The Death Drive Revisited: A Reexamination of Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and its Implications for Critical Theory

This dissertation is a reexamination of Sigmund Freud's mature drive theory, also known as his theory of the death drive, and its relevance for critical social theory, and in particular that of the so-called "Frankfurt school." By tracing the emergence of Freud's theory in his enigmatic Beyond the Pleasure Principle and then its development in the hands of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, I aim, in the first three chapters, to articulate a drive theory centered around the opposition between what Freud calls the death drive and the drive to mastery, as well as the developmental hazards therein. In the last two chapters, I then attempt to integrate this drive theory into the Frankfurt school's analysis of the intrusion of mass media and state institutions on the developmental process with the aim of both providing historical weight to the dialectic of death and mastery articulated in the first part of the dissertation and also strengthening the psychological component of critical theory

Indigenous Rights Movements, Land Conflicts, and Cultural Politics in Taiwan: A Case Study of Li-Shan.

Land rights claims remain the major focus of world indigenous movements. Lands relate to the formation of indigenous identity, religious practices, and the material base for indigenous cultural survival. From a spatial/geographical perspective, this dissertation explores the influences of Taiwan\u27s state policies on indigenous peoples, their cultures, identities, and human-land relationship. The Li-shan area, in central Taiwan, is the focus of the research due to the fact that the most severe land disputes are in this area, as well as longest history of economic interactions among indigenous peoples, the dominant Han people, and the State, in the postwar Taiwan. The rise of indigenous movements in the mid-1980s in Taiwan indicated that the indigenous peoples remain the victims of colonialism. Appreciating this fact, the movements made demands against the State in struggling for ethnic space. Although the movements drew significant concessions from the State, the majority Han people systematically fought back with appeals which deny the existence of any indigenous peoples in current Taiwan and requested the abolishment of Aboriginal Reservation Lands. Political economy, new cultural geography, and post-colonial theories provide the major theoretical framework for this study. The perpetual uneven ethnic power relationships between the dominant Han people and the dominated indigenous peoples are examined from the critical perspective of political economy. The new cultural geography offers the theoretical backgrounds for discussing cultural and identity politics, and multiculturalism. Post-colonial theories are especially helpful in explaining the social construction of a new indigenous/Taiwanese culture through the combination of the colonizing and the colonized cultures, as well as in deconstructing mainstream social values, and in illustrating the geography of resistance. Finally, I wish to summarize the impacts of indigenous movements on three aspects of mainstream culture. First, indigenous movements shatter the mainstream definition of social justice and question the superficial multiculturalism. Second, the indigenous claim of natural sovereignty challenges the ideological myth enshrined by modern nation-states. Third, indigenous ecological wisdom injects a new and different ethic between society and nature. The formation of respect of the indigenous situated knowledge through an appropriate application in eco-tourism will uphold the improvement of ethnic relations

Flow-based Intrinsic Curiosity Module

In this paper, we focus on a prediction-based novelty estimation strategy upon the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, and present a flow-based intrinsic curiosity module (FICM) to exploit the prediction errors from optical flow estimation as exploration bonuses. We propose the concept of leveraging motion features captured between consecutive observations to evaluate the novelty of observations in an environment. FICM encourages a DRL agent to explore observations with unfamiliar motion features, and requires only two consecutive frames to obtain sufficient information when estimating the novelty. We evaluate our method and compare it with a number of existing methods on multiple benchmark environments, including Atari games, Super Mario Bros., and ViZDoom. We demonstrate that FICM is favorable to tasks or environments featuring moving objects, which allow FICM to utilize the motion features between consecutive observations. We further ablatively analyze the encoding efficiency of FICM, and discuss its applicable domains comprehensively.Comment: The SOLE copyright holder is IJCAI (International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence), all rights reserved. The link is provided as follows: https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2020/28

VocabAnalyzer: A Referred Word List Analyzing Tool with Keyword, Concordancing and N-gram Functions

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Molecular characterization of the PhoPQ-PmrD-PmrAB mediated pathway regulating polymyxin B resistance in Klebsiella pneumoniae CG43

