeable impact on overall performance. Furthermore, we illustrate that our models significantly narrow the performance gap to current vision-language models using only 1/10 of the data. Finally, we showcase how our image-text models can seamlessly adapt to video-conditioned language generation tasks through novel soft attentive temporal token contextualizing modules. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yiren-jian/EVLGen}

3D dendritic-Fe2O3@C nanoparticles as an anode material for lithium ion batteries

3D dendritic Fe2O3 nanoparticles wrapped with carbon (denoted as 3DD-Fe2O3@C hereafter) were synthesized.</p

Rice Calcineurin B-Like Protein-Interacting Protein Kinase 31 (OsCIPK31) Is Involved in the Development of Panicle Apical Spikelets

Panicle apical abortion (PAA) causes severe yield losses in rice production, but details about its development and molecular basis remain elusive. Herein, a PAA mutant, paa1019, was identified among the progeny of an elite indica maintainer rice line Yixiang 1B (YXB) mutagenized population obtained using ethyl methyl sulfonate. The abortion rate of spikelets in paa1019 was observed up to 60%. Genetic mapping combined with Mutmap analysis revealed that LOC_Os03g20380 harbored a single-bp substitution (C to T) that altered its transcript length. This gene encodes calcineurin B-like protein-interacting protein kinase 31 (OsCIPK31) localized into the cytoplasm, and is preferentially expressed in transport tissues of rice. Complementation of paa1019 by transferring the open reading frame of LOC_Os03g20380 from YXB reversed the mutant phenotype, and conversely, gene editing by knocking out of OsCIPK31 in YXB results in PAA phenotype. Our results support that OsCIPK31 plays an important role in panicle development. We found that dysregulation is caused by the disruption of OsCIPK31 function due to excessive accumulation of ROS, which ultimately leads to cell death in rice panicle. OsCIPK31 and MAPK pathway might have a synergistic effect to lead ROS accumulation in response to stresses. Meanwhile the PAA distribution is related to IAA hormone accumulation in the panicle. Our study provides an understanding of the role of OsCIPK31 in panicle development by responding to various stresses and phytohormones

Effect of Air Jet Vortex Generators on the Shock Wave Boundary Layer Interaction of Transonic Wing

The interaction between shock waves and turbulent boundary layers (SBLI) is a common phenomenon in transonic and supersonic aircraft wings. In this study, we simulated the SBLI of a classical NACA0012 wing at an angle of attack (AOA) of 1.4° and Mach number (Ma) of 0.78 using the open-source software OpenFOAM. Our results show that an air-jet vortex generator can effectively reduce the length of the separation zone and improve the lift coefficient of the airfoil. The vortex structure generated by the jet vortex generator significantly reduces the separation caused by SBLI. We conducted simulations with jet angles of 30°, 45°, and 60° and found that the larger the jet angle, the stronger the vortex and the greater the improvement in the lift coefficient. When the jet angle was 60°, the vortex structure generated by the jet vortex generator transformed the normal shock wave into a λ shock wave, resulting in a maximum increase in the lift coefficient of 2.35%. The simulations focused on exploring the effect of the jet angle and determined that that optimal jet parameters that effectively reduce SBLI damage and improve the lift coefficient of the airfoil

Does armed conflict lead to lower prevalence of maternal health-seeking behaviours: theoretical and empirical research based on 55 683 women in armed conflict settings

Background Women and children bear a substantial burden of morbidity and mortality due to armed conflict. Life-saving maternal and child health (MCH) services are low-quality in most conflict-affected regions. Previous studies on armed conflict and MCH services have been mostly cross-sectional, and a causal relationship between armed conflict and MCH services utilisation cannot be inferred.Methods First, we constructed a utility equation for maternal health-seeking behaviour. Next, we extracted MCH data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey led by the UNICEF. Armed conflict data were obtained from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme; 55 683 women aged 15–49 from Chad, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Republic of Iraq were selected as participants. We fitted a difference-in-differences (DID) model, taking before or after the conflict started as an exposure variable to estimate the effects of armed conflict on maternal health-seeking behaviours.Results According to the results of the DID model, in the regional sample, armed conflict had a positive effect on tetanus vaccination (β=0.055, 95% CI 0.004 to 0.106, p&lt;0.05), and had a negative effect on antenatal care at least eight visits (ANC8+) (β=−0.046, 95% CI −0.078 to −0.015, p&lt;0.01). And, the effects of armed conflict on ANC, ANC4+, institutional delivery and early initiation of breast feeding (EIB) were not statistically significant. As for the country sample, we found that armed conflict had a negative effect on EIB (β=−0.085, 95% CI −0.184 to 0.015, p&lt;0.1) in Chad. In Iraq, armed conflict had positive impacts on ANC (β=0.038, 95% CI −0.001 to 0.078, p&lt;0.1) and tetanus vaccination (β=0.059, 95% CI 0.012 to 0.107, p&lt;0.05), whereas it had a negative effect on ANC8+ (β=−0.039, 95% CI −0.080 to 0.002, p&lt;0.1). No statistically significant associations were discovered in DRC based on the DID model.Conclusions There might be a mixed effect of armed conflict on maternal health-seeking behaviours. In the absence of humanitarian assistance, armed conflict reduces certain maternal health-seeking behaviours, such as ANC8+. When practical humanitarian health assistance is provided, the damage can be alleviated, and even the prevalence of maternal health-seeking behaviours can be improved, such as tetanus vaccination. Providing humanitarian assistance to conflict-affected regions improved the accessibility of MCH services for women living in those areas. However, the goals of saving lives and alleviating suffering still need to be achieved. In conflict-affected regions, humanitarian assistance on ANC, institutional delivery and breast feeding need strengthening

Evaluation of horizontal submarine slide impact force on pipeline via a modified hybrid geotechnical-fluid dynamics framework

There are situations in offshore energy development where potential impact forces between submarine slides and pipelines need to be estimated. The horizontal slide-pipeline impact force, parallel to the main travel direction of the sliding mass and normal to the pipeline axis, is generally dominant compared to other force components, and hence of particular concern. In practice, pipelines may be suspended at varying distances above the seabed (gap) and existing methods do not consider how this will affect the horizontal slide-pipeline forces. This paper investigates the effects of pipeline-seabed gap and pipeline diameter on the horizontal slide-pipeline impact force via 181 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations at Reynolds numbers of 0.36 - 287. Results show that variation in the pipeline-seabed gap and pipeline diameter alters the slide mass flow behavior as it flows past the pipeline and hence the impact force when the pipeline-seabed gap is below a critical value. A modified hybrid geotechnical-fluid dynamics framework for estimating the horizontal impact force is proposed by considering the effects of the pipeline-seabed gap and pipeline diameter, which is validated with existing experimental datasets.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author