Voice portrait technology has explored and established the relationship between speakers’ voices and their facialfeatures, aiming to generate corresponding facial characteristics by providing the voice of an unknown ...Voice portrait technology has explored and established the relationship between speakers’ voices and their facialfeatures, aiming to generate corresponding facial characteristics by providing the voice of an unknown speaker.Due to its powerful advantages in image generation, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have now beenwidely applied across various fields. The existing Voice2Face methods for voice portraits are primarily based onGANs trained on voice-face paired datasets. However, voice portrait models solely constructed on GANs facelimitations in image generation quality and struggle to maintain facial similarity. Additionally, the training processis relatively unstable, thereby affecting the overall generative performance of the model. To overcome the abovechallenges,wepropose a novel deepGenerativeAdversarialNetworkmodel for audio-visual synthesis, namedAVPGAN(Attention-enhanced Voice Portrait Model using Generative Adversarial Network). This model is based ona convolutional attention mechanism and is capable of generating corresponding facial images from the voice ofan unknown speaker. Firstly, to address the issue of training instability, we integrate convolutional neural networkswith deep GANs. In the network architecture, we apply spectral normalization to constrain the variation of thediscriminator, preventing issues such as mode collapse. Secondly, to enhance the model’s ability to extract relevantfeatures between the two modalities, we propose a voice portrait model based on convolutional attention. Thismodel learns the mapping relationship between voice and facial features in a common space from both channeland spatial dimensions independently. Thirdly, to enhance the quality of generated faces, we have incorporated adegradation removal module and utilized pretrained facial GANs as facial priors to repair and enhance the clarityof the generated facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that our AVP-GAN achieved a cosine similarity of0.511, outperforming the performance of our comparison model, and effectively achieved the generation of highqualityfacial images corresponding to a speaker’s voice.展开更多
Mount Wutai,a place endowed with fine spirits of humanities and prolific remains of Arhats portrait art.The existing Mount Wutai Arhats portrait spans the Ming,Qing,and Republic of China periods,and through the artist...Mount Wutai,a place endowed with fine spirits of humanities and prolific remains of Arhats portrait art.The existing Mount Wutai Arhats portrait spans the Ming,Qing,and Republic of China periods,and through the artistic creation of successive generations of literati painters,exquisite Arhats portraits are painted on different artistic carriers.On the basis of inheriting the traditional Chinese paradigm painting expression,the portrait of Mount Wutai Arhats constantly draws on folk nutrients.It integrates foreign Buddhist culture for refinement and sublimation.The reconstructed portrait pays attention to the image expression of its objects and the shaping of spiritual temperament.The shape is ancient and vivid,and the scene is ethereal and mysterious,which rationally expresses the Buddhist philosophy of generosity,benevolence and kindness,and contains unique oriental aesthetics.展开更多
The Altomani&Sons Collection owns a remarkable newly discovered portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere,Duke of Urbino(1514-1574),a historical military figure who was a condottiere,ruler of Urbino,Commander-in-chie...The Altomani&Sons Collection owns a remarkable newly discovered portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere,Duke of Urbino(1514-1574),a historical military figure who was a condottiere,ruler of Urbino,Commander-in-chief of the Papal Estate,and Perfect of Rome,as well as a collector and patron of the Fine Arts.Camilla Guerrieri Nati(1628-1694),a seventeenth-century Italian painter from Fossombrone(in the province of Pesaro and Urbino),portrayed this heroic personage surrounded by emblems associated with his military courage and leadership,including his plumed burgonet helmet,metal gilded armor,a necklace with the golden fleece,and batons of secular and religious dominions.This oil painting on copper-considered a precious metal at the time-emphasizes the importance of the commission.The material and technique also reveals a unique artistic achievement in that it provides the painting with a smooth,reflective surface and vibrant coloration,symbolizing precious imagery.展开更多
As the number of power terminals continues to increase and their usage becomes more widespread,the security of power systems is under great threat.In response to the lack of effective trust evaluation methods for term...As the number of power terminals continues to increase and their usage becomes more widespread,the security of power systems is under great threat.In response to the lack of effective trust evaluation methods for terminals,we propose a trust evaluation model based on equipment portraits for power terminals.First,we propose an exception evaluation method based on the network flow order and evaluate anomalous terminals by monitoring the external characteristics of network traffic.Second,we propose an exception evaluation method based on syntax and semantics.The key fields of each message are extracted,and the frequency of keywords in the message is statistically analyzed to obtain the keyword frequency and time-slot threshold for evaluating the status of the terminal.Thus,by combining the network flow order,syntax,and semantic analysis,an equipment portrait can be constructed to guarantee security of the power network terminals.We then propose a trust evaluation method based on an equipment portrait to calculate the trust values in real time.Finally,the experimental results of terminal anomaly detection show that the proposed model has a higher detection rate and lower false detection rate,as well as a higher real-time performance,which is more suitable for power terminals.展开更多
With the frequent occurrence of telecommunications and networkfraud crimes in recent years, new frauds have emerged one after another whichhas caused huge losses to the people. However, due to the lack of an effective...With the frequent occurrence of telecommunications and networkfraud crimes in recent years, new frauds have emerged one after another whichhas caused huge losses to the people. However, due to the lack of an effectivepreventive mechanism, the police are often in a passive position. Usingtechnologies such as web crawlers, feature engineering, deep learning, andartificial intelligence, this paper proposes a user portrait fraudwarning schemebased on Weibo public data. First, we perform preliminary screening andcleaning based on the keyword “defrauded” to obtain valid fraudulent userIdentity Documents (IDs). The basic information and account information ofthese users is user-labeled to achieve the purpose of distinguishing the typesof fraud. Secondly, through feature engineering technologies such as avatarrecognition, Artificial Intelligence (AI) sentiment analysis, data screening,and follower blogger type analysis, these pictures and texts will be abstractedinto user preferences and personality characteristics which integrate multidimensionalinformation to build user portraits. Third, deep neural networktraining is performed on the cube. 80% percent of the data is predicted basedon the N-way K-shot problem and used to train the model, and the remaining20% is used for model accuracy evaluation. Experiments have shown thatFew-short learning has higher accuracy compared with Long Short TermMemory (LSTM), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and ConvolutionalNeural Network (CNN). On this basis, this paper develops a WeChat smallprogram for early warning of telecommunications network fraud based onuser portraits. When the user enters some personal information on the frontend, the back-end database can perform correlation analysis by itself, so as tomatch the most likely fraud types and give relevant early warning information.The fraud warning model is highly scaleable. The data of other Applications(APPs) can be extended to further improve the efficiency of anti-fraud whichhas extremely high public welfare value.展开更多
The objective of style transfer is to maintain the content of an image while transferring the style of another image.However,conventional methods face challenges in preserving facial features,especially in Korean port...The objective of style transfer is to maintain the content of an image while transferring the style of another image.However,conventional methods face challenges in preserving facial features,especially in Korean portraits where elements like the“Gat”(a traditional Korean hat)are prevalent.This paper proposes a deep learning network designed to perform style transfer that includes the“Gat”while preserving the identity of the face.Unlike traditional style transfer techniques,the proposed method aims to preserve the texture,attire,and the“Gat”in the style image by employing image sharpening and face landmark,with the GAN.The color,texture,and intensity were extracted differently based on the characteristics of each block and layer of the pre-trained VGG-16,and only the necessary elements during training were preserved using a facial landmark mask.The head area was presented using the eyebrow area to transfer the“Gat”.Furthermore,the identity of the face was retained,and style correlation was considered based on the Gram matrix.To evaluate performance,we introduced a metric using PSNR and SSIM,with an emphasis on median values through new weightings for style transfer in Korean portraits.Additionally,we have conducted a survey that evaluated the content,style,and naturalness of the transferred results,and based on the assessment,we can confidently conclude that our method to maintain the integrity of content surpasses the previous research.Our approach,enriched by landmarks preservation and diverse loss functions,including those related to“Gat”,outperformed previous researches in facial identity preservation.展开更多
In this paper, following the phase portraits analysis, we investigate the integrability of a system which physically describes the transverse oscillation of an elastic beam under end-thrust. As a result, we find that ...In this paper, following the phase portraits analysis, we investigate the integrability of a system which physically describes the transverse oscillation of an elastic beam under end-thrust. As a result, we find that this system actually comprises two families of travelling waves: the sub- and super-sonic periodic waves of positive- and negative- definite velocities, respectively, and the localized sub-sonic loop-shaped waves of positive-definite velocity. Expressing the energy-like of this system while depicting its phase portrait dynamics, we show that these multivaiued localized travelling waves appear as the boundary solutions to which the periodic travelling waves tend asymptotically展开更多
