258 research outputs found
Synchronous Inflation of a Valvuloplasty Balloon Catheter With Heart Rate: In-Vitro Evaluation in Terms of Dilatation Performance
No full textBalloon aortic valvuloplasty (BAV), a minimally invasive procedure to alleviate aortic valve stenosis, commonly employs rapid ventricular pacing (RVP) for balloon stabilization. However, the repeated and extended operation time associated with this technique poses potential complications. This paper introduces a novel approach to mitigate these concerns by employing a dilatation mechanism that is synchronized with the cardiac frequency, wherein the balloon catheter is fully inflated and deflated to a safe, low volume during the decrement of the ventricular pressure. The synchronized pacing was tested at a heart rate of 60bpm. To experimentally validate the performance of this new approach, mock aortic roots reproducing different calcification patterns were used to compare the leaflets' mobility after the dilatation test with traditional BAV. Results confirm successful balloon pacing, maintaining low volume before the ventricular pressure increases. The dilatation performance assessment underscores that the proposed methodology resulted in a higher improvement in terms of the transvalvular pressure gradient and opening area. Optimal performance occurs at 60bpm, yielding a 30.28% gradient decrease and a 21.35% opening area increase. This research represents a notable step forward toward the development of BAV devices capable of autonomous stabilization, eliminating the need for RVP and its related complications. Furthermore, the use of calcified aortic root (AR) phantoms contributes to an enhanced understanding of hemodynamic implications during BAV procedures
Table1_Potential inhibitory effects of compounds ZK-PI-5 and ZK-PI-9 on trehalose and chitin metabolism in Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith).DOCX
No full textIntroduction:Spodoptera frugiperda is an omnivorous agricultural pest which is great dangerous for grain output.Methods: In order to investigate the effects of potential trehalase inhibitors, ZK-PI-5 and ZK-PI-9, on the growth and development of S. frugiperda, and to identify new avenues for S. frugiperda control, we measured the content of the trehalose, glucose, glycogen and chitin, enzyme activity, and gene expression levels in trehalose and chitin metabolism of S. frugiperda. Besides, their growth and development were also observed.Results: The results showed that ZK-PI-9 significantly reduced trehalase activity and ZK-PI-5 significantly reduced membraned-bound trehalase activity. Moreover, ZK-PI-5 inhibited the expression of SfTRE2, SfCHS2, and SfCHT, thus affecting the chitin metabolism. In addition, the mortality of S. frugiperda in pupal stage and eclosion stage increased significantly after treatment with ZK-PI-5 and ZK-PI-9, which affected their development stage and caused death phenotype (abnormal pupation and difficulty in breaking pupa).Discussion: These results have provided a theoretical basis for the application of trehalase inhibitors in the control of agricultural pests to promote future global grain yield.</p
Towards accurate group activity analysis in videos: robust saliency detection and effective feature modeling
No full textHuman activity analysis is an important area of computer vision research today. The goal of human activity analysis is to automatically analyze ongoing activities from an unknown video. The ability to analyze complex human activities from videos has many important applications, such as smart camera system, video surveillance, etc. However, it is still far from an off-the-shelf system. There are many challenging problems and it is still an active research area. This dissertation focuses on addressing two problems: various camera motions and effective modeling of group behaviors. We propose a unified and robust framework to detect salient motions from diverse types of videos. Given a video sequence that is recorded from either a stationary or moving camera, our algorithm is able to detect the salient motion regions. The model is inspired by two observations: 1) background motion caused by orthographic cameras lies in a low rank subspace, and 2) pixels belonging to one trajectory tend to group together. Based on these two observations, we introduce a new model using both low rank and group sparsity constraints. It is able to robustly decompose a motion trajectory matrix into foreground and background ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate very competitive performance on both synthetic data and real videos. After salient motion detection, a new method is proposed to model group behaviors in video sequences. This approach effectively models group activities based on social behavior analysis. Different from previous work that uses independent local features, our method explores the relationships between the current behavior state of a subject and its actions. An interaction energy potential function is proposed to represent the current behavior state of a subject, and velocity is used as its actions. Our method does not depend on human detection, so it is robust to detection errors. Instead, tracked salient points are able to provide a good estimation of modeling group interaction. We evaluate our algorithm in two datasets: UMN and BEHAVE. Experimental results show its promising performance against the state-of-art methods.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Xinyi Cu
Terra Sonâmbula de Mia Couto em português e chinês : análise de neologismos
No full textPublicada em 1992, o romance de Mia Couto Terra Sonâmbula é marcado pelo uso de neologismos, formados a partir de processos não-morfológicos como a amálgama e processos morfológicos como a afixação e a composição. A criatividade miacoutiana é espelhada nas palavras novas por ele inventadas, através de processos criativos permitidos pelas regras de formação lexical do português. Vários estudos refletem sobre a tradução das obras de Mia Couto para línguas indo-europeias como o francês e o inglês, mas poucos se debruçam sobre a tradução para o chinês. A tradução chinesa dos neologismos é desafiante, uma vez que o chinês não dispõe de mecanismos equivalentes para formar novas palavras.
O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar a tradução chinesa de neologismos em Terra Sonâmbula, publicada em Taiwan, partindo das diferenças linguísticas entre o português e o chinês e explorando as transformações que os processos criativos sofreram durante o processo de tradução, bem como as diferenças na experiência de leitura entre os leitores de português e os de chinês. Após uma breve introdução da obra e estado de questão, propõe-se no primeiro capítulo uma análise comparativa entre o português e o chinês em termos morfológicos. No segundo capítulo, foi analisada a tradução de neologismos formados por diferentes processos morfológicos ou não-morfológicos, com ênfase em amálgamas, neologismo mais frequente na obra, mostrando que a tradução preservou, na maioria dos casos, as propriedades semânticas dos neologismos, mas perdeu os processos criativos devido às diferenças linguísticas. Assim, os leitores da tradução têm acesso às imagens criadas pelo autor, mas a forma como as imagens são representadas e coordenadas é definida pela tradutora, não conforme a descodificação e interpretação dos leitores aos neologismos, daí a diferença entre a experiência de leitura dos dois tipos de leitores (original e tradução).
No final, apresentamos nos anexos uma entrevista feita à tradutora Jin Xinyi e um corpus com os neologismos identificados na obra e a respetiva tradução.Published in 1992, Mia Couto's novel Terra Sonâmbula is marked by the use of neologisms, formed through non-morphological processes as blending and morphological processes as affixation and composition. Mia Couto's creativity is mirrored in the new words that he has invented, through creative processes allowed by the word formation rules of Portuguese. Several studies reflect on the translation of Mia Couto's works into Indo-European languages, such as French and English, but few on the translation into Chinese. The Chinese translation of neologisms is challenging due to the scarcity of equivalent mechanisms to form new words.
The present work aims to analyze the Chinese translation of neologisms in Terra Sonâmbula, published in Taiwan, starting from the linguistic differences between Portuguese and Chinese and exploring the transformations underwent by the creative processes during the translation, as well as the differences in the reading experience between Portuguese and Chinese readers. After a brief introduction to the dissertation and the Status Quaestionis, it was made a comparative analysis between Portuguese and Chinese in morphological terms. Then, it was analyzed the translation of neologisms formed by diverse morphological or non-morphological processes, with emphasis on blending words, the most frequent neologisms in Terra Sonâmbula, showing that the translation has preserved, in most cases, the semantic properties of the neologisms, but lost the creative processes due to differences between Portuguese and Chinese. Thus, the images created by the author are accessible to the readers of the translation, but the way in which the images are represented and coordinated is defined by the translator, not according to the readers' own decoding and interpretation of the new words, hence the difference on the reading experience between the readers of Portuguese and Chinese.
At the end, we present in the Annexes attached an interview to the translator Jin Xinyi and a corpus with the neologisms identified in Terra Sonâmbula, as well as the respective translation
Terra Sonâmbula de Mia Couto em português e chinês : análise de neologismos
No full textPublicada em 1992, o romance de Mia Couto Terra Sonâmbula é marcado pelo uso de neologismos, formados a partir de processos não-morfológicos como a amálgama e processos morfológicos como a afixação e a composição. A criatividade miacoutiana é espelhada nas palavras novas por ele inventadas, através de processos criativos permitidos pelas regras de formação lexical do português. Vários estudos refletem sobre a tradução das obras de Mia Couto para línguas indo-europeias como o francês e o inglês, mas poucos se debruçam sobre a tradução para o chinês. A tradução chinesa dos neologismos é desafiante, uma vez que o chinês não dispõe de mecanismos equivalentes para formar novas palavras.
O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar a tradução chinesa de neologismos em Terra Sonâmbula, publicada em Taiwan, partindo das diferenças linguísticas entre o português e o chinês e explorando as transformações que os processos criativos sofreram durante o processo de tradução, bem como as diferenças na experiência de leitura entre os leitores de português e os de chinês. Após uma breve introdução da obra e estado de questão, propõe-se no primeiro capítulo uma análise comparativa entre o português e o chinês em termos morfológicos. No segundo capítulo, foi analisada a tradução de neologismos formados por diferentes processos morfológicos ou não-morfológicos, com ênfase em amálgamas, neologismo mais frequente na obra, mostrando que a tradução preservou, na maioria dos casos, as propriedades semânticas dos neologismos, mas perdeu os processos criativos devido às diferenças linguísticas. Assim, os leitores da tradução têm acesso às imagens criadas pelo autor, mas a forma como as imagens são representadas e coordenadas é definida pela tradutora, não conforme a descodificação e interpretação dos leitores aos neologismos, daí a diferença entre a experiência de leitura dos dois tipos de leitores (original e tradução).
No final, apresentamos nos anexos uma entrevista feita à tradutora Jin Xinyi e um corpus com os neologismos identificados na obra e a respetiva tradução.Published in 1992, Mia Couto's novel Terra Sonâmbula is marked by the use of neologisms, formed through non-morphological processes as blending and morphological processes as affixation and composition. Mia Couto's creativity is mirrored in the new words that he has invented, through creative processes allowed by the word formation rules of Portuguese. Several studies reflect on the translation of Mia Couto's works into Indo-European languages, such as French and English, but few on the translation into Chinese. The Chinese translation of neologisms is challenging due to the scarcity of equivalent mechanisms to form new words.
The present work aims to analyze the Chinese translation of neologisms in Terra Sonâmbula, published in Taiwan, starting from the linguistic differences between Portuguese and Chinese and exploring the transformations underwent by the creative processes during the translation, as well as the differences in the reading experience between Portuguese and Chinese readers. After a brief introduction to the dissertation and the Status Quaestionis, it was made a comparative analysis between Portuguese and Chinese in morphological terms. Then, it was analyzed the translation of neologisms formed by diverse morphological or non-morphological processes, with emphasis on blending words, the most frequent neologisms in Terra Sonâmbula, showing that the translation has preserved, in most cases, the semantic properties of the neologisms, but lost the creative processes due to differences between Portuguese and Chinese. Thus, the images created by the author are accessible to the readers of the translation, but the way in which the images are represented and coordinated is defined by the translator, not according to the readers' own decoding and interpretation of the new words, hence the difference on the reading experience between the readers of Portuguese and Chinese.
At the end, we present in the Annexes attached an interview to the translator Jin Xinyi and a corpus with the neologisms identified in Terra Sonâmbula, as well as the respective translation
How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text and Post-Darwinian Animal Fable in Yann Martel\u27s Life of Pi
No full textAnimal fable, a genre that anthropomorphizes animals to convey moral lessons, demonstrates the possibility that animals can be tools to teach us to be ethical human beings. In this article1 I adopt ethical literary criticism, especially its conception of human-animal relations and the term brain text to investigate the role and place of animal fable in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi to explore how the post-Darwinian animal might be exploited by fabulists to tackle human reality. In the novel, brain texts of Pi as the storyteller reveal his intention to use stories as ethical interpretations of his experience which is precisely the nature of the animal story as an animal fable. Besides, brain texts of animal characters in the fable stress the existence of animal factor in human beings, especially primitive desires and instincts for food, on one hand, and necessity and inevitability of dominance of animal factor in extreme situations on the other. Converting humans to animals in literature, Pi demonstrates multifaceted identity of human beings and the possibility of interpreting human reality in plural ways
Cultural identities as reflected in the literature of the Northern and Southern dynasties period (4th-6th centuries A.D.)
