Partial Connection Research Articles

Spent Earth

This essay considers the multiscalar manifestations of loss and the destruction of loss through the material-semiotic figure of “spent earth,” a toxic waste by-product generated by the industrial bleaching of crude oils into edible oils. Drawing on two distinct encounters with spent earth in the Indonesian palm oil sector, the essay reflects on the substance's unevenly distributed effects across peoples, places, and generations; its association with visions of purity and realities of complicity; and the importance of attending to loss through both its situated, localized manifestations and its partial connections across sites, scales, and subjects.

Near-Optimal Designs of Hybrid Precoding and Combining for Massive MIMO Systems From Lattice Decoding

Near-optimal designs consisting of a pair of finite resolution analog precoder and combiner and a baseband encoder for hybrid massive MIMO communication systems are proposed in this paper. Firstly, for any configuration of hybrid MIMO systems, several powerful upper bounds on the maximal achievable rates are presented and are used as guidelines for the proposed designs. Armed with the insights of upper bounds, designing the coefficients for finite resolution analog precoders and combiners is then regarded as a lattice decoding problem, where low-complexity lattice decoders and convex solvers are employed to yield optimal solutions with the best structure for partial connection. Simulation results show that the proposed design achieves within a negligible gap from the rate upper bound using phase shifters with low resolution, while reducing the number of required phase shifters by roughly 20% and significantly outperforming many existing designs at the same time.

Enhanced Distributed Non-Linear Voltage Regulation and Power Apportion Technique for an Islanded DC Microgrid

There is a growing focus on exploring direct current (DC) microgrids in traditional power grids. A key challenge in operating these microgrids is ensuring proper current distribution among converters. While conventional droop control has been used to address this issue, it requires compensating for voltage deviations in the DC bus. This paper introduces an innovative distributed secondary control approach that effectively addresses both voltage restoration and current sharing challenges within a standalone DC microgrid. The distributed secondary control proposed in this study is integrated into the microgrid’s cyber layer, enabling information sharing between controllers. This distributed approach ensures reliability, even in the event of partial communication connection failures. The controller employs a fuzzy logic control approach to dynamically determine the parameters of the secondary control, resulting in an enhanced control response. Additionally, the proposed approach can handle constant power and resistive loads without specific requirements. Employing the Lyapunov method, we have derived adequate stability conditions for the proposed controller. The performance of the controller has been assessed using MATLAB/Simulink® models and validated with real-time experimental testing performed with a SpeedgoatTM real-time machine, considering five different test cases. The results indicated that the proposed control system is robust in achieving its control objectives within a DC microgrid, exhibiting fast response and minimal oscillations.

EPC-DARTS: Efficient partial channel connection for differentiable architecture search

With weight-sharing and continuous relaxation strategies, the differentiable architecture search (DARTS) proposes a fast and effective solution to perform neural network architecture search in various deep learning tasks. However, unresolved issues, such as the inefficient memory utilization, and the poor stability of the search architecture due to channels randomly selected, which has even caused performance collapses, are still perplexing researchers and practitioners. In this paper, a novel efficient channel attention mechanism based on partial channel connection for differentiable neural architecture search, termed EPC-DARTS, is proposed to address these two issues. Specifically, we design an efficient channel attention module, which is applied to capture cross-channel interactions and assign weight based on channel importance, to dramatically improve search efficiency and reduce memory occupation. Moreover, only partial channels with higher weights in the mixed calculation of operation are used through the efficient channel attention mechanism, and thus unstable network architectures obtained by the random selection operation can also be avoided in the proposed EPC-DARTS. Experimental results show that the proposed EPC-DARTS achieves remarkably competitive performance (CIFAR-10/CIFAR-100: a test accuracy rate of 97.60%/84.02%), compared to other state-of-the-art NAS methods using only 0.2 GPU-Days.