Henry James is a great master of world literature and a prolific American writer in the 19th century.The portrayal of woman has been a prominent feature of his works.This thesis is mainly about Henry James's view ...Henry James is a great master of world literature and a prolific American writer in the 19th century.The portrayal of woman has been a prominent feature of his works.This thesis is mainly about Henry James's view of marriage revealed in the Portrait of a Lady,and the relationship between his life and his works.展开更多
The Jamesian style of poise and exquisiteness, and his notion of structural balance and his superb craftsmanship, is bril-liantly exemplified by The Portrait of a Lady, a work to be appreciated endlessly. This paper s...The Jamesian style of poise and exquisiteness, and his notion of structural balance and his superb craftsmanship, is bril-liantly exemplified by The Portrait of a Lady, a work to be appreciated endlessly. This paper studies the artistic genius of HenryJames, as it attains a great height in this early masterpiece.展开更多
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is a novel full of different linguistic varieties,making it hard for common readers to comprehend.Stylistic analysis provides a different but not difficult way fo...A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is a novel full of different linguistic varieties,making it hard for common readers to comprehend.Stylistic analysis provides a different but not difficult way for common readers to explore how and why the novelist employs such a foregrounding writing technique to depict its hero,develop its plot and sublime its theme.展开更多
The global phase portrait describes the qualitative behaviour of the solution set for all time. In general, this is as close as we can get to solving nonlinear systems. The question of particular interest is: For what...The global phase portrait describes the qualitative behaviour of the solution set for all time. In general, this is as close as we can get to solving nonlinear systems. The question of particular interest is: For what parameter values does the global phase portrait of a dynamical system change its qualitative structure? In this paper, we attempt to answer the above question specifically for the case of certain third order nonlinear differential equations of the form . The linear case where is also considered. Our phase portrait analysis shows that under certain conditions on the coefficients as well as the function , we have asymptotic stability of solutions.展开更多
With the emergence of massive online courses,how to evaluate the quality of courses with different qualities to improve the discrimination between courses and recommend personalized online course learning resources fo...With the emergence of massive online courses,how to evaluate the quality of courses with different qualities to improve the discrimination between courses and recommend personalized online course learning resources for learners needs to be evaluated from all aspects.In this paper,a method of constructing an online course portrait based on feature engineering is proposed.Firstly,the framework of online course portrait is established,the related features of the portrait are extracted by feature engineering method,and then the indicator weights of the portrait are calculated by entropy weight method.Finally,experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of the algorithms,and an example of the course portrait is given.展开更多
Theoretical investigation of generation-recombination processes in silicon, which has a lifetime of charge carriers 10-3 s and capture cross sections of 10-16 sm2. For the study uses a method of phase portraits, which...Theoretical investigation of generation-recombination processes in silicon, which has a lifetime of charge carriers 10-3 s and capture cross sections of 10-16 sm2. For the study uses a method of phase portraits, which are widely used in the theory of vibrations. It is shown that the form of phase portraits strongly depends on the frequency of exposure to the external variable deformation.展开更多
By the 1880’s, Henry James had published some twelve volumes, including two full-length novels, and had another volume in preparation. His reputation as a writer had already been established. Yet, being a fastidious ...By the 1880’s, Henry James had published some twelve volumes, including two full-length novels, and had another volume in preparation. His reputation as a writer had already been established. Yet, being a fastidious craftsman, James dismissed all his writings up to this time as merely a series of "experiments of form" and the first stage of a "step-by-step evolution". Now he was confident that he could attain "form" in big subjects and he was determined to do something "big".展开更多
