Spinal cord injury(SCI)causes disturbances in motor and sensory functions leading to paralysis,the severity of which depends on the spinal level of the injury.Traumatic lesions of spinal cord axon projection tracts ...Spinal cord injury(SCI)causes disturbances in motor and sensory functions leading to paralysis,the severity of which depends on the spinal level of the injury.Traumatic lesions of spinal cord axon projection tracts are untreatable in human patients,although numerous research groupsworldwide are studying putative treatment strategies.展开更多
The various competing contributions to the anomalous Hall effect in spin-polarized two-dimensional electron gases in the presence of both intrinsic, extrinsic and external electric-field induced spin-orbit coupling we...The various competing contributions to the anomalous Hall effect in spin-polarized two-dimensional electron gases in the presence of both intrinsic, extrinsic and external electric-field induced spin-orbit coupling were investigated theoretically. Based on a unified semiclassical theoretical approach, it is shown that the total anomalous Hall conductivity can be expressed as the sum of three distinct contributions in the presence of these competing spin-orbit interactions, namely an intrinsic contribution determined by the Berry curvature in the momentum space, an extrinsic contribution determined by the modified Bloch band group velocity and an extrinsic contribution determined by spin-orbit-dependent impurity scattering. The characteristics of these competing contributions are discussed in detail in the paper.展开更多
A novel and accurate method is proposed to extract the intrinsic elements of the GaN high-electron-mobility transistor(HEMT) switch.The new extraction method is verified by comparing the simulated S-parameters with ...A novel and accurate method is proposed to extract the intrinsic elements of the GaN high-electron-mobility transistor(HEMT) switch.The new extraction method is verified by comparing the simulated S-parameters with the measured data over the 5-40 GHz frequency range.The percentage errors E(ij) within 3.83% show the great agreement between the simulated S-parameters and the measured data.展开更多
AIM: To reveal the cytotoxicity and related mechanisms of gatifloxacin(GFX) to stromal fibroblasts(SFs) in vitro.METHODS: SFs were treated with GFX at different concentrations(0.009375%-0.3%), and their viability was ...AIM: To reveal the cytotoxicity and related mechanisms of gatifloxacin(GFX) to stromal fibroblasts(SFs) in vitro.METHODS: SFs were treated with GFX at different concentrations(0.009375%-0.3%), and their viability was detected by MTT method. The cell morphology was observed using light/transmission electron microscope. The plasma membrane permeability was measured by AO/EB double-staining. Then cell cycle, phosphatidylserine(PS) externalization, and mitochondrial transmembrane potential(MTP) were analyzed by flow cytometry. DNA damage was analyzed by electrophoresis and immunostaining. ELISA was used to evaluate the caspase-3/-8/-9 activation. Finally, Western blotting was applied for detecting the expressions of apoptosis-related proteins.RESULTS: Morphological changes and reduced viability of GFX-treated SFs demonstrated that GFX above 0.009375% had cytotoxicity to SFs with dependence of concentration and time. GFX-treating cells also showed G1 phase arrest, increased membrane permeability, PS externalization and DNA damage, which indicated that GFX induced apoptosis of SFs. Additionally, GFX could activate the caspase-8, caspase-9, and caspase-3, induce MTP disruption, downregulate B-cell leukemia-2(Bcl-2) and B-cell leukemiaXL(Bcl-XL), and upregulate Bcl-2 assaciated X protein(Bax), Bcl-2-associated death promoter(Bad), Bcl-2 interacting domain(Bid) and cytoplasmic cytochrome C in SFs, suggesting that caspase-dependent extrinsic and intrinsic pathways were related to GFX-contributed apoptosis of SFs.CONCLUSION: The cytotoxicity of GFX induces apoptosis of SFs through triggering the caspase-dependent extrinsic and intrinsic pathways.展开更多
This paper addresses the robust visual tracking of multi-feature points for a 3D manipulator with unknown intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the vision system. This class of control systems are highly nonlinear con...This paper addresses the robust visual tracking of multi-feature points for a 3D manipulator with unknown intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the vision system. This class of control systems are highly nonlinear control systems characterized as time-varying and strong coupling in states and unknown parameters. It is first pointed out that not only is the Jacobian image matrix nonsingular, but also its minimum singular value has a positive limit. This provides the foundation of kinematics and dynamics control of manipulators with visual feedback. Second, the Euler angle expressed rotation transformation is employed to estimate a subspace of the parameter space of the vision system. Based on the two results above, and arbitrarily chosen parameters in this subspace, the tracking controllers are proposed so that the image errors can be made as small as desired so long as the control gain is allowed to be large. The controller does not use visual velocity to achieve high and robust performance with low sampling rate of the vision system. The obtained results are proved by Lyapunov direct method. Experiments are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.展开更多
