The interactional achievement of familyhood in Vietnamese-Taiwanese international families

Phd ThesisWhile so many studies relating to Vietnamese female spouses in Taiwan have tapped into crucial issues facilitating understanding of this particular social group, none of them deals with face-to-face interaction between Vietnamese female spouses and their Taiwanese family members. This thesis thus tries to bridge the research gap by studying real-life face-to-face interaction in such transnational families with special attention to identifying the interactional relevance and consequentiality of membership categories invoked by the family members and how Taiwanese and Mandarin are used as interactional resources in familial discourse. This study engaged 3 Vietnamese wives in Taiwan along with 14 Taiwanese family members whose mealtime talks were audio-/video‐recorded. Conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) were adopted to analyse the 7 hours of data collected. It was found (from the corpus of recordings) that a Vietnamese spouse’s deployment of the membership categories ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Vietnamese’ relates to her use of first-person plural pronouns to form the (literally translated) ‘we + country’ compound. The compound is found to be a distinctive identity-related device used by the Vietnamese participants to engage in self-categorisation. Moreover, it is also an epistemics-related device used by the Vietanamese spouses to ascribe authority or expertise to themselves or their Taiwanese family members in the enactment of 'Vietnamese' or 'Taiwanese'. On the other hand, it was found that the Vietnamese participants orient to Taiwanese and Mandarin as salient resources in admonishment sequences. Specifically, the two languages serve as contextualisation cues and framing devices in 3 different types of admonishment sequences. It is identified that familyhood can be achieved in an admonishment context, in which language varieties are used by adult family members to facilitate their alignment with each other in educating the youngest generation. The research findings suggest that the Vietnamese female spouses can fabricate interactional resources into devices to actively engage in familial communicative events and fulfil their responsibilities as a family member and as a mother. From the discursive construction of national and household identity categories, the Vietnamese spouses have demonstrated how they manage identity work and position themselves in the family; on the other hand, the way that participants negotiate national identities in family discourse have made salient the transnationality pertaining to the families. The study therefore contributes to enriching the understanding of Vietnamese female spouses in Taiwan from a conversation and membership categorisation analytic perspective, and the research findings serve as a reference point for research on cross-border marriage, cross-border couples and interactional patterns in transnational families

Low magnetic field reversal of electric polarization in a Y-type hexaferrite

Magnetoelectric multiferroics in which ferroelectricity and magnetism coexist have attracted extensive attention because they provide great opportunities for the mutual control of electric polarization by magnetic fields and magnetization by electric fields. From a practical point view, the main challenge in this field is to find proper multiferroic materials with a high operating temperature and great magnetoelectric sensitivity. Here we report on the magnetically tunable ferroelectricity and the giant magnetoelectric sensitivity up to 250 K in a Y-type hexaferrite, BaSrCoZnFe11AlO22. Not only the magnitude but also the sign of electric polarization can be effectively controlled by applying low magnetic fields (a few hundreds of Oe) that modifies the spiral magnetic structures. The magnetically induced ferroelectricity is stabilized even in zero magnetic field. Decayless reproducible flipping of electric polarization by oscillating low magnetic fields is shown. The maximum linear magnetoelectric coefficient reaches a high value of ~ 3.0\times10^3 ps/m at 200 K.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, a couple of errors are correcte

Developmental differences in the structure of executive function in middle childhood and adolescence

Although it has been argued that the structure of executive function (EF) may change developmentally, there is little empirical research to examine this view in middle childhood and adolescence. The main objective of this study was to examine developmental changes in the component structure of EF in a large sample (N = 457) of 7–15 year olds. Participants completed batteries of tasks that measured three components of EF: updating working memory (UWM), inhibition, and shifting. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test five alternative models in 7–9 year olds, 10–12 year olds, and 13–15 year olds. The results of CFA showed that a single-factor EF model best explained EF performance in 7–9-year-old and 10–12-year-old groups, namely unitary EF, though this single factor explained different amounts of variance at these two ages. In contrast, a three-factor model that included UWM, inhibition, and shifting best accounted for the data from 13–15 year olds, namely diverse EF. In sum, during middle childhood, putative measures of UWM, inhibition, and shifting may rely on similar underlying cognitive processes. Importantly, our findings suggest that developmental dissociations in these three EF components do not emerge until children transition into adolescence. These findings provided empirical evidence for the development of EF structure which progressed from unity to diversity during middle childhood and adolescence

Electrical Control of Magnetization in Charge-ordered Multiferroic LuFe2O4

LuFe2O4 exhibits multiferroicity due to charge order on a frustrated triangular lattice. We find that the magnetization of LuFe2O4 in the multiferroic state can be electrically controlled by applying voltage pulses. Depending on with or without magnetic fields, the magnetization can be electrically switched up or down. We have excluded thermal heating effect and attributed this electrical control of magnetization to an intrinsic magnetoelectric coupling in response to the electrical breakdown of charge ordering. Our findings open up a new route toward electrical control of magnetization.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Allosteric p97 inhibitors can overcome resistance to ATP-competitive p97 inhibitors for potential anti-cancer therapy

A major challenge of targeted cancer therapy is the selection for drug‐resistant mutations in tumor cells leading to loss of treatment effectiveness. p97/VCP is a central regulator of protein homeostasis and a promising anti‐cancer target because of its vital role in cell growth and survival. One ATP‐competitive p97 inhibitor, CB‐5083, has entered clinical trials. Selective pressure on HCT116 cells treated with CB‐5083 identified 5 different resistant mutants. Identification of p97 inhibitors with different mechanisms of action would offer the potential to overcome this class of resistance mutations. Our results demonstrate that two CB‐5083 resistant p97 mutants, N660K and T688A, were also resistant to several other ATP‐competitive p97 inhibitors, whereas inhibition by two allosteric p97 inhibitors NMS‐873 and UPCDC‐30245 were unaffected by these mutations. We also established a CB‐5083 resistant cell line that harbors a new p97 double mutation (D649A/T688A). While CB‐5083, NMS‐873, and UPCDC‐30245 all effectively inhibited proliferation of the parental HCT116 cell line, NMS‐873 and UPCDC‐30245 were 30‐fold more potent than CB‐5083 in inhibiting the CB‐5083 resistant D649A/T688A double mutant. Our results suggest that allosteric p97 inhibitors are promising alternatives when resistance to ATP‐competitive p97 inhibitors arises during anti‐cancer treatment

Stabilizer Approximation

We propose a heuristic method to obtain the approximate groundstate for a Hamiltonian in the qubit form, based on the stabilizer formalism. These states may serve as proper initial states for further refined computation. It would be interesting to assess the efficiency and scalability of the method.Comment: 10 page

catena-Poly[[diazido­manganese(II)]bis­[μ-1-(4-pyridylmeth­yl)-1H-benzimidazole]]

In the title polymeric compound, [Mn(N3)2(C13H11N3)2]n, each MnII centre is six-coordinated in an octahedral geometry by six N atoms from four 1-(4-pyridylmeth­yl)-1H-benzimidazole (L) ligands and two azide anions (N3 −). Each of the MnII ions lies on an inversion centre. The L ligands and N3 − anions bridge adjacent MnII centres, generating a polymeric chain running along the [110] direction. Adjacent polymeric chains are arranged in a two-dimensional network parallel to the (001) plane, linked by C—H⋯N hydrogen bonds