Zhang Ziyi and China’s Celebrity–Philanthropy Scandals

In January 2010, the internationally acclaimed Chinese actor, Zhang Ziyi, became a focus of public criticism for allegedly defaulting on a pledge to donate one million yuan to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund. That earthquake not only killed 70,000 people and left five million homeless, but also produced a dramatic rise in individual and corporate philanthropy in China. Philanthropic donations in 2008 amounted to a total figure of 100 billion yuan, exceeding the documented total for the preceding decade. Zhang’s ‘failed pledge’ led fans and critics to accuse her in interactive media forums of both charity fraud and generating a nationwide crisis of faith in the philanthropic activities of the rich and famous. Dubbed ‘donation-gate’, the ensuing controversy obliged Zhang Ziyi to hire a team of USA-based lawyers, to give an exclusive interview to the China Daily, and to engage in renewed philanthropic endeavours, in an effort to clear her name. Hence, contrary to claims that celebrity philanthropy is an apolitical mode of philanthropy, an examination of the Zhang Ziyi scandal and its disaster-relief precursors demonstrates that celebrity philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China is a political affair

Zhang Ziyi and China’s Celebrity–Philanthropy Scandals

In January 2010, the internationally acclaimed Chinese actor, Zhang Ziyi, became a focus of public criticism for allegedly defaulting on a pledge to donate one million yuan to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund. That earthquake not only killed 70,000 people and left five million homeless, but also produced a dramatic rise in individual and corporate philanthropy in China. Philanthropic donations in 2008 amounted to a total figure of 100 billion yuan, exceeding the documented total for the preceding decade. Zhang’s ‘failed pledge’ led fans and critics to accuse her in interactive media forums of both charity fraud and generating a nationwide crisis of faith in the philanthropic activities of the rich and famous. Dubbed ‘donation-gate’, the ensuing controversy obliged Zhang Ziyi to hire a team of USA-based lawyers, to give an exclusive interview to the China Daily, and to engage in renewed philanthropic endeavours, in an effort to clear her name. Hence, contrary to claims that celebrity philanthropy is an apolitical mode of philanthropy, an examination of the Zhang Ziyi scandal and its disaster-relief precursors demonstrates that celebrity philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China is a political affair

A Phylogenetic Study of Vulnerable Batoid Species from the North Atlantic

Successful resolution of the nomenclature and taxonomy of batoid fish complicated by the high degree of morphological and ecological conservatism in this group. However, both mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and nuclear DNA (nDNA) phylogenies have been utilised to resolve batoid phylogenies and even to identify cryptic species. As a result, the number of ray species described in recent decades has dramatically increased- although questions still remain regarding the taxonomic status of many batoid species. In chapter one of this thesis, the importance of taxonomy in skate conservation and management is reviewed. In chapter two, control region (CR) and cytochrome oxidase I (COI) sequencing of the blue skate (Dipturus batis) and the flapper skate (Dipturus intermedius) from across the Northeast Atlantic was performed, in order to clarify their geographical distribution. Although now formally recognised as distinct species, before 2010 these two taxa were classified together as the critically endangered ‘common skate’, D. batis. Although this has important conservation implications, their protection is currently being hindered by a lack of spatiotemporal data. In the present study, the blue skate generally appears to be more common than the flapper skate, with a distribution extending from Rockall and Iceland to the Western Approaches and the Celtic Sea. Whilst the flapper skate appears most frequent around northern Scotland, the North Sea and Ireland, novel data also suggests that it may have once had a much wider distribution. For the first time, this species was identified in the Azores, where unique haplotypes were also isolated, potentially highlighting the genetic distinctiveness of the population in this region. In chapter three, nextRAD and mtDNA (concatenated CR and COI) sequencing were utilised to explore the phylogenetics of several vulnerable species of European skate. Whilst the current designation of the Madeiran skate (Raja maderensis) and the thornback ray (Raja clavata) as distinct species wasn’t fully supported, genetically distinct populations were identified in the Azores and surrounding seamounts. The presence of a cryptic Dipturus species in the Azores wasn’t supported, as suggested by previous work on the longnosed skate (Dipturus oxyrinchus). However, Azorean longnosed skate and flapper skate were distinct from their geographically proximate counterparts, and may represent distinct populations. The uniqueness of the Azores highlights the importance of seamounts as ‘hotspots’ of biodiversity, which has important implications for marine protected areas that include these batoid species as a protected feature. In addition to resolving these phylogenies, this thesis also offered an opportunity to comment on the utility of mtDNA and nextRAD sequencing for batoid phylogenetics, the latter of which has never been applied to skates and rays before

A Bayesian Approach to Comparing Cosmic Ray Energy Spectra

A common problem in ultra-high energy cosmic ray physics is the comparison of energy spectra. The question is whether the spectra from two experiments or two regions of the sky agree within their statistical and systematic uncertainties. We develop a method to directly compare energy spectra for ultra-high energy cosmic rays from two different regions of the sky in the same experiment without reliance on agreement with a theoretical model of the energy spectra. The consistency between the two spectra is expressed in terms of a Bayes factor, defined here as the ratio of the likelihood of the two-parent source hypothesis to the likelihood of the one-parent source hypothesis. Unlike other methods, for example chi^2 tests, the Bayes factor allows for the calculation of the posterior odds ratio and correctly accounts for non-Gaussian uncertainties. The latter is particularly important at the highest energies, where the number of events is very small.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Bayesian Analysis of Inflation II: Model Selection and Constraints on Reheating

We discuss the model selection problem for inflationary cosmology. We couple ModeCode, a publicly-available numerical solver for the primordial perturbation spectra, to the nested sampler MultiNest, in order to efficiently compute Bayesian evidence. Particular attention is paid to the specification of physically realistic priors, including the parametrization of the post-inflationary expansion and associated thermalization scale. It is confirmed that while present-day data tightly constrains the properties of the power spectrum, it cannot usefully distinguish between the members of a large class of simple inflationary models. We also compute evidence using a simulated Planck likelihood, showing that while Planck will have more power than WMAP to discriminate between inflationary models, it will not definitively address the inflationary model selection problem on its own. However, Planck will place very tight constraints on any model with more than one observationally-distinct inflationary regime -- e.g. the large- and small-field limits of the hilltop inflation model -- and put useful limits on different reheating scenarios for a given model.Comment: ModeCode package available from http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~hiranya/ModeCode/ModeCode (requires CosmoMC and MultiNest); to be published in PRD. Typos fixe

Testing and selection of cosmological models with (1+z)6(1+z)^6 corrections

In the paper we check whether the contribution of $(-)(1+z)^6$ type in the Friedmann equation can be tested. We consider some astronomical tests to constrain the density parameters in such models. We describe different interpretations of such an additional term: geometric effects of Loop Quantum Cosmology, effects of braneworld cosmological models, non-standard cosmological models in metric-affine gravity, and models with spinning fluid. Kinematical (or geometrical) tests based on null geodesics are insufficient to separate individual matter components when they behave like perfect fluid and scale in the same way. Still, it is possible to measure their overall effect. We use recent measurements of the coordinate distances from the Fanaroff-Riley type IIb (FRIIb) radio galaxy (RG) data, supernovae type Ia (SNIa) data, baryon oscillation peak and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) observations to obtain stronger bounds for the contribution of the type considered. We demonstrate that, while $\rho^2$ corrections are very small, they can be tested by astronomical observations -- at least in principle. Bayesian criteria of model selection (the Bayesian factor, AIC, and BIC) are used to check if additional parameters are detectable in the present epoch. As it turns out, the $\Lambda$CDM model is favoured over the bouncing model driven by loop quantum effects. Or, in other words, the bounds obtained from cosmography are very weak, and from the point of view of the present data this model is indistinguishable from the $\Lambda$CDM one.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure. Version 2 generally revised and accepted for publicatio

Attempts to detect retrotransposition and de novo deletion of Alus and other dispersed repeats at specific loci in the human genome

Dispersed repeat elements contribute to genome instability by de novo insertion and unequal recombination between repeats. To study the dynamics of these processes, we have developed single DNA molecule approaches to detect de novo insertions at a single locus and Alu-mediated deletions at two different loci in human genomic DNA. Validation experiments showed these approaches could detect insertions and deletions at frequencies below 10(-6) per cell. However, bulk analysis of germline (sperm) and somatic DNA showed no evidence for genuine mutant molecules, placing an upper limit of insertion and deletion rates of 2 x 10(-7) and 3 x 10(-7), respectively, in the individuals tested. Such re-arrangements at these loci therefore occur at a rate lower than that detectable by the most sensitive methods currently available

Might EPR particles communicate through a wormhole?

We consider the two-particle wave function of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen system, given by a two dimensional relativistic scalar field model. The Bohm-de Broglie interpretation is applied and the quantum potential is viewed as modifying the Minkowski geometry. In this way an effective metric, which is analogous to a black hole metric in some limited region, is obtained in one case and a particular metric with singularities appears in the other case, opening the possibility, following Holland, of interpreting the EPR correlations as being originated by an effective wormhole geometry, through which the physical signals can propagate.Comment: Corrected version, to appears in EP

XAFS spectroscopy. I. Extracting the fine structure from the absorption spectra

Three independent techniques are used to separate fine structure from the absorption spectra, the background function in which is approximated by (i) smoothing spline. We propose a new reliable criterion for determination of smoothing parameter and the method for raising of stability with respect to k_min variation; (ii) interpolation spline with the varied knots; (iii) the line obtained from bayesian smoothing. This methods considers various prior information and includes a natural way to determine the errors of XAFS extraction. Particular attention has been given to the estimation of uncertainties in XAFS data. Experimental noise is shown to be essentially smaller than the errors of the background approximation, and it is the latter that determines the variances of structural parameters in subsequent fitting.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, for freeware XAFS analysis program, see http://www.crosswinds.net/~klmn/viper.htm