Chinese women’s makeover shows: idealised femininity, self-presentation and body maintenance

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese television industry has witnessed the rise of a new form of television programme, Chinese Women’s Makeover Shows. These programmes have quickly become a great success and have received enormous attention from growing audiences. The shows are themed on educating and demonstrating to the audiences the information and methods needed to beautify their faces and bodies and consume products accordingly. The shows are different from earlier Chinese fashion television programmes in format, and are also different from western makeover shows that have personal transformations of external appearance as their subject. The importance of adopting these shows as a research topic lies in the fact that the shows not only represent the images of contemporary Chinese women and propose a series of standards that a modern Chinese woman is advised to abide by in terms of body presentation and appearance, but also reflect the characteristics of Chinese female consumers and the rising consumer culture of China in general. It concerns the challenges and anxieties that have been brought to every woman in China. The thesis starts with an overview analysis of this flourishing genre of television programme and outlines its status quo, format and production techniques. In the following three chapters, it takes three years (2010-2012) of episodes of the three most popular Chinese Women’s Makeover Shows, Queen, Pretty Women, and I am a Great Beauty as the main samples for analysis, aiming to scrutinise 1) the idealised femininity represented in the shows and the cultural context from which the features derive; 2) the self-presentation promoted as appropriate in the shows and how it relates to the reality of Chinese women’s daily life; 3) the body maintenance that the shows urge upon their audiences as regards consumption for the female body and to what extent this epitomises and functions in constructing a consumer society with Chinese characteristics. The thesis intends to fill a gap in academic research with a systematic analysis of the prevailing phenomenon of the Chinese Women’s Makeover Shows and an in-depth study concerning the shows’ meaning-making process within their cultural context

The effects of big data analytics capability on supply chain resilience and financial performance: An empirical study of China’s manufacturing industry

Due to the significant uncertainties and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been become crucial for firms to develop supply chain resilience (SCRes). Both researchers and practitioners have recognised the importance of big data analytics capability (BDAC) in helping firms deal with the uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, to date there has been limited research that has examined the relationships among data-driven culture, BDAC, SCRes, and financial performance, especially in the Chinese manufacturing industry. Therefore, drawing upon resource-based view (RBV), this research develops and empirically test a conceptual framework that investigate the relationships among data-driven culture, BDAC, SCRes, and financial performance. To test the hypothesised relationships, structural equation modelling is used to analyse the survey data collected from 113 manufacturing firms in China. The results show that there is a significant positive effect of data-driven culture on BDAC and SCRes. The results also reveal that BDAC has a significant positive effect on SCRes, and that SCRes is significantly and positively associated with financial performance. The findings provide useful and timely guidance for managers on how to develop resilience supply chains through the development of data analytics capability for financial performance improvement during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Dissociation of E-cadherin and Β-catenin in a mouse model of total parenteral nutrition: a mechanism for the loss of epithelial cell proliferation and villus atrophy

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65985/1/jphysiol.2008.162719.pd

An efficient decision support system for flood inundation management using intermittent remote-sensing data

Abstract: Timely acquisition of spatial flood distribution is an essential basis for flood-disaster monitoring and management. Remote-sensing data have been widely used in water-body surveys. However, due to the cloudy weather and complex geomorphic environment, the inability to receive remote-sensing images throughout the day has resulted in some data being missing and unable to provide dynamic and continuous flood inundation process data. To fully and effectively use remote-sensing data, we developed a new decision support system for integrated flood inundation management based on limited and intermittent remote-sensing data. Firstly, we established a new multi-scale water-extraction convolutional neural network named DEU-Net to extract water from remote-sensing images automatically. A specific datasets training method was created for typical region types to separate the water body from the confusing surface features more accurately. Secondly, we built a waterfront contour active tracking model to implicitly describe the flood movement interface. In this way, the flooding process was converted into the numerical solution of the partial differential equation of the boundary function. Space upwind difference format and the time Euler difference format were used to perform the numerical solution. Finally, we established seven indicators that considered regional characteristics and flood-inundation attributes to evaluate flood-disaster losses. The cloud model using the entropy weight method was introduced to account for uncertainties in various parameters. In the end, a decision support system realizing the flood losses risk visualization was developed by using the ArcGIS application programming interface (API). To verify the effectiveness of the model constructed in this paper, we conducted numerical experiments on the model’s performance through comparative experiments based on a laboratory scale and actual scale, respectively. The results were as follows: (1) The DEU-Net method had a better capability to accurately extract various water bodies, such as urban water bodies, open-air ponds, plateau lakes etc., than the other comparison methods. (2) The simulation results of the active tracking model had good temporal and spatial consistency with the image extraction results and actual statistical data compared with the synthetic observation data. (3) The application results showed that the system has high computational efficiency and noticeable visualization effects. The research results may provide a scientific basis for the emergency-response decision-making of flood disasters, especially in data-sparse regions

Impact of Caloric Intake on Parenteral Nutrition–Associated Intestinal Morphology and Mucosal Barrier Function

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142275/1/jpen0474.pd

Damage Detection of Closed Crack in a Metallic Plate Using Nonlinear Ultrasonic Time Reversal Method

Initial cracks in metallic structures incline to be closed at rest. Such incipient damage generally fails to be detected and located with traditional linear ultrasonic techniques because ultrasonic waves penetrate the contact area of the closed crack. In this paper, an imaging algorithm based on nonlinear ultrasonic time reversal method is proposed to detect closed cracks in aluminum plates. Two surface-bonded piezoelectric transducer arrays are used to generate, receive, and reemit ultrasonic wave signals. The closed crack is simulated by tightening a bolt on the aluminum plate. By applying large amplitude excitation voltage on the PZT transducers, the closed crack could be opened and closed. The transmitted waves recorded by PZT array contain nonlinear components, the signals are time reversed and emitted back, and the tone burst reconstructions are achieved. The linear reciprocity and the time reversibility break down due to the presence of the nonlinear components. The correlation coefficient between the original excitation signal and the reconstructed signal is calculated to define the damage index for individual sensing path and is used to develop an imaging algorithm to locate the closed crack on the plate. The experimental results demonstrate that incident wave signals and their reconstructed signals can be used to accurately detect and locate closed cracks