Systematic Constructions of Bent-Negabent Functions, 2-Rotation Symmetric Bent-Negabent Functions and Their Duals

Bent-negabent functions have many important properties for their application in cryptography since they have the flat absolute spectrum under the both Walsh-Hadamard transform and nega-Hadamard transform. In this paper, we present four new systematic constructions of bent-negabent functions on $4k, 8k, 4k+2$ and $8k+2$ variables, respectively, by modifying the truth tables of two classes of quadratic bent-negabent functions with simple form. The algebraic normal forms and duals of these constructed functions are also determined. We further identify necessary and sufficient conditions for those bent-negabent functions which have the maximum algebraic degree. At last, by modifying the truth tables of a class of quadratic 2-rotation symmetric bent-negabent functions, we present a construction of 2-rotation symmetric bent-negabent functions with any possible algebraic degrees. Considering that there are probably no bent-negabent functions in the rotation symmetric class, it is the first significant attempt to construct bent-negabent functions in the generalized rotation symmetric class

Commentary on the Pseudonymous Letters of Aeschines (excluding Letter 10)

The aim of the thesis is to study the pseudonymous letters of Aeschines, all of which purport to give an account of his sojourn in exile. There is a strong consensus among scholars that all the letters are forgeries, and their date of composition tends to be located in the first few centuries CE on linguistic grounds. Embracing a variety of literary forms, these letters were probably composed by multiple hands and may for convenience be divided into three categories: Letters 2, 3, 7, 11, 12 imitate the ‘Demosthenic’ letters in a manner similar to the Hellenistic (and beyond) historical declamations and progymnasmata; Letters 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 come to us with features reminiscent of what German scholars would call Briefromane, or ‘epistolary novels’, and are normally deemed typical of the so-called Second Sophistic; and Letter 4 is a showpiece assuming the form of a Pindaric exegesis. The thesis consists of two parts. The first gives an extensive account of the letters, including their background, history of scholarship, and basic features, to seek to present the ‘forger’ and the text in their proper historical and cultural contexts. The second part, which constitutes the basis for the reflections developed in the first, provides a detailed commentary in thematic sequence. It begins with the ‘Demosthenic’ counterparts (Epp. 2, 3, 7, 11, 12), and stylistic comparisons are made throughout. The analysis of the fictional letters (Epp. 1, 5, 6, 8, 9) pays particular attention to their consistency of narrative and engagement with other literary genres. The commentary on Letter 4 foregrounds the Pindaric elements and completes the thesis. Letter 10 is discussed at sporadic points: it is a later attachment to the corpus and the erotic content is inconsistent with the ‘original’ forgeries. The overall focus of the thesis is on two overlapping aspects of Aeschines’ early reception in antiquity – as ‘the other orator’ beside Demosthenes and as inspiration for later rhetorical education. Existing studies, however, are more concerned with textual criticism and linguistic analysis and have left the letters almost unproductive in these respects: so Drerup (1904), Schwegler (1914), and, most recently, García Ruiz and Hernández Muñoz (2012). In his classic work Goldstein (1968) took the parallel passages in the pseudonymous letters as evidence for authenticating Demosthenes’ letters, and scholars are now able to take advantage of a more reliable reference when studying Ps.-Aeschines. Holzberg (1994), on the other hand, established a set of generic criteria for the Briefromane and has substantially changed the way we read Ps.-Aeschines: it is now possible to appreciate the literary value of the letters without scrutinising their authenticity. Yet both these studies tell us only half the story: while Goldstein left more remarks on the imitative counterparts of Demosthenes’ letters, Holzberg focused on the way the letters reflect the epistolary narrative. Following Rohde (1876/1960), moreover, it seems common sense to characterise the pseudo-historical tale as seen through the letters as a product of the ‘Second Sophistic’, though discoveries of new papyri, e.g. the Ninus romance c. first century BCE, undermined this assumption. My study is built on these investigations in an attempt to form the most extended analysis. The study of the ‘Demosthenic’ counterparts will contribute to a better understanding of Ps.-Aeschines’ intertextual engagement with Demosthenes and his successors, e.g. Ps.-Leosthenes (FGrH 105 F 6 = MP3 2496). It shows that Ps.-Aeschines owes a great deal to the culture of rhetoric and highlights his significance in the Nachleben of Attic oratory. As for the other letters, this thesis argues that they deserve some space in our accounts of the history of exilic, periegetic, and epinician literatures for contextualising a wide range of preexisting literary forms such as the Homeric Odyssey (Ep. 1) and Pindar’s victory odes (Ep. 4). As contingent by-products of the ‘Demosthenic’ counterparts, however, they seem to allow no confident judgement about generic consciousness, esp. the very notion of ‘novel’, and need to be approached as antedating the Imperial exponents. Contrary to the communis opinio, therefore, I attempt to move the date of composition forward to the late Hellenistic period, in which there was already ample encouragement for a sophist, as well as for his students, to write pseudonymous letters. The ‘traitors’ blacklist’ (Ep. 12.8–9) and the term for the Rhodian family of Diagoreans (Ep. 4.4) entertain this possibility inasmuch as both show marked affinities with the Hellenistic sources. Last but not least, the two coexisting, radically opposed interpretations of one’s civic orientation in exile will help us tackle the stability and change in the political cultures of the post-Classical era. My conclusion is that these letters hold a unique position as very early – and very illuminating – examples of how different literary, political trends were interwoven to make, and to remould, a Classic. It is hoped that this study may have done something to reappraise Ps.-Aeschines, who is, in all likelihood, a pre-sophisticated forerunner at a crossroads in the history of Greek literature