Case Report: Removal of septal occluder device and closure of atrial septal defect with pulmonary vein flow redirection

BACKGROUND: Atrial septal defect represents 10 to 15% of congenital heart disease and is more frequent in women with a 2:1 ratio. Sinus venosus atrial septal defect is usually associated with partial anomalous pulmonary venous drainage from the right superior pulmonary vein to the right atrium directly or indirectly through the superior vena cava. Rarer still, is the inferior sinus venosus, which may be associated with partial anomalous venous drainage from the right inferior pulmonary vein. CASE REPORT: 13-year-old patient with a history of intervention for interatrial defect closure with Amplatzer occluder at the age of six. He was brought to receive medical attention for fatigue and dyspnea that had been progressing for 2 years. Cardiac CT reported partial anomalous connection of pulmonary veins and echocardiogram reported a residual atrial septal defect of 10 mm and mild to moderate pulmonary hypertension. Based on the findings, surgical treatment was decided. EVOLUTION: In correction surgery, we observed Amplatzer occluder incorrectly positioned, the device was removed and flow was redirected from right pulmonary veins to left atrium with bovine pericardium patch. After the surgical intervention, the patient had a favorable evolution without no post-surgical complications. At follow-up, 15 days after medical discharge, the patient was asymptomatic, and a cardiac CT scan showed the corrected interatrial defect. CONCLUSION: The treatment of atrial septal defect should be individualized, since it will depend on the size of the defect, the age at the time of diagnosis, the magnitude of the shunt, the severity of the symptoms and the presence of other conditions. If the defect requires repair, it is important to weigh the benefits of choosing percutaneous closure vs. surgical intervention to avoid the need for reintervention, as in the present case. Closure and redirection of pulmonary vein flow with bovine patch is a safe and effective option.

Cardiac Function and Serum Biomarkers throughout Staged Fontan Palliation: A Prospective Observational Study.

Fontan patients undergo multiple cardiothoracic surgeries in childhood. Following these procedures, ventricular function is temporarily decreased, and recovers over months. This is presumably related to cardiopulmonary bypass, but this is incompletely understood. Throughout the Fontan palliation, cardiac function is also affected by volume unloading. We aimed to gain insight into the biological processes related to impaired ventricular function and recovery following Fontan palliations using a panel of biomarkers. Furthermore, we described changes in ventricular function across the Fontan palliation due to volume unloading. We performed a prospective multicenter observational study in patients undergoing partial (PCPC) or total cavo-pulmonary connection (TCPC). Patients underwent assessment-including echocardiography and blood sampling-before surgery (T1), at first follow-up (T2), and 1 year after their procedures (T3). Blood samples were analyzed using a biomarker panel (OLINK CVD-III). Ninety-two biomarkers were expressed as principal components (PC) to limit multiple statistical testing. We included 32 PCPC patients aged 7.2 [5.3-10.3] months, and 28 TCPC patients aged 2.7 [2.2-3.8] years. The single ventricular longitudinal strain (SV GLS) temporarily decreased for PCPC patients at T2 (-15.1 ± 5.6 (T1) to -13.5 ± 5.2 (T2) to -17.3 ± 4.5 (T3), p < 0.047 for all differences), but not following TCPC. The serum biomarkers were expressed as 4 PCs. PC1, including biomarkers of cell-cell adhesion, was not related to any patient characteristic. PC2, including biomarkers of superoxide anion regulation, increased at T2. PC3, including biomarkers of cardiovascular development, related to the stage of Fontan palliation. PC4 was of uncertain biological or clinical significance. No PC was found that related to ventricular performance. The SV GLS was temporarily diminished following PCPC, but not following TCPC. Several biomarkers were related to post-operative stress and adaptation to the PCPC or TCPC circulation, but none were related to the outcome.

