3,443 research outputs found

    From Aspiration to Actuality under Xi Jinping: Reinterpreting the Outcome-driven Debate towards the Role of Historical Materialism in China’s Rise, 1949–2021

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    DOES THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY of socialist rising powers influence their rise to power? If so, how, when, and why? The literature on rising powers works on a set of historical assumptions which, when applied to China’s rise, predict an inevitable rise to power. In this literature, a new world order is imagined with China as a new kind of leading great power. For some, this development represents the correction of imperial China’s historical position in the world. This thesis disagrees with this outcome-based analytical approach to China’s rise. It instead posits another argument: in understanding the dynamics of a socialist rising power, the role of ideology matters more than the rising power literature suggests. In the Chinese context, this means bringing the Communist Party of China back into the story of its rise. This Party- state builds on a genuine belief in historical materialism and a teleology of success which it, presumably, represents. Treating the Xi Jinping era (2012 to the present) as a pivotal moment, this thesis understands the Chinese Dream of Great Rejuvenation as promethean. While it fits within the Chinese tradition of organising China in its own image, as a political actor it is entirely new. China’s rise, then, becomes much more than simply ensuring the Party’s self- perpetuation of its political rule. It is a grand historical narrative which may only be understood, and problema

    Conversations on Empathy

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    In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

    Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5

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    This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well

    British Bangladeshi Muslim Women’s In-Law Relationships: A Narrative Analysis

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    Despite being a major feature of everyday life, research on in-law relationships has received relatively scant attention in comparison to other close relationships. In-law relationships have mostly been portrayed negatively in popular culture, influencing and reflecting the pervading negative attitudes held by wider society. This has provided a narrow and restrictive view of affinal relationships. In-law relationships are found across the globe, and literature suggests that culture and its underlying values play a major role in shaping the nature and dynamics of such relationships. However, the majority of research has been dominated by the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dyad, with little attention to the wider context. Using a post-colonial feminist framework and narrative analysis, the current research documents the stories of 10 British Bangladeshi Muslim women and their subjective experiences of in-law relationships. The research highlights the subtle and nuanced way they navigate in-law relationships and exercise their agency. It also demonstrates how intersecting markers of difference impact experiences of agency and the shaping of their identity. The research highlights four major themes from the analysis: (1) “It’s a family marriage” (2) Rising tensions (3) Tug of war – the role of husband and (4) Developing a survivor’s identity. A description of these themes and related subthemes are discussed. The findings of the present study challenge Eurocentric models of feminism and demonstrate the diversity of women’s experiences and identities. They also reveal how gender intersects with other markers of identity that shape the participants’ social realities. They also point to the urgency of highlighting the role of the wider family in the perpetration of abuse against women. The research discusses further implications of findings for academics, clinicians, policy, and the wider community, and recommends suggestions for future research

    A corpus-based CDA study of ideological mediation through translation shifts: an analysis of the official Chinese-English translation of the governance of China

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    This study aims to explore the extent to which President Xi’s ideological message is mediated in the official Chinese-English translation of The Governance of China via various translation shifts and analyze the possible ideological reasons behind it. Unlike previous studies whose interpretation of translation shifts has been restricted to either the linguistic level or the speech situation, this research project focuses on exploring the translation shifts’ ideological significance within the broader sociopolitical context. It adopts a mixed-methods approach, merging critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus-based translation studies. A parallel corpus based on the source and target texts of President Xi’s domestic speeches to officials and Party members, published in The Governance of China, was built to ensure a quantitative and qualitative analysis. It is also noteworthy that this study concentrates on the key Chinese modality markers, transitivity processes, metaphorical expressions, and referring terms that stand out in the present research corpus compared to general Chinese discourse instead of all the existing or the most frequent ones. The overall results suggest that translation shifts in modality, transitivity, metaphor, and reference have slightly increased the ideological significance of strengthening the government and the Party’s self-discipline compared to other national issues, and exhibited a tendency to contextualize considering the foreign audiences’ ideological positions. Such shifts may be related to the translation agency’s commitment and the state’s current foreign policy. Ultimately, this study reveals subtle ideological translation shifts that will be buried if researchers treat source and target texts separately. It calls for translators to raise awareness of textual features’ ideological potential and encourages audiences to pay attention to the institutional and sociopolitical background of translated texts

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    From transactions to partnerships : Essays in honor of Jukka Vesalainen

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    This Festschrift for Professor Jukka Vesalainen is a collection of articles related to business relationships. The book focuses on different types of business relationships that constitute business networks, the development of business relationships and a practical perspective on relationship management. The book builds on the assumption that no firm is an island, and any business development takes place within ecosystems, networks, and relationships, where firms and other organizations collaborate. Firms are seen to be interdependent with other firms and actors in their business environment. Even though firms would not choose to operate in networks, they end up in networks, as perfect markets rarely exist. This emphasizes the importance of relationship management in today’s business activities. The collection contains empirical, theoretical and practical articles that all reflect the impact of the research and practical work done by Professor Vesalainen. The articles relate to important academic and practically oriented topics of Vesalainen’s research and academic career and also provide a sense of each contributor’s relationship with him.fi=vertaisarvioimaton|en=nonPeerReviewed

    Summer/Fall 2023

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    Co-designing the inflammatory arthritis self-management (aiM) intervention.

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    Self-management is an integral part of care for people living with inflammatory arthritis. The benefits of self-management interventions for people living with long-term conditions are well established. To date, most of the inflammatory arthritis self-management interventions have targeted only rheumatoid arthritis. Therefore, there is a need for a self-management intervention that reaches beyond just people living with rheumatoid arthritis. The overarching aim of this project was to co-design a self-management intervention for people across the inflammatory arthritis spectrum, based on the needs and preferences of co-designers (i.e. both people living with IA and healthcare professionals), as well as on the scientific literature. This project commenced with a mixed-method systematic review exploring the effectiveness and acceptability of existing inflammatory arthritis self-management interventions. Then, a two-phase, sequential multi-methods approach was employed. The first phase involved five asynchronous co-design workshops, guided by the Intervention Mapping Framework (Bartholomew et al. 2016). The second phase then explored participants' experience in participating in co-design research, including the barriers and facilitators to co-design. The mixed-method systematic review demonstrated that inflammatory arthritis self-management interventions produced a clinically meaningful reduction in fatigue and pain in people living with inflammatory arthritis. There was also some data to suggest that inflammatory arthritis self-management interventions have a beneficial effect on self-efficacy; knowledge; communication; health- related quality of life; and engagement with self-management behaviours. Additionally, the review found that inflammatory arthritis self-management interventions are generally acceptable to people living with inflammatory arthritis and healthcare professionals. Workshop findings provided important insight into the health problems and self-management needs of people living with inflammatory arthritis. The workshops also helped to identify the key content and features of the developed self-management intervention - i.e. the inflAmmatory arthrItis self-Management (aiM) intervention. Participants reported having an overall positive experience participating in the workshops, which provided them with an opportunity to meet others living with IA. The use of asynchronous workshops was felt to contribute to the participants' high attendance rate and the study's low attrition, despite IT-issues that were reported as a barrier to the participants' ability to fully participate in the workshops. This project developed a novel self-management intervention, which aims to improve the health status of people living with inflammatory arthritis through increased engagement with self-management strategies. The aiM intervention is based on the needs and preferences of the co-designers, and is grounded in theory and evidence. The findings have also provided new knowledge regarding the health problems related to people living with inflammatory arthritis, their self-management needs, and mechanisms that facilitate and inhibit co-design processes in an asynchronous remote context. Moving forward, it is recommended that the aiM intervention be tested for its feasibility and acceptability
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