Randomized control trial of using tongue acupuncture in autism spectrum disorder

Objective The therapeutic approach of traditional chinese Medicine (TCM) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a functional one. To study the efficacy, safety and functional brain change from the use of tongue acupuncture (TAC) on ASD children. Methods 21 autistic boys (3–16 years old) were randomly assigned to TAC group (TAC: n = 12; receiving daily TAC for 8 weeks) or control (C: n = 9; no acupuncture). Primary outcome measures included Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC), Reynell Language Developmental Scale, Symbolic Play Test (SPT), Functional Independence Measure for Children (WeeFIM), Clinical Global Impression (CGI) Scale and Cerebral FDG Metabolism by PET. Results There were significant improvement in speech domain of ATEC (p = 0.030), Self-care domain of WeeFIM (p = 0.021), cognition domain of WeeFIM (p = 0.001) and Total score domain of WeeFIM (p = 0.001) in TAC group compared to the C group. There were significant difference in positive clinical response between C and TAC group in language (p = 0.0211), functional (p = 0.0011), parental Impression criteria (p = 0.0003) and overall cerebral glucose metabolism (p = 0.0451) using ROC criteria. No significant association of PET Glucose Metabolism with Clinical response was found. None of the children developed any side-effects. Conclusion A short course of TAC can improve specific functions in children with autism spectrum disorder, especially speech and cognition function. No statistical significant association of PET Glucose Metabolism with Clinical response. Larger scale with more sample size trial should be done for further investigation.published_or_final_versio

A quasi-Monte Carlo method for computing areas of point-sampled surfaces

A novel and efficient quasi-Monte Carlo method for computing the area of a point-sampled surface with associated surface normal for each point is presented. Our method operates directly on the point cloud without any surface reconstruction procedure. Using the Cauchy–Crofton formula, the area of the point-sampled surface is calculated by counting the number of intersection points between the point cloud and a set of uniformly distributed lines generated with low-discrepancy sequences. Based on a clustering technique, we also propose an effective algorithm for computing the intersection points of a line with the point-sampled surface. By testing on a number of point-based models, experiments suggest that our method is more robust and more efficient than those conventional approaches based on surface reconstruction.postprin

激光探针等离子体质谱用于错石Pb-Pb定年的分析和校正方法的进一步探讨

激光探针等离子体质谱可对错石进行快速准确的Pb一Pb 同位素定年。本文进一步探讨了该方法应用中的几个问题。对不同样品采用不同的聚焦方式可以对U/Pb 分异有一定的控制作用。在一定的条件下, 不连续和连续采样模式都可以得到较高精度和准确度的结果。连续采样模式还可以得到同位素计数的深度剖面。不同的侧量滞留时间会影响测量结果的精度。20Ins 为适合错石ZO7Pb/206Pb 分析的最佳侧量滞留时间。在对侧定结果进行校正时, 可以采用玻璃标样NIST61O 和错石标样两种不同的校正方法。Laser probe-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LP-ICPMS) provides a rapid,precise and accurate technique for Pb-Pb zircon chronology. Different conditions affect massfractionation during laser ablation. Fixed-focus-mode and active-focus-mode, focus-mode anddefocus-mode, time-average mode (single point method) and time-resolved mode (depth pro-filing method), are compared. Both time-average mode and time-resolved mode can give rel-atively high precise, accurate results, and depth profile can only be obtained by time-resolvedmode. Comparing the results of time-resolved mode using different dwell time, it is found that20 ms is the best dwell time with highest precision and accuracy. It is shown that both NIST610and Zircon Standard give satisfactory calibration results for zircon 207Pb/206Pb isotopic age.Therefore, time resolved mode with dwell time of 20 ms is preferred for zircon analysis.published_or_final_versio

Dynamic analysis of sugar metabolism in different harvest seasons of pineapple (Ananas comosus L. (Merr.))

In pineapple fruits, sugar accumulation plays an important role in flavor characteristics, which varies according to the stage of fruit development. Metabolic changes in the contents of fructose, sucrose and glucose and reducing sugar related to the activities of soluble acid invertase (AI), neutral invertase (NI), sucrose synathase (SS) and sucrose-phosphate synthase (SPS) were studied in winter and summer pineapple fruits in this paper. Sucrose was significantly increased in most of the harvesting winter fruits which reached the peak of 64.87 mg·g-1 FW at 130 days after anthesis, while hexose was mainly accumulated at the 90 day of the summer fruits in July. The ratio of hexose to sucrose was 5.92:0.73 from the winter fruit in February. Interestingly, the activities of SPS and SS synthetic direction of the harvested fruits in February were significantly higher than those in July, whereas the invertase activities were exactly opposite. NI activity showed a similar trend to AI, but the amount of NI activity was higher than AI in both months. Therefore, NI appears to be one of the vital enzymes in pineapple fruit development. Conclusively, the enzyme activities related to sugar play key roles in the eating of quality pineapple, which could be improved by cultivation in different seasons. So we can arbitrate different temperature to improve the quality of pineapple fruits according to market demand.Keywords: Pineapple (Ananas comosus), different harvest seasons, sucrose, sucrose phosphate synthase, sucrose synthas

Optimization of a five-phase E-core bearingless flux-switching permanent magnet motor for flywheel batteries

© 2018 IEEE. In this paper, a five-phase E-core bearingless fluxswitching permanent magnet (BSFPM) motor for flywheel batteries is proposed and optimized. First, the structure and the principle of the BSFPM motor are described simply. Second, the trial and error method is used to obtain the most reasonable relationship of center tooth arc width and edge tooth arc width, and then the electromagnetic torque and suspension force after optimization are got. The motor after optimization has smoother five-phase flux-linkage and the disturbance of the torque and suspension force decrease

Skew angle optimization analysis of a permanent magnet synchronous motor for EVs

© 2018 IEEE. In this paper, the skew angle of the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) for electric vehicles (EVs) is studied. The stability of the output torque of the driving motor is important for the EVs. The influence of skew angle on the Back-electromotive force, cogging torque, and output torque are studied by finite element analysis. The optimum skew angle of the stator slot is analyzed for the prototype. The results show that the proposed PMSM has better comprehensive performance after the optimization of the skew angle

Trust Region Policy Optimisation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Trust region methods rigorously enabled reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn monotonically improving policies, leading to superior performance on a variety of tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the property of monotonic improvement may not simply apply; this is because agents, even in cooperative games, could have conflicting directions of policy updates. As a result, achieving a guaranteed improvement on the joint policy where each agent acts individually remains an open challenge. In this paper, we extend the theory of trust region learning to cooperative MARL. Central to our findings are the multi-agent advantage decomposition lemma and the sequential policy update scheme. Based on these, we develop Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Policy Optimisation (HATPRO) and Heterogeneous-Agent Proximal Policy Optimisation (HAPPO) algorithms. Unlike many existing MARL algorithms, HATRPO/HAPPO do not need agents to share parameters, nor do they need any restrictive assumptions on decomposibility of the joint value function. Most importantly, we justify in theory the monotonic improvement property of HATRPO/HAPPO. We evaluate the proposed methods on a series of Multi-Agent MuJoCo and StarCraftII tasks. Results show that HATRPO and HAPPO significantly outperform strong baselines such as IPPO, MAPPO and MADDPG on all tested tasks, thereby establishing a new state of the art

SHRIMP zircon geochronology of the Emeishan Large Igneous Province (SW China): implications for double mass extinctions in Late Permian

Abstract in http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/gold2001/pdf/3519.pd

Environmental impacts of mining the giant Panzhihua V-Ti magnetite deposit, SW China

Abstract in http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/gold2001/pdf/3530.pd