Local well-posedness and small Deborah limit of a molecule-based QQ-tensor system

In this paper, we consider a hydrodynamic $Q$-tensor system for nematic liquid crystal flow, which is derived from Doi-Onsager molecular theory by the Bingham closure. We first prove the existence and uniqueness of local strong solution. Furthermore, by taking Deborah number goes to zero and using the Hilbert expansion method, we present a rigorous derivation from the molecule-based $Q$-tensor theory to the Ericksen-Leslie theory.Comment: 44 page

Farming publics: Use farming practices as a tool to de-alienate people with land

Historically, farming was the primary way people interacted with the land. Colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism have made people increasingly detached and alienated from nature and the land. The return to agriculture has the potential to play an essential role in resisting the increasing monoculture of our society through re-establishing the kinship toward land. The rising public awareness of sustainability makes the market for organic food expand every year and allures capitalism to manipulate the organic market from its original purpose into their familiar realm of the conventional food system for maximum profit. The market economy, which is controlled by capitalism, limits the method of farming and consumption by restricting the connection between farmers, consumers, and the land. Ignoring the voice of land and people is one of the strategies used in colonialism, and rebuilding an equal relationship with the land is fundamental to counteract the domination of urban areas. As the health of the land is deteriorating from increased monoculture and economic pressure, there is an urgent need for landscape architects to consider how to re-establishing the kinship towards the land. In this thesis, I investigated the potential of a nonprofit farm to provide a point of access for people living in cities to reconnect to the land through spending time participating in farming activities. The public can interact with the farm in varying ways for different amounts of time. Daily visitors can enjoy the beautiful scenery produced by perennial sunflowers and other vegetable gardens. Weekend visitors can camp and offer their labor for additional activities such as foraging and fruit picking. For people who want to start a farming career, there are rentable 1-acre farming plots, and tiny houses installed on-site for beginner producers to live inexpensively while gaining skills, experimenting, and learning from each other. The rentable farmland serves to diversify the demographic of predominantly white farmers as they are the remainder of colonialization. Through this, the aim is to shift away from capitalist and colonial attitudes about land and land ownership and stimulate a new culture between people and the lan

Perceived Attributes and Factors Influencing Instructors’ Using E-Textbooks in Higher Education

As digital content, e-Textbooks display text on the screen, integrate multimedia within textual components, and allow reading on portable devices; which make learning highly interactive, flexible, and immediately accessible, increase students’ engagements in learning, and make learning content portable, transferrable, and searchable. Those advanced features did not bring prosperity in using e-Textbooks in education. The adoption of using e-Textbooks in higher education is still far from its confirmation stage. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the perceived attributes of using e-Textbooks by instructors and their actual use of e-Textbooks in higher educational settings, to discuss the factors that prevent instructors from using e-Textbooks in teaching, and to provide statistical evidence for promoting digital content and e-Textbooks into higher education in the future. A quantitative study was conducted to measure instructors who are from public universities in the college of education on how they perceived using e-Textbooks in higher education. Several factors emerged to explain the relationships between instructors and using e-Textbooks. With the findings, it suggests instructors, e-Textbooks publishers, institutions, and instructional designers need to work collaboratively to enhance the using of e-Textbooks in higher education

Pole skipping in holographic theories with gauge and fermionic fields

Using covariant expansions, recent work showed that pole skipping happens in general holographic theories with bosonic fields at frequencies $\mathrm{i}(l_b-s) 2\pi T$, where $l_b$ is the highest integer spin in the theory and $s$ takes all positive integer values. We revisit this formalism in theories with gauge symmetry and upgrade the pole-skipping condition so that it works without having to remove the gauge redundancy. We also extend the formalism by incorporating fermions with general spins and interactions and show that their presence generally leads to a separate tower of pole-skipping points at frequencies $\mathrm{i}(l_f-s)2\pi T$, $l_f$ being the highest half-integer spin in the theory and $s$ again taking all positive integer values. We also demonstrate the practical value of this formalism using a selection of examples with spins $0,\frac{1}{2},1,\frac{3}{2},2$.Comment: 40 page

Methods of quantifying specialized knowledge and network rewiring

Technological innovations are a major driver of economic development that depend on the exchange of knowledge and ideas among those with unique but complementary specialized knowledge and knowhow. However, measurement of specialized knowledge embedded in technologists, scientists and entrepreneurs in the knowledge economy presents an empirical challenge as both the exchange of knowledge and knowledge itself remain difficult to observe. We develop novel measures of specialized knowledge using a unique dataset of longitudinal records of participation at technology-focused meetup events in two regional knowledge economics. Our measures of specialized knowledge can be further used to quantify the extend of knowledge spillover and network rewiring and uncover underlying social mechanisms that contribute to the development of increasingly complex and differentiated networks in maturing knowledge economies. We apply these methods in the context of the rapid morphogenesis of emerging regional technology economies in New York City and Los Angeles.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

InstructERC: Reforming Emotion Recognition in Conversation with a Retrieval Multi-task LLMs Framework

The development of emotion recognition in dialogue (ERC) has been consistently hindered by the complexity of pipeline designs, leading to ERC models that often overfit to specific datasets and dialogue patterns. In this study, we propose a novel approach, namely InstructERC, to reformulates the ERC task from a discriminative framework to a generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) . InstructERC has two significant contributions: Firstly, InstructERC introduces a simple yet effective retrieval template module, which helps the model explicitly integrate multi-granularity dialogue supervision information by concatenating the historical dialog content, label statement, and emotional domain demonstrations with high semantic similarity. Furthermore, we introduce two additional emotion alignment tasks, namely speaker identification and emotion prediction tasks, to implicitly model the dialogue role relationships and future emotional tendencies in conversations. Our LLM-based plug-and-play plugin framework significantly outperforms all previous models and achieves comprehensive SOTA on three commonly used ERC datasets. Extensive analysis of parameter-efficient and data-scaling experiments provide empirical guidance for applying InstructERC in practical scenarios. Our code will be released after blind review

Association between -238 but not -308 polymorphism of Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha)v and unexplained recurrent spontaneous abortion (URSA) in Chinese population

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>TNF-alpha is a critical cytokine produced by Th1 cells while altered T helper 1 (Th1)-Th2 balance is found crucial for a successful pregnancy.</p> <p>Study Design</p> <p>A cohort of 132 Southern Chinese Han RSA patients and 152 controls constituted the subjects of this study. Two functional polymorphisms -308 and -238 of TNF-alpha were studied by association analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>lack of association was found in TNF-alpha -308 SNP yet a significant difference was discovered in -238 polymorphism.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study suggested that TNF-alpha may be a risk factor in Chinese RSA patients. However the ethnic differences may also contribute to the results.</p