Making the world in our image: the New York Times & Financial Times' mediation of China's public diplomacy messages

My thesis argues that a major condition for the success of China’s public diplomacy stems from the support or opposition of the targeted country’s news media. Using content analysis and adapting Fairclough’s discourse analytical approach, this thesis analyses the ideas and discourses associated with China in two major influential news organisations: The Financial Times and the New York Times. Drawing on David Vukovich’s writings on Sinological-Orientalism and Chengxin Pan’s Bifocal Lens of Threat and Opportunity to analyse news texts and other supplementary sources such as semistructured interviews with China correspondents, the thesis provides insights and detailed analysis of the mechanisms involved in the production of China’s representation in the news. The project provides a fresh perspective on how China’s strategic narratives that are promoted by its public diplomacy face a difficult news media environment because of its antagonism towards authoritarian governments

The Edge-Distinguishing Chromatic Number of Petal Graphs, Chorded Cycles, and Spider Graphs

The edge-distinguishing chromatic number (EDCN) of a graph $G$ is the minimum positive integer $k$ such that there exists a vertex coloring $c:V(G)\to\{1,2,\dotsc,k\}$ whose induced edge labels $\{c(u),c(v)\}$ are distinct for all edges $uv$. Previous work has determined the EDCN of paths, cycles, and spider graphs with three legs. In this paper, we determine the EDCN of petal graphs with two petals and a loop, cycles with one chord, and spider graphs with four legs. These are achieved by graph embedding into looped complete graphs.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur

Listening to The Heart: Exploring Atmospheres through Experiments with Affective Capture and Sound

Given this experimental research design informed by non-representational methodologies, I aim to answer two questions. What do experiments with affective capture through atmospheres of listening reveal about academic discussions on affect, emotion, and affective atmospheres? Moreover, what are the benefits of engaging in the discursive deconstruction of feeling and atmosphere if a disentangling is impossible? To summarize, I reaffirm the understanding of atmosphere as one which blurs the boundary between emotion and affect because of experiential subtleties and an affective excess that sometimes manifests from atmosphere (Anderson, 2009, p. 80). As for affect, I emphasize its precognitive and transpersonal qualities. Regarding discursive analysis of atmosphere, I argue that the process can help attune to affective life by revealing spatial-temporal extensions of subjectivity, and in the process, provide opportunities to explore difference informing the non-representational call to enliven the world. The following is a breakdown of this project. Chapter 1 is a literature review of geographic engagements with sound, affect and emotion, as well as affective atmospheres. Chapter 2 details the creation of methodologies for listening and experiments with affective capture. Chapter 3 details methods for audio performance creation and affective analysis including creative performance pieces and arguments on subjectivity. Finally, in the conclusion, I emphasize remarks answering the two questions posed earlier while positing further research possibilities with listening.Bachelor of Art

Conductance asymmetry of graphene pn junction

We use the non-equilibrium Green function (NEGF) method in the ballistic limit to provide a quantitative description of the conductance of graphene pn junctions - an important building block for graphene electronics devices. In this paper, recent experiments on graphene junctions are explained by a ballistic transport model, but only if the finite junction transition width, Dw, is accounted for. In particular, the experimentally observed anamolous increase in the resistance asymmetry between nn and np junctions under low source/drain charge density conditions is also quantitatively captured by our model. In light of the requirement for sharp junctions in applications such as electron focusing, we also examine the pn junction conductance in the regime where Dw is small and find that wavefunction mismatch (so-called pseudo-spin) plays a major role in sharp pn junctions.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Angular Distributions of 12C(gamma, NN) Reactions

The work presented in this thesis describes an experimental study of the 12C(gamma,pn) and the 12C(gamma,pp) reactions using tagged photons in the energy range of 120MeV to 400MeV. The experiment was carried out using the MAMI-B c.w. electron accelerator at the Institut fur Kernphysik, Mainz, Germany. Bremsstrahlung photons were produced on a thin nickel foil and are tagged by momentum analysing the recoiling electrons using the Glasgow tagging spectrometer. The Tagger tags photons with an energy resolution of 2MeV and a photon flux of ~10e7s-1. A plastic scintillator hodoscope PIP was used to detect the protons in both reaction channels. It was set in three positions covering polar angles from 22.