When Humanity Meets Technology: Contemplating Neil Postman\u27s Critique of Advertising

This project aims to contemplate Postman’s critique of advertising and offer insights to understand Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) in today’s mediated environment. As an essential component of IMC, the history of advertising demonstrates and documents that the medium of communication has an extensive influence on IMC practices. The concern about how communication media affect human perception, understanding, and behavior, resides within the central claim of the study of media ecology. Thus, this project investigates IMC through the lens of Postman’s media ecology perspectives, and argues that Postman’s prescient ideas provide both hope and constructive insights. Moreover, Postman’s thermostatic perspective, rooted in media ecology, offers a functional and creative approach to understanding IMC and seeking improvement of IMC practices in today’s mediated environment

Topological superconductivity with large Chern numbers in a ferromagnetic metal-superconductor heterostructure

The ferromagnetic metal-superconductor heterostructure with interface Rashba spin-orbit hopping is a promising candidate for topological superconductivity. We study the interplay between the interface Rashba hopping and the intrinsic Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling in this heterostructure, and demonstrate rich topological phases with five distinct Chern numbers. In particular, we find a topological state with a Chern number as large as four in the parameter space of the heterostructure. We calculate the Berry curvatures that construct the Chern numbers, and show that these Berry curvatures induce anomalous thermal Hall transport of the superconducting quasiparticles. We reveal chiral edge states in the topological phases, as well as helical edge states in the trivial phase, and show that the wave functions of these edge states mostly concentrate on the ferrometal layer of the heterostructure

Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers

With the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) exhibiting remarkable reasoning and comprehension abilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), most Question Answering (QA) research has primarily centered around general QA tasks based on GPT, neglecting the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA. In this paper, we propose to incorporate GPT-3.5 to address such challenges, in which complex tables are reconstructed into tuples and specific prompt designs are employed for dialogues. Specifically, we encode each cell's hierarchical structure, position information, and content as a tuple. By enhancing the prompt template with an explanatory description of the meaning of each tuple and the logical reasoning process of the task, we effectively improve the hierarchical structure awareness capability of GPT-3.5 to better parse the complex tables. Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets, leading to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Mai

Metabolic fingerprinting of Angelica sinensis during growth using UPLC-TOFMS and chemometrics data analysis

BACKGROUND: The radix of Angelica sinensis is widely used as a medicinal herbal and metabolomics research of this plant during growth is necessary. RESULTS: Principal component analysis of the UPLC-QTOFMS data showed that these 27 samples could be separated into 4 different groups. The chemical markers accounting for these separations were identified from the PCA loadings plot. These markers were further verified by accurate mass tandem mass and retention times of available reference standards. The study has shown that accumulation of secondary metabolites of Angelica sinensis is closely related to the growth periods. CONCLUSIONS: The UPLC-QTOFMS based metabolomics approach has great potential for analysis of the alterations of secondary metabolites of Angelica sinensis during growth

Nutrient limitation of woody debris decomposition in a tropical forest:contrasting effects of N and P addition

1.Tropical forests represent a major terrestrial store of carbon (C), a large proportion of which is contained in the soil and decaying organic matter. Woody debris plays a key role in forest C dynamics because it contains a sizeable proportion of total forest C. Understanding the factors controlling the decomposition of organic matter in general, and woody debris in particular, is hence critical to assessing changes in tropical C storage. 2.We conducted a factorial fertilization experiment in a tropical forest in South China to investigate the influence of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) availability onwoody debris decomposition using branch segments (5-cm diameter) of four species (Acacia auriculaeformis, Aphanamixis polystachya, Schefflera octophylla, Carallia brachiata) in plots fertilized with +N, +P, or +NP, and controls. 3.Fertilization with +P and +NP increased decomposition rates by 5-53% and the magnitude was species-specific. Contrary to expectations, we observed no negative effect of +N addition on decay rates or mass loss of woody debris in any of the four study species. Decomposition rates of woody debris were higher in species with lower C:P ratios regardless of treatment. 4.We observed significant accumulation of P in the woody debris of all species in plots fertilized with +P and +NP during the early stages of decomposition. N-release from woody debris of Acacia (N-fixing) was greater in the +P plots towards the end of the study, whereas fertilization with +N had no impact on the patterns of nutrient release during decomposition. 5.Synthesis: Our results indicate that decomposition of woody debris is primarily constrained by P availability in this tropical forest. However, contrary to expectations, +N addition did not exacerbate P-limitation. It is conceivable that decay rates of woody debris in tropical forests can be predicted by C:P or lignin:P ratios but additional work with more tree species is needed to determine whether the patterns we observed are more generally applicable

Security boundaries of an optical power limiter for protecting quantum key distribution systems

