Data Analysis for Emotion Identification in Text

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Quantitative prediction of fractures in shale using the lithology combination index

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Fractures, which are related to tectonic activity and lithology, have a significant impact on the storage and production of oil and gas in shales. To analyze the impact of lithological factors on fracture development in shales, we selected the shale formation from the Da’anzhai member of the lower Jurassic shales in a weak tectonic deformation zone in the Sichuan Basin. We defined a lithology combination index (LCI), that is, an attribute quantity value of some length artificially defined by exploring the lithology combination. LCI contains information on shale content at a certain depth, the number of layers in a fixed length (lithology window), and the shale content in the lithology window. Fracture porosity is the percentage of pore volume to the apparent volume of the rock. In the experiment, fracture porosity was obtained using 50 samples from six wells, by observing rock slices under a microscope. The relationship between LCI and fracture porosity was analyzed based on machine learning, regression analysis, and weighting methods. The results show that LCI is able to represent the impact of multiple lithological factors (i.e., shale content at a certain depth, the number of layers in the lithology window, and the shale content in the lithology window). The LCI within a thickness of 2 m for the lithology window demonstrates a good linear relationship with fracture porosity. We therefore suggest LCI be used for fracture predictions of shale formations from weak tectonic deformation zones. Our proposed LCI and fracture prediction methods also provide implications for sandstone, mudstone, or carbonate formations under similar processes

Singing Voice Synthesis with Vibrato Modeling and Latent Energy Representation

This paper proposes an expressive singing voice synthesis system by introducing explicit vibrato modeling and latent energy representation. Vibrato is essential to the naturalness of synthesized sound, due to the inherent characteristics of human singing. Hence, a deep learning-based vibrato model is introduced in this paper to control the vibrato's likeliness, rate, depth and phase in singing, where the vibrato likeliness represents the existence probability of vibrato and it would help improve the singing voice's naturalness. Actually, there is no annotated label about vibrato likeliness in existing singing corpus. We adopt a novel vibrato likeliness labeling method to label the vibrato likeliness automatically. Meanwhile, the power spectrogram of audio contains rich information that can improve the expressiveness of singing. An autoencoder-based latent energy bottleneck feature is proposed for expressive singing voice synthesis. Experimental results on the open dataset NUS48E show that both the vibrato modeling and the latent energy representation could significantly improve the expressiveness of singing voice. The audio samples are shown in the demo website

Hepatoprotective effect of Fufang-Huanglu oral liquid on α- naphthylisothiocyanate-induced hepatitis jaundice in mice

Purpose: To investigate the effect of Fufang-Huanglu Oral Liquid (HOL) on hepatitis jaundice in mice.Methods: A total of 72 mice were divided into 6 groups (n = 12): normal group,  control group (model group), positive-treated group, and 3 HOL treatment groups (7.5, 15 and 30 mL/kg). Mice in normal and control groups received normal saline (20 mL/kg) orally, while positive and HOL-treated mice were orally administered Huganning tablets (1.0 g/kg) and HOL (7.5, 15 and 30 mL/kg), respectively. After 8 days, all mice (except normal group) were orally administered  α-naphthylisothiocyanate (ANIT, 100 mg/kg) to induce hepatitis jaundice, and sacrificed 2 days after drug administration. Serum GPT, GOT and TNF-α, as well as liver index, MDA, SOD and lipid profiles were determined.Results: The results showed that HOL, at all doses, significantly decreased liver index, serum GPT, serum SGOT and serum  TNF-α (p < 0.01). HOL also significantly decreased MDA, total cholesterol, TC and triglycerides, TG (p < 0.01), but increased  liver SOD (p < 0.01). Histological results indicate that HOL ameliorated liver injury induced by ANIT.Conclusion: These results showed that HOL possesses significant hepatoprotective effects against liver injury.Keywords: Fufang-Huanglu Oral Liquid, Hepatoprotective, Mice, Hepatitis, Jaundice, α-Naphthylisothiocyanate, Liver inde

The role of sediment-induced light attenuation on primary production during Hurricane Gustav (2008)

