Unwelcome heroines : Mao Dun and Yu Dafu\u27s creations of a new Chinese woman

In this essay, I examine fictional works by two of the most influential and progressive male writers of the period—Mao Dun and Yu Dafu - to explore issues concerning the emergence of the new Chinese woman. My study will focus on Mao Dun’s story, “Chuangzao” [Creation], published in 1928, and Yu Dafu’s short novel, Ta shi yi ge ruo nuzi [She is a weak woman], written in 1932. I look at these writers’ depictions of two different types of woman and contemporary Chinese men’s reactions to a new gender relation. Male intellectuals, while heralding the advance of a new Chinese woman, were far from certain about the future of this new woman, and were troubled by further prospects of change once the “genie was out of the bottle.” They were, understandably, apprehensive over their own position in the new world order of the two sexes. Male anxiety, compounded by contemporary social and political situations, manifested itself, in part, in a shift of focus from women\u27s individual emancipation to women\u27s collective role in mass liberation. In other words, whereas nationalism remained an overarching concern, the projection of male anxiety onto women in these texts subsumed women’s individuality. In the 1930s, the May Fourth belief concerning the contribution of women\u27s liberation to national rejuvenation was being replaced by a proletarian conformity that erased gender differences. Such a shift was by no means unique; as Wendy Larson points out, the period from 1925 to 1935 [was] a transitional time when both writers and critics aligned themselves politically and socially, for or against a ‘new’ kind of socially engaged writing, and willing or unwilling to follow an overt political cause in their works”. The objective of my inquiry into this widely acknowledged shift is to investigate how two representative male writers1 works reflected conflicting and confused theories involving the incorporation of women into the project of nation building

Electronic band gaps and transport in aperiodic graphene superlattices of Thue-Morse sequence

We have studied the electronic properties in aperiodic graphene superlattices of Thue-Morse sequence. Although the structure is aperiodic, an unusual Dirac point (DP) does exist and its location is exactly at the position of the zero-averaged wave number (zero-$\bar{k})$. Furthermore, the zero-$\bar{k}$ gap associated with the DP is robust against the lattice constants and the incident angles, and multi-DPs can appear under the suitable conditions. A resultant controllability of electron transport in Thue-Morse sequence is predicted, which may facilitate the development of many graphene-based electronics.Comment: Accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters; 4 pagese, 5 figure

Efficient chain structure for high-utility sequential pattern mining

High-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) is an emerging topic in data mining, which considers both utility and sequence factors to derive the set of high-utility sequential patterns (HUSPs) from the quantitative databases. Several works have been presented to reduce the computational cost by variants of pruning strategies. In this paper, we present an efficient sequence-utility (SU)-chain structure, which can be used to store more relevant information to improve mining performance. Based on the SU-Chain structure, the existing pruning strategies can also be utilized here to early prune the unpromising candidates and obtain the satisfied HUSPs. Experiments are then compared with the state-of-the-art HUSPM algorithms and the results showed that the SU-Chain-based model can efficiently improve the efficiency performance than the existing HUSPM algorithms in terms of runtime and number of the determined candidates

FRIOD: a deeply integrated feature-rich interactive system for effective and efficient outlier detection

In this paper, we propose an novel interactive outlier detection system called feature-rich interactive outlier detection (FRIOD), which features a deep integration of human interaction to improve detection performance and greatly streamline the detection process. A user-friendly interactive mechanism is developed to allow easy and intuitive user interaction in all the major stages of the underlying outlier detection algorithm which includes dense cell selection, location-aware distance thresholding, and final top outlier validation. By doing so, we can mitigate the major difficulty of the competitive outlier detection methods in specifying the key parameter values, such as the density and distance thresholds. An innovative optimization approach is also proposed to optimize the grid-based space partitioning, which is a critical step of FRIOD. Such optimization fully considers the high-quality outliers it detects with the aid of human interaction. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that FRIOD can improve the quality of the detected outliers and make the detection process more intuitive, effective, and efficient

Practical decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) is immune to all the detection attacks; thus when it is combined with the decoy-state method, the final key is unconditionally secure, even if a practical weak coherent source is used by Alice and Bob. However, until now, the analysis of decoy-state MDI-QKD with a weak coherent source is incomplete. In this paper, we derive, with only vacuum+weak decoy state, some tight formulas to estimate the lower bound of yield and the upper bound of error rate for the fraction of signals in which both Alice and Bob send a single-photon pulse to the untrusted third party Charlie. The numerical simulations show that our method with only vacuum+weak decoy state can asymptotically approach the theoretical limit of the infinite number of decoy states. Furthermore, the statistical fluctuation due to the finite length of date is also considered based on the standard statistical analysis.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure