China, institutional leadership and regional order: the cases of ASEAN Plus Three and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2007 - 2017

This thesis examines China’s leadership behavior in ASEAN Plus Three (APT) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) after the global financial crisis. Notwithstanding the Chinese government’s rhetoric, the question of leadership in the two regional institutions was pivotal to the rising power’s renegotiation of the geopolitical definition of East and Central Asia. Adopting an interdisciplinary and eclectic approach, this thesis dissects institutional leadership as the ability to promote an institution’s identity by guiding its adaptation to a changing environment. Based on a conception of leadership behavior as the combination of relationship and task, I develop an analytical framework of six types of leadership behavior – delegating, supporting, brokering, soft selling, hard selling and directing – to explain how a leader responds to external challenges. This thesis finds that although China demonstrated increasing capacity to provide public goods, it remained unable to unite member states behind its purpose. Under Hu Jintao, the precedence of relationship over task led Beijing to promote APT and the SCO’s identities through supporting and soft selling, employing its capabilities to advance capacity building while proposing institution-building initiatives. The combination of external and internal pressure, however, led task to precede relationship under Xi Jinping. The launch of the Belt and Road Initiative and other parallel initiatives constituted China’s attempt at hard selling in economic cooperation by redefining collective purposes and initiating structures of cooperation on its own terms. Nevertheless, the problem of trust, together with structural and institutional constraints, confined Chinese institutional leadership in both APT and the SCO largely to functional tasks in the economic domain, and consequently prevented the two regional institutions from fully adapting to a changing environment. China’s behavioral shift represented a change in its approach toward the geopolitical reconstruction of East and Central Asia, from anchoring them to APT and the SCO under Hu Jintao to (re)integrating them into an expanding, Sino-centric geopolitical construct of periphery under Xi Jinping

Behavioral disinhibition in stroke

BackgroundPost-stroke behavioral disinhibition (PSBD) is common in stroke survivors and often presents as impulsive, tactless or vulgar behavior. However, it often remains undiagnosed and thus untreated, even though it can lead to a longer length of stay in a rehabilitation facility. The proposed study will aim to evaluate the clinical, neuropsychological and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) correlates of PSBD in a cohort of stroke survivors and describe its 12-month course.MethodsThis prospective cohort study will recruit 237 patients and will be conducted at the Neurology Unit of the Prince of Wales Hospital. The project duration will be 24 months. The patients will be examined by multiple MRI methods, including diffusion-weighted imaging, within 1 week after stroke onset. The patients and their caregivers will receive a detailed assessment at a research clinic at 3, 9 and 15 months after stroke onset (T1, T2 and T3, respectively). The disinhibition subscale of the Frontal Systems Behavior Scale (FrSBe) will be completed by each subject and caregiver, and scores ≥65 will be considered to indicate PSBD.A stepwise logistic regression will be performed to assess the importance of lesions in the regions of interest (ROIs), together with other significant variables identified in the univariate analyses. For patients with PSBD at T1, the FrSBe disinhibition scores will be compared between the groups of patients with and without ROI infarcts, using covariance analysis. The demographic, clinical and MRI variables of remitters and non-remitters will be examined again at T2 and T3 by logistic regression.DiscussionThis project will be the first MRI study on PSBD in stroke survivors. The results will shed light on the associations of lesions in the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior temporal lobe and subcortical brain structures with the risk of PSBD. The obtained data will advance our understanding of the pathogenesis and clinical course of PSBD in stroke, as well as other neurological conditions. The findings are thus likely to be applicable to the large population of patients with neurological disorders at risk of PSBD and are expected to stimulate further research in this field

The influence of refrigerant (R32) flow maldistribution on the thermal performance of a microchannel heat exchanger without considering superheat and sub-cool / Chng Ming Hui, Chin Wai Meng and Tang Sai Hong

The research work reported in this paper investigates the numerical study on the influence of statistical moments of probability density function of R32 tube-side flow maldistribution on the thermal performance of microchannel heat exchanger. A model without considering superheat and sub-cool was developed to analyze the effect of mean, standard deviation and skew of the refrigerant maldistribution profile on the heating capacity degradation of the heat exchanger. Next, the performance degradation of microchannel heat exchanger due to refrigerant (R32) maldistribution was quantified and analyzed. After that, the model was validated by doing experiment. Finally, a performance deterioration correlation related to refrigerant maldistribution without considering superheat and sub-cool was developed to offer a faster and simpler method to analyze the maldistribution problem. It is found that mean and standard deviation have the highest impact on the performance deterioration. Maldistribution with high standard deviation and high negative skew gives a large magnitude of performance deterioration. For standard deviation more than 0.3, the deterioration can up to 1%. Besides that, the deterioration reaches 1% for skew below -0.5. Furthermore, the deterioration is as high as 4% when the mean is less than 0.9. Hence, the first three moments such as mean, standard deviation and skew should be optimized in the effort of improve the thermal performance of the heat exchanger. The proposed correlation in this work offers a faster and simpler method for a quick estimate of the degradation factor