Both stylistics and literature are important courses for the English majors. How to apply stylistics theory in the literary analysis is important. The paper aims to provide some introduction of stylistics, its major d...Both stylistics and literature are important courses for the English majors. How to apply stylistics theory in the literary analysis is important. The paper aims to provide some introduction of stylistics, its major domains and its contribution in analysing literature. It is suggested that characteristics of the language in a particular context can be identified within the guidelines of stylistic categories and that a better comprehension as well as appropriateness and effectiveness of the examined text can be achieved. With the help of stylistic analysis of novel The Portrait of a Lady (1996) by Henry James, its style can be appreciated from phonological, lexical and grammatical aspects.展开更多
"The new academic portrait sculpture" is the mainstream style of Chinese contemporary portrait sculpture, it attempts to rethink traditional and contemporary cultural on the basis of the traditional realism College...."The new academic portrait sculpture" is the mainstream style of Chinese contemporary portrait sculpture, it attempts to rethink traditional and contemporary cultural on the basis of the traditional realism College. Perhaps this attempt was coordinated with Chinese traditional " eclectic, absorbing " idea, and soon was unanimously affirmed. Parts of the second generation of sculptors have begun to " adapt to the times," the vast majority of third-generation sculptors completed the transition very quickly, and therefore produced various works, such as Li Xiangqun' s "Guo Moruo ", Jiang Jie ' s " classmates series "etc.展开更多
基金the Double First-Class Innovation Research Projectfor People’s Public Security University of China (No. 2023SYL08).
文摘Voice portrait technology has explored and established the relationship between speakers’ voices and their facialfeatures, aiming to generate corresponding facial characteristics by providing the voice of an unknown speaker.Due to its powerful advantages in image generation, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have now beenwidely applied across various fields. The existing Voice2Face methods for voice portraits are primarily based onGANs trained on voice-face paired datasets. However, voice portrait models solely constructed on GANs facelimitations in image generation quality and struggle to maintain facial similarity. Additionally, the training processis relatively unstable, thereby affecting the overall generative performance of the model. To overcome the abovechallenges,wepropose a novel deepGenerativeAdversarialNetworkmodel for audio-visual synthesis, namedAVPGAN(Attention-enhanced Voice Portrait Model using Generative Adversarial Network). This model is based ona convolutional attention mechanism and is capable of generating corresponding facial images from the voice ofan unknown speaker. Firstly, to address the issue of training instability, we integrate convolutional neural networkswith deep GANs. In the network architecture, we apply spectral normalization to constrain the variation of thediscriminator, preventing issues such as mode collapse. Secondly, to enhance the model’s ability to extract relevantfeatures between the two modalities, we propose a voice portrait model based on convolutional attention. Thismodel learns the mapping relationship between voice and facial features in a common space from both channeland spatial dimensions independently. Thirdly, to enhance the quality of generated faces, we have incorporated adegradation removal module and utilized pretrained facial GANs as facial priors to repair and enhance the clarityof the generated facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that our AVP-GAN achieved a cosine similarity of0.511, outperforming the performance of our comparison model, and effectively achieved the generation of highqualityfacial images corresponding to a speaker’s voice.
文摘Mount Wutai,a place endowed with fine spirits of humanities and prolific remains of Arhats portrait art.The existing Mount Wutai Arhats portrait spans the Ming,Qing,and Republic of China periods,and through the artistic creation of successive generations of literati painters,exquisite Arhats portraits are painted on different artistic carriers.On the basis of inheriting the traditional Chinese paradigm painting expression,the portrait of Mount Wutai Arhats constantly draws on folk nutrients.It integrates foreign Buddhist culture for refinement and sublimation.The reconstructed portrait pays attention to the image expression of its objects and the shaping of spiritual temperament.The shape is ancient and vivid,and the scene is ethereal and mysterious,which rationally expresses the Buddhist philosophy of generosity,benevolence and kindness,and contains unique oriental aesthetics.
文摘The Altomani&Sons Collection owns a remarkable newly discovered portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere,Duke of Urbino(1514-1574),a historical military figure who was a condottiere,ruler of Urbino,Commander-in-chief of the Papal Estate,and Perfect of Rome,as well as a collector and patron of the Fine Arts.Camilla Guerrieri Nati(1628-1694),a seventeenth-century Italian painter from Fossombrone(in the province of Pesaro and Urbino),portrayed this heroic personage surrounded by emblems associated with his military courage and leadership,including his plumed burgonet helmet,metal gilded armor,a necklace with the golden fleece,and batons of secular and religious dominions.This oil painting on copper-considered a precious metal at the time-emphasizes the importance of the commission.The material and technique also reveals a unique artistic achievement in that it provides the painting with a smooth,reflective surface and vibrant coloration,symbolizing precious imagery.