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The cationic peptide antibiotic polymyxin has recently been reevaluated in the treatment of severe infections caused by gram negative bacteria.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this study, the genetic determinants for capsular polysaccharide level and lipopolysaccharide modification involved in polymyxin B resistance of the opportunistic pathogen <it>Klebsiella pneumoniae </it>were characterized. The expressional control of the genes responsible for the resistance was assessed by a LacZ reporter system. The PmrD connector-mediated regulation for the expression of <it>pmr </it>genes involved in polymyxin B resistance was also demonstrated by DNA EMSA, two-hybrid analysis and <it>in vitro </it>phosphor-transfer assay.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Deletion of the <it>rcsB</it>, which encoded an activator for the production of capsular polysaccharide, had a minor effect on <it>K. pneumoniae </it>resistance to polymyxin B. On the other hand, deletion of <it>ugd </it>or <it>pmrF </it>gene resulted in a drastic reduction of the resistance. The polymyxin B resistance was shown to be regulated by the two-component response regulators PhoP and PmrA at low magnesium and high iron, respectively. Similar to the control identified in <it>Salmonella</it>, expression of <it>pmrD </it>in <it>K. pneumoniae </it>was dependent on PhoP, the activated PmrD would then bind to PmrA to prolong the phosphorylation state of the PmrA, and eventually turn on the expression of <it>pmr </it>for the resistance to polymyxin B.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The study reports a role of the capsular polysaccharide level and the <it>pmr </it>genes for <it>K. pneumoniae </it>resistance to polymyxin B. The PmrD connector-mediated pathway in governing the regulation of <it>pmr </it>expression was demonstrated. In comparison to the <it>pmr </it>regulation in <it>Salmonella</it>, PhoP in <it>K. pneumoniae </it>plays a major regulatory role in polymyxin B resistance.</p

Multi-Plant Assembly Planning Model in Collaborative Manufacturing and Commerce Systems

With emerging e-business models in a global supply chain, the components or parts of a product may be distributed and produced at various plants in a collaborative way for the purpose of expanding capacity and reducing costs. For an assembled product, the assembly operations for assembling the product may be performed at different assembly plants at various geographical locations. In the collaborative commerce environment, it is required to develop a multi-plant assembly planning model for orgaizing and distributing the assembly operations to the suitable plants for completing the final product. In this research, a multi-plant assembly planning model for generating and evaluating the multi-plant assembly sequences is presented. A graph-based model is developed to model and generate the assembly sequences. The feasible assembly sequences are analyzed and evaluated based on several cost objectives. The multi-plant assembly planning model is formulated with an aim of minimizing the total of assembly costs and multiplant costs. As a result, the optimized multi-plant assembly sequences can be obtained and each of the assembly operations is assigned to the suitable plant with a minimized cost. Example parts are tested and discussed

The IPO initial returns-aftermarket risk question revisited: evidence from firms in Taiwan

The purpose of this study is to utilize the Three Stage Least Squares (3SLS) of the simultaneous equation estimation approach to revisit the possible cross relationship between IPO initial returns and aftermarket risk. A structural form equation system of IPO initial returns and aftermarket risk equations is estimated first to obtain the structural form coefficients. The analytically derived reduced form coefficients are then calculated to analyze the net effects of each exogenous variable on two endogenous variables. Major findings of this study are as follows. First, the signs of net effects of all exogenous variables on IPO initial returns and aftermarket risk are the same. In other words, any change in exogenous variables, IPO initial returns and IPO aftermarket risk will change in the same direction, i.e., the higher (lower) the IPO initial returns, the higher (lower) the IPO aftermarket risk. Second, the less the degree of corporate governance, the higher the IPO initial returns and aftermarket risk. Third, the higher the market risk or return before IPO, the higher the IPO initial returns and aftermarket risk

Kappa-Opioid Receptors in the Caudal Nucleus Tractus Solitarius Mediate 100 Hz Electroacupuncture-Induced Sleep Activities in Rats

Previous results demonstrated that 10 Hz electroacupuncture (EA) of Anmian acupoints in rats during the dark period enhances slow wave sleep (SWS), which involves the induction of cholinergic activity in the caudal nucleus tractus solitarius (NTS) and subsequent activation of opioidergic neurons and μ-receptors. Studies have shown that different kinds of endogenous opiate peptides and receptors may mediate the consequences of EA with different frequencies. Herein, we further elucidated that high-frequency (100 Hz)-EA of Anmian enhanced SWS during the dark period but exhibited no direct effect on rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. High-frequency EA-induced SWS enhancement was dose-dependently blocked by microinjection of naloxone or κ-receptor antagonist (nor-binaltorphimine) into the caudal NTS, but was affected neither by μ- (naloxonazine) nor δ-receptor antagonists (natatrindole), suggesting the role of NTS κ-receptors in the high-frequency EA-induced SWS enhancement. Current and previous results depict the opioid mechanisms of EA-induced sleep