Search Results (20)

Action Quality Assessment (AQA)—the task of evaluating how well human actions are performed—is essential in domains such as sports and medicine. Existing AQA methods typically rely on score regression following feature extraction but often neglect the ambiguity inherent in extracted features. In this work, we introduce a novel AQA framework that incorporates a modified attention module to better capture relevant information. Our approach segments video data into clips, extracts features using the I3D network, and applies attention mechanisms to highlight salient features while suppressing irrelevant ones. To assess feature quality, we employ score distribution regression and propose an uncertainty-aware score distribution learning strategy that models features as Gaussian distributions. We further leverage Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to capture complex latent representations and quantify uncertainty. Extensive experiments on the MTL-AQA and JIGSAWS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method. Full article

The objective of this research is to determine the meteorological drought index and the effective rainfall model that exhibit the highest correlation with the yield of rainfed wheat in the Karkheh watershed. Additionally, using spatial statistics analysis, the trend and status of drought in various parts of the watershed will be identified. This will allow for the determination of suitable areas for rainfed wheat cultivation in the near future. In this research, meteorological drought monitoring was conducted using the standardized precipitation index (SPI) and standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) drought indices at 34 synoptic stations of the Karkheh watershed in southwestern Iran from 1981 to 2016. Effective precipitation (EPCP) was calculated using four methods, namely the United States bureau of reclamation method (USBR), the simplified version of soil conservation service of the United States department of agriculture method (USDA-SCS simplified), the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations method (FAO), and the CROPWAT version of the USDA-SCS method (USDA-SCS CROPWAT). The correlation between SPI and SPEI and between wheat yield and these indices was performed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R) to select the best index for assessing the effects of meteorological droughts on the agricultural sector. The analysis of the drought features showed that the SPEI reported milder and longer droughts in most synoptic stations. The spatial pattern of drought in the Karkheh watershed was determined using spatial statistics methods, and global Moran’s I statistic showed that the drought in the Karkheh watershed had spatial autocorrelation and a clustered pattern with a 99% confidence level. The results of global and local Moran’s I and the Getis-Ord statistic (Gi*) showed that milder droughts prevailed in the northern clusters and more severe droughts in the southern clusters. Also, the correlation between wheat yield and the SPI and SPEI was positive in all stations except for the stations of Kermanshah province and Aqa Jan Bolaghi, which is due to the existence of numerous dams and springs in these areas. Considering the impact of temperature (Tmean) on meteorological drought, it is suggested that in addition to the SPI, the SPEI should also be used to predict droughts in the Karkheh watershed. Full article

Assessing the quality of arguments is both valuable and challenging. Humans often find that making pairwise comparisons between a target argument and several reference arguments facilitates a more precise judgment of the target argument’s quality. Inspired by this, we propose a comparison-based framework for argument quality assessments (CompAQA), which scores the quality of an argument through multiple pairwise comparisons. Additionally, we introduce an argument order-based data augmentation strategy to enhance CompAQA’s relative quality comparison ability. By introducing multiple reference arguments for pairwise comparisons, CompAQA improves the objectivity and precision of argument quality assessments. Another advantage of CompAQA is its ability to integrate both pairwise argument quality classification and argument quality ranking tasks into a unified framework, distinguishing it from existing methods. We conduct extensive experiments using various pre-trained encoder-only models. Our experiments involve two argument quality ranking datasets (IBM-ArgQ-5.3kArgs and IBM-Rank-30k) and one pairwise argument quality classification dataset (IBM-ArgQ-9.1kPairs). Overall, CompAQA significantly outperforms several strong baselines. Specifically, when using the RoBERTa model as a backbone, CompAQA outperforms the previous best method on the IBM-Rank-30k dataset, improving Pearson correlation by 0.0203 and Spearman correlation by 0.0148. On the IBM-ArgQ-5.3kArgs dataset, it shows improvements of 0.0069 in Pearson correlation and 0.0208 in Spearman correlation. Furthermore, CompAQA demonstrates a 4.71% increase in accuracy over the baseline method on the IBM-ArgQ-9.1kPairs dataset. We also show that CompAQA can be effectively applied to fine-tune larger decoder-only pre-trained models, such as Llama. Full article

