The Hidden Investment War: State Intervention and Relative Gains Seeking from Inward Foreign Direct Investment in the U.S. and China

This dissertation aims to analyze and compare the evolution of the regulatory regimes for inward foreign direct investments (IFDIs) in the U.S. and China. The theoretical-analytical framework combines the theory of relative gains-seeking and historical institutionalism. Since some cutting-edge technologies generate positive externalities across different industrial sectors and have both commercial and military applications, firms and countries that possess them can yield long-term relative gains from international economic cooperation and global value chains. As indigenous innovation demands long-term and large capital investments, especially in R&D-intensive sectors, a late developer such as China can accelerate the general process of technology diffusion by intervening in IFDI deals to promote the transfer of cutting-edge technologies possessed by foreign entities to domestic firms. For an early developed economy such as the U.S., its task is to protect the advanced technologies from being transacted or taken over by foreign firms – to defend relative gains from international economic cooperation. The comparative-historical analysis in this study first places the institutional origins and evolutions of the two regulatory regimes in the broader historical context. It gives special attention to the institutional origins of the contemporary IFDI regulatory regimes in the 1970s and 1980s in both countries, and illustrates how the institutions have evolved and effectively worked to serve states’ political goals. The empirical findings show that relative gains-seeking driven by the political logic of globalization – insecurity and competition – has enabled both countries to transform the domestic regulatory institutions. However, at some critical junctures, the historically constituted institutional relations within the two states also constrained the recasting of domestic institutions. In the U.S., even though capital and technology transfer had impaired its domestic productive capabilities and U.S. companies’ economic positions in strategic sectors in the 1970s and 1980s, the Treasury Department steered the institutional change of CFIUS and shielded it from the more politicized – yet also more democratic – site of decision-making in Congress. In China, institutional change and policy liberalization have also been mainly characterized with an elite-led process, which countered the demands of the greater conservative social coalition in the 1970s and impeded the legalization of a national security review regime for IFDIs amid the trade war. A comparison of the two cases shows that the state capacity to regulate IFDI for strategic goals increased in the U.S., while decreased somewhat in China. Today’s policy instruments are outcomes of long-term exposure to the changing international markets. Lastly, these findings also demonstrate that historical institutionalism and neorealism can complement each other in explaining change and continuity in world politics

Chinas Debatte über Nordkorea: aus chinesischen Fachzeitschriften und sozialen Medien der Jahre 2013-2015

Der nordkoreanische Machthaber Kim Jong-un hat seine Teilnahme an der chinesischen Gedenkfeier zum 70. Jahrestag des Sieges im Zweiten Weltkrieg im September 2015 abgesagt. Da er schon seine Reise zu den Moskauer Festlichkeiten im Mai nicht angetreten hatte, lässt das erste Treffen mit Chinas Präsident Xi Jinping weiter auf sich warten, und das, obwohl dieser schon zwei Jahre im Amt ist. Offenbar haben die chinesisch-nordkoreanischen Beziehungen, die sich seit dem dritten Nukleartest vom 12. Februar 2013 kontinuierlich verschlechterten, einen historischen Tiefpunkt erreicht. Irritiert sind viele chinesische Beobachter zudem von den brutalen innenpolitischen Säuberungen in Nordkorea. So wurde im Dezember 2013 der langjährige China-Verbindungsmann Jang Song-thaek binnen drei Tagen seines Amtes enthoben und zum Tode verurteilt. Verteidigungsminister Hyon Yong-chol wurde im April 2015 abgesetzt und hingerichtet - ein Schicksal, das auch zahlreiche andere Vertreter der nordkoreanischen Führungselite ereilte. Diese Ereignisse wurden vom chinesischen Außenministerium eher vorsichtig als »innenpolitische Angelegenheiten Nordkoreas« bezeichnet oder oftmals -selbst bei direkter Nachfrage- nicht weiter kommentiert. Chinesische Wissenschaftler hingegen äußern in Fachzeitschriften zurückhaltende Kritik an Chinas Nordkoreapolitik. Der Blick in diese Medien macht deutlich, dass viele Experten eine härtere Linie in der chinesischen Außenpolitik gegenüber Nordkorea befürworten. (Autorenreferat

Astragaloside IV exerts anti-inflammatory role in endometriosis by downregulating TLR4/NF-κB pathway

Purpose: To investigate the effect of astragaloside IV administration on the inflammatory response in endometriosis and the underlying mechanism of action. Methods: Mice were divided into two groups: endometriosis (EMs) mice and control mice (n = 12). EMs induction in mice was achieved by transplantation of mouse uterine tissue. The same procedure was performed in control mice except that a separate suture was inserted instead of endometrial tissue. After 5 weeks, EMs mice were treated with or without astragaloside IV (AIV). The tissue lesions in EMs and control mice were stained with hematoxylin and eosin staining. The activation of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) and nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) p65 signaling was evaluated by western blot, while expression of inflammatory cytokines was evaluated by quantitative real-time-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Results: Astragaloside IV repressed the inflammation of murine Ems lesions, and also dampened the activation of TLR4/NF-κB signaling in vivo and vitro (p < 0.01 and p < 0.001, respectively). In addition, the expression levels of inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, Ccl-2, and TNF-α) decreased following AIV treatment in vivo. Conclusion: The results indicate that TLR4/NF-κB signaling pathways are closely related to the inhibition of Ems inflammation by astragaloside IV. Thus, astragaloside IV may be a novel drug for the prevention and treatment of endometrioses

From Artifacts to Outcomes: Comparison of HMD VR, Desktop, and Slides Lectures for Food Microbiology Laboratory Instruction

Despite the value of VR (Virtual Reality) for educational purposes, the instructional power of VR in Biology Laboratory education remains under-explored. Laboratory lectures can be challenging due to students' low motivation to learn abstract scientific concepts and low retention rate. Therefore, we designed a VR-based lecture on fermentation and compared its effectiveness with lectures using PowerPoint slides and a desktop application. Grounded in the theory of distributed cognition and motivational theories, our study examined how learning happens in each condition from students' learning outcomes, behaviors, and perceptions. Our result indicates that VR facilitates students' long-term retention to learn by cultivating their longer visual attention and fostering a higher sense of immersion, though students' short-term retention remains the same across all conditions. This study extends current research on VR studies by identifying the characteristics of each teaching artifact and providing design implications for integrating VR technology into higher education

Exploring the Common Appearance-Boundary Adaptation for Nighttime Optical Flow

We investigate a challenging task of nighttime optical flow, which suffers from weakened texture and amplified noise. These degradations weaken discriminative visual features, thus causing invalid motion feature matching. Typically, existing methods employ domain adaptation to transfer knowledge from auxiliary domain to nighttime domain in either input visual space or output motion space. However, this direct adaptation is ineffective, since there exists a large domain gap due to the intrinsic heterogeneous nature of the feature representations between auxiliary and nighttime domains. To overcome this issue, we explore a common-latent space as the intermediate bridge to reinforce the feature alignment between auxiliary and nighttime domains. In this work, we exploit two auxiliary daytime and event domains, and propose a novel common appearance-boundary adaptation framework for nighttime optical flow. In appearance adaptation, we employ the intrinsic image decomposition to embed the auxiliary daytime image and the nighttime image into a reflectance-aligned common space. We discover that motion distributions of the two reflectance maps are very similar, benefiting us to consistently transfer motion appearance knowledge from daytime to nighttime domain. In boundary adaptation, we theoretically derive the motion correlation formula between nighttime image and accumulated events within a spatiotemporal gradient-aligned common space. We figure out that the correlation of the two spatiotemporal gradient maps shares significant discrepancy, benefitting us to contrastively transfer boundary knowledge from event to nighttime domain. Moreover, appearance adaptation and boundary adaptation are complementary to each other, since they could jointly transfer global motion and local boundary knowledge to the nighttime domain

Effect of indoxyl sulfate on myocardial remodeling in a mouse model of myocardial infarction

Objective To investigate the effect of indoxyl sulfate (IS) on myocardial remodeling in a mouse model of myocardial infarction (MI). Methods A total of 50 adult male C57BL/6J mice were randomly divided into sham-operation group (Sham group) with 10 mice, sham operation+indoxyl sulfate group (Sham+IS group) with 10 mice, myocardial infarction group (MI group) with 15 mice, and myocardial infarction+indoxyl sulfate group (MI+IS group) with 15 mice. Left anterior descending coronary artery ligation was performed to establish a mouse model of MI, and at 24 hours after surgery, the mice in the Sham+IS group and the MI+IS group were given intraperitoneal injection of IS (100 mg/kg), while those in the Sham group and the MI group were given intraperitoneal injection of an equal volume of PBS, once a day for 28 consecutive days. The survival status of the mice in each group was recorded during this period of time. On day 30 of the experiment, echocardiography was performed to evaluate the cardiac function of mice in each group. Ultra-performance liquid chromatography was used to measure the serum concentration of IS. Masson staining was used to assess the degree of myocardial fibrosis in the infarct zone. RT-qPCR was used to measure the mRNA expression levels of α-sma and Collagen Ⅰ in myocardial tissue. Western blot was used to measure the protein expression levels of the TGF-β signaling pathway marker proteins TGF-β, p-Smad2, and p-Smad3 in myocardial tissue. Results On day 30 of the experiment, the MI+IS group had a significant reduction in the survival rate of mice compared with the MI group (χ2=5.02,P<0.05). Compared with the Sham group, the Sham+IS group had a significant increase in the serum concentration of IS (t=54.87,P<0.05), and compared with the MI group, the MI+IS group had a significant increase in the serum concentration of IS (t=38.55,P<0.05). Echocardiography showed no significant differences between the Sham group and the Sham+IS group in left ventricular internal diameter at end-diastole (LVIDd), left ventricular internal diameter at end-systole (LVIDs), left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), and left ventricular fractional shortening (LVFS) (P>0.05). Compared with the MI group, the MI+IS group had significant increases in LVIDd and LVIDs (t=3.96,4.31,P<0.05) and significant reductions in LVEF and LVFS (t=5.68,4.07,P<0.05). Masson staining showed that compared with the MI group, the MI+IS group had a significant increase in interstitial collagen fiber deposition. RT-qPCR showed that compared with the MI group, the MI+IS group had significant increases in the mRNA expression levels of α-sma and Collagen Ⅰ in myocardial tissue (t=8.74,4.78,P<0.05). Western blot showed that compared with the MI group, the MI+IS group had significant increases in the protein expression levels of TGF-β, p-Smad2, and p-Smad3 in myocardial tissue (t=4.04-5.64,P<0.05). Conclusion IS can aggravate pathological myocardial remodeling in mice with MI, possibly by activating the TGF-β signaling pathway

Ferroptosis: new insight into the mechanisms of diabetic nephropathy and retinopathy

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) and diabetic retinopathy (DR) are the most serious and common diabetes-associated complications. DN and DR are all highly prevalent and dangerous global diseases, but the underlying mechanism remains to be elucidated. Ferroptosis, a relatively recently described type of cell death, has been confirmed to be involved in the occurrence and development of various diabetic complications. The disturbance of cellular iron metabolism directly triggers ferroptosis, and abnormal iron metabolism is closely related to diabetes. However, the molecular mechanism underlying the role of ferroptosis in DN and DR is still unclear, and needs further study. In this review article, we summarize and evaluate the mechanism of ferroptosis and its role and progress in DN and DR, it provides new ideas for the diagnosis and treatment of DN and DR

Renormalization invariants and the CKM matrix

In this research work, we introduce a rephrasing invariant parameterization of the CKM matrix, which is parameterized in terms of six manifestly rephrasing invariant parameters, and they exhibit explicitly hierarchies in power of λ 2, from zero order toλ8, and correlations amongst the VCKM parameters are exhibited by these hierarchical structures as well. Among them, we identified a set of four rephasing invariant parameters of the CKM matrix. They are found to exhibit hierarchies in powers of λ2, from λ2 toλ 8, in contrast to the familiar CKM hierarchies ranging fromλ 2 to λ6. It is shown that, at the present level of accuracy, only the first three parameters are needed to fit all available data on flavor physics. In addition, we also obtain explicitly the renormalization group equations for the quark mass matrices in terms of these rephasing invariant parameters. It turns out that the RGE are simpler than earlier ones, and we are able to draw some general conclusions from them. We also further explore relations between the quark mixings and quark mass ratios in terms of these renormalization group equations. We find that a set of renormalization invariants can be constructed using approximate, two-flavor, analytic solutions for RGEs. These invariants exhibit explicitly the correlation between quark flavor mixings and mass ratios in the context of the SM, DHM and MSSM of electroweak interaction. The well known empirical relations &thetas; 23∝ m s/mb, &thetas;13 ∝ m d/mb can thus be understood as the result of renormalization evolution toward the infrared point. The validity of this approximation is evaluated by comparing the numerical solutions with the analytical approach. It is found that the scale dependence of these quantities for general three flavoring mixing follows closely these invariants up to the GUT scale