IO-YOLOv5: Improved Pig Detection under Various Illuminations and Heavy Occlusion

Accurate detection and counting of live pigs are integral to scientific breeding and production in intelligent agriculture. However, existing pig counting methods are challenged by heavy occlusion and varying illumination conditions. To overcome these challenges, we proposed IO-YOLOv5 (Illumination-Occlusion YOLOv5), an improved network that expands on the YOLOv5 framework with three key contributions. Firstly, we introduced the Simple Attention Receptive Field Block (SARFB) module to expand the receptive field and give greater weight to important features at different levels. The Ghost Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast Cross Stage Partial Connections (GSPPFC) module was also introduced to enhance model feature reuse and information flow. Secondly, we optimized the loss function by using Varifocal Loss to improve the model’s learning ability on high-quality and challenging samples. Thirdly, we proposed a public dataset consisting of 1270 images and 15,672 pig labels. Experiments demonstrated that IO-YOLOv5 achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 90.8% and a precision of 86.4%, surpassing the baseline model by 2.2% and 3.7% respectively. By using a model ensemble and test time augmentation, we further improved the mAP to 92.6%, which is a 4% improvement over the baseline model. Extensive experiments showed that IO-YOLOv5 exhibits excellent performance in pig recognition, particularly under heavy occlusion and various illuminations. These results provide a strong foundation for pig recognition in complex breeding environments.

Strength prediction methods in shear bond behaviour of composite slabs

Composite deck slabs are gaining wide acceptance in many countries as they promote faster, lighter and economical construction in buildings. The shear behaviour of composite deck slab is a complex phenomenon. Strength of composite deck slabs can be analyzed by different methods for restrained and unrestrained conditions. In this work various methods for determining the shear bond capacity of composite deck slab are studied by modelling composite deck slab for various shear spans in finite element analysis software. The main objective is to understand the deflection as well as slip characteristics of composite deck slab and to apply these values for calculating shear strength using different methods of the composite deck slab. A comparison between methods are also done to find out the best possible prediction method. It is found that Partial Shear Connection (PSC) method performs better than that of other methods considered.

Analysis and Design of a Partial Power Processing Architecture for High Step-Up Applications

Combining the advantageous features of the traditional two-stage and input-parallel-output-series (IPOS) structure, this paper proposes a partial power connection method for step-up applications with the advantages of wide input voltage range, galvanic isolation and partial power voltage regulation. In the proposed structure, the non-isolated DC-DC converter handles a small portion of the total power to regulate the system output voltage by simple PWM control. The latter stage should be a full bridge structure and the partial power processing is realized with different input voltages of the two bridge arms, which is beneficial to reduce the total number and cost of components, and two connection architectures are achieved in this way. The operation characteristics of the two architectures are analyzed in detail in this paper, and an optimal structure is obtained from the perspective of fewer components and better partial power processing capacity. Further, an isolated full bridge DC-DC converter with secondary resonance is selected to operate at the unregulated state as an application case to verify the feasibility and advantages of the proposed structure. An experimental prototype with 32-40V input voltage range and 400V/ 0.5A output is built with 1MHz switching frequency. The peak measured efficiency at 40V full load is 95.3%.

Strong positive fractionation of chromium isotopes in iron formation of the Jacadigo Group (Brazil) – A link to enhanced atmospheric oxygenation during the Late Neoproterozoic

Cr isotopes recorded in iron formations (IF) are considered to have the potential to reflect the isotope signatures in respective ambient surface seawater. The ∼600 Ma Fe and Mn deposits pertaining to the Banda Alta Formation (Urucum district, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil), comprise the world’s youngest and largest Neoproterozoic sedimentary Fe and Mn formations (MnF). Shale normalized Rare Earth Element and Yttrium (REY) patterns of drillcore samples show flat, positively sloped patterns with absent Europium anomalies and near- to supra-chondritic Yttrium-Holmium ratios with negative Cerium anomalies, which imply intermittent mixing of freshwater with seawater. Redox sensitive element enrichment factors (MoEF, UEF, CrEF) show positive correlation, indicating varying redox conditions across the Jacadigo Basin, with ephemeral euxinic conditions. The Cr isotope signatures across the Urucum IF (δ53Crauth at: Morraria Grande + 0.93 ± 0.34 ‰, 2σ, n = 28; Morro do Rabichão + 0.5 ± 0.4 ‰, 2σ, n = 3; and Morro do Urucum ca. + 0.64 ‰, n = 1) are statistically indistinguishable from previously published surface outcrop samples at Morro do Urucum. Our new data support: (1) a stable supply of oxidized Cr potentially from continental sources at the time of deposition, implying high atmospheric O2 levels in the Late Neoproterozoic; (2) insignificant alteration of the authigenic Cr isotope signals by tropical weathering despite surface iron up-concentration and leaching of carbonates, and (3) lack of isotope effects that would be associated with non-quantitative reduction processes and accompanying particulate transport to the chemical sediments in the Jacadigo Basin. The combined information from (isotope)geochemical data presented herein speak for a deposition of the Urucum IFs in restricted, periodically ice-covered and stratified sub-basins with partial connection to the open ocean, and for the presence of a sufficiently oxidative atmosphere which promoted a continuous supply of the surface waters with isotopically heavy Cr from the weathering landmasses at this time.