Acyl-quinic acids (AQAs), present in various plants with many health benefits, are regarded as therapeutic agents in the prevention and treatment of chronic and cardiovascular diseases. The molecular network-guided identification of ten AQA compounds, two new (5 and 7) and eight known compounds, were isolated from V. rotundifolia L. f. by using a newly applied extraction method. Their structures were determined through spectroscopic means, reaction mixtures, and modified Mosher and PGME techniques. These compounds were assessed for their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant capabilities. Notably, compounds 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9 exhibited notable DPPH radical scavenging activity. In LPS-induced HT-29 cells, compounds 2–7 significantly inhibited IL-8 production. Furthermore, compounds 3–5 and 7 markedly suppressed NO production, while compounds 1–10 effectively inhibited IL-6 production in LPS-induced RAW264.7 cells. Western blot analyses revealed that compounds 3–5, and 7 reduced iNOS and COX-2 expression, and compounds 2–5, 7, and 8 also diminished the expression levels of p38 MAPK phosphorylation. Docking studies demonstrated the active compounds’ binding affinity with the IL-8, iNOS, COX-2, and p38 MAPK proteins through interactions with essential amino acids within the binding pockets of complexes. The findings suggest that compounds 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9, and compounds 3–5, and 7, hold promise as potential therapeutic agents for treating antioxidative and inflammatory diseases, respectively. Full article

We present strategies to derive Bell inequalities valid for systems composed of many three-level parties. This scenario is formalized by a Bell experiment with N observers, each of which performs one out of two possible three-outcome measurements on their share of the system. As the complexity of the set of classical correlations prohibits its full characterization in this multipartite scenario, we consider its projection to a lower-dimensional subspace spanned by permutationally invariant one- and two-body observables. This simplification allows us to formulate two complementary methods for detecting nonlocality in multipartite three-level systems, both having a complexity independent of N. Our work can have interesting applications in the detection of Bell correlations in paradigmatic spin-1 models, as well as in experiments with solid-state systems or atomic ensembles. Full article

Pineapple is a globally significant tropical fruit, but its cultivation faces numerous challenges due to abiotic and biotic stresses, affecting its quality and quantity. WRKY transcription factors are known regulators of stress responses, however, their specific functions in pineapple are not fully understood. This study investigates the role of AcWRKY31 by overexpressing it in pineapple and Arabidopsis. Transgenic pineapple lines were obtained using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation methods and abiotic and biotic stress treatments. Transgenic AcWRKY31-OE pineapple plants showed an increased sensitivity to salt and drought stress and an increased resistance to biotic stress from pineapple mealybugs compared to that of WT plants. Similar experiments in AcWRKY31-OE, AtWRKY53-OE, and the Arabidopsis Atwrky53 mutant were performed and consistently confirmed these findings. A comparative transcriptomic analysis revealed 5357 upregulated genes in AcWRKY31-OE pineapple, with 30 genes related to disease and pathogen response. Notably, 18 of these genes contained a W-box sequence in their promoter region. A KEGG analysis of RNA-Seq data showed that upregulated DEG genes are mostly involved in translation, protein kinases, peptidases and inhibitors, membrane trafficking, folding, sorting, and degradation, while the downregulated genes are involved in metabolism, protein families, signaling, and cellular processes. RT-qPCR assays of selected genes confirmed the transcriptomic results. In summary, the AcWRKY31 gene is promising for the improvement of stress responses in pineapple, and it could be a valuable tool for plant breeders to develop stress-tolerant crops in the future. Full article

Particulate and gaseous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAHs) samples (n = 108) were measured every six days from January to December 2022 at a representative point in the Korean Banwol National Industrial Complex. The measurement results revealed that the concentration of particulate Σ18 PAHs was 7.92 ± 4.04 ng/Sm³ in winter, 1.83 ± 1.99 ng/Sm³ in spring, 1.43 ± 0.95 ng/Sm³ in summer, and 2.58 ± 2.14 ng/Sm³ in autumn. The concentration of gaseous Σ18 PAHs was 3.32 ± 3.72 ng/Sm³ in winter, 6.34 ± 5.95 ng/Sm³ in spring, 8.33 ± 8.13 ng/Sm³ in summer, and 3.88 ± 1.71 ng/Sm³ in autumn. The results of the correlation analysis showed that particulate PAHs have positive relationships with PM₁₀ and PM_2.5 and negative relationships with temperature and O₃. The diagnostic ratio and PAHs component slope showed that the emission source characteristics of the Banwol National Industrial Complex were dominated by biomass coal combustion over four seasons; however, the influence of petroleum combustion (automobile emissions) was not negligible. As for coal combustion, bituminous coal was the most influential, and lignite was relevant in summer and autumn. Full article

Action quality assessment (AQA) tasks in computer vision evaluate action quality in videos, and they can be applied to sports for performance evaluation. A typical example of AQA is predicting the final score from a video that captures an entire figure skating program. However, no previous studies have predicted individual jump scores, which are of great interest to competitors because of the high weight of competition. Despite the presence of unnecessary information in figure skating videos, human specialists can focus and reduce information when they evaluate jumps. In this study, we clarified the eye movements of figure skating judges and skaters while evaluating jumps and proposed a prediction model for jump performance that utilized specialists’ gaze location to reduce information. Kinematic features obtained from the tracking system were input into the model in addition to videos to improve accuracy. The results showed that skaters focused more on the face, whereas judges focused on the lower extremities. These gaze locations were applied to the model, which demonstrated the highest accuracy when utilizing both specialists’ gaze locations. The model outperformed human predictions and the baseline model (RMSE:0.775), suggesting a combination of human specialist knowledge and machine capabilities could yield higher accuracy. Full article

The present study introduces a subtraction-average-based optimization algorithm (SAOA), a unique enhanced evolutionary technique for solving engineering optimization problems. The typical SAOA works by subtracting the average of searcher agents from the position of population members in the search space. To increase searching capabilities, this study proposes an improved SAO (ISAO) that incorporates a cooperative learning technique based on the leader solution. First, after considering testing on different standard mathematical benchmark functions, the proposed ISAOA is assessed in comparison to the standard SAOA. The simulation results declare that the proposed ISAOA establishes great superiority over the standard SAOA. Additionally, the proposed ISAOA is adopted to handle power system applications for Thyristor Controlled Series Capacitor (TCSC) allocation-based losses reduction in electrical power grids. The SAOA and the proposed ISAOA are employed to optimally size the TCSCs and simultaneously select their installed transmission lines. Both are compared to two recent algorithms, the Artificial Ecosystem Optimizer (AEO) and AQuila Algorithm (AQA), and two other effective and well-known algorithms, the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) and Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO). In three separate case studies, the standard IEEE-30 bus system is used for this purpose while considering varying numbers of TCSC devices that will be deployed. The suggested ISAOA’s simulated implementations claim significant power loss reductions for the three analyzed situations compared to the GWO, AEO, PSO, and AQA. Full article

Aqa Musa Naghiev Karbala’i (1849–1919)—an oil magnate from Baku and a significant figure in the modern history of Baku and Azerbaijan—and his multiple identities are the focus of this article. Alongside his National-Azerbaijani identity, Naghiev’s religious identity was divided between the Shi‘i Muslim and Bahá’í identities. The circumstances in which Naghiev was born and raised, and lived, especially during his adulthood—as a Shi‘i who had converted to the Baha’i faith, living among the majority Shi‘i Muslim population who were generally alien to Baha’is—dictated, at times, the need to carefully maneuver between these two religious identities. The Baha’i principle of hikmat provided Naghiev with the appropriate means for this during his lifetime. The problem, however, is in the way his identity has been engineered and presented in Azerbaijan’s national historical consciousness as an Azerbaijani-Muslim, concealing his Baha’i religious identity, in spite of his public activities for Baha’is and the Baha’i community, which included financing the building of the Baha’i Spiritual Assembly in Baku (Ruhanie) and being the chairman of its management committee. In this article, I explain this complex picture of Naghiev’s multiple identities through the use of primary (documents from national and private archives, and interviews) and secondary sources. Full article

Action quality assessment (AQA) is an important problem in computer vision applications. During human AQA, differences in body size or changes in position relative to the sensor may cause unwanted effects. We propose a motion registration method based on self-coordination (SC) and self-referential normalization (SRN). By establishing a coordinate system on the human body and using a part of the human body as a normalized reference standard to process the raw data, the standardization and distinguishability of the raw data are improved. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted experiments on KTH datasets. The experimental results show that the method improved the classification accuracy of the KNN-DTW network for KTH-5 from 82.46% to 87.72% and for KTH-4 from 89.47% to 94.74%, and it improved the classification accuracy of the tsai-MiniRocket network for KTH-5 from 91.29% to 93.86% and for KTH-4 from 94.74% to 97.90%. The results show that our method can reduce the above effects and improve the action classification accuracy of the action classification network. This study provides a new method and idea for improving the accuracy of AQA-related algorithms. Full article

