Mobile Communication, Public Participation and E-Governance in China:A case study of Xiamen Anti-PX Demonstration

China has become the biggest mobile communication carrier in the world since 2001. Advanced technologies create a communication revolution, and the individual, through the advent of mobile media, has become an active participant in this process. This study investigates the mobile phone’s impact upon the developments of public participation, social inclusion and citizenship through the case study of Xiamen PX demonstration. In terms of local environmental activism, the Xiamen residents shared information with the help of wireless communication about the alleged misdeeds of party officials and took various civic actions again them. A rare sense of participation in public affairs is fostered through the use of mobile communication technology. The government must figure out how to improve the effective and regular information exchange and feedback top down and bottom up to raise the awareness and understanding among higher decision making agencies, government and the public

(Standard) Language Ideology and Regional Putonghua in Chinese Social Media: A View from Weibo

Despite having numerous Chinese language varieties and non-Chinese ethnic minority languages, China is often considered a monolingual nation (Liang 2015, 154). The country's strong monolingual language policy heavily promotes a single standard language-Putonghua. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate 'regional Putonghua' varieties, contact varieties that have emerged from standard language promotion and community second language acquisition (e.g. Xiao 2007). This paper analyses data collected from Weibo, China's online microblogging site, to investigate the language ideologies surrounding these 'non-standard' regional varieties. Two cities (Ningbo and Shanghai) and their local Putonghua varieties are examined: the cities share a similar linguistic background but Shanghai is more economically advanced than its neighbouring city Ningbo, and the language varieties in Shanghai are also believed to have more prestige (Zhou 2001, 246). Discourse analysis on Weibo posts allows us to show how regional Putonghua varieties are portrayed and perceived by laypeople and how they exist as 'non-standard' varieties in the shadow of the strong standard language ideology. These 'non-standard' varieties are associated with rich language ideologies and social meanings and their links to both negative cultural stereotypes and positive local identities often associated with vernacular varieties are also discussed

Whole-Chain Recommendations

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in developing RL-based recommender systems. In practical recommendation sessions, users will sequentially access multiple scenarios, such as the entrance pages and the item detail pages, and each scenario has its specific characteristics. However, the majority of existing RL-based recommender systems focus on optimizing one strategy for all scenarios or separately optimizing each strategy, which could lead to sub-optimal overall performance. In this paper, we study the recommendation problem with multiple (consecutive) scenarios, i.e., whole-chain recommendations. We propose a multi-agent RL-based approach (DeepChain), which can capture the sequential correlation among different scenarios and jointly optimize multiple recommendation strategies. To be specific, all recommender agents (RAs) share the same memory of users' historical behaviors, and they work collaboratively to maximize the overall reward of a session. Note that optimizing multiple recommendation strategies jointly faces two challenges in the existing model-free RL model - (i) it requires huge amounts of user behavior data, and (ii) the distribution of reward (users' feedback) are extremely unbalanced. In this paper, we introduce model-based RL techniques to reduce the training data requirement and execute more accurate strategy updates. The experimental results based on a real e-commerce platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.Comment: 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Managemen

Quantification of the influence of drugs on zebrafish larvae swimming kinematics and energetics

The use of zebrafish larvae has aroused wide interest in the medical field for its potential role in the development of new therapies. The larvae grow extremely quickly and the embryos are nearly transparent which allows easy examination of its internal structures using fluorescent imaging techniques. Medical treatment of zebrafish larvae can directly influence its swimming behaviours. These behaviour changes are related to functional changes of central nervous system and transformations of the zebrafish body such as muscle mechanical power and force variation, which cannot be measured directly by pure experiment observation. To quantify the influence of drugs on zebrafish larvae swimming behaviours and energetics, we have developed a novel methodology to exploit intravital changes based on observed zebrafish locomotion. Specifically, by using an in-house MATLAB code to process the recorded live zebrafish swimming video, the kinematic locomotion equation of a 3D zebrafish larvae was obtained, and a customised Computational Fluid Dynamics tool was used to solve the fluid flow around the fish model which was geometrically the same as experimentally tested zebrafish. The developed methodology was firstly verified against experiment, and further applied to quantify the fish internal body force, torque and power consumption associated with a group of normal zebrafish larvae vs. those immersed in acetic acid and two neuroactive drugs. As indicated by our results, zebrafish larvae immersed in 0.01% acetic acid display approximately 30% higher hydrodynamic power and 10% higher cost of transport than control group. In addition, 500 μM diphenylhydantoin significantly decreases the locomotion activity for approximately 50% lower hydrodynamic power, whereas 100 mg/L yohimbine has not caused any significant influences on 5 dpf zebrafish larvae locomotion. The approach has potential to evaluate the influence of drugs on the aquatic animal’s behaviour changes and thus support the development of new analgesic and neuroactive drugs

N-acetylcysteine effectively alleviates systemic lupus erythematosus in mice via regulation of oxidative stress

Purpose: To study the influence of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) on systemic lupus  erythematosus (SLE) mice, and the mechanism(s) involved. Methods: Fourteen MRL/lpr SLE mice aged 5 weeks (mean weight = 20.35 ± 2.12 g) were divided into two 7-mouse groups: SLE (control) and treatment groups. The control group comprised healthy female SPF-grade C57BL/6 mice (n = 7). The treatment group mice received intraperitoneal injection of NAC at a dose of 250 mg/kg daily for 8 weeks. The serum levels of malondialdehyde (MDA) and nitric oxide (NO), and activities of glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and superoxide dismutase (SOD), were assayed using standard methods. The level of urine protein and activity of anti-double stranded (ds) DNA antibody were determined using their respective enzyme-linked assay (ELISA) kits. Results: The spleens of mice in SLE mice were significantly enlarged, relative to control mice, but they were reduced significantly by NAC (p < 0.05). N-Acetylcysteine (NAC) also significantly reduced the serum levels of MDA and NO in SLE mice, but significantly  increased the serum activities of superoxide dismutase and GPx. Moreover, urine protein concentration and activity of anti-dsDNA antibody in SLE mice significantly increased, but reduced significantly by NAC treatment (p < 0.05). Conclusion: These results suggest that NAC effectively alleviates SLE in mice via regulation of oxidative stress. Thus, NAC has the potentials for development into a therapy for the management of SLE. Keywords: Anti-dsDNA antibodies, Antioxidant enzymes, N-acetylcysteine, Oxidative stress, Systemic lupus erythematosu