War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Victoria Tin-bor Hui is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Notre Dame. She is author of "War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge, 2005), winner of the Mershon Center's Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for an author whose first book makes an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security. Hui will deliver a lecture based on her book, which demonstrates that from 656-221 B.C., China's government consisted of a system of sovereign territorial states similar to those in early modern Europe. This finding runs counter to the common belief that the roots of liberal democracy are unique to European civilization and alien to non-Western cultures.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, streaming video, photo

Religious pathways to coping with personal death anxiety among older adult British Christians and Chinese Buddhists: afterlife beliefs, psychosocial maturity and regret management

Religion was proposed to account for the relatively low personal death anxiety found among older adults. This dissertation sought to examine the influence of religious afterlife beliefs, religiously enhanced psychosocial maturity and religious management of a past major regret on personal death anxiety in later life. Terror Management Theory and Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory were used to describe these three religious pathways to coping with personal death anxiety in later life. The cross-sectional postal survey samples consisted of 143 older adult British Christians and 141 older adult Chinese Buddhists. Structural Equation Modelling results from the British Christian survey study showed that intrinsic religiosity predicted lower personal death anxiety through: (a) fostering more benign afterlife beliefs; (b) enhancing psychosocial maturity; and (c) promoting emotional stability. No significant relationship between belief in reincarnation and personal death anxiety was found in the Chinese Buddhist survey study. Both survey studies failed to support the personal death anxiety buffering power of religious management of a past major life regret, although some religious coping strategies were associated with lower negative emotional appraisal towards the major life regret among older adults. The British survey study has been the first to demonstrate both the personal death anxiety buffering and psychosocial maturity enhancing power of religion in an increasingly secular society. The lack of relationship between Buddhist reincarnation beliefs and personal death anxiety suggests that not all religious afterlife beliefs have death anxiety buffering power as proposed by Terror Management Theory. The development of Buddhist reincarnation belief and Buddhist coping scales is a pioneering step towards developing research on under-explored Eastern non-theistic afterlife beliefs and coping measures. Implications for ways that help religious older adults cope with their personal death anxiety were discussed. Prospective cross cultural and cross-religion studies were recommended to replicate the present survey findings. Finally, self detachment (self negation) was proposed as the basis of an alternative death transcendence theory to be researched in future studies on personal death anxiety

Charles Horner, Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context

Dans Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate, Charles Horner aborde le thème devenu incontournable de la politique chinoise d’« émergence paisible ». Si les ouvrages portant un titre similaire s’intéressent généralement aux implications militaires et économiques de l’essor chinois dans les pays occidentaux, Horner analyse en revanche ce que l’émergence de la Chine signifie pour les Chinois. Il étudie ainsi comment « la Chine cherche à rassembler une série d’enseignements tirés de son passé et qu..

Charles Horner, Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context

Dans Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate, Charles Horner aborde le thème devenu incontournable de la politique chinoise d’« émergence paisible ». Si les ouvrages portant un titre similaire s’intéressent généralement aux implications militaires et économiques de l’essor chinois dans les pays occidentaux, Horner analyse en revanche ce que l’émergence de la Chine signifie pour les Chinois. Il étudie ainsi comment « la Chine cherche à rassembler une série d’enseignements tirés de son passé et qu..

Learning to Solve Climate Sensor Placement Problems with a Transformer

The optimal placement of sensors for environmental monitoring and disaster management is a challenging problem due to its NP-hard nature. Traditional methods for sensor placement involve exact, approximation, or heuristic approaches, with the latter being the most widely used. However, heuristic methods are limited by expert intuition and experience. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a promising approach for generating heuristic algorithms automatically. In this paper, we introduce a novel sensor placement approach focused on learning improvement heuristics using deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Our approach leverages an RL formulation for learning improvement heuristics, driven by an actor-critic algorithm for training the policy network. We compare our method with several state-of-the-art approaches by conducting comprehensive experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach in producing high-quality solutions. Our work presents a promising direction for applying advanced DL and RL techniques to challenging climate sensor placement problems

Understanding food consumption lifecycles using wearable cameras

Application of design in HCI is a common approach to engendering behavioural change to address important challenges such as sustainability. Encouraging such change requires an understanding of current motivations and behaviours in the domain in question. In this paper, we describe use of wearable cameras to study motivations and behaviours around food consumption by focusing on two contrasting cultures, Malaysia and the UK. Our findings highlight the potential of wearable cameras to enhance knowledge of food consumption practices and identify where and how some digital interventions might be appropriate to change food behaviour. This includes appealing to people’s motivations behind food consumption and capitalising on existing practices such as gifting of food and social meals. We propose a food consumption lifecycle as a framework to understand and design human–food interaction. The use of wearable cameras enabled us to capture a high-level overview of spatially distributed food-related practices and understand food behaviours in greater depth.This work was co-funded by Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, UK, and Crops for the Future, Malaysia.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-015-0871-

Wearables or infrastructure: contrasting approaches to collecting behavioural data in the home

This paper examines and contrasts two approaches to collecting behavioural data within the home. The first of these involves filming from static video cameras combined with network logging to capture media consumption activities across multiple screens. The second utilises wearable cameras that passively collect still images to provide insights into food related behaviours. The paper compares the approaches from the perspective of the researchers and participants, and outlines the key benefits and challenges of each, with the aim of further mapping the space of possibilities now available when studying behaviour in the home

Wearables or infrastructure: contrasting approaches to collecting behavioural data in the home

This paper examines and contrasts two approaches to collecting behavioural data within the home. The first of these involves filming from static video cameras combined with network logging to capture media consumption activities across multiple screens. The second utilises wearable cameras that passively collect still images to provide insights into food related behaviours. The paper compares the approaches from the perspective of the researchers and participants,and outlines the key benefits and challenges of each, with the aim of further mapping the space of possibilities now available when studying behaviour in the home

The Metal-Insulator Transition in \u3cem\u3eVO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e\u3c/em\u3e Studied using Terahertz Apertureless Near-Field Microscopy

We have studied the metal-insulator transition in a vanadium dioxide (VO2) thin film using terahertz apertureless near-field optical microscopy. We observe a variation of the terahertz amplitude due to the phase transition induced by an applied voltage across the sample. The change of the terahertz signal is related to the abrupt change of the conductivity of the VO2 film at the metal-insulator transition. The subwavelength spatial resolution of this near-field microscopy makes it possible to detect signatures of micron-scale metallic domains in inhomogeneous VO2 thin films