Numerical Study on the Bending Resistance of Lightweight Built-Up Steel-Concrete Composite Beams

This paper investigates the bending resistance of an innovative lightweight composite floor system, LWT-FLOOR. The system consists of built-up cold-formed steel elements that are spot-welded and connected to the concrete slab using demountable shear connectors. As the system under investigation is new, the existing standards do not provide guidelines for calculating its bending resistance. This paper gives an overview of different analytical approaches and a comparison of calculated results using bending capacities from the numerical parametric study. Within the numerical parametric study, the influence of the height of the steel beam, the type and degree of shear connection, the connection between the steel elements, and the thickness of the corrugated web used for the bending capacity are investigated. Numerical results for the full shear connections resulted in lower bending capacities than the analytically calculated plastic bending resistances. However, numerically obtained bending capacities for partial shear connections were found to exceed the calculated characteristic non-linear bending resistances and bending resistances for partial shear connections. The obtained results will comprise the basis for further experimental tests, which will support the search for an optimal analytical approach for the bending resistance of the proposed composite system.

Catheter interventional closure of veno-venous collaterals in cyanotic patients after partial cavopulmonary shunts in pediatric patients: clinical practice review.

The development of veno-venous collaterals is an important and treatable cause of cyanosis in patients who had undergone partial cavo-pulmonary connection (PCPC) operations. Nevertheless, the literature on this complicated therapeutic option is sparse. Patients can present cyanosis either immediately after the operation (<30 days), which delays or hinders discharge from the intensive care unit or cyanosis may occur late: (>30 days and/or in another hospital admission), after the operation. Hence, transcatheter closure of veno-venous collaterals is the treatment of choice. Four patients were selected who showed cyanosis at variable durations after PCPC; the morphology of the collaterals and their hemodynamic effect was described and the strategy for closure of such abnormal vessels is suggested. Veno-venous collaterals described in our series were seen originating mainly or mostly from innominate vein angles. The drainage sites were either above the diaphragm into a cardiac structure: the coronary sinus (CS) and/or atria; or below the diaphragm into the inferior vena cava (IVC) or hepatic veins through the paravertebral venous system and/or the azygous system. It is stated in the literature that several types of devices and coils can be used to close the collaterals such as the Amplatzer vascular plugs (AVPs), Amplatzer duct occluder II (ADOII), non-detachable and detachable coils. In this clinical review, the technical details that determine device type and size are explained. The recent generations of hydrogel-coated coils were also used in this series of patients to close the difficult types of collaterals with better results. All described vessels were closed successfully, without any complications. The patients had a significant rise in their transcutaneous oxygen saturations and hence, a clear clinical benefit.

Wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 in on-grid, partially and fully off-grid Bedouin communities in Southern Israel

