Research on the Protection and Renewal of Wanshougong Historical and Cultural Block from the Perspective of Living Inheritance

As an important part of the historical and cultural city, with the acceleration of urbanization, the protection of the block will face many challenges, aiming at the problems of breaking the traditional texture of the streets and alleys, the carrier of cultural inheritance has been destroyed, how to achieve the connection between historical inheritance and the development of the times, it is urgent to study the corresponding mode and method. From the perspective of living inheritance, this paper compares the before and after the renovation of Nanchang Wanshougong historical and cultural district through the field research and literature investigation of Nanchang Wanshougong, explores the application of intangible cultural heritage in the renewal and transformation of historical and cultural districts, and puts forward feasible suggestions for the shortcomings of historical and cultural districts after transformation

Uformer: A Unet based dilated complex & real dual-path conformer network for simultaneous speech enhancement and dereverberation

Complex spectrum and magnitude are considered as two major features of speech enhancement and dereverberation. Traditional approaches always treat these two features separately, ignoring their underlying relationship. In this paper, we propose Uformer, a Unet based dilated complex & real dual-path conformer network in both complex and magnitude domain for simultaneous speech enhancement and dereverberation. We exploit time attention (TA) and dilated convolution (DC) to leverage local and global contextual information and frequency attention (FA) to model dimensional information. These three sub-modules contained in the proposed dilated complex & real dual-path conformer module effectively improve the speech enhancement and dereverberation performance. Furthermore, hybrid encoder and decoder are adopted to simultaneously model the complex spectrum and magnitude and promote the information interaction between two domains. Encoder decoder attention is also applied to enhance the interaction between encoder and decoder. Our experimental results outperform all SOTA time and complex domain models objectively and subjectively. Specifically, Uformer reaches 3.6032 DNSMOS on the blind test set of Interspeech 2021 DNS Challenge, which outperforms all top-performed models. We also carry out ablation experiments to tease apart all proposed sub-modules that are most important.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202

VE-KWS: Visual Modality Enhanced End-to-End Keyword Spotting

The performance of the keyword spotting (KWS) system based on audio modality, commonly measured in false alarms and false rejects, degrades significantly under the far field and noisy conditions. Therefore, audio-visual keyword spotting, which leverages complementary relationships over multiple modalities, has recently gained much attention. However, current studies mainly focus on combining the exclusively learned representations of different modalities, instead of exploring the modal relationships during each respective modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel visual modality enhanced end-to-end KWS framework (VE-KWS), which fuses audio and visual modalities from two aspects. The first one is utilizing the speaker location information obtained from the lip region in videos to assist the training of multi-channel audio beamformer. By involving the beamformer as an audio enhancement module, the acoustic distortions, caused by the far field or noisy environments, could be significantly suppressed. The other one is conducting cross-attention between different modalities to capture the inter-modal relationships and help the representation learning of each modality. Experiments on the MSIP challenge corpus show that our proposed model achieves 2.79% false rejection rate and 2.95% false alarm rate on the Eval set, resulting in a new SOTA performance compared with the top-ranking systems in the ICASSP2022 MISP challenge.Comment: 5 pages. Accepted at ICASSP202

A stability study of impregnated LSCF–GDC composite cathodes of solid oxide fuel cells

The performance degradation of composite cathodes of La0.6Sr0.4Co0.2Fe0.8O3−δ and Gd-doped ceria (LSCF–GDC), prepared by impregnating the porous GDC scaffold with a nitrate solution containing La, Sr, Co and Fe in desired composition, is investigated at 750 °C and open circuit in air for 500 h. The performance of the impregnated LSCF–GDC composite cathodes deteriorates after testing at 750 °C for 500 h; the electrode polarization resistance (Rp) increases from 0.38 to 0.83 Ω cm2, and the electrode ohmic resistance (Ro) increases from 1.79 to 2.14 Ω cm2. The grain growth and coarsening of impregnated LSCF nanoparticles are responsible for the performance degradation of the cathodes. XPS analysis shows the enrichment of cobalt on the surface of the infiltrated LSCF–GDC cathodes and such surface segregation could also contribute to the degradation of the electrocatalytic activity of the cathodes. Introducing MgO and LaNi0.6Fe0.4O3 phases can effectively suppress the coarsening of LSCF nanoparticles and enhance the stability of the cathodes. However, the enhancing effect is related to the conductivity and electrocatalytic activity of the introduced phases

Selling motherhood: Gendered emotional labour, citizenly discounting, and alienation among China’s migrant domestic workers

The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This article expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China’s intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds “racial or ethnic discounting,” the latter is characterized by “citizenly discounting” whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of alienation, subordination, and exploitation owning to their second-class rural hùkŏu (household registration) status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China’s migrant domestic workers’ experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration

Novel Functional MAR Elements of Double Minute Chromosomes in Human Ovarian Cells Capable of Enhancing Gene Expression

Double minute chromosomes or double minutes (DMs) are cytogenetic hallmarks of extrachromosomal genomic amplification and play a critical role in tumorigenesis. Amplified copies of oncogenes in DMs have been associated with increased growth and survival of cancer cells but DNA sequences in DMs which are mostly non-coding remain to be characterized. Following sequencing and bioinformatics analyses, we have found 5 novel matrix attachment regions (MARs) in a 682 kb DM in the human ovarian cancer cell line, UACC-1598. By electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA), we determined that all 5 MARs interact with the nuclear matrix in vitro. Furthermore, qPCR analysis revealed that these MARs associate with the nuclear matrix in vivo, indicating that they are functional. Transfection of MARs constructs into human embryonic kidney 293T cells showed significant enhancement of gene expression as measured by luciferase assay, suggesting that the identified MARS, particularly MARs 1 to 4, regulate their target genes in vivo and are potentially involved in DM-mediated oncogene activation