Background: The performance assessment of tests that express qualitative results in the medical laboratory is of primary importance in characterization, diagnosis, follow-up, and screening. An important contribution to this type of assessment may be the publication of the Eurachem AQA 2021 guide. The text intends to principally discuss the consistency of the subclauses of this guide with ISO 15189 and CLSI EP12-A2. Methods: The study involves a literature review within the scope of qualitative tests. Results: Tables are used for crossing AQA. with ISO 15189 and CLSI EP12-A2. Conclusions: Consistency with ISO 15189 and CLSI EP12-A2 is demonstrated in the study. Introducing “uncertainty of proportion” reflects the necessity of assessing uncertainties when dealing with qualitative results. Full article

COVID-19, a novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has wreaked havoc on global financial markets, economies, and societies. For example, this study looks at the impact of COVID-19 on the Chinese economy and its policy responses (fiscal, monetary, and institutional). This study also examines future issues. This study is timely and essential for policymakers and investors worldwide because of China’s size, contribution to global growth, and growing influence. The research shows that the presence of COVID-19 in China has global implications. Because of the virus threat, foreigners avoid mixing with the Chinese. Global tourists have cancelled their plans to visit China, and Chinese tourists cannot visit foreign countries. The rapid spread of the COVID-19 in China has halted normal life. The intensification of the COVID-19 may have long-term effects on China’s economy. Full article

Psammosilene tunicoides is a unique perennial medicinal plant species native to the Southwestern regions of China. Its wild population is rare and endangered due to over-excessive collection and extended growth (4–5 years). This research shows that H⁺-ATPase activity was a key factor for oxalate-inducing programmed cell death (PCD) of P. tunicoides suspension cells. Oxalic acid (OA) is an effective abiotic elicitor that enhances a plant cell’s resistance to environmental stress. However, the role of OA in this process remains to be mechanistically unveiled. The present study evaluated the role of OA-induced cell death using an inverted fluorescence microscope after staining with Evans blue, FDA, PI, and Rd123. OA-stimulated changes in K⁺ and Ca²⁺ trans-membrane flows using a patch-clamp method, together with OA modulation of H⁺-ATPase activity, were further examined. OA treatment increased cell death rate in a dosage-and duration-dependent manner. OA significantly decreased the mitochondria activity and damaged its electron transport chain. The OA treatment also decreased intracellular pH, while the FC increased the pH value. Simultaneously, NH₄Cl caused intracellular acidification. The OA treatment independently resulted in 90% and the FC led to 25% cell death rates. Consistently, the combined treatments caused a 31% cell death rate. Furthermore, treatment with EGTA caused a similar change in intracellular pH value to the La³⁺ and OA application. Combined results suggest that OA-caused cell death could be attributed to intracellular acidification and the involvement of OA in the influx of extracellular Ca²⁺, thereby leading to membrane depolarization. Here we explore the resistance mechanism of P. tunicoides cells against various stresses endowed by OA treatment. Full article

Konjac (Amorphophallus konjac K. Koch) is a well-known tuberous vegetable belonging to the important medicinal family Araceae, and the plant grows from an underground tuber. Here, we used a “one-step seedling regeneration” tissue culture system to improve the plantlet regeneration efficiency of konjac using young leaves as an explant source. In the current study, we used several sterilization methods for tuber sterilization. Moreover, various plant growth regulator combinations were applied to achieve efficient somatic embryogenesis and plantlet regeneration. Our results showed that the optimal tuber sterilization was method C (75% alcohol for 15 s + 0.1% HgCl₂ for 15 min + washing by double-sterilized water three times). Three types of embryogenic calli were induced on full-strength Murashige and Skoog (MS) basal medium supplemented with 0.5 mg/L of 6-benzylaminopurine (6-BA), 0.5 mg/L of naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA), 1.0 mg/L of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), and 30 g/L of sucrose. Of the three types of embryogenic calli, only type Ⅲ further regenerated plantlets, with a callus induction rate of 55.73% and a seedling induction rate of 92.73%. This suggests that the addition of the above hormones gives the optimal callus induction. The proliferation rate achieved was 38% on the MS basal medium containing 1.0 mg/L of 6-BA, 1.0 mg/L of indolebutyric acid (IBA), 0.2 mg/L of kinetin (KT), and 50 g/L of sucrose. The one-step seedling formation achieved in MS medium contained 2.0 mg/L of 6-BA, 0.5 mg/L of NAA, 0.1 mg/L of gibberellic acid (GA₃), and 30 g/L of sucrose, and the number of regenerated shoots per explants was 6 ± 2. Therefore, we establish a one-step seedling regeneration system through indirect plant regeneration, which shortens the time for konjac in vitro regeneration, significantly increased the micropropagation efficiency, and decreased the cost of the konjac tissue culture. Full article