Unauthorized light injection has always been a vital threat to the practical security of a quantum key distribution (QKD) system. An optical power limiter (OPL) based on the thermo-optical defocusing effect has been proposed and implemented, limiting the injected hacking light. As a hardware countermeasure, the performance of the OPL under various light-injection attacks shall be tested to clarify the security boundary before being widely deployed. To investigate the OPL's security boundary in quantum cryptography, we comprehensively test and analyse the behavior of OPL under continuous-wave (c.w.) light-injection attacks and pulse illumination attacks with pulses' repetition rate at 0.5-Hz,40-MHz, and 1-GHz. The testing results illuminate the security boundary of the OPL, which allows one to properly employ the OPL in the use cases. The methodology of testing and analysis proposed here is applicable to other power-limitation components in a QKD system.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Foliar phosphorus fractions reveal how tropical plants maintain photosynthetic rates despite low soil phosphorus availability

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are essential nutrients for plant metabolism, and their availability often limits primary productivity. Whereas the effects of N availability on photosynthetic capacity are well established, we still know relatively little about the effects of P availability at a foliar level, especially in P‐limited tropical forests. We examined photosynthetic capacity, leaf mass per area (LMA) and foliar P fractions in five woody plant species after 6 years of N and P fertilization in a lowland tropical forest. Foliar N:P ratios indicated P limitation of the unfertilized plants; accordingly, photosynthetic P‐use efficiency (PPUE) and LMA decreased with P addition, and foliar N and P concentrations increased, whereas N addition had little effect on measured foliar traits. However, P addition enhanced photosynthetic capacity only in one species and not in other four species. We then assessed plant acclimation to low P availability by quantifying four fractions of foliar P representing different functional pools: structural P, metabolic P (including inorganic P), nucleic acid P, and residual P. We found that P addition enhanced the concentrations of metabolic, structural, and nucleic acid P fractions in all species, but the magnitude of the effect was species‐specific. Our findings indicate that tropical species acclimate to low P availability by altering allocation of foliar P to meet the demand of P for photosynthesis. Importantly, species typical of lowland tropical forests in East Asia maintained their photosynthetic rate under low P availability. We conclude that P limitation of leaf photosynthetic capacity may not be as common as previously assumed due to plant acclimation mechanisms in low‐P tropical forests. Species‐specific strategies to allocate P to different foliar fractions represent a potentially important adaptive mechanism for plants in P‐limited systems

Epidemiological characteristics and risk factors of severe asthma in children: a single-center prospective cohort study

Objective·To explore the epidemiological characteristics of severe asthma in children and analyze the risk factors.Methods·A single-center prospective cohort study was conducted. Six hundred and seventy four children with difficult-to-treat asthma who visited the Children´s Hospital of Fudan University from January 1 to December 31, 2021 were included to establish a dynamic cohort. Basic information (including gender, age, gestational age at birth, birth weight, etc.) and comorbidity of the cohort members were collected. The asthma control status, drug inhalation technique level, medication compliance, pulmonary function parameters [forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) as a percent-age of the predicted value (FEV1%pred), FEV1/ forced vital capacity (FVC), and the rate of estimated values of forced expiratory flow at 50% of FVC exhaled (FEF50), FEF75, and FEF25-75 in percent-predicted value, respectively], airway inflammation index [fraction exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO)], and allergy status parameters [eosinophil (EOS) and immunoglobulin E (IgE)] of all cohort members were evaluated. All cohort members underwent re-evaluation respectively at the specialist asthma clinic of the hospital at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months.Results·At the endpoint of the cohort, 52 children were diagnosed with severe asthma, accounting for 7.7%. A high proportion of severe asthma was found in children who were exposed to secondhand smoke, used air conditioning at home all year round, or had coexisting rhinitis/nasosinusitis, FEV1%pred300/μL, IgE>200 IU/L, or FeNO>20/25 ppb [FeNO>20 ppb (≤12 years old) or >25 ppb (>12 years old), 1 ppb=1×10-9 mol/L]. A high proportion of non-severe asthma was found in children who were breastfed for 6 months or longer, or had good medication compliance. The differences were statistically significant (all P<0.05). There were more males in children with severe asthma aged 6‒11 years, and more females in children with severe asthma aged 12‒17 years, with statistical significance (both P<0.05). Multiple-factor Logistic regression analysis showed that only small airway dysfunction was an independent risk factor for severe asthma [OR=5.158 (95%CI 2.516‒10.572)].Conclusion·The proportion of children with severe asthma has a significantly decrease after one year of standardized management in children with difficult-to-treat asthma. Small airway dysfunction is an independent risk factor for the progression to severe asthma

The recent ecological efficiency development in China: interactive systems of economy, society and environment

Ecological efficiency (EE) provides much reference for formulating appropriate regional economic, social and environmental policies to promote sustainable development. Interactive subsystems of economy, society and environment within EE system have been considered in this paper. By innovatively integrating the merits of two advanced economic research methods (global super efficiency network data envelopment analysis (GSE-NDEA) and panel vector autoregression (PVAR) and updating the EE evaluation indicator system by following the new features of sustainable development in the recent China, this paper comprehensively evaluates EE by drawing evidence from 3 regions in China during the period of 2011–2020, and further reveals how the three subsystems within EE system interact to achieve EE enhancement. The findings show EE and its three subsystems’ trend, the major constrains of EE development, the regional discrepancies in EE progress, and the interactions among the subsystems of economy-society-environment within the EE system in different regions of China. The policy implications are proposed accordingly