Latent Embeddings for Collective Activity Recognition

Rather than simply recognizing the action of a person individually, collective activity recognition aims to find out what a group of people is acting in a collective scene. Previ- ous state-of-the-art methods using hand-crafted potentials in conventional graphical model which can only define a limited range of relations. Thus, the complex structural de- pendencies among individuals involved in a collective sce- nario cannot be fully modeled. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by embedding latent variables into feature space and learning the feature mapping functions in a deep learning framework. The embeddings of latent variables build a global relation containing person-group interac- tions and richer contextual information by jointly modeling broader range of individuals. Besides, we assemble atten- tion mechanism during embedding for achieving more com- pact representations. We evaluate our method on three col- lective activity datasets, where we contribute a much larger dataset in this work. The proposed model has achieved clearly better performance as compared to the state-of-the- art methods in our experiments.Comment: 6pages, accepted by IEEE-AVSS201

A comparison of cosmological models with high-redshift quasars

The non-linear relationship between the monochromatic X-ray and UV luminosities in quasars offers the possibility of using high-z quasars as standard candles for cosmological testing. In this paper, we use a high-quality catalog of 1598 quasars extending to redshift 6, to compare the flat and uniformly expanding cosmological model, $R_h$ = ct and $\Lambda$CDM cosmological models which are the most debated. The quasar samples are mainly from the XMM-Newton and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The final result is that the Akaike Information Criterion favors $\Lambda$CDM over $R_h$=ct with a relative probability of 86.30% versus 13.70%.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in APS

Disodium dihydrogen pyridine-2,3,5,6-tetra­carboxyl­ate trihydrate

In the title compound, 2Na+·C9H3NO8 2−·3H2O, the asymmetric unit consists of two Na+ cations, one dihydrogen pyridine-2,3,5,6-tetra­carboxyl­ate dianion (H2pdtc2−) and three water mol­ecules coordinated to the Na+ cations. The configuration of the anion is stabilized by intramolecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonding between vicinal carboxylate/carboxy groups. The Na+ cations are bridged by the H2pdtc2− dianions, generating layers extending infinitely in sheets parallel to (001), and further pillared by the water mol­ecule linkers to build up a three-dimensional framework

Protective effect of catalpol on isoproterenol-induced myocardial injury in Wistar rats

The neuroprotective effects of catalpol had been well demonstrated in many studies. Nevertheless, little work was done to investigate the cardioprotective effects of catalpol. This study was designed to explore whether catalpol protected myocardium against isoproterenol (ISO)-induced myocardial injury through attenuating oxidative stress and suppressing inflammation. Histopathological changes were assessed by hematoxylin and eosin staining. Results show that catalpol could effectively suppress the histopathological changes including myocardial structure damage and leucocyte infiltration. Oxidative stress and antioxidant status were also analysed. Results show that catalpol could significantly attenuate the increase of myocardial malondialdehyde (MDA) and renew the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD). Furthermore, the results of real time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and Western-blot analysis showed that catalpol could inhibit the upregulation of the expressions of tumor necrosis factor-β (TNF-β) and interleukin-1β (IL-1β) caused by ISO. In conclusion, our data suggest that catalpol had a protective effect against ISO-induced cardiotoxicity in rat, by maintaining endogenous antioxidant enzyme activities and alleviating inflammatory response. This study provides novel insights that catalpol treatment could be an approach for the prevention of ischemic heart disease.Key words: Catalpol, isoproterenol, inflammation, oxidative stress, myocardial injury

6,6′-Dibromo-2,2′-dihex­yloxy-1,1′-bi­naphthalene

The title compound, C32H36Br2O2, was prepared by the reaction of 6-bromo-1-(2-bromo-6-hydroxy­naphthalen-5-yl)­naphthalen-2-ol and 1-iodo­hexane. The dihedral angle between the naphthalene ring planes is 63.8 (9)° The crystal structure may be stabilized by two very weak π–π inter­actions involving the six-membered rings, with centroid–centroid distances of 4.012 (4) and 4.010 (4) Å. The crystal studied was an inversion twin