The Transfiguration of the Woman’s Body: A Study of Holy Bible and The Woman’s Bible

This article employs the method of critical discourse analysis to study the changing portrayal of the woman’s body. Our analysis shows the ways in which the woman’s body is constructed as silent, instrumentalized, sinful, and unclean in Holy Bible under the dominance of male discourses. Then we examined how the woman’s body is reconstructed as an independent and glorified entity in The Woman’s Bible, along with the subversion of male discourses by feminist renditions thereof. The study has implications for women who are fighting for their bodily rights

Fabricating nanostructures on fused silica using femtosecond infrared pulses combined with sub-nanojoule ultraviolet pulses

Circular craters with diameters of 500 nm are fabricated on the surface of fused silica by femtosecond ultraviolet–infrared (UV–IR) pulse trains with 0.8 nJ UV pulse energy. UV damage thresholds at different IR energies and UV–IR delays are measured. Diameters and depths of the ablated craters can be modified by adding the IR pulse and varying the UV–IR delays. These results demonstrate the feasibility of nanomachining using short wavelength lasers with pulse energy far below normal damage thresholds

Latitudinal dependence of wind-induced near-inertial energy

Mid-latitude storms, accounting for the majority of wind energy input to near-inertial motions in the ocean, are known to shift their track significantly from one year to another. The consequence of such storm track shifts on wind-induced near-inertial energy (NIE) is yet unknown. Here, the latitudinal dependence of wind-induced NIE is first analysed in the framework of the slab model and then tested using two numerical ocean models. It is found that the NIE input by pure inertial wind stress forcing, which dominates the wind energy input to near-inertial motions, is independent of latitude. As a consequence, the NIE generated by white-noise wind stress forcing is also latitudinally independent. In contrast, the NIE generated by red-noise wind stress forcing shows strong dependence on latitude owing to longer inertial periods at lower latitudes capable of sampling greater inertial wind stress forcing. Given that the observed surface wind stress spectra are red, results from this study suggest that an equatorward shift of the storm track is likely to result in an increase in wind-induced NIE in the ocean, while the opposite is true for a poleward shift

ARGONAUTE PIWI domain and microRNA duplex structure regulate small RNA sorting in Arabidopsis.

Small RNAs (sRNAs) are loaded into ARGONAUTE (AGO) proteins to induce gene silencing. In plants, the 5'-terminal nucleotide is important for sRNA sorting into different AGOs. Here we show that microRNA (miRNA) duplex structure also contributes to miRNA sorting. Base pairing at the 15th nucleotide of a miRNA duplex is important for miRNA sorting in both Arabidopsis AGO1 and AGO2. AGO2 favours miRNA duplexes with no middle mismatches, whereas AGO1 tolerates, or prefers, duplexes with central mismatches. AGO structure modelling and mutational analyses reveal that the QF-V motif within the conserved PIWI domain contributes to recognition of base pairing at the 15th nucleotide of a duplex, while the DDDE catalytic core of AtAGO2 is important for recognition of the central nucleotides. Finally, we rescued the adaxialized phenotype of ago1-12, which is largely due to miR165 loss-of-function, by changing miR165 duplex structure which we predict redirects it to AGO2

Mining product adopter information from online reviews for improving product recommendation

We present in this article an automated framework that extracts product adopter information from online reviews and incorporates the extracted information into feature-based matrix factorization formore effective product recommendation. In specific, we propose a bootstrapping approach for the extraction of product adopters from review text and categorize them into a number of different demographic categories. The aggregated demographic information of many product adopters can be used to characterize both products and users in the form of distributions over different demographic categories. We further propose a graphbased method to iteratively update user- and product-related distributions more reliably in a heterogeneous user-product graph and incorporate them as features into the matrix factorization approach for product recommendation. Our experimental results on a large dataset crawled from JINGDONG, the largest B2C e-commerce website in China, show that our proposed framework outperforms a number of competitive baselines for product recommendation

Design method for quasi-isotropic transformation materials based on inverse Laplace's equation with sliding boundaries

The deformation method of transformation optics has been demonstrated to be a useful tool, especially in designing arbitrary and nonsingular transformation materials. Recently, there are emerging demands for isotropic material parameters, arising from the broadband requirement of the designed devices. In this work, the deformation method is further developed to design quasi-isotropic/isotropic transformation materials. The variational functional of the inverse Laplace's equation is investigated and found to involve the smooth and quasi-conformal nature of coordinate transformation. Together with the sliding boundary conditions, the inverse Laplace's equation can be utilized to give transformations which are conformal or quasi-conformal, depending on functionalities of interest. Examples of designing an arbitrary carpet cloak and a waveguide with arbitrary cross sections are given to validate the proposed idea. Compared with other quasi-conformal methods based on grid generation tools, the proposed method unifies the design and validation of transformation devices, and thus is much convenient.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure