Simultaneous Past and Present in The Sea

O tempo é complexo nos romances de Banville, pois constantemente apresentam mudança de tempos verbais, confusão cronológica e personagens que estão sempre lançando um olhar para o passado para uma fugir do presente. Em O Mar, a experimentação de Banville com tempos verbais reflete sua concepção de tempo,  particularmente a complexa relação entre passado e presente. A primeira parte deste artigo, ao enfocar a memória infantil de Max, examina como o embaçamento entre os “eus” do passado e do presente, como resultado da troca frequente de tempos verbais e do uso notável do presente histórico, desestabiliza a lacuna temporal entre o narrador e o narrado na narração retrospectiva. A segunda parte, referente ao presente de Max, propõe comparar o retrato da família atual, os Cedars, nas duas partes do romance e provar que o presente é ilusório, pois a experiência de Max não é contemporânea ao tempo da narração. Com base nas várias experiências de Max de um espaço alternativo, a terceira parte argumenta que todo o ato de narração de Max constrói um espaço alternativo semelhante, onde passado e presente são gerados simultaneamente. A existência duvidosa do eu neste espaço alternativo sugere um desafio contra o centro dêitico como eu-aqui-agora.Time is complex in Banville’s novels in that they constantly feature tense switching, chronological confusion, and characters who are always casting a look back to the past for an escape from the present. In The Sea, Banville’s experimentation with tenses reflects his conception of time, particularly, the complex relationship between past and present. Part one of this article, focusing on Max’s childhood memory, examines how the blurring of the past and present selves, resulting from frequent tense switching and the notable use of the historical present, destabilizes the temporal gap between the narrator and the narrated within retrospective narration. Part two, concerning Max’s present, proposes to compare the portrayal of the present-day Cedars in the two parts of the novel, and proves the present to be elusive since Max’s experience is not contemporaneous with the time of narration. Drawing on Max’s various experiences of an alternative space, part three proceeds to argue that Max’s entire act of narration constructs a similar alternative space where past and present are engendered simultaneously. The dubious existence of the self in this alternative space suggests a defiance against the deictic center as I- herenow

Mom's sweet gift:The beneficial effects of human milk oligosaccharides and their structure-function relationships

Human milk oligosaccharide (hMO) is the third-largest solid compound and the most abundant bioactive molecule in human milk. The beneficial effects of hMOs in human milk are broadly acknowledged but the underlying mechanisms are still insufficiently understood. Especially the impact of individual hMOs on the intestinal immune system are still largely unknown. It is important to study now single instead of mixtures of hMOs are used in functional foods and infant formula. In this thesis, we tested different individual hMOs as well as a hMO’s acid hydrolysis product (after passing the stomach) on different cellular systems that represent essential parts of the gastrointestinal immune barrier. We showed that hMOs contribute to the reinforcement of the gastrointestinal immune barrier via direct and indirect modulatory effects, but all in a structure-dependent way. Slight differences in structure have a significant impact on the biological action of an hMO. Specific hMOs can influence growth and function of gut microorganisms. We also identified a new potential receptor for hMOs on gut epithelial cells and proved the importance of cross-talk and the presence of peristaltic movements on impact of hMOs. Our data contribute more knowledge about the structure-function relationship of hMOs, bring new insights for the future hMOs study, and helps for the future design of hMO containing products for the specific target groups

Regional Chinese negotiation differences in intra- and international negotiations

