The Question of Nation and Nationalism in Chinese Postcolonialism

This paper examines the impact of postcolonial theory in China on the question of the nation from historical and genealogical perspectives. China first encountered Jameson’s third-world national allegory and Edward Said’s Orientalism, which were quickly assimilated into the framework of the China/West dichotomy. Then Homi Bhabha’s ideas of national identity and cultural hybridity were utilized in studying Chinese ethnic minorities and identity construction. From the earlier views of postcolonialism as cultural resistance to cultural production now, Chinese postcolonial studies have acquired new energy for growth

Chinese Theories of Anti-Modern or Alternative Modernity: Arif Dirlik, Liu Kang, and Wang Hui

In Yuyu Wu’s article, There and Back Again: A Critical Study on \u27Anti-modern Modernity,\u27 the author discusses the arguments about anti-modern modernity, raised by Arif Dirlik, Kang Liu and Hui Wang, and compares different contexts in which China’s modernity has been understood and interpreted. Both Dirlik and Liu reflect upon western Critical Theory through analysis of the Chinese experience, while Wang brings this theory back to China. However, in this two-way journey, a structural change occurs. By justifying China’s historical experience through abstract western theories, western Critical Theory has not only lost its sharp critical edge, but also transmogrified into an excuse for the Chinese experience. As a result, the insights of western Critical Theory become blind spots for interpreting the Chinese experience

The relationship between family-school socioeconomic status match and adolescent aggressive behavior

The objective of the present study was to analyze the effect of the match between family and school socioeconomic status (SES) on adolescents’ aggressive behaviors. Additionally, the moderating roles of gender and the parent–child relationship were examined. A total of 2,823 adolescents completed the Aggressive Behavior Scale, the Parent–Child Relationship Scale, and the Family SES Scale. School SES was measured by the average family SES of all students in the school. SES was categorized as high or low based on one standard deviation above or below the mean. The results showed that when there was a match between family and school SES, adolescents with “Low Family-Low School” SES exhibited more aggressive behaviors compared to those with “High Family-High School” SES. When there was a mismatch between family and school SES, adolescents with “High Family-Low School” SES exhibited higher levels of aggressive behaviors than those with “Low Family-High School” SES. Gender did not moderate these effects. Furthermore, when the parent–child relationship was poor, adolescents exhibited higher levels of aggressive behaviors when family SES exceeded school SES. Conversely, the effects of family and school SES on aggressive behavior were not significant when the parent–child relationship was strong. The present study highlights that the match and mismatch between family and school SES significantly influence adolescents’ aggressive behaviors and that a strong parent–child relationship has a protective effect

A dataset of 30-meter annual vegetation phenology indicators (1985–2015) in urban areas of the conterminous United States

Fine-resolution satellite observations show great potential for characterizing seasonal and annual dynamics of vegetation phenology in urban domains, from local to regional and global scales. However, most previous studies were conducted using coarse or moderate resolution data, which are inadequate for characterizing the spatiotemporal dynamics of vegetation phenology in urban domains. In this study, we produced an annual vegetation phenology dataset in urban ecosystems for the conterminous United States (US), using all available Landsat images on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. First, we characterized the long-term mean seasonal pattern of phenology indicators of the start of season (SOS) and the end of season (EOS), using a double logistic model. Then, we identified the annual variability of these two phenology indicators by measuring the difference of dates when the vegetation index in a specific year reaches the same magnitude as its long-term mean. The derived phenology indicators agree well with in-situ observations from PhenoCam network and Harvard Forest. Comparing with results derived from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, our Landsat derived phenology indicators can provide more spatial details. Also, temporal trends of phenology indicators (e.g., SOS) derived from Landsat and MODIS are consistent overall, but the Landsat derived results from 1985 have a longer temporal span compared to MODIS from 2001. In general, there is a spatially explicit pattern of phenology indicators from the North to the South in cities in the conterminous US, with an overall advanced SOS in the past three decades. The derived phenology product in the US urban domains at the national level is of great use for urban ecology studies for its fine spatial resolution (30 m) and long temporal span (30 years). The data are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7685645.v2

KidneyRegNet: A Deep Learning Method for 3DCT-2DUS Kidney Registration during Breathing

This work proposed a novel deep registration pipeline for 3D CT and 2D U/S kidney scans of free breathing, which consists of a feature network, and a 3D-2D CNN-based registration network. The feature network has handcraft texture feature layers to reduce the semantic gap. The registration network is encoder-decoder structure with loss of feature-image-motion (FIM), which enables hierarchical regression at decoder layers and avoids multiple network concatenation. It was first pretrained with retrospective datasets cum training data generation strategy, then adapted to specific patient data under unsupervised one-cycle transfer learning in onsite application. The experiment was on 132 U/S sequences, 39 multiple phase CT and 210 public single phase CT images, and 25 pairs of CT and U/S sequences. It resulted in mean contour distance (MCD) of 0.94 mm between kidneys on CT and U/S images and MCD of 1.15 mm on CT and reference CT images. For datasets with small transformations, it resulted in MCD of 0.82 and 1.02 mm respectively. For large transformations, it resulted in MCD of 1.10 and 1.28 mm respectively. This work addressed difficulties in 3DCT-2DUS kidney registration during free breathing via novel network structures and training strategy.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 9 table

