205 research outputs found
A neoliberalizing Chinese cinema: political economy of the Chinese film industry in post-WTO China
This thesis aims to investigate the industry restructuration of the Chinese film industry in the context of China integrating into the global neoliberal capitalist system since its WTO entry in 2002. By interrogating the power dynamics between the Party-state, domestic capital and transnational media capital, this thesis explores respective roles each of the three stakeholders have played in shaping the commercialization and marketization of the Chinese film industry. Methodically, this thesis primarily relies on elite interviews with industry professionals, together with critical discourse analysis of one key policy document, and secondary data collected from news outlets, trade publications, industry reports, etc. Drawing on the empirical data, I present four main arguments.
First, in light of China’s culture system reform and the evolution of film policies since 2002, the Party-state continues to utilize film as an ideological instrument for consolidating the Party’s hegemonic rule and sustaining its legitimacy. The Party-state proves ingenious in governing the Chinese film industry at the discursive level as China experiencing the integration into global neoliberalism. Second, despite the installation of the market mechanism in the film sector, the Party-state manages to retain control over the Chinese film industry, not only on the ideological front, but also in the economic sense by partaking in the competition with private capital, domestic and foreign. Third, the Chinese film industry has been profoundly transformed by the trend of conglomeration driven by other capital-intensive industry sectors in China, in particular the internet sector. Riding on their explosive success in the new century, several key tech giants seek to build Chinese media conglomerates that are competitive on the global scale. This process is further complicated by the keen participation of transnational media capital, mainly Hollywood players. Co-production film projects best epitomize the transnational collaboration which however, haven’t achieved much success. Fourth, the Chinese film workers have developed professional skills that enable them to navigate between political imperatives, commercial demands, and personal fulfilment. The mental struggle of balancing individual artistic vision with political and commercial constraints is palpable for film practitioners on a daily basis, though to varying degree. One way of coping with the challenge is exercise agency in a highly depoliticized manner, channelling creative energy into filmmaking activities that are either considered politically safe, or in accordance with the official ideologies, in some cases pandering to the Party-state. The fact that Chinese film workers actively transform themselves into depoliticized subjects in their professional work, indicating neoliberalism as a national hegemonic project at its core
CoGANPPIS: Coevolution-enhanced Global Attention Neural Network for Protein-Protein Interaction Site Prediction
Protein-protein interactions are essential in biochemical processes. Accurate
prediction of the protein-protein interaction sites (PPIs) deepens our
understanding of biological mechanism and is crucial for new drug design.
However, conventional experimental methods for PPIs prediction are costly and
time-consuming so that many computational approaches, especially ML-based
methods, have been developed recently. Although these approaches have achieved
gratifying results, there are still two limitations: (1) Most models have
excavated some useful input features, but failed to take coevolutionary
features into account, which could provide clues for inter-residue
relationships; (2) The attention-based models only allocate attention weights
for neighboring residues, instead of doing it globally, neglecting that some
residues being far away from the target residues might also matter.
We propose a coevolution-enhanced global attention neural network, a
sequence-based deep learning model for PPIs prediction, called CoGANPPIS. It
utilizes three layers in parallel for feature extraction: (1) Local-level
representation aggregation layer, which aggregates the neighboring residues'
features; (2) Global-level representation learning layer, which employs a novel
coevolution-enhanced global attention mechanism to allocate attention weights
to all the residues on the same protein sequences; (3) Coevolutionary
information learning layer, which applies CNN & pooling to coevolutionary
information to obtain the coevolutionary profile representation. Then, the
three outputs are concatenated and passed into several fully connected layers
for the final prediction. Application on two benchmark datasets demonstrated a
state-of-the-art performance of our model. The source code is publicly
available at https://github.com/Slam1423/CoGANPPIS_source_code
Learning interactions to boost human creativity with bandits and GPT-4
This paper considers how interactions with AI algorithms can boost human
creative thought. We employ a psychological task that demonstrates limits on
human creativity, namely semantic feature generation: given a concept name,
respondents must list as many of its features as possible. Human participants
typically produce only a fraction of the features they know before getting
"stuck." In experiments with humans and with a language AI (GPT-4) we contrast
behavior in the standard task versus a variant in which participants can ask
for algorithmically-generated hints. Algorithm choice is administered by a
multi-armed bandit whose reward indicates whether the hint helped generating
more features. Humans and the AI show similar benefits from hints, and
remarkably, bandits learning from AI responses prefer the same prompting
strategy as those learning from human behavior. The results suggest that
strategies for boosting human creativity via computer interactions can be
learned by bandits run on groups of simulated participants
NF-kappa B mediated Up-regulation of CCCTC-binding factor in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia
BACKGROUND: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most frequently occurring malignant neoplasm in children. Despite advances in treatment and outcomes for ALL patients, the pathogenesis of the disease remains unclear. Microarray analysis of samples from 100 Chinese children with ALL revealed the up-regulation of CTCF (CCCTC binding factor). CTCF is a highly conserved 11-zinc finger protein that is involved in many human cancers; however, the biological function of CTCF in pediatric ALL is unknown. METHODS: The expression patterns of CTCF were evaluated in matched newly diagnosed (ND), complete remission (CR), and relapsed (RE) bone marrow samples from 28 patients. The potential oncogenic mechanism of CTCF and related pathways in leukemogenesis were investigated in leukemia cell lines. RESULTS: We identified significant up-regulation of CTCF in the ND samples. Importantly, the expression of CTCF returned to normal levels after CR but rebounded in the RE samples. In the pre-B ALL cell line Nalm-6, siRNA-mediated silencing of CTCF expression promoted cell apoptosis and reduced cell proliferation; accordingly, over-expression of a cDNA encoding full-length CTCF protected cells from apoptosis and enhanced cell proliferation. Furthermore, inhibition or activation of the nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) pathway resulted in marked variations in the levels of CTCF mRNA and protein in leukemic cells, indicating that CTCF may be involved downstream of the NF-κB pathway. Moreover, inhibition of the NF-κB pathway increased cell apoptosis, which was partially rescued by ectopic over-expression of CTCF, suggesting that CTCF may play a significant role in the anti-apoptotic pathway mediated by NF-κB. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that CTCF serves as both an anti-apoptotic factor and a proliferative factor in leukemic cells. It potentially contributes to leukemogenesis through the NF-κB pathway in pediatric ALL patients
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Functional inks and printing of two-dimensional materials.
Graphene and related two-dimensional materials provide an ideal platform for next generation disruptive technologies and applications. Exploiting these solution-processed two-dimensional materials in printing can accelerate this development by allowing additive patterning on both rigid and conformable substrates for flexible device design and large-scale, high-speed, cost-effective manufacturing. In this review, we summarise the current progress on ink formulation of two-dimensional materials and the printable applications enabled by them. We also present our perspectives on their research and technological future prospects
Picosecond electric-field-induced threshold switching in phase-change materials
Many chalcogenide glasses undergo a breakdown in electronic resistance above
a critical field strength. Known as threshold switching, this mechanism enables
field-induced crystallization in emerging phase-change memory. Purely
electronic as well as crystal nucleation assisted models have been employed to
explain the electronic breakdown. Here, picosecond electric pulses are used to
excite amorphous AgInSbTe. Field-dependent reversible
changes in conductivity and pulse-driven crystallization are observed. The
present results show that threshold switching can take place within the
electric pulse on sub-picosecond time-scales - faster than crystals can
nucleate. This supports purely electronic models of threshold switching and
reveals potential applications as an ultrafast electronic switch.Comment: 6 pages manuscript with 3 figures and 8 pages supplementary materia
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