Paraphrase is an expression of a text with alternative words and orders to achieve a better clarity. Paraphrases have been found vital for augmenting training dataset, which aid to enhance performance of machine learn...Paraphrase is an expression of a text with alternative words and orders to achieve a better clarity. Paraphrases have been found vital for augmenting training dataset, which aid to enhance performance of machine learning models that intended for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Thus, recently, automatic paraphrase generation has received increasing attention. However, evaluating quality of generated paraphrases is technically challenging. In the literature, the importance of generated paraphrases is tended to be determined by their impact on the performance of other NLP tasks. This kind of evaluation is referred as extrinsic evaluation, which requires high computational resources to train and test the models. So far, very little attention has been paid to the role of intrinsic evaluation in which quality of generated paraphrase is judged against predefined ground truth (reference paraphrases). In fact, it is also very challenging to find ideal and complete reference paraphrases. Therefore, in this study, we propose semantic or meaning oriented automatic evaluation metric that helps to evaluate quality of generated paraphrases against the original text, which is an intrinsic evaluation approach. Further, we evaluate quality of the paraphrases by assessing their impact on other NLP tasks, which is an extrinsic evaluation method. The goal is to explore the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods. To ensure the effectiveness of proposed evaluation methods, extensive experiments are done on different publicly available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation strategies are promising. The results further reveal that there is a significant correlation between intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation approaches.展开更多
Spinal cord injury(SCI)is a traumatic event that can lead to permanent motor and sensory deficits.After the initial trauma,axons of surviving neurons rapidly retract.While there may be a small degree of abortive spr...Spinal cord injury(SCI)is a traumatic event that can lead to permanent motor and sensory deficits.After the initial trauma,axons of surviving neurons rapidly retract.While there may be a small degree of abortive sprouting,virtually all attempts at robust regrowth across the lesion site ultimately fail.Thus,neurons below the level of the injury are permanently disconnected from their normal input,resulting in persistent loss of function.展开更多
Traditionally, organizations assume that compensation/pay and monetary benefits are what all employees need to work harder, be productive, or remain with the company. According to Abraham Maslow, within every person i...Traditionally, organizations assume that compensation/pay and monetary benefits are what all employees need to work harder, be productive, or remain with the company. According to Abraham Maslow, within every person is a hierarchy of five needs: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs Organizations must be able to identify what employees desire to secure optimum performance and to meet the needs of both employees and employers. This research focuses on the generational gap and the significance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in the workforce. The purpose and objective of this research are to test the significance of monetary versus non-monetary rewards among the different generations in the organization. A self-designed questionnaire distributed to a multi-generational group of employees of selected organizations was used to collect the analyzed data. Sixty-five (65%) responses were obtained. Secondary data were used to elucidate the needs in this area of study. Because the workforce is predicted to become more diverse in terms of age, organizations will be unlikely to implement one set of rewards for the multiple generations. This is due to the differing expectations and requirements among the generations. However, the results indicate no significant difference in monetary versus non-monetary rewards among the different generations in the workforce.展开更多
The environment in the sense of all the ecosystems on Earth, has been polluted, harmed, and put at risk of degradation to some extent. Nevertheless, the mainstream ethical philosophies have found it difficult to assig...The environment in the sense of all the ecosystems on Earth, has been polluted, harmed, and put at risk of degradation to some extent. Nevertheless, the mainstream ethical philosophies have found it difficult to assign an intrinsic value to the environment itself, and most environmental ethics is based on an "enlightened" anthropocentrism which values environmental protection for the sake of other humans including the future generations. Philosophically speaking, the concept of moral obligations towards generations, who have not been born yet, can be challenged. This vicious circle is a fundamental issue for "environmental ethics." The current paper is an attempt to help correct this broken cycle of arguments using three lines of argument: (1) The harmful impact of human activity on the environment does not benefit all humans; the question is not over the selfishness and short-sightedness of humankind regarding the environment as much as it is regarding "environmental" justice among humans. The pursuit of self-interest and wealth by some humans, but not all, should not lead philosophers to ignore the insufficiencies of our economic and capitalist systems in the delineation of morally correct human-environment interaction. The right to a livable environment is a universal human right and morality has to support it. (2) The moral obligation of humankind toward the environment is similar to any situation where a party, such as a child, does not have the ability to protect itself or defend its rights; this is the principle of "due care." Humans have the knowledge to understand the complexity of ecosystem interrelationships and the harm which industrial activity has caused. Therefore they have a moral obligation to exercise due care to prevent it from being harmed irreversibly. (3) The third argument is concerned with human morality and the spirituality of the environment. It can be argued that the natural instinct of the love of the environment, biophilia, is not a cause but a symptom of the grand spiritual value in the environment, even though this spiritual value may not be confined to humans, but be accrued to all life forms that have and/or show a genuine interest in the environment.展开更多
文摘Spinal cord injury(SCI)causes disturbances in motor and sensory functions leading to paralysis,the severity of which depends on the spinal level of the injury.Traumatic lesions of spinal cord axon projection tracts are untreatable in human patients,although numerous research groupsworldwide are studying putative treatment strategies.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.10874049)
文摘The various competing contributions to the anomalous Hall effect in spin-polarized two-dimensional electron gases in the presence of both intrinsic, extrinsic and external electric-field induced spin-orbit coupling were investigated theoretically. Based on a unified semiclassical theoretical approach, it is shown that the total anomalous Hall conductivity can be expressed as the sum of three distinct contributions in the presence of these competing spin-orbit interactions, namely an intrinsic contribution determined by the Berry curvature in the momentum space, an extrinsic contribution determined by the modified Bloch band group velocity and an extrinsic contribution determined by spin-orbit-dependent impurity scattering. The characteristics of these competing contributions are discussed in detail in the paper.
文摘A novel and accurate method is proposed to extract the intrinsic elements of the GaN high-electron-mobility transistor(HEMT) switch.The new extraction method is verified by comparing the simulated S-parameters with the measured data over the 5-40 GHz frequency range.The percentage errors E(ij) within 3.83% show the great agreement between the simulated S-parameters and the measured data.
基金Supported by the National High Technology R&D Program of China(No.2006AA02A132)
文摘AIM: To reveal the cytotoxicity and related mechanisms of gatifloxacin(GFX) to stromal fibroblasts(SFs) in vitro.METHODS: SFs were treated with GFX at different concentrations(0.009375%-0.3%), and their viability was detected by MTT method. The cell morphology was observed using light/transmission electron microscope. The plasma membrane permeability was measured by AO/EB double-staining. Then cell cycle, phosphatidylserine(PS) externalization, and mitochondrial transmembrane potential(MTP) were analyzed by flow cytometry. DNA damage was analyzed by electrophoresis and immunostaining. ELISA was used to evaluate the caspase-3/-8/-9 activation. Finally, Western blotting was applied for detecting the expressions of apoptosis-related proteins.RESULTS: Morphological changes and reduced viability of GFX-treated SFs demonstrated that GFX above 0.009375% had cytotoxicity to SFs with dependence of concentration and time. GFX-treating cells also showed G1 phase arrest, increased membrane permeability, PS externalization and DNA damage, which indicated that GFX induced apoptosis of SFs. Additionally, GFX could activate the caspase-8, caspase-9, and caspase-3, induce MTP disruption, downregulate B-cell leukemia-2(Bcl-2) and B-cell leukemiaXL(Bcl-XL), and upregulate Bcl-2 assaciated X protein(Bax), Bcl-2-associated death promoter(Bad), Bcl-2 interacting domain(Bid) and cytoplasmic cytochrome C in SFs, suggesting that caspase-dependent extrinsic and intrinsic pathways were related to GFX-contributed apoptosis of SFs.CONCLUSION: The cytotoxicity of GFX induces apoptosis of SFs through triggering the caspase-dependent extrinsic and intrinsic pathways.
基金This work was supported by The National Science Foundation(No.60474009),Shu Guang Program(No.05SG48)Scientific Programm ofShanghai Education Committee(No.07zz90).
文摘This paper addresses the robust visual tracking of multi-feature points for a 3D manipulator with unknown intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the vision system. This class of control systems are highly nonlinear control systems characterized as time-varying and strong coupling in states and unknown parameters. It is first pointed out that not only is the Jacobian image matrix nonsingular, but also its minimum singular value has a positive limit. This provides the foundation of kinematics and dynamics control of manipulators with visual feedback. Second, the Euler angle expressed rotation transformation is employed to estimate a subspace of the parameter space of the vision system. Based on the two results above, and arbitrarily chosen parameters in this subspace, the tracking controllers are proposed so that the image errors can be made as small as desired so long as the control gain is allowed to be large. The controller does not use visual velocity to achieve high and robust performance with low sampling rate of the vision system. The obtained results are proved by Lyapunov direct method. Experiments are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
文摘Paraphrase is an expression of a text with alternative words and orders to achieve a better clarity. Paraphrases have been found vital for augmenting training dataset, which aid to enhance performance of machine learning models that intended for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Thus, recently, automatic paraphrase generation has received increasing attention. However, evaluating quality of generated paraphrases is technically challenging. In the literature, the importance of generated paraphrases is tended to be determined by their impact on the performance of other NLP tasks. This kind of evaluation is referred as extrinsic evaluation, which requires high computational resources to train and test the models. So far, very little attention has been paid to the role of intrinsic evaluation in which quality of generated paraphrase is judged against predefined ground truth (reference paraphrases). In fact, it is also very challenging to find ideal and complete reference paraphrases. Therefore, in this study, we propose semantic or meaning oriented automatic evaluation metric that helps to evaluate quality of generated paraphrases against the original text, which is an intrinsic evaluation approach. Further, we evaluate quality of the paraphrases by assessing their impact on other NLP tasks, which is an extrinsic evaluation method. The goal is to explore the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods. To ensure the effectiveness of proposed evaluation methods, extensive experiments are done on different publicly available datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation strategies are promising. The results further reveal that there is a significant correlation between intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation approaches.
基金funded by NIH R01 NS085426(VJT)the Craig H.Neilsen Foundation(DW)
文摘Spinal cord injury(SCI)is a traumatic event that can lead to permanent motor and sensory deficits.After the initial trauma,axons of surviving neurons rapidly retract.While there may be a small degree of abortive sprouting,virtually all attempts at robust regrowth across the lesion site ultimately fail.Thus,neurons below the level of the injury are permanently disconnected from their normal input,resulting in persistent loss of function.
文摘Traditionally, organizations assume that compensation/pay and monetary benefits are what all employees need to work harder, be productive, or remain with the company. According to Abraham Maslow, within every person is a hierarchy of five needs: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs Organizations must be able to identify what employees desire to secure optimum performance and to meet the needs of both employees and employers. This research focuses on the generational gap and the significance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in the workforce. The purpose and objective of this research are to test the significance of monetary versus non-monetary rewards among the different generations in the organization. A self-designed questionnaire distributed to a multi-generational group of employees of selected organizations was used to collect the analyzed data. Sixty-five (65%) responses were obtained. Secondary data were used to elucidate the needs in this area of study. Because the workforce is predicted to become more diverse in terms of age, organizations will be unlikely to implement one set of rewards for the multiple generations. This is due to the differing expectations and requirements among the generations. However, the results indicate no significant difference in monetary versus non-monetary rewards among the different generations in the workforce.
文摘The environment in the sense of all the ecosystems on Earth, has been polluted, harmed, and put at risk of degradation to some extent. Nevertheless, the mainstream ethical philosophies have found it difficult to assign an intrinsic value to the environment itself, and most environmental ethics is based on an "enlightened" anthropocentrism which values environmental protection for the sake of other humans including the future generations. Philosophically speaking, the concept of moral obligations towards generations, who have not been born yet, can be challenged. This vicious circle is a fundamental issue for "environmental ethics." The current paper is an attempt to help correct this broken cycle of arguments using three lines of argument: (1) The harmful impact of human activity on the environment does not benefit all humans; the question is not over the selfishness and short-sightedness of humankind regarding the environment as much as it is regarding "environmental" justice among humans. The pursuit of self-interest and wealth by some humans, but not all, should not lead philosophers to ignore the insufficiencies of our economic and capitalist systems in the delineation of morally correct human-environment interaction. The right to a livable environment is a universal human right and morality has to support it. (2) The moral obligation of humankind toward the environment is similar to any situation where a party, such as a child, does not have the ability to protect itself or defend its rights; this is the principle of "due care." Humans have the knowledge to understand the complexity of ecosystem interrelationships and the harm which industrial activity has caused. Therefore they have a moral obligation to exercise due care to prevent it from being harmed irreversibly. (3) The third argument is concerned with human morality and the spirituality of the environment. It can be argued that the natural instinct of the love of the environment, biophilia, is not a cause but a symptom of the grand spiritual value in the environment, even though this spiritual value may not be confined to humans, but be accrued to all life forms that have and/or show a genuine interest in the environment.