Spin Density Wave Fluctuations and p-Wave Pairing in Sr2RuO4

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Effect of superlattice modulation of electronic parameters on the density of states of cuprate superconductors

Recent scanning tunneling microscopy on BSCCO 2212 has revealed a substantial spatial supermodulation of the energy gap in the superconducting state. We propose that this gap modulation is due to the superlattice modulations of the atoms in the structure, and hence the parameters in a microscopic model of the CuO2 plane. The gap modulation is estimated using renormalized mean field theory for a t- t′ -J model on a superlattice. The results compare well with experiment. © 2007 The American Physical Society.published_or_final_versio

Mechanisms influencing the spread of a native marine alga

Like invasive macrophytes, some native macrophytes are spreading rapidly with consequences for community structure. There is evidence that the native alga Caulerpa filiformis is spreading along intertidal rocky shores in New South Wales, Australia, seemingly at the expense of native Sargassum spp. We experimentally investigated the role physical disturbance plays in the spread of C. filiformis and its possible consequences for Sargassum spp. Cleared patches within beds of C. filiformis (Caulerpa habitat) or Sargassum spp. (Sargassum habitat) at multiple sites showed that C. filiformis had significantly higher recruitment (via propagules) into its own habitat. The recruitment of Sargassum spp. to Caulerpa habitat was rare, possibly due in part to sediment accretion within Caulerpa habitat. Diversity of newly recruited epibiotic assemblages within Caulerpa habitat was significantly less than in Sargassum habitat. In addition, more C. filiformis than Sargassum spp. recruited to Sargassum habitat at some sites. On common boundaries between these two macroalgae, the vegetative growth of adjacent C. filiformis into cleared patches was significantly higher than for adjacent Sargassum spp. In both experiments, results were largely independent of the size of disturbance (clearing). Lastly, we used PAM fluorometry to show that the photosynthetic condition of Sargassum spp. fronds adjacent to C. filiformis was generally suppressed relative to those distant from C. filiformis. Thus, physical disturbance, combined with invasive traits (e.g. high levels of recruitment and vegetative growth) most likely facilitate the spread of C. filiformis, with the ramifications being lower epibiotic diversity and possibly reduced photosynthetic condition of co-occurring native macrophytes. © 2014 Zhang et al

The internal dynamics of privatised public education: Fee-charging supplementary tutoring provided by teachers in Cambodia

Much literature is available on private schools that operate alongside public schools, and on public schools that are encouraged to operate more like businesses in order to become more efficient and client-oriented. This paper, by contrast, focuses on privatisation by default behind a façade of fee-free education. It concerns supplementary private tutoring provided by government-employed teachers, in many cases to their own students in large classes and on the school premises. Drawing on questionnaire and interview data from secondary school students and teachers in one province of Cambodia, the paper examines interlinked factors that contribute to this process. These factors include low teachers’ salaries, lack of instructional time, large classes, and the possibility of different teacher-student relationships in supplementary lessons. The paper is contextualised within the wider literatures on privatisation and shadow education

Interleukin-2 Confers Cardioprotection by Inhibiting Mitochondrial Permeability Transition Pore

In the present study, we determined whether interleukin-2 (IL-2) confers cardioprotection by inhibiting mitochondria permeability transition pore (MPTP) opening. In isolated rat hearts subject to 30 min ischemia and 120 min reperfusion (IR), IL-2 (50 U/ml) decreased the infarct size and LDH release, effects blocked by a selective kappa-opioid receptor antagonist, Nor-BNI (5 microM) or an opener of MPTP, atractyloside (Atr, 20 microM). In isolated ventricular myocytes subjected to anoxia and reoxygenation (AR), which reduced both the amplitude of the electrically induced [Ca2+]i transient and diastolic [Ca2+]i, IL-2 attenuated the AR-induced alterations and their effects were abolished by Atr. In addition, IL-2 attenuated the reduction in calcein fluorescence in myocytes subject to AR and reduced calcium-induced swelling in mitochondria of rat hearts subjected to IR, which were similar to effect of inhibitor of MPTP. The observations indicated that IL-2 confers cardioprotection by inhibiting the MPTP opening.published_or_final_versio

Micro-neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education

With its shift to a market economy gathering speed from the 1990s, the Chinese government embarked on an agenda that brought neoliberal forces into almost all sectors including education. The policies underpinned China’s spectacular economic growth, but in education have had consequences that arguably are problematic. Drawing on a mixed-methods study in Shanghai, this paper examines ‘micro-neoliberalism’ in China’s education system, i.e. privatization and marketization at the individual, family and institutional levels, with focus on blurring boundaries between public schooling and private supplementary tutoring. Some dimensions of these processes resulted from deliberate macro-level policies to decentralize control of schooling, raise performance, and empower private education. Other dimensions arose from the market behavior of individuals, families and institutions that countered government efforts to steer parental choice of schools and to reduce disparities between schools. Education policies are enacted not only in schools but also in the shadow sector which is commonly overlooked. This paper focuses on Shanghai but has implications for other parts of China; and since shadow education is expanding as a global phenomenon, it also has relevance to many other countries.postprin

Equalising Schooling, Unequalising Private Supplementary Tutoring: Access and Tracking through Shadow Education in China

The global expansion of mass schooling has greatly increased opportunities for low-income families, and governments have devoted much effort to equalising access and quality in education systems. Alongside regular schooling, the so-called shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring has grown rapidly across the world. The fact that rich families can purchase more and better quality shadow education undermines the achievements of increased equality of opportunities in formal schooling. Drawing on a mixed-methods study in Shanghai, China, the article shows how shadow education has offset school equalisation policies through differentiation of access and through sorting mechanisms. Shadow education occupies a space beyond strict government control in which privileged families and elite schools ignore and mediate the equalisation policies, seeking competitive advantages. Uneven access to shadow education and tracking within it shape, maintain and exacerbate inequitable schooling experiences at individual and institutional levels

Actor-Critic Sequence Training for Image Captioning.

Generating natural language descriptions of images is an important capability for a robot or other visual-intelligence driven AI agent that may need to communicate with human users about what it is seeing. Such image captioning methods are typically trained by maximising the likelihood of ground-truth annotated caption given the image. While simple and easy to implement, this approach does not directly maximise the language quality metrics we care about such as CIDEr. In this paper we investigate training image captioning methods based on actor-critic reinforcement learning in order to directly optimise non-differentiable quality metrics of interest. By formulating a per-token advantage and value computation strategy in this novel reinforcement learning based captioning model, we show that it is possible to achieve the state of the art performance on the widely used MSCOCO benchmark