"Friends and foes on the battlefield": a study of Chinese and U.S. youth literature about the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

In order to understand how postwar generations??? understanding of the history of World War II has been shaped by the information sources made available to them, this dissertation examines the representation of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)???fought between Imperial Japan and China, with U.S. as the latter???s major military ally???in youth literature published in mainland China and the United States from 1937 through 2007. The study is based on a sociopolitical analysis of the historical context in which Chinese and American youth literature about ethnic Chinese experiences during the Second World War was produced; a content analysis of 360 titles of illustrated popular reading materials in Chinese; and a literary and visual analysis of important works of youth literature in both countries. Those who obtained the opportunity to ???tell??? the war history, which part of it they told, and how they told it were all highly politicized. In China, the subject matter and main themes of war stories served the shifting agendas and needs that might or might not be shared among different political and interest groups, from the war years, through the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949, to the post-Mao era after 1976. Further comparison between public literary sources about the war and Chinese private memories of it suggest a chasm between the ruling Party???s master narrative and the way individuals remember their own experiences during the years of 1937-45. In the United States, the narrative space for ethnic Chinese wartime experiences expanded or contracted in a racialized society that perpetuated Asian Americans??? alien identity. The result was a dearth of information that could help ethnic Chinese youth to understand their ancestors??? role during the war and, in the larger American society, amnesia about a military conflict with ongoing political, economic, and social ramifications

Stacked Switched Capacitor Energy Buffer Architecture

Electrolytic capacitors are often used for energy buffering applications, including buffering between single-phase ac and dc. While these capacitors have high energy density compared to film and ceramic capacitors, their life is limited. This paper presents a stacked switched capacitor (SSC) energy buffer architecture and some of its topological embodiments, which when used with longer life film capacitors overcome this limitation while achieving effective energy densities comparable to electrolytic capacitors. The architectural approach is introduced along with design and control techniques. A prototype SSC energy buffer using film capacitors, designed for a 320 V dc bus and able to support a 135 W load, has been built and tested with a power factor correction circuit. It is shown that the SSC energy buffer can successfully replace limited-life electrolytic capacitors with much longer life film capacitors, while maintaining volume and efficiency at a comparable level

A multilevel energy buffer and voltage modulator for grid-interfaced micro-inverters

Micro-inverters operating into the single-phase grid from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels or other low-voltage sources must buffer the twice-line-frequency variations between the energy sourced by the PV panel and that required for the grid. Moreover, in addition to operating over wide average power ranges, they inherently operate over a wide range of voltage conversion ratios as the line voltage traverses a cycle. These factors make the design of micro-inverters challenging. This paper presents a multilevel energy buffer and voltage modulator (MEB) that significantly reduces the range of voltage conversion ratios that the dc-ac converter portion of the micro-inverter must operate over by stepping its effective input voltage in pace with the line voltage. The MEB also functions as an active energy buffer to reduce the twice-line-frequency voltage ripple at the output of the solar panel. The small additional loss of the MEB can be compensated by the improved efficiency of the dc-ac converter stage, leading to a higher overall system efficiency. A prototype micro-inverter incorporating a MEB, designed for 27 V to 38 V dc input voltage, 230 V rms ac output voltage, and rated for line cycle average power of 70 W, has been built and tested in grid-connected mode. It is shown that the MEB can successfully enhance the performance of a single-phase grid-interfaced micro-inverter by increasing its efficiency and reducing the total size of the twice-line-frequency energy buffering capacitance

Prognostic Value of Facial Nerve Antidromic Evoked Potentials in Bell Palsy: A Preliminary Study

To analyze the value of facial nerve antidromic evoked potentials (FNAEPs) in predicting recovery from Bell palsy. Study Design. Retrospective study using electrodiagnostic data and medical chart review. Methods. A series of 46 patients with unilateral Bell palsy treated were included. According to taste test, 26 cases were associated with taste disorder (Group 1) and 20 cases were not (Group 2). Facial function was established clinically by the Stennert system after monthly follow-up. The result was evaluated with clinical recovery rate (CRR) and FNAEP. FNAEPs were recorded at the posterior wall of the external auditory meatus of both sides. Results. Mean CRR of Group 1 and Group 2 was 61.63% and 75.50%. We discovered a statistical difference between two groups and also in the amplitude difference (AD) of FNAEP. Mean ± SD of AD was −6.96% ± 12.66% in patients with excellent result, −27.67% ± 27.70% with good result, and −66.05% ± 31.76% with poor result. Conclusions. FNAEP should be monitored in patients with intratemporal facial palsy at the early stage. FNAEP at posterior wall of external auditory meatus was sensitive to detect signs of taste disorder. There was close relativity between FNAEPs and facial nerve recovery

Graph Self-Contrast Representation Learning

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently emerged as a promising approach for graph representation learning. Some existing methods adopt the 1-vs-K scheme to construct one positive and K negative samples for each graph, but it is difficult to set K. For those methods that do not use negative samples, it is often necessary to add additional strategies to avoid model collapse, which could only alleviate the problem to some extent. All these drawbacks will undoubtedly have an adverse impact on the generalizability and efficiency of the model. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a novel graph self-contrast framework GraphSC, which only uses one positive and one negative sample, and chooses triplet loss as the objective. Specifically, self-contrast has two implications. First, GraphSC generates both positive and negative views of a graph sample from the graph itself via graph augmentation functions of various intensities, and use them for self-contrast. Second, GraphSC uses Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to factorize the representations into multiple factors and proposes a masked self-contrast mechanism to better separate positive and negative samples. Further, Since the triplet loss only optimizes the relative distance between the anchor and its positive/negative samples, it is difficult to ensure the absolute distance between the anchor and positive sample. Therefore, we explicitly reduced the absolute distance between the anchor and positive sample to accelerate convergence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of GraphSC against 19 other state-of-the-art methods in both unsupervised and transfer learning settings.Comment: ICDM 2023(Regular