No full textDuring the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties of China identity questions became serious in a society thrown into disorder by political, religious and ethnic problems. This thesis uses three books written in the sixth century to
discuss how educated Chinese faced identity problems and how they dealt with them.
The Buddhist monk Huijiao, dealt with the problems of sinifying a foreign religion. He constructed many different identities in addition to the Buddhist one for the monks in his book Gaoseng zhuan, (Lives of Eminent Monks), a collection of biographies of Buddhist monks, to bring Buddhism closer to Chinese tradition and more acceptable by Confucian standards. Through the identity construction he
also made responses to anti-Buddhist ideas.
Yang Xuanzhi's Luoyang qielan ji, (Record of the Monasteries of Luoyang), deals with the identity problems of Chinese officials serving a Xianbei regime in
the north and of the short-lived capital of the Northern Wei in Luoyang. Yang reconstructed a Chinese identity for the lost capital as a true heir of Chinese tradition, as were the emperors, princes and officials who lived there. He created an identity defined not by ethnicity but by culture.
Yan Zhitui's Tanshi jiaxun, (Family Instruction of the Yan Clan), is a book which tells his descendants how to construct and maintain the future identity of his
own family. He drew on his own experience of recovering from repeated political catastrophes to set out an identity that would help the family to survive disordered times and maintain their status in society
The Effect of Language Ability in Creativity Assessment
No full textUniversity of Minnesota M.S. thesis. May 2016. Major: Design. Advisor: Barry Kudrowitz. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 51 pages.Creativity is widely acknowledged and manifested a universal human experience, yet its definitions and assessments are complex and vary in different cultures. This paper aims at exploring the effect of English language ability on university students’ creativity assessment. With two studies, the investigation was conducted among students of English as a Second Language (ESL) and Native Speakers of English (NSE). Creativity assessment test Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was used in both a United States university class and a Chinese university class. The Alternative Use Test (ALT) and Remote Associates Test (RAT) were used in the US university class. All three tests are a widely used means to evaluate an individual’s creative ability. These tests require some degree of written text to communicate the creative concepts. The TTCT, ALT and RAT were used by US students in the first study. As hypothesized, the results indicated a significant difference in creative ability between ESL and NSE students, with NSE students’ scores being much higher than that of ESL students. Scores of TTCT revealed no strong correlation between self-rating of English ability and creativity. It was hypothesized that the language in which the test is taken is a critical factor. A second study was conducted among Chinese university students (ESL) with the TTCT. Approximately half of the students were given the TTCT in Mandarin; the other half was given the test in English. Disproving our hypothesis, there was no significant difference in creativity scores, showing that English ability was not a critical factor in the TTCT. However there is a significant difference when comparing TTCT scores of the Chinese students to that of the NSE students. This data suggests that Chinese students are likely less creative than NSE students as evaluated by the TTCT. Factors which affect the result of creativity assessment are various, of which language plays certain functions in the aspect of opening up individuals’ vision, inspiring their imagination and better understanding the works of art from other cultures. In the last part of this thesis, the author points out that when making a fair and reliable conclusion about individual’s creative ability, elements in social, cultural and educational diversities should certainly be included.Wang, Xinyi. (2016). The Effect of Language Ability in Creativity Assessment. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/181825
ZnO nanorod/GaN light-emitting diodes : the origin of yellow and violet emission bands under reverse and forward bias
No full textAuthor name used in this publication: Xinyi ChenAuthor name used in this publication: Alan Man Ching NgAuthor name used in this publication: Aleksandra B DjurišićAuthor name used in this publication: Kok Wai CheahAuthor name used in this publication: Patrick Wai Keung Fong2011-2012 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishedVoR allowe
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