基金supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China(No.2021YFB2401200)。
文摘As the number of power terminals continues to increase and their usage becomes more widespread,the security of power systems is under great threat.In response to the lack of effective trust evaluation methods for terminals,we propose a trust evaluation model based on equipment portraits for power terminals.First,we propose an exception evaluation method based on the network flow order and evaluate anomalous terminals by monitoring the external characteristics of network traffic.Second,we propose an exception evaluation method based on syntax and semantics.The key fields of each message are extracted,and the frequency of keywords in the message is statistically analyzed to obtain the keyword frequency and time-slot threshold for evaluating the status of the terminal.Thus,by combining the network flow order,syntax,and semantic analysis,an equipment portrait can be constructed to guarantee security of the power network terminals.We then propose a trust evaluation method based on an equipment portrait to calculate the trust values in real time.Finally,the experimental results of terminal anomaly detection show that the proposed model has a higher detection rate and lower false detection rate,as well as a higher real-time performance,which is more suitable for power terminals.
文摘With the frequent occurrence of telecommunications and networkfraud crimes in recent years, new frauds have emerged one after another whichhas caused huge losses to the people. However, due to the lack of an effectivepreventive mechanism, the police are often in a passive position. Usingtechnologies such as web crawlers, feature engineering, deep learning, andartificial intelligence, this paper proposes a user portrait fraudwarning schemebased on Weibo public data. First, we perform preliminary screening andcleaning based on the keyword “defrauded” to obtain valid fraudulent userIdentity Documents (IDs). The basic information and account information ofthese users is user-labeled to achieve the purpose of distinguishing the typesof fraud. Secondly, through feature engineering technologies such as avatarrecognition, Artificial Intelligence (AI) sentiment analysis, data screening,and follower blogger type analysis, these pictures and texts will be abstractedinto user preferences and personality characteristics which integrate multidimensionalinformation to build user portraits. Third, deep neural networktraining is performed on the cube. 80% percent of the data is predicted basedon the N-way K-shot problem and used to train the model, and the remaining20% is used for model accuracy evaluation. Experiments have shown thatFew-short learning has higher accuracy compared with Long Short TermMemory (LSTM), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and ConvolutionalNeural Network (CNN). On this basis, this paper develops a WeChat smallprogram for early warning of telecommunications network fraud based onuser portraits. When the user enters some personal information on the frontend, the back-end database can perform correlation analysis by itself, so as tomatch the most likely fraud types and give relevant early warning information.The fraud warning model is highly scaleable. The data of other Applications(APPs) can be extended to further improve the efficiency of anti-fraud whichhas extremely high public welfare value.
基金supported by Metaverse Lab Program funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT(MSIT),and the Korea Radio Promotion Association(RAPA).
文摘The objective of style transfer is to maintain the content of an image while transferring the style of another image.However,conventional methods face challenges in preserving facial features,especially in Korean portraits where elements like the“Gat”(a traditional Korean hat)are prevalent.This paper proposes a deep learning network designed to perform style transfer that includes the“Gat”while preserving the identity of the face.Unlike traditional style transfer techniques,the proposed method aims to preserve the texture,attire,and the“Gat”in the style image by employing image sharpening and face landmark,with the GAN.The color,texture,and intensity were extracted differently based on the characteristics of each block and layer of the pre-trained VGG-16,and only the necessary elements during training were preserved using a facial landmark mask.The head area was presented using the eyebrow area to transfer the“Gat”.Furthermore,the identity of the face was retained,and style correlation was considered based on the Gram matrix.To evaluate performance,we introduced a metric using PSNR and SSIM,with an emphasis on median values through new weightings for style transfer in Korean portraits.Additionally,we have conducted a survey that evaluated the content,style,and naturalness of the transferred results,and based on the assessment,we can confidently conclude that our method to maintain the integrity of content surpasses the previous research.Our approach,enriched by landmarks preservation and diverse loss functions,including those related to“Gat”,outperformed previous researches in facial identity preservation.
