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By revisiting the century-old problem of water bridge, we demonstrate that it is in fact dynamic and comprises of two coaxial water currents that carry different charges and flow in opposite directions. This spontaneous separation is triggered by the different stages to construct the water bridge. Initially, a flow is facilitated by the cone jet that is powered by H+ and flows out of the positive-electrode beaker. An opposing cone-jet from negative beaker is established later and forced to take the outer route. This spontaneous arrangement of two-way flow is revealed by using fluorescein and carbon powder as tracers, and the Particle Image Velocimetry, These two opposing flows are found to carry non-equal flux that results in a net transport of water to the negative beaker. We manage to estimate the flow speed and cross-sectional area of these co-axial flows as a function of time and applied voltage. Note that the water on the outer layer functions as a millimeter tube that confines and interacts strongly with the flow inside. This provides a first natural and yet counter example to the recently reported near-frictionless flow in an equally miniatureized soft wall made from ferrofluid., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

We study quantum coherence of strongly interacting cold bosons in a double-well potential driven by a laser field. The system is initially in a Fock state and, for either with or without a static tilting field, evolves into the coherent states. The coherence is resonantly enhanced by the photon-assisted tunneling. For the tilted wells, it reveals a two-branch pattern which corresponds to the multiple photon absorption or emission, respectively., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures

Classifier ensemble generally should combine diverse component classifiers. However, it is difficult to give a definitive connection between diversity measure and ensemble accuracy. Given a list of available component classifiers, how to adaptively and diversely ensemble classifiers becomes a big challenge in the literature. In this paper, we argue that diversity, not direct diversity on samples but adaptive diversity with data, is highly correlated to ensemble accuracy, and we propose a novel technology for classifier ensemble, learning to diversify, which learns to adaptively combine classifiers by considering both accuracy and diversity. Specifically, our approach, Learning TO Diversify via Weighted Kernels (L2DWK), performs classifier combination by optimizing a direct but simple criterion: maximizing ensemble accuracy and adaptive diversity simultaneously by minimizing a convex loss function. Given a measure formulation, the diversity is calculated with weighted kernels (i.e., the diversity is measured on the component classifiers' outputs which are kernelled and weighted), and the kernel weights are automatically learned. We minimize this loss function by estimating the kernel weights in conjunction with the classifier weights, and propose a self-training algorithm for conducting this convex optimization procedure iteratively. Extensive experiments on a variety of 32 UCI classification benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ensembles such as Bagging, AdaBoost, Random Forests, Gasen, Regularized Selective Ensemble, and Ensemble Pruning via Semi-Definite Programming., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)

Text detection in natural scene images is an important prerequisite for many content-based image analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose an accurate and robust method for detecting texts in natural scene images. A fast and effective pruning algorithm is designed to extract Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs) as character candidates using the strategy of minimizing regularized variations. Character candidates are grouped into text candidates by the ingle-link clustering algorithm, where distance weights and threshold of the clustering algorithm are learned automatically by a novel self-training distance metric learning algorithm. The posterior probabilities of text candidates corresponding to non-text are estimated with an character classifier; text candidates with high probabilities are then eliminated and finally texts are identified with a text classifier. The proposed system is evaluated on the ICDAR 2011 Robust Reading Competition dataset; the f measure is over 76% and is significantly better than the state-of-the-art performance of 71%. Experimental results on a publicly available multilingual dataset also show that our proposed method can outperform the other competitive method with the f measure increase of over 9 percent. Finally, we have setup an online demo of our proposed scene text detection system at http://kems.ustb.edu.cn/learning/yin/dtext., Comment: A Draft Version (Submitted to IEEE TPAMI)

Three ultra-short-period W/B4C multilayers (1.244nm, 1.235nm and 1.034nm) have been fabricated and used for polarization measurement at the 4B7B Beamline of Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility (BSRF). By rotating analyzer ellipsometry method, the linear polarization degree of light emerging from this beamline has been measured and the circular polarization evaluated for 700eV-860eV. The first soft x-ray magnetic circular dichroism measurements are carried out at BSRF by positioning the beamline aperture out of the plane of the electron storage ring.

It is very important to know the strength of annihilation contribution in B charmless nonleptonic decays. $\bar{B}_{s}\to \pi^{+}\pi^{-}$ process could serve a good probe of the strength. We have studied the process in QCD factorization framework. Using a gluon mass scale indicted by the studies of infrared behavior of gluon propagators to avoid enhancements in the soft end point regions, we find that the CP averaged branching ratio is about $1.24\times 10^{-7}$, the direct CP asymmetry $C_{\pi\pi}$ is about -0.05, while the mixing-induced CP asymmetry quite large with the value $S_{\pi\pi}$=0.18. The process could be measured at LHC-b experiments in the near future and would deepen our understanding of dynamics of B charmless decays., Comment: 9 pages, 3 eps figures. To appear in EPJC