Phylogeny of higher taxa of Hexapoda according to 12sRNA sequences

The phylogenetic relationship of Hexapoda has been debated for a long time, which will be resolved mainly depending on the settlement of monophyly, affinities and interrelationships among Protura, Collembola and Diplura. Mitochondrial 12sRNA gene about 35

Intra- and interspecific variation of the CCR5 gene in higher primates

We have evaluated the molecular evolution of the chemokine receptor CCR5 in primates. The chemokine receptor CCR5 serves as a major co-receptor for human immunodeficiency virus/simian immunodeficiency virus (HIV/SIV) infection. Knowledge of evolution of the CCR5 molecule and selection on the CCR5 gene may shed light on its functional role. The comparison of differences between intraspecific polymorphisms and interspecific fixed substitutions provides useful information regarding modes of selection during the course of evolution. There is marked polymorphism in the CCR5 gene sequence within different primate species, whereas sequence divergence between different species is small. By using contingency tests, we compared synonymous (SS) and nonsynonymous (NS) CCR5 mutations occurring within and between a broad range of primates. Our results demonstrate that CCR5 evolution did not follow expectations, of strict neutrality at the level of the whole gene. The proportion of NS to SS at the intraspecific level was significantly higher than that observed at the interspecific level. These results suggest that most CCR5 NS polymorphisms are slightly deleterious. However, at domains more closely correlated with its known biological functions, there was no obvious evidence to support deviation from neutrality.

Analysis of dimensions involved in the option of improved fish curing practices

A statistical analysis was made of the dimensions involved in the adoption of improved fish curing practices.

Neuronal activity in dorsomedial frontal cortex and prefrontal cortex reflecting irrelevant stimulus dimensions

Previous studies of the dorsomedial frontal cortex (DMF) and the prefrontal cortex (PF) have shown that, when monkeys respond to nonspatial features of a discriminative stimulus (e.g., color) and the stimulus appears at a place unrelated to the movement t

Adaptive BDDC in Three Dimensions

The adaptive BDDC method is extended to the selection of face constraints in three dimensions. A new implementation of the BDDC method is presented based on a global formulation without an explicit coarse problem, with massive parallelism provided by a multifrontal solver. Constraints are implemented by a projection and sparsity of the projected operator is preserved by a generalized change of variables. The effectiveness of the method is illustrated on several engineering problems.

Restoration of images and 3D data to higher resolution by deconvolution with sparsity regularization

Image convolution is conventionally approximated by the LTI discrete model. It is well recognized that the higher the sampling rate, the better is the approximation. However sometimes images or 3D data are only available at a lower sampling rate due to physical constraints of the imaging system. In this paper, we model the under-sampled observation as the result of combining convolution and subsampling. Because the wavelet coefficients of piecewise smooth images tend to be sparse and well modelled by tree-like structures, we propose the L0 reweighted-L2 minimization (L0RL2 ) algorithm to solve this problem. This promotes model-based sparsity by minimizing the reweighted L2 norm, which approximates the L0 norm, and by enforcing a tree model over the weights. We test the algorithm on 3 examples: a simple ring, the cameraman image and a 3D microscope dataset; and show that good results can be obtained. © 2010 IEEE.

Augmented attribute representations

We propose a new learning method to infer a mid-level feature representation that combines the advantage of semantic attribute representations with the higher expressive power of non-semantic features. The idea lies in augmenting an existing attribute-based representation with additional dimensions for which an autoencoder model is coupled with a large-margin principle. This construction allows a smooth transition between the zero-shot regime with no training example, the unsupervised regime with training examples but without class labels, and the supervised regime with training examples and with class labels. The resulting optimization problem can be solved efficiently, because several of the necessity steps have closed-form solutions. Through extensive experiments we show that the augmented representation achieves better results in terms of object categorization accuracy than the semantic representation alone. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Half-bridge SIC inverter for hybrid electric vehicles: Design, development and testing at higher operating temperature

In recent years, Silicon Carbide (SiC) semiconductor devices have shown promise for high density power electronic applications, due to their electrical and thermal properties. In this paper, the performance of SiC JFETs for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) applications is investigated at heatsink temperatures of 100 °C. The thermal runaway characteristics, maximum current density and packaging temperature limitations of the devices are considered and the efficiency implications discussed. To quantify the power density capabilities of power transistors, a novel 'expression of rating' (EoR) is proposed. A prototype single phase, half-bridge voltage source inverter using SiC JFETs is also tested and its performance at 25 °C and 100 °C investigated.