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Zang, Z., Xue, Z. G., Xu, K., Bentley, S. J., Chen, Q., D'Sa, E. J., Zhang, L., & Ou, Y. The role of sediment-induced light attenuation on primary production during Hurricane Gustav (2008). Biogeosciences, 17(20), (2020): 5043-5055, doi:10.5194/bg-17-5043-2020.We introduced a sediment-induced light attenuation algorithm into a biogeochemical model of the Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere–Wave–Sediment Transport (COAWST) modeling system. A fully coupled ocean–atmospheric–sediment–biogeochemical simulation was carried out to assess the impact of sediment-induced light attenuation on primary production in the northern Gulf of Mexico during the passage of Hurricane Gustav in 2008. When compared with model results without sediment-induced light attenuation, our new model showed a better agreement with satellite data on both the magnitude of nearshore chlorophyll concentration and the spatial distribution of offshore bloom. When Hurricane Gustav approached, resuspended sediment shifted the inner shelf ecosystem from a nutrient-limited one to a light-limited one. Only 1 week after Hurricane Gustav's landfall, accumulated nutrients and a favorable optical environment induced a posthurricane algal bloom in the top 20 m of the water column, while the productivity in the lower water column was still light-limited due to slow-settling sediment. Corresponding with the elevated offshore NO3 flux (38.71 mmol N m−1 s−1) and decreased chlorophyll flux (43.10 mg m−1 s−1), the outer shelf posthurricane bloom should have resulted from the cross-shelf nutrient supply instead of the lateral dispersed chlorophyll. Sensitivity tests indicated that sediment light attenuation efficiency affected primary production when sediment concentration was moderately high. Model uncertainties due to colored dissolved organic matter and parameterization of sediment-induced light attenuation are also discussed.This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (grant nos. CCF-1856359, EnvS-1903340, OCE-1635837 and EAR-1427389), NASA (grant no. NNH17ZHA002C), the Louisiana Board of Regents (grant no. NASA/LEQSF(2018-20)-Phase3-11) and the LSU Foundation Billy and Ann Harrison Endowment for Sedimentary Geology

PROTECTIVE ROLE OF XINNAONING TABLET IN ISCHEMIC STROKE IN RAT MODEL

Background: Stroke has been considered as the second leading cause of death worldwide. The survivors of stroke experience different level of impair brain function. In China, Chinese traditional medicine had been widely accepted for stroke therapy and prevention. In this study, we developed Traditional Chinese Medicine based Xinnaoning (peace of heart and brain) Tablet and tested its protective role for ischemic stroke in rat model. Material and Methods: Male Wistar rats (n=60) with 12 weeks old and weight from 180 to 200 gram were randomly divided to five groups (n=12). For the groups with Xinaoning administration, the drug was administrated to rats once per day for 7 consecutive days. The blood clotting time and the thrombus wet weight was measured. Serum samples were collected from each rat for further Measurement of biochemical indicators. Results: Our results demonstrated that Xinnaoning tablet reduced lactate acid (LD) level and increased lactic acid dehydrogenase (LDH) in cerebral ischemia model as well as reduced the infarct size caused by stroke. Besides, evaluation of the level of different ATPases suggested Xinnaoning tablet could modulate ATPases activity and confer a protective role in brain. Moreover, analysis indicated Xinnaoning tablet have the anti-coagulation effect in vivo which may contribute to the protection of ischemia. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that Xinnaoning tablet may be a potential way for cerebral ischemia prevention

Telerobotic Pointing Gestures Shape Human Spatial Cognition

This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an experimenter. The robot could point to virtual locations that represented certain entities. In Experiment 1, the experimenter described spatial locations of fictitious objects sequentially in two conditions: speech condition (SO, verbal descriptions clearly indicated the spatial layout) and speech and gesture condition (SR, verbal descriptions were ambiguous but accompanied by robotic pointing gestures). Participants were then asked to recall the objects' spatial locations. We found that the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was on par with that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures compensated ambiguous speech during the process of spatial information. In Experiment 2, the experimenter described spatial locations non-sequentially in the SR and SO conditions. Surprisingly, the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was even higher than that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures were more powerful than speech in conveying spatial information when information was presented in an unpredictable order. The findings provide evidence that human beings are able to comprehend telerobotic gestures, and importantly, integrate these gestures with co-occurring speech. This work promotes engaging remote collaboration among humans through a robot intermediary.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

Study on Paste Transformation and Parameter Optimization of Cemented Backfilling with Fine Tailings in Deep Gold Deposits

The key to cementation backfilling in underground stopes of metal mines is quality and efficiency of backfilling. Backfilling quality is inseparable from the cementitious material as well as the tailings properties. To explore the influence of different factors on the strength of the backfilling body, the ratio of backfilling cementitious materials in the preparation process of backfilling slurry was experimentally studied to determine the economical and reasonable proportion of backfilling cementitious materials. Under the multi-factor test, it is concluded that the proportion concentration of 1:6 and 66% in the cemented specimen of medium and fine tailings meets the strength requirements of the surface layer of the backfilling body. Using the numerical simulation software FLAC3D, the movement of rock mass under different backfillings is simulated, and the subsidence of overburden, the stress of the ore body, and the damage range of the plastic zone are analyzed. The results showed that, during the transition from full tailings cemented backfilling to medium-fine tailings paste backfilling, the vertical stress concentration area of the overlying strata shifts from the surrounding ore body to the backfilling body, the plastic zone decreases, and the complexity of failure forms gradually decreases. Finally, the transformation method from full tailings cementation backfilling to medium fine tailings paste backfilling is determined, and the medium fine tailings paste backfilling in a deep gold mine is realized