Fingers, pelvis, and everything we do not know

Through performative and participatory works, I situate myself in everyday life scenes, unfamiliar geographic locations, or in interactions with other people. My works challenge efficiencies in the mundane by being physically tiring, time consuming, absurd, obscure, unpredictable, and impractical. I use my body and often neutral and low-key bodily movements as tools to reveal alternative, unfamiliar possibilities. The works explore unproductivity’s richness, aliveness, and poetry

SYSTEMATIC POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT

Determining whether a given policy meets a site’s high-level security goals has been a challenging task, due to the low-level nature and complexity of the policy language, various security requirements and the multiple policy violation patterns. In this dissertation, we outline a systematic policy analysis and management approach that enables system administrators to easily identify and resolve various policy violations. Our approach incorporates a domain-based isolation model to address the security requirements and visualization mechanisms to provide the policy administrator with intuitive cognitive sense about the policy analysis and policy violations. Based on the domain-based isolation model and the policy visualization mechanisms, we develop a visualization-based policy analysis and management framework. We also describe our implementation of a visualization-based policy analysis and management tool that provides the functionalities discussed in our framework. In addition, a user study is performed and the result is included as part of our evaluation efforts for the prototype system. One important application of our policy analysis and management is to support remote attestation. Remote attestation is an important mechanism to provide the trustworthiness proof of a computing system by verifying its integrity. In our work, we propose a remote attestation framework, called Dynamic Remote Attestation Framework and Tactics (DR@FT), for efficiently attesting a target system based on our extended visualization-based policy analysis and management approach. In addition, we adopt the proposed visualization-based policy violation expression to represent integrity violations with a ranked violation graph, which supports intuitive reasoning of attestation results. We also describe our experiments and performance evaluation

A Study of Sustainable Business Models For Small and Medium Enterprises in China

Although studies of sustainability business models are increasingly popular in the literature, most businesses in China seldom include sustainability elements or the triple bottom line concept in their business model design. Given the fact that China has developed and become a stronger player in the global economy, sustainable practices and triple-bottom-line, business models (social, economic and environmental sustainability), should be better represented. This paper illustrates the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) concept of business models for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in China. It also examines Chinese SMEs’ perception of their own corporate development in reference to sustainability and their understanding of the TBL concept. A Pyramid of Chinese SMEs’ Sustainability Values and a Chinese SMEs’ Sustainability Credit Score (SCS) are designed and informed by the literature review; a SWOT analysis from the TBL perspective and a survey that focuses on Chinese SMEs’ perceptions of sustainability are developed. Sustainable business models for Chinese SMEs can be customized by using the two tools, SWOT analysis and SCS

Moderated Online Communities and User-Generated Content

Online communities provide a social sphere for people to share information and knowledge. While information sharing is becoming a ubiquitous online phenomenon, how to ensure information quality or induce quality content, however, remains a challenge due to the anonymity of commentators. This paper introduces moderation into reputation systems. We show that moderation directly impacts strategic commentators incentive to generate useful information, and moderation is generally desirable to improve information quality. Interestingly, we find that when being moderated with different probabilities based on their reputations, commentators may display a pattern of reputation oscillation, in which they generate useful content to build up high reputation and then exploit their reputation. As a result, the expected performance from high-reputation commentators can be inferior to that from low-reputation ones (reversed reputation). We then investigate the optimal moderation resource allocation, and conclude that the seemingly abnormal reversed reputation could arise as an optimal result. The paper concludes with a discussion of the development of a scientific moderation system with application to academic publishing

Probing ferroelectricity by X-ray absorption spectroscopy in molecular crystals

We carry out X-ray absorption spectroscopy experiment at the oxygen K edge in croconic acid (C5H2O5) crystal as a prototype of ferroelectric organic molecular solid, whose electric polarization is generated by proton transfer. The experimental spectrum is well reproduced by the electron-hole excitation theory simulations from configuration generated by ab initio molecular dynamics simulation. When inversion symmetry is broken in the ferroelectric state, the hydrogen bonding environment on the two bonded molecules become inequivalent. Such a difference is sensitively probed by the bound excitation in the pre-edge, which is strongly localized on the excited molecules. Our analysis shows that a satellite peak in the pre-edge will emerge at higher excitation energy, which serves as a clear signature of ferroelectricity in the material

A supramolecular self-assembly strategy for upconversion nanoparticle bioconjugation

© 2018 The Royal Society of Chemistry. An efficient surface modification for upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) is reported via supramolecular host-guest self-assembly. Cucurbit[7]uril (CB) can provide a hydrophilic surface and cavities for most biomolecules. High biological efficiency, activity and versatility of the approach enable UCNPs to be significantly applied in bio-imaging, early disease detection, and bio-sensing

Investigating Proactive Interference Effects After Switching Encoding Language in Bilingual Individuals