A Sanitization Approach to Secure Shared Data in an IoT Environment

Internet of Things (IoT) supports high flexibility and convenience in several applications because the IoT devices continuously transfer, share, and exchange data without human intervention. During shared or exchanged progress of data, security and privacy threats result because the published or shared data mainly corresponds to a raw dataset, and an attacker can easily obtain details on the shared data in an IoT environment. In the paper, we present a sanitization approach by adopting the hierarchical-cluster method to hide confidential information while still discovering useful and meaningful information in the sanitized dataset. The multi-objective particle swarm optimization framework and an algorithm termed as HCMPSO are utilized to balance four side effects, namely, hiding failure, missing cost, artificial cost, and database dissimilarity (Dis), and thereby provide optimized solutions for data sanitization. The experiments are performed to compare the performance of the designed HCMPSO with that of the single-objective cpGA2DT and multi-objective NSGA-II-based approaches. As shown in the results, the designed HCMPSO exhibits good performance in terms of hiding failure, and thus the most confidential information is hidden after the sanitization process. The shared or published data in IoT is secured. Furthermore, the designed sanitization algorithm achieves reasonable results in terms of missing cost, artificial cost, and Dis.publishedVersio

The effect of the interaction of sleep onset latency and age on ischemic stroke severity via inflammatory chemokines

ObjectiveProlonged sleep onset latency (PSOL) and age have been linked to ischemic stroke (IS) severity and the production of chemokines and inflammation, both of which contribute to IS development. This study aimed to explore the relationship between chemokines, inflammation, and the interplay between sleep onset latency (SOL) and age in influencing stroke severity.MethodsA cohort of 281 participants with mild to moderate IS was enrolled. Stroke severity was assessed using the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS), and SOL was recorded. Serum levels of macrophage inflammatory protein-1alpha (MIP-1α), macrophage inflammatory protein-1beta (MIP-1β), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) were measured.ResultsNIHSS scores of middle-aged participants with PSOL were significantly higher than those with normal sleep onset latency (NSOL) (p = 0.046). This difference was also observed when compared to both the elderly with NSOL (p = 0.022), and PSOL (p < 0.001). Among middle-aged adults with PSOL, MIP-1β exhibited a protective effect on NIHSS scores (β = −0.01, t = −2.11, p = 0.039, R2 = 0.13). MIP-1α demonstrated a protective effect on NIHSS scores in the elderly with NSOL (β = −0.03, t = −2.27, p = 0.027, R2 = 0.12).ConclusionThis study reveals a hitherto undocumented association between PSOL and IS severity, along with the potential protective effects of MIP-1β in mitigating stroke severity, especially among middle-aged patients

Integrating LiDAR data and multi-temporal aerial imagery to map wetland inundation dynamics using Google Earth Engine

The Prairie Pothole Region of North America is characterized by millions of depressional wetlands, which provide critical habitats for globally significant populations of migratory waterfowl and other wildlife species. Due to their relatively small size and shallow depth, these wetlands are highly sensitive to climate variability and anthropogenic changes, exhibiting inter- and intra-annual inundation dynamics. Moderate-resolution satellite imagery (e.g., Landsat, Sentinel) alone cannot be used to effectively delineate these small depressional wetlands. By integrating fine spatial resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and multi-temporal (2009–2017) aerial images, we developed a fully automated approach to delineate wetland inundation extent at watershed scales using Google Earth Engine. Machine learning algorithms were used to classify aerial imagery with additional spectral indices to extract potential wetland inundation areas, which were further refined using LiDAR-derived landform depressions. The wetland delineation results were then compared to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) geospatial dataset and existing global-scale surface water products to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. We tested the workflow on 26 watersheds with a total area of 16,576 km2 in the Prairie Pothole Region. The results showed that the proposed method can not only delineate current wetland inundation status but also demonstrate wetland hydrological dynamics, such as wetland coalescence through fill-spill hydrological processes. Our automated algorithm provides a practical, reproducible, and scalable framework, which can be easily adapted to delineate wetland inundation dynamics at broad geographic scales

Research Status of Peptide-Calcium Chelation and Absorption Mechanism

Calcium is one of the essential macro-elements in the human body. The scientific calcium supplementation is greatly significant to maintaining life and health. The peptide-calcium chelates with good calcium binding capacity and high bioavailability have attracted more attention. This work reviews the binding sites, binding modes, and intermolecular forces between calcium and peptides in peptide-calcium chelates. Compared with free calcium, chelated calcium is more easily absorbed in the intestine according to the summarization of the calcium absorption pathways. Peptide-calcium chelates, as a new generation of calcium supplements, have a rich source of raw materials, high bioavailability, good economic value, and broad development prospects. Further research is needed on the safety, physicochemical stability, digestive stability, and Ca2+ release mechanism of peptide-calcium chelates after intestinal absorption. This paper aims to provide new insight into the development of novel calcium supplements