Framing the Digital Silk Road's (de)securitisation

China's Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) is sending the offer of a technological upgrade around the world. Foreign perceptions of the DBAR pave the way to success through a cooperative attitude or to failure through resistance and confrontation. The United States of America (USA), in particular, plays a prominent role. The power rivalry between Washington and Beijing also affects foreign initiatives such as the DBAR. However, it remains underresearched, how the DBAR is perceived in the USA. The article fills this gap by analysing documents issued by US state bodies as well as three non-partisan think tanks between 2016 and mid-2021. Since no previous study has examined both securitised and desecuritised DBAR frames, we present a new research framework. The results show that negative perceptions of the DBAR prevail among think tanks and political elites. This suggests hardened fronts in the heated technological competition due to confrontational attitudes

Tauschringe und Nachhaltigkeit

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A python tool to determine the thickness of the hydrate layer around clinker grains using SEM-BSE images

To accurately simulate the hydration process of cementitious materials, understanding the growth rate of C-S-H layers around clinker grains is crucial. Nonetheless, the thickness of the hydrate layer shows substantial variation around individual grains, depending on their surrounding. Consequently, it is not feasible to measure hydrate layers manually in a reliable and reproducible manner. To address this challenge, a software has been developed to statistically determine the C-S-H thickness, requiring minimal manual interventions for thresholding and for setting limits like particle size or circularity. This study presents a tool, which automatically identifies suitable clinker grains and and perform statistical measurements of their hydrate layer up to a specimen age of 28 days. The findings reveal a significant increase in the C-S-H layer, starting from 0.45 micrometer after 1 day and reaching 3.04 micrometer after 28 days. However, for older specimens, the measurement of the C-S-H layer was not feasible due to limited pore space and clinker grains.Comment: Paper for the 19th Euroseminar on Microscopy Applied to Building Materials in a special issue, 7 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

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RNA quality control in miRNA expression analysis Application Not

C-S-H Pore Size Characterization Via a Combined Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)-Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) Surface Relaxivity Calibration.

A new method for the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) surface relaxivity calibration in hydrated cement samples is proposed. This method relies on a combined analysis of 28-d hydrated tricalcium silicate samples by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image analysis and 1H-time-domain (TD)-NMR relaxometry. Pore surface and volume data for interhydrate pores are obtained from high resolution SEM images on surfaces obtained by argon broad ion beam sectioning. These data are combined with T2 relaxation times from 1H-TD-NMR to calculate the systems surface relaxivity according to the fast exchange model of relaxation. This new method is compared to an alternative method that employs sequential drying to calibrate the systems surface relaxivity

Understanding of nursing students about collaborative work

Objective: to identify the understanding of nursing students in relation to collaborative work. Methods: a descriptive exploratory study with a qualitative approach, semi-structured interview, held in a Faculty of Curitiba-PR. It included 30 nursing students. Results: through Bardin Content analysis we identified the following categories: collaborative work seen as teamwork; collaborative work between the nursing staff: areas of use; decision-making: understanding the academic students; shared decision: understanding the academic students. Conclusion: collaboration opens an increasing space and positive valuation for individuals, as well as to get different results when it's compared with those obtained by individual effort, the relationship between the members of the group operates on a constructive dependence in terms of valuing the other