As China emerges as a major player on the international business scene, it is becoming increasingly important for Western negotiators to understand how the Chinese negotiate business deals. Existing knowledge regarding the Chinese negotiation style is largely based on considering China as one single country and the Chinese as to negotiate in one homogeneous way. Regional differences in the Chinese negotiation style have traditionally been overlooked in the literature. Guided by a negotiation analysis approach, this thesis conducts an exploratory study of the diversity of the Chinese negotiation style from a regional sub-cultural perspective. It suggests four characteristics of the Chinese negotiation style based on the frameworks of international business negotiations and the Chinese cultural roots and values. This thesis investigates five research questions, which address the characteristics of regional negotiation styles and the consequences of these different styles in relation to Sino-Western negotiations. A case study research strategy is employed to study four regions in China, including the Northern, the Eastern, the Southern and the Central region. Each case was studied using three research methods: semi-structured interviews, secondary documents, and negotiation experiments. Interview data analysis focuses on the perceptions of the Chinese negotiators, the Chinese government official, and the foreign negotiators regarding regional negotiation styles, whereas the experiments examine the students cognitive information on regional differences. The results confirm that regional negotiation styles exist in China. The findings show that Northern and Central negotiators have the Chinese negotiation style in the literature. They place emphasis on relationship and face and show low time-sensitivity and risk-taking propensity. On the contrary, Eastern and Southern negotiators are extremely task-oriented and deal-focused, which means they place little value on relationship and face in negotiations. Differences also exist between the two groups of business-oriented negotiators as Southern negotiators have higher time-sensitivity and risk-taking propensity than Eastern negotiators. Differences in historical and geographical backgrounds are found to be the key drivers in the forming of these regional negotiation styles. Importantly, the experiment results show that, in contrast to the conventional idea, Western negotiators might find it easier to negotiate with the relationship-focused Chinese than with the deal-focused Chinese. This is because Northern and Central negotiators appear to be cooperative in Sino-Western negotiations, whereas Eastern and Southern negotiators tend to use a competitive approach. This thesis provides a number of contributions to the existing literature. First, it provides a better understanding of the overall picture of the Chinese negotiation behaviour and fine-tunes the Chinese negotiation style from a regional sub-cultural perspective. This regional approach to the study of culture is not only rare in Sino-Western negotiation studies, but also uncommon in the literature of international business negotiations. Second, this research highlights the fallacious assumption of cultural homogeneity with nations. It calls for academic attention to balance inter-cultural and intra-cultural diversity in the studies of international business. Third, a step is taken towards exploring the regional values and behavioural differences in China. The findings of this research provide directions for future regional studies on other managerial issues

Identifying Left Behind Passengers at Subway Stations from Auto Fare Collection Data

With the rapid growth in transport demand, it has become a frequent occurrence that passengers are left behind especially during peak hours in subway, which has led to a significant reduction in the level of service. In this paper, we propose a left behind passengers identifying method based on Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) and Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) data. Firstly, we choose the passengers with the limited deterministic information as the research objects; secondly, we propose a classification-based method for identifying left behind passengers by the probabilistic model; next, the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the simulation experiment and the case of Beijing Subway. Ultimately, the proposed method will support research related to the operation, management and future development of subways

JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judges

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in open-ended scenarios is challenging because existing benchmarks and metrics can not measure them comprehensively. To address this problem, we propose to fine-tune LLMs as scalable judges (JudgeLM) to evaluate LLMs efficiently and effectively in open-ended benchmarks. We first propose a comprehensive, large-scale, high-quality dataset containing task seeds, LLMs-generated answers, and GPT-4-generated judgments for fine-tuning high-performance judges, as well as a new benchmark for evaluating the judges. We train JudgeLM at different scales from 7B, 13B, to 33B parameters, and conduct a systematic analysis of its capabilities and behaviors. We then analyze the key biases in fine-tuning LLM as a judge and consider them as position bias, knowledge bias, and format bias. To address these issues, JudgeLM introduces a bag of techniques including swap augmentation, reference support, and reference drop, which clearly enhance the judge's performance. JudgeLM obtains the state-of-the-art judge performance on both the existing PandaLM benchmark and our proposed new benchmark. Our JudgeLM is efficient and the JudgeLM-7B only needs 3 minutes to judge 5K samples with 8 A100 GPUs. JudgeLM obtains high agreement with the teacher judge, achieving an agreement exceeding 90% that even surpasses human-to-human agreement. JudgeLM also demonstrates extended capabilities in being judges of the single answer, multimodal models, multiple answers, and multi-turn chat.Comment: 30 pages, 23 figure