BackgroundWastewater based epidemiology (WBE) has become an important tool in SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and epidemiology. While WBE measurements generally correlate with observed case numbers in large municipal areas on sewer grids, there are few studies on its utility in communities that are off-grid (non-sewered).Methods and materialsTo explore the applicability of wastewater surveillance in our region, five Bedouin communities along the Hebron Stream in Southern Israel (Negev desert) were sampled. One point (El-Sayed) represents a community with partial connection to the sewer grid system and another point (Um Batin) represents a community with no access to the sewer grid system. The towns of Hura, Lakia, and Tel Al-Sabi/Tel Sheva were on-grid. A total of 87 samples were collected between August 2020 to January 2021 using both grab and composite sampling. RNA was extracted from the raw sewage and concentrated sewage. RT-qPCR was carried out with N1, N2, and N3 gene targets, and findings were compared to human case data from the Israeli Ministry of Health.ResultsSARS-CoV-2 was detected consistently over time in on-grid Bedouin towns (Lakia, Tel Sheva/Tel as-Sabi, and Hura) and inconsistently in smaller, off-grid communities (El-Sayed and Um Batin). The trend in maximum copy number/L appears to be driven by population size. When comparing case numbers normalized to population size, the amount of gene copies/L was inconsistently related to reported case numbers. SARS-CoV-2 was also detected from sewage-impacted environmental waters representing communities with no access to the wastewater grid. When grab sampling and composite sampling data were compared, results were generally comparable however composite sampling produced superior results.ConclusionsThe mismatch observed between detected virus and reported cases could indicate asymptomatic or “silent” community transmission, under-testing within these communities (due to factors like mistrust in government, stigma, misinformation) or a combination therein. While the exact reason for the mismatch between environmental SARS-CoV-2 signals and case numbers remains unresolved, these findings suggest that sewage surveillance, including grab sampling methodologies, can be a critical aspect of outbreak surveillance and control in areas with insufficient human testing and off-grid communities.

Partial Connection Based on Channel Attention for Differentiable Neural Architecture Search

Differentiable neural architecture search (DARTS), as a gradient-guided search method, greatly reduces the cost of computation and speeds up the search. In DARTS, the architecture parameters are introduced to the candidate operations, but the parameters of some weight-equipped operations may not be trained well in the initial stage, which causes unfair competition between candidate operations. The weight-free operations appear in large numbers which results in the phenomenon of performance crash. Besides, a lot of memory will be occupied during training supernet which causes the memory utilization to be low. In this paper, a partial channel connection based on channel attention for differentiable neural architecture search (ADARTS) is proposed. Some channels with higher weights are selected through the attention mechanism and sent into the operation space while the other channels are directly contacted with the processed channels. Selecting a few channels with higher attention weights can better transmit important feature information into the search space and greatly improve search efficiency and memory utilization. The instability of network structure caused by random selection can also be avoided. The experimental results show that ADARTS achieved 2.46&#x0025; and 17.06&#x0025; classification error rates on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, respectively. ADARTS can effectively solve the problem that too many skip connections appear in the search process and obtain network structures with better performance.

Contact instantons and partial connections

Contact instantons and partial connections

Partial anomalous venous connection with intrapulmonary dual drainage: Transcatheter treatment of a rare entity.

Partial anomalous pulmonary venous return (PAPVR) is a rare congenital condition, and dual-drainage connection PAPVR to the left atrium has been reported in a few cases in the literature; in which cases, percutaneous catheterization was successfully used in lieu of surgery. We, hereby, describe a 7-month-old boy with a functional single-ventricle physiology with dual drainage of the left upper pulmonary vein to the left atrium and the innominate vein. Appropriate recognition of this entity allowed safe occlusion of the anomalous draining vein.

YOLO-BYTE: An efficient multi-object tracking algorithm for automatic monitoring of dairy cows

Dairy cows tracking is an essential means to obtain their behavioral information, real-time position, activity data, and health status. A multi-object tracking method (YOLO-BYTE) is proposed to address the problem of missed detection and false detection caused by complex environments in cow individual detection and tracking. The method improves upon the YOLO v7 Backbone network feature extraction module by adding a Self-Attention and Convolution mixed module (ACmix) to account for the uneven spatial distribution and target scale variation of the cows. Additionally, in order to reduce the number of model parameters, an improved lightweight Spatial Pyramid Pooling Cross Stage Partial Connections (SPPCSPC-L) module is adopted to reduce model complexity. At the same time, the state parameters in the Kalman filter are improved by directly predicting the width and height information of the tracking boxes, so as to improve the ByteTrack algorithm to make tracking boxes matching the cows more precisely and accurately. Experimental conducted on the dairy cow object detection and multi-object tracking dataset show that the proposed YOLO-BYTE model achieves a Precision (P) of 97.3% in the dairy cow target detection dataset, with an improved Recall (R) and Average Precision (AP) by 1.1% compared to the original algorithm, and an 18% reduction in model parameters. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrated significant improvements in High Order Tracking Accuracy (HOTA), Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA), and Identification F1 (IDF1) by 4.4%, 6.1%, and 3.8%, respectively, compared to the original model, with a decrease of 37.5% in Identity Switch (IDS). The tracker runs in a real-time manner with an average analysis speed of 47 fps. Hence, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach is capable of effective multi-object tracking of dairy cows in natural scenes and provides technical support for non-contact dairy cow automatic monitoring.

RePGAN: image inpainting via residual partial connection and mask discriminator

RePGAN: image inpainting via residual partial connection and mask discriminator

Ресурсность профессионального мышления и эмоциональное выгорание в профессиях социономического типа

&lt;p&gt;The analysis of specific features of professional thinking and emotional exhaustion among teachers and doctors in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. The growing demand for practical social psychological support of members of &amp;ldquo;person to person&amp;rdquo; professions during the unstable epidemiological situation due to COVID-19 have preconditioned the consideration of emotional exhaustion in the terms of interconnection with professional thinking that is able to contribute new professional and personal meaning to the activity process, thus becoming the cognitive resource that balances the levels and components of emotional exhaustion. The method of content analysis and expert evaluation alongside with mathematical statistical methods, such as correlation method of Charles Spearman and Student&amp;rsquo;s t-distribution, were used. Participants: 55 people, the members of professions of socionomic type, 25 teachers and 30 doctors, length of time worked &amp;ndash; 10-25 years, men &amp;ndash; 30%, women &amp;ndash; 70%. The methods of studying the specific features of emotional exhaustion (V.V. Boyko; Christina Maslach, S. Jackson, adapted by N.E. Vodopiyanova) and components of professional thinking (the author&amp;rsquo;s method of self-analysis of the problem situation by I.V. Serafimovich and M.M. Kashapov). It has been demonstrated that suprasituatedness of thinking is negatively correlated with emotional burnout, while situatedness is positively correlated with it. It has been specified that the emotional burnout is more pronounced in doctors. It has been identified that adequacy and sufficiency of analysis of a problem situation are positively associated with the self-esteem of professional success and self-satisfaction, whereas validity is associated with the capability to cope with psychologically destructive circumstances. Under the high efficiency of analysis emotional involvement reduces, and when increasing the depth of analysis emotional burnout enhances. The obtained results about the partial connection of components of professional thinking and signs of emotional exhaustion can be used as the arguments for the author&amp;rsquo;s position of the ability of usage of thinking as a cognitive resource for solving practical problems.&lt;/p&gt;

Using Semantic Segmentation Network to Measure Vibration Displacement of Rotating Body

Compared with traditional vibration measurement sensors, visual vibration displacement measurement technology has many advantages, such as long-distance, non-contact and non-interference. However, when it comes to complex working conditions or inconvenient pre-processing scene, visual measuring techniques usually can’t produce results with the high precision needed for vibration analysis. In this paper, we proposed a visual measurement algorithm for vibration displacement of rotating body using semantic segmentation network by taking a high-speed industrial camera as the image acquisition medium and rotor as the experimental object. To make the network better applicable to segmentation of rotating body targets in different illumination, blur and similarity contexts, the cross stage partial (CSP) connections, concat channel fusion module and shuffle attention (SA) are purposefully incorporated into proposed CMCS convolution module. During calculating the loss in the training network stage, we add the binary cross-entropy loss and Dice-loss to solve the problem of serious imbalance between positive and negative samples caused by remote photography. The vibration signal synchronously collected by eddy current sensor is exploited as standard signal to compare the different segmentation algorithms quantitatively and qualitatively. The experimental results show that the RMSE between vibration displacement signal regressed by our segmentation algorithm and standard signal is the smallest, and the time domain diagram, frequency domain diagram and shaft orbit diagram are also more fitted to the standard signal curve, which provides valuable guidance for the visual vibration displacement measurement of rotating body in complex industrial setting.