CoRide: Joint Order Dispatching and Fleet Management for Multi-Scale Ride-Hailing Platforms

How to optimally dispatch orders to vehicles and how to tradeoff between immediate and future returns are fundamental questions for a typical ride-hailing platform. We model ride-hailing as a large-scale parallel ranking problem and study the joint decision-making task of order dispatching and fleet management in online ride-hailing platforms. This task brings unique challenges in the following four aspects. First, to facilitate a huge number of vehicles to act and learn efficiently and robustly, we treat each region cell as an agent and build a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework. Second, to coordinate the agents from different regions to achieve long-term benefits, we leverage the geographical hierarchy of the region grids to perform hierarchical reinforcement learning. Third, to deal with the heterogeneous and variant action space for joint order dispatching and fleet management, we design the action as the ranking weight vector to rank and select the specific order or the fleet management destination in a unified formulation. Fourth, to achieve the multi-scale ride-hailing platform, we conduct the decision-making process in a hierarchical way where a multi-head attention mechanism is utilized to incorporate the impacts of neighbor agents and capture the key agent in each scale. The whole novel framework is named as CoRide. Extensive experiments based on multiple cities real-world data as well as analytic synthetic data demonstrate that CoRide provides superior performance in terms of platform revenue and user experience in the task of city-wide hybrid order dispatching and fleet management over strong baselines.Comment: CIKM 201

One-Step Preparation of High Performance TiO 2 /CNT/CQD Nanocomposites Bactericidal Coating with Ultrasonic Radiation

© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).As an environmental semiconductor material, TiO2 has important applications in the fields of environmental protection and water treatment. The preparation of P25 particles into nano-functional material films with a high specific surface area has always been a bottleneck limiting its large-scale application. In this paper, a one-step method of preparing TiO2 nanocomposites by doping carbon nanotube (CNT) and carbon quantum dots (CQD) with tetrabutyltitanate and P25 TiO2 under ultrasonic radiation is proposed to synthesize a novel antifouling material, which both eliminates the bacterium of Escherichia coli and shows good photoelectric properties, indicating a great value for the industrial promotion of TiO2/CNT. This mesoporous composite exhibits a high specific surface area of 78.07 M2/g (BET) and a tested pore width range within 10–120 nm. The surface morphology of this composite is characterized by TEM and the microstructure is characterized through XRD. This preparation method can fabricate P25 particles into a nano-functional material film with a high specific surface area at a very low cost.Peer reviewe

