tHEiR BLUE 她们的蓝

tHEiR BLUE(她们的蓝)is a thesis project dedicated to exploring, promoting, and honouring Miao Batik, one of the Intangible Cultural Heritages (as defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 2003) of China, and its inheritors—the Miao women. The Miao are one of the 55 recognized ethnic minorities in China. For more than two millennia of Miao Batik's existence, Miao women used beeswax to paint on cloth and dye it using indigo plants, thereby depicting and preserving the cultural and historical journey of the Miao people. Through this art form, they capture their reflections on life and convey hopeful wishes for future generations. This research project employs a multidisciplinary approach, including research-creation, storytelling, and interviews with inheritors of Miao Batik to explore the protective processes of Chinese traditional culture/intangible cultural heritage and the inadequate protection of women's social rights in Chinese (Miao) society. The project's creative output includes an artist’s book, videos, illustration designs, and Miao Batik artworks. Moreover, due to the unique aspects of Chinese/Miao culture and language expression, this thesis is written in both Chinese and English, with translations of references first processed through translation software and then refined by me

The Influence of Orthographic Experiences on the Development of Functional Phonological Unit in Spoken Word Production

The current dissertation project examined the influence of orthographic experiences on the development of the functional phonological unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Functional phonological unit refers to the first selectable phonological unit after lexical selection in the planning of spoken word production. Previous research has shown that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge restructures literate speakers’ phonological representation and in particular, the acquisition of alphabetic orthographic knowledge improves children’s phonological awareness at the phonemic level. However, few studies have investigated the influence of orthographic experiences on phonological retrieval and encoding in spoken word production. The goal of this dissertation is to fill this gap. Four experiments were carried out to conduct the investigation. Participants consisted of native Mandarin speakers from four age groups with different orthographic experiences, including 1) Grade 1 children, who were comparatively more exposed to alphabetic Pinyin and had very limited Chinese character knowledge, 2) Grade 2 and Grade 4 children, who had better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and 3) adult readers, who had the highest level of character knowledge and the most exposure to characters. Experiment 1 investigated whether the onset served as the functional phonological unit in producing monosyllables; Experiment 2 investigated whether the role of the onset in phonological retrieval and encoding was sustained when producing disyllabic words; Experiment 3 examined the role of the syllable segment (i.e., a syllable whose tone is indeterminate or an atonal syllable) in producing disyllabic words; Experiment 4 examined the role of the tonal syllable (i.e., tonal information is also included) in producing disyllabic words. Results showed that only Grade 1 children selected the onset as the functional phonological unit regardless of the word length during spoken word production and that additionally, they might process the rime segment and tone as a cohesive unit. By contrast, Grade 4 children and adults selected the syllable segment as the functional phonological unit. Grade 2 children were in their transitional stage of development, and they selected tonal syllable as the functional phonological unit. The different orthographic experiences of the four groups might contribute to the above differences. The current dissertation has important theoretical and pedagogical implications. The aforementioned findings help us better understand the mechanism of phonological processing, and as a result, may help educators develop more efficient pedagogical approaches to improve children’s phonological processing ability

Scalable and Safe Multi-Agent Motion Planning with Nonlinear Dynamics and Bounded Disturbances

We present a scalable and effective multi-agent safe motion planner that enables a group of agents to move to their desired locations while avoiding collisions with obstacles and other agents, with the presence of rich obstacles, high-dimensional, nonlinear, nonholonomic dynamics, actuation limits, and disturbances. We address this problem by finding a piecewise linear path for each agent such that the actual trajectories following these paths are guaranteed to satisfy the reach-and-avoid requirement. We show that the spatial tracking error of the actual trajectories of the controlled agents can be pre-computed for any qualified path that considers the minimum duration of each path segment due to actuation limits. Using these bounds, we find a collision-free path for each agent by solving Mixed Integer-Linear Programs and coordinate agents by using the priority-based search. We demonstrate our method by benchmarking in 2D and 3D scenarios with ground vehicles and quadrotors, respectively, and show improvements over the solving time and the solution quality compared to two state-of-the-art multi-agent motion planners.Comment: Accepted at AAAI2021. 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Evaluation of genetic susceptibility of common variants in CACNA1D with schizophrenia in Han Chinese

The heritability of schizophrenia (SCZ) has been estimated to be as high as 80%, suggesting that genetic factors may play an important role in the etiology of SCZ. Cav1.2 encoded by CACNA1C and Cav1.3 encoded by CACNA1D are dominant calcium channel-forming subunits of L-type Voltage-dependent Ca(2+) channels, expressed in many types of neurons. The CACNA1C has been consistently found to be a risk gene for SCZ, but it is unknown for CACNA1D. To investigate the association of CACNA1D with SCZ, we designed a two-stage case-control study, including a testing set with 1117 cases and 1815 controls and a validation set with 1430 cases and 4295 controls in Han Chinese. A total of selected 97 tag single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in CACNA1D were genotyped, and single-SNP association, imputation analysis and gender-specific association analyses were performed in the two independent datasets. None was found to associate with SCZ. Further genotype and haplotype association analyses indicated a similar pattern in the two-stage study. Our findings suggested CACNA1D might not be a risk gene for SCZ in Han Chinese population, which add to the current state of knowledge regarding the susceptibility of CACNA1D to SCZ

The Contributions of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in Reading Chinese Characters Aloud

Funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.The Chinese writing system provides an excellent case for testing the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information in reading words aloud within the same language. In logographic Chinese characters, neither segmental nor tonal information is explicitly represented, whereas in Pinyin, an alphabetic transcription of the character, both are explicitly represented. Two primed naming experiments were conducted in which the targets were always written characters. When logographic characters served as the primes (Experiment 1), syllable segmental and tonal information appeared to be represented and encoded as an integral unit which in turn facilitated target character naming. When Pinyin served as the primes (Experiment 2), the explicit phonetic representation facilitated encoding of both segmental and suprasegmental information, but with later access to suprasegmental information. In addition, Chinese speakers were faster to name characters than Pinyin in a simple naming task (Experiment 3), suggesting that Pinyin may be read via a phonological assembly route, whereas characters may be read via a lexical route. Taken together, our findings point to the need to consider the contributions of both segmental and suprasegmental information and the time course in the well-established models for reading aloud, as well as the cognitive mechanisms underlying the reading aloud of logographic characters versus alphabetic Pinyin script

NeRF-VINS: A Real-time Neural Radiance Field Map-based Visual-Inertial Navigation System

Achieving accurate, efficient, and consistent localization within an a priori environment map remains a fundamental challenge in robotics and computer vision. Conventional map-based keyframe localization often suffers from sub-optimal viewpoints due to limited field of view (FOV), thus degrading its performance. To address this issue, in this paper, we design a real-time tightly-coupled Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-aided visual-inertial navigation system (VINS), termed NeRF-VINS. By effectively leveraging NeRF's potential to synthesize novel views, essential for addressing limited viewpoints, the proposed NeRF-VINS optimally fuses IMU and monocular image measurements along with synthetically rendered images within an efficient filter-based framework. This tightly coupled integration enables 3D motion tracking with bounded error. We extensively compare the proposed NeRF-VINS against the state-of-the-art methods that use prior map information, which is shown to achieve superior performance. We also demonstrate the proposed method is able to perform real-time estimation at 15 Hz, on a resource-constrained Jetson AGX Orin embedded platform with impressive accuracy.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Novel Yersinia enterocolitica Prophages and a Comparative Analysis of Genomic Diversity

Yersinia enterocolitica is a major agent of foodborne diseases worldwide. Prophage plays an important role in the genetic evolution of the bacterial genome. Little is known about the genetic information about prophages in the genome of Y. enterocolitica, and no pathogenic Y. enterocolitica prophages have been described. In this study, we induced and described the genomes of six prophages from pathogenic Y. enterocolitica for the first time. Phylogenetic analysis based on whole genome sequencing revealed that these novel Yersinia phages are genetically distinct from the previously reported phages, showing considerable genetic diversity. Interestingly, the prophages induced from O:3 and O:9 Y. enterocolitica showed different genomic sequences and morphology but highly conserved among the same serotype strains, which classified into two diverse clusters. The three long-tailed Myoviridae prophages induced from serotype O:3 Y. enterocolitica were highly conserved, shared ≥99.99% identity and forming genotypic cluster A; the three Podoviridae prophages induced from the serotype O:9 strains formed cluster B, also shared more than 99.90% identity with one another. Cluster A was most closely related to O:5 non-pathogenic Y. enterocolitica prophage PY54 (61.72% identity). The genetic polymorphism of these two kinds of prophages and highly conserved among the same serotype strains, suggested a possible shared evolutionary past for these phages: originated from distinct ancestors, and entered pathogenic Y. enterocolitica as extrachromosomal genetic components during evolution when facing selective pressure. These results are critically important for further understanding of phage roles in host physiology and the pathology of disease

Epidemiological and genomic characteristics of global mcr-positive Escherichia coli isolates

ObjectiveThe worldwide dissemination of colistin-resistant Escherichia coli (E. coli) endangers public health. This study aimed to better understand the global genomic epidemiology of E. coli isolates carrying mobilized colistin resistance (mcr) genes, providing information to assist in infection and prevention.MethodsEscherichia coli genomes were downloaded from NCBI, and mcr was detected using BLASTP. Per software was used to extract information on hosts, resources, collection data, and countries of origin from GenBank. Sequence types (STs), prevalence of plasmids, antimicrobial resistance genes (ARG), and virulence factors (VF) in these genomes were analyzed. Statistical analyses were performed to assess the relationships between mcr, ARGs, plasmids, and STs.ResultsIn total, 778 mcr-positive isolates were identified. Four mcr variants were detected, with mcr-1 (86.1%) being the most widespread, followed by mcr-9 (5.7%), mcr-5 (4.4%), and mcr-3 (3.0%). Multiple ARGs were identified, with blaCTX–M (53.3%), fosA (28.8%), qnr (26.1%), blaNDM (19.8%), and aac (6’)-Ib-cr (14.5%) being the most common. Overall, 239 distinct STs were identified, of which ST10 (13.8%) was the most prevalent. A total of 113 different VFs were found, terC (99.9%) and gad (83.0%) were most frequently detected. Twenty types of plasmids were identified; IncFIB (64.1%), IncX (42.3%), and IncX (42.3%) were the most common replicons. IncI2 and IncX4 were frequently detected in mcr-1-positive isolates, whereas IncFII, IncI1-I, and IncHI2 were dominant plasmids in mcr-3, mcr-5, and mcr-9-positive isolates, respectively. A higher frequency of ARGs and VFs was observed among ST156 and ST131 isolates.ConclusionOur data indicated that more than half of the mcr-positive E. coli strains carried endemic ARGs and VFs. ST10 and ST156 isolates deserved further attention, given the rapid transmission of ST10 and the convergence of ARGs and VFs in ST156