To Be or Not To Be…Christian: Explaining Chinese Immigrant Elders’ Christian Participation in the U.S.

In recent years, growing numbers of Mainland Chinese elders are participating in Christian congregations during short visits or extended stays in the U.S. This thesis explores social and cultural factors that explain these immigrant elders’ involvement with Christianity while in the U.S. Based on face-to-face interviews with 20 Mainland Chinese elders living in Atlanta as well as participant observation at a Chinese Christian church and with a Bible study group, this study finds that loneliness and social isolation in a foreign land are the main reasons for Mainland Chinese elders’ participation in Christian activities. Besides religious services, social service functions of churches and opportunities for fellowship are other factors explaining church involvement. Long immersion with China’s religious history of syncretism renders these elders receptive to spiritual alternatives, such as Christianity, especially when dominant ideologies of Confucianism and Communism seem to be in decline in China. But most elders approach their Christian involvement with pragmatic selectivity based more on secular than religious considerations. In conclusion, I argue that social isolation and minority ethnic status, Chinese Christian Churches’ social functions, and current social contexts in China are all factors that help explain Chinese elders’ religious involvement in the U.S

Holistic Dynamic Frequency Transformer for Image Fusion and Exposure Correction

The correction of exposure-related issues is a pivotal component in enhancing the quality of images, offering substantial implications for various computer vision tasks. Historically, most methodologies have predominantly utilized spatial domain recovery, offering limited consideration to the potentialities of the frequency domain. Additionally, there has been a lack of a unified perspective towards low-light enhancement, exposure correction, and multi-exposure fusion, complicating and impeding the optimization of image processing. In response to these challenges, this paper proposes a novel methodology that leverages the frequency domain to improve and unify the handling of exposure correction tasks. Our method introduces Holistic Frequency Attention and Dynamic Frequency Feed-Forward Network, which replace conventional correlation computation in the spatial-domain. They form a foundational building block that facilitates a U-shaped Holistic Dynamic Frequency Transformer as a filter to extract global information and dynamically select important frequency bands for image restoration. Complementing this, we employ a Laplacian pyramid to decompose images into distinct frequency bands, followed by multiple restorers, each tuned to recover specific frequency-band information. The pyramid fusion allows a more detailed and nuanced image restoration process. Ultimately, our structure unifies the three tasks of low-light enhancement, exposure correction, and multi-exposure fusion, enabling comprehensive treatment of all classical exposure errors. Benchmarking on mainstream datasets for these tasks, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, paving the way for more sophisticated and unified solutions in exposure correction

Seasonal Characteristics of Black Carbon Aerosol and its Potential Source Regions in Baoji, China

Continuous measurements of black carbon (BC) aerosol were made at a midsized urban site in Baoji, China, in 2015. The daily average mass concentrations varied from 0.6 to 11.5 mu g m(-3), with an annual mean value of 2.9 +/- 1.7 mu g m(-3). The monthly variation indicated that the largest loading of BC occurred in January and the smallest in June. The mass concentrations exhibited strong seasonality, with the highest occurring in winter and the lowest in summer. The large BC loadings in winter were attributed to the increased use of fuel for domestic heating and to stagnant meteorological conditions, whereas the low levels in summer were related to the increase in precipitation. BC values exhibited similar bimodal diurnal patterns during the four seasons, with peaks occurring in the morning and evening rush hours and an afternoon trough, which was associated with local anthropogenic activities and meteorological conditions. A potential source contribution function model indicated that the effects of regional transport mostly occurred in spring and winter. The most likely regional sources of BC in Baoji were southern Shaanxi province, northwestern Hubei province, and northern Chongqing during spring, whereas the northeastern Sichuan Basin was the most important source region during winter