Neutrophil extracellular traps mediate deep vein thrombosis: from mechanism to therapy

Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) is a part of venous thromboembolism (VTE) that clinically manifests as swelling and pain in the lower limbs. The most serious clinical complication of DVT is pulmonary embolism (PE), which has a high mortality rate. To date, its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood, and patients usually present with clinical symptoms only after the formation of the thrombus. Thus, it is essential to understand the underlying mechanisms of deep vein thrombosis for an early diagnosis and treatment of DVT. In recent years, many studies have concluded that Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs) are closely associated with DVT. These are released by neutrophils and, in addition to trapping pathogens, can mediate the formation of deep vein thrombi, thereby blocking blood vessels and leading to the development of disease. Therefore, this paper describes the occurrence and development of NETs and discusses the mechanism of action of NETs on deep vein thrombosis. It aims to provide a direction for improved diagnosis and treatment of deep vein thrombosis in the near future

Novel digital features feature discriminate between drought resistant and drought sensitive rice under controlled and field conditions

Dynamic quantification of drought response is a key issue both for variety selection and for functional genetic study of rice drought resistance. Traditional assessment of drought resistance traits, such as stay-green and leaf-rolling, has utilized manual measurements, that are often subjective, error-prone, poorly quantified and time consuming. To relieve this phenotyping bottleneck, we demonstrate a feasible, robust and non-destructive method that dynamically quantifies response to drought, under both controlled and field conditions. Firstly, RGB images of individual rice plants at different growth points were analyzed to derive 4 features that were influenced by imposition of drought. These include a feature related to the ability to stay green, which we termed greenness plant area ratio (GPAR) and 3 shape descriptors [total plant area/bounding rectangle area ratio (TBR), perimeter area ratio (PAR) and total plant area/convex hull area ratio (TCR)]. Experiments showed that these 4 features were capable of discriminating reliably between drought resistant and drought sensitive accessions, and dynamically quantifying the drought response under controlled conditions across time (at either daily or half hourly time intervals). We compared the 3 shape descriptors and concluded that PAR was more robust and sensitive to leaf-rolling than the other shape descriptors. In addition, PAR and GPAR proved to be effective in quantification of drought response in the field. Moreover, the values obtained in field experiments using the collection of rice varieties were correlated with those derived from pot-based experiments. The general applicability of the algorithms is demonstrated by their ability to probe archival Miscanthus data previously collected on an independent platform. In conclusion, this image-based technology is robust providing a platform-independent tool for quantifying drought response that should be of general utility for breeding and functional genomics in future

Combining high-throughput micro-CT-RGB phenotyping and genome-wide association study to dissect the genetic architecture of tiller growth in rice

Manual phenotyping of rice tillers is time consuming and labor intensive and lags behind the rapid development of rice functional genomics. Thus, automated, non-destructive phenotyping of rice tiller traits at a high spatial resolution and high-throughput for large-scale assessment of rice accessions is urgently needed. In this study, we developed a high-throughput micro-CT-RGB (HCR) imaging system to non-destructively extract 730 traits from 234 rice accessions at 9 time points. We could explain 30% of the grain yield variance from 2 tiller traits assessed in the early growth stages. A total of 402 significantly associated loci were identified by GWAS, and dynamic and static genetic components were found across the nine time points. A major locus associated with tiller angle was detected at nine time points, which contained a major gene TAC1. Significant variants associated with tiller angle were enriched in the 3'-UTR of TAC1. Three haplotypes for the gene were found and rice accessions containing haplotype H3 displayed much smaller tiller angles. Further, we found two loci contained associations with both vigor-related HCR traits and yield. The superior alleles would be beneficial for breeding of high yield and dense planting