文摘In this paper, following the phase portraits analysis, we investigate the integrability of a system which physically describes the transverse oscillation of an elastic beam under end-thrust. As a result, we find that this system actually comprises two families of travelling waves: the sub- and super-sonic periodic waves of positive- and negative- definite velocities, respectively, and the localized sub-sonic loop-shaped waves of positive-definite velocity. Expressing the energy-like of this system while depicting its phase portrait dynamics, we show that these multivaiued localized travelling waves appear as the boundary solutions to which the periodic travelling waves tend asymptotically
文摘Henry James is a great master of world literature and a prolific American writer in the 19th century.The portrayal of woman has been a prominent feature of his works.This thesis is mainly about Henry James's view of marriage revealed in the Portrait of a Lady,and the relationship between his life and his works.
文摘The Jamesian style of poise and exquisiteness, and his notion of structural balance and his superb craftsmanship, is bril-liantly exemplified by The Portrait of a Lady, a work to be appreciated endlessly. This paper studies the artistic genius of HenryJames, as it attains a great height in this early masterpiece.
文摘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is a novel full of different linguistic varieties,making it hard for common readers to comprehend.Stylistic analysis provides a different but not difficult way for common readers to explore how and why the novelist employs such a foregrounding writing technique to depict its hero,develop its plot and sublime its theme.
文摘The global phase portrait describes the qualitative behaviour of the solution set for all time. In general, this is as close as we can get to solving nonlinear systems. The question of particular interest is: For what parameter values does the global phase portrait of a dynamical system change its qualitative structure? In this paper, we attempt to answer the above question specifically for the case of certain third order nonlinear differential equations of the form . The linear case where is also considered. Our phase portrait analysis shows that under certain conditions on the coefficients as well as the function , we have asymptotic stability of solutions.
基金This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China(Grant No.2020AAA0108803).
文摘With the emergence of massive online courses,how to evaluate the quality of courses with different qualities to improve the discrimination between courses and recommend personalized online course learning resources for learners needs to be evaluated from all aspects.In this paper,a method of constructing an online course portrait based on feature engineering is proposed.Firstly,the framework of online course portrait is established,the related features of the portrait are extracted by feature engineering method,and then the indicator weights of the portrait are calculated by entropy weight method.Finally,experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of the algorithms,and an example of the course portrait is given.
文摘Theoretical investigation of generation-recombination processes in silicon, which has a lifetime of charge carriers 10-3 s and capture cross sections of 10-16 sm2. For the study uses a method of phase portraits, which are widely used in the theory of vibrations. It is shown that the form of phase portraits strongly depends on the frequency of exposure to the external variable deformation.
文摘By the 1880’s, Henry James had published some twelve volumes, including two full-length novels, and had another volume in preparation. His reputation as a writer had already been established. Yet, being a fastidious craftsman, James dismissed all his writings up to this time as merely a series of "experiments of form" and the first stage of a "step-by-step evolution". Now he was confident that he could attain "form" in big subjects and he was determined to do something "big".
文摘Both stylistics and literature are important courses for the English majors. How to apply stylistics theory in the literary analysis is important. The paper aims to provide some introduction of stylistics, its major domains and its contribution in analysing literature. It is suggested that characteristics of the language in a particular context can be identified within the guidelines of stylistic categories and that a better comprehension as well as appropriateness and effectiveness of the examined text can be achieved. With the help of stylistic analysis of novel The Portrait of a Lady (1996) by Henry James, its style can be appreciated from phonological, lexical and grammatical aspects.
文摘"The new academic portrait sculpture" is the mainstream style of Chinese contemporary portrait sculpture, it attempts to rethink traditional and contemporary cultural on the basis of the traditional realism College. Perhaps this attempt was coordinated with Chinese traditional " eclectic, absorbing " idea, and soon was unanimously affirmed. Parts of the second generation of sculptors have begun to " adapt to the times," the vast majority of third-generation sculptors completed the transition very quickly, and therefore produced various works, such as Li Xiangqun' s "Guo Moruo ", Jiang Jie ' s " classmates series "etc.