Proactive interference (PI) is the phenomenon where previously learned information hinders recall of later learned information. A common method of studying PI is to ask participants to memorize several lists of words, with poorer recall of words from later lists attributed to interference from earlier lists. Previous research has shown that certain strategies can be used to increase recall performance by reducing PI. For bilingual individuals, this includes switching the language of presentation on the last list. However, there has not been any research on whether mental translation can be used as a conscious strategy to reduce PI.In the current study, we investigate whether switching the encoding language in bilingual individuals reduces the effects of PI. We adopt a 2 (English vs. Spanish) by 3 (Control vs. Shift vs. Translate) factorial design, recruiting both Spanish dominant and English dominant bilinguals. Participants are instructed to memorize words from four lists and then recall them. In the Control condition, all four lists present words in the same language. In the language Shift condition, words on the last list are presented in the other language relative to the first three. In the Translate condition, participants are asked to mentally translate the words on the fourth list. We expect participants in the mental translation condition to show a larger reduction in PI compared to those in the Control and Shift groups, resulting in higher recall of words from the last list. The findings have implications for the understanding of bilingual processing as well as the cognition processes underlying the effects of PI

Functionalizable coaxial PLLA/PDLA nanofibers with stereocomplexes at the internal interface

Multifunctionality of electrospun polylactic acid (PLA) nonwovens was generated by the morphological design of nanofibers. Coaxial fibers with a lower number average molar mass Mn PLLA core and a higher Mn PDLA shell form PDLA–PLLA stereocrystals at the interface, induced by annealing. In tensile tests under physiological conditions, the core–shell fibers with higher crystallinity (22% compared to 11–14%) had lower Young’s moduli E (9 ± 1 MPa) and lower elongation at break εb (26 ± 3%) than PDLA alone (E = 31 ± 9 MPa, εb = 80 ± 5%), which can be attributed to simultaneous crystallization and relaxation effects. Gelatin incorporated in the PDLA phase was presented on the outer surface providing a biointerface putatively favorable for cell adherence. Gelatin incorporation did not influence the crystallization behavior but slightly lowered Tg (60 → 54 °C). Employing exclusively polymers established in the clinic, multifunctionality was generated by design

Ab initio prediction of Boron compounds arising from Borozene: Structural and electronic properties

Structure and electronic properties of two unusual boron clusters obtained by fusion of borozene rings has been studied by means of first principles calculations, based on the generalized-gradient approximation of the density functional theory, and the semiempirical tight-binding method was used for the transport calculations. The role of disorder has also been considered with single vacancies and substitutional atoms. Results show that the pure boron clusters are topologically planar and characterized by (3c-2e) bonds, which can explain, together with the aromaticity (estimated by means of NICS), the remarkable cohesive energy values obtained. Such feature makes these systems competitive with the most stable boron clusters to date. On the contrary, the introduction of impurities compromises stability and planarity in both cases. The energy gap values indicate that these clusters possess a semiconducting character, while when the larger system is considered, zero-values of the density of states are found exclusively within the HOMO-LUMO gap. Electron transport calculations within the Landauer formalism confirm these indications, showing semiconductor-like low bias differential conductance for these stuctures. Differences and similarities with Carbon clusters are highlighted in the discussion.Comment: 10 pages, 2 tables, 5 figure

A new assessment model for tumor heterogeneity analysis with [18]F-FDG PET images

It has been shown that the intratumor heterogeneity can be characterized with quantitative analysis of the [18]F-FDG PET image data. The existing models employ multiple parameters for feature extraction which makes it difficult to implement in clinical settings for the quantitative characterization. This article reports an easy-to-use and differential SUV based model for quantitative assessment of the intratumor heterogeneity from 3D [18]F-FDG PET image data. An H index is defined to assess tumor heterogeneity by summing voxel-wise distribution of differential SUV from the [18]F-FDG PET image data. The summation is weighted by the distance of SUV difference among neighboring voxels from the center of the tumor and can thus yield increased values for tumors with peripheral sub-regions of high SUV that often serves as an indicator of augmented malignancy. Furthermore, the sign of H index is used to differentiate the rate of change for volume averaged SUV from its center to periphery. The new model with the H index has been compared with a widely-used model of gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) for image texture characterization with phantoms of different configurations and the [18]F-FDG PET image data of 6 lung cancer patients to evaluate its effectiveness and feasibility for clinical uses. The comparison of the H index and GLCM parameters with the phantoms demonstrate that the H index can characterize the SUV heterogeneity in all of 6 2D phantoms while only 1 GLCM parameter can do for 1 and fail to differentiate for other 2D phantoms. For the 8 3D phantoms, the H index can clearly differentiate all of them while the 4 GLCM parameters provide complicated patterns in the characterization. Feasibility study with the PET image data from 6 lung cancer patients show that the H index provides an effective single-parameter metric to characterize tumor heterogeneity in terms of the local SUV variation, and it has higher correlation with tumor volume change after radiotherapy (R2 = 0.83) than the 4 GLCM parameters (R2 = 0.63, 0.73, 0.59 and 0.75 for Energy, Contrast, Local Homogeneity and Entropy respectively). The new model of the H index has the capacity to characterize the intratumor heterogeneity feature from 3D [18]F-FDG PET image data. As a single parameter with an intuitive definition, the H index offers potential for clinical applications