Coalition-Based Gender Lobbying: Revisiting Women's Substantive Representation in China's Authoritarian Governance

While research on women's substantive representation in legislatures has proliferated, our knowledge of gender lobbying mechanisms in authoritarian regimes remains limited. Adopting a state-society interaction approach, this article addresses how women's interests are substantively represented in China despite the absence of an electoral mandate and the omnipresence of state power. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article maps out the intertwining of key political agents and institutions within and outside the state that mobilize for women's grievances and demands. We find that representation of women's interests in China requires the emergence of a unified societal demand followed by a coalition of state agency allies navigating within legislative, executive, and Party-affiliated institutional bodies. The pursuit of women's interests is also politically bounded and faces strong repression if the lobbying lacks state alliances or the targeted issue is considered “politically sensitive” by the government

Collective magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As mediated by photo-excited carriers

We present a study of photo-excited magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic (Ga,Mn)As films observed by time-resolved magneto-optical measurements. The magnetization precession triggered by linearly polarized optical pulses in the absence of an external field shows a strong dependence on photon frequency when the photo-excitation energy approaches the band-edge of (Ga,Mn)As. This can be understood in terms of magnetic anisotropy modulation by both laser heating of the sample and by hole-induced non-thermal paths. Our findings provide a means for identifying the transition of laser-triggered magnetization dynamics from thermal to non-thermal mechanisms, a result that is of importance for ultrafast optical spin manipulation in ferromagnetic materials via non-thermal paths.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

An MRI-based articulatory and acoustic study of American English liquid sounds /r/ and /l/

In American English, the liquid sounds /r/ and /l/ are the most articulatorily variable and complex sounds. They can be produced by several distinct types of tongue configurations and are the most troublesome sounds for children and nonnative English-speakers to learn. Better understanding of this many-to-one mapping between articulation and acoustics would be beneficial to other areas such as speech pathology, speaker verification, speech recognition and speech synthesis. In this dissertation, two articulatory configurations for each liquid sound were studied (a "retroflex" /r/ vs. a "bunched" /r/, and a light /l/ vs. a dark /l/). Different from previous work on liquids, finite element analysis has been performed to obtain the acoustic responses of the three-dimensional (3-D) vocal tract models, which are based on volumetric magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Area function models were derived based on the wave propagation property inside the vocal tract. The retroflex /r/ and the bunched /r/ show similar patterns of F1-F3 but very different spacing between F4 and F5. The results from the formant acoustic sensitivity functions and simple-tube vocal tract models suggested that this F4/F5 difference can be explained largely by differences in whether the long cavity behind the palatal constriction acts as a half- or a quarter-wavelength resonator. For both the retroflex /r/ and the bunched /r/, F4 and F5 (along with F3 for the particular speakers studied in this research) come from the long back cavity. However, these formants are half wavelength resonances for the retroflex /r/, but quarter wavelength resonances for the bunched /r/. While both the dark /l/ and the light /l/ have a linguo-alveolar contact and two lateral channels, they differ in the length of the linguo-alveolar contact and in the presence of the linguopalatal contacts caused by raising the sides of the tongue. Both have similar patterns in F1-F3, but differ in the number and locations of zeros in spectrum. For the dark /l/, only one zero occurs below 6 kHz and it is produced by the cross mode posterior to the linguo-alveolar contact. For the light /l/, three zeros below 6 kHz are produced by the asymmetrical channels, the supralingual cavity and the cross mode posterior to the linguo-alveolar contact. The results from two simple vocal tract models show that the lateral channels have to be asymmetrical with an effective length between 3-6 cm to get a zero in the region of F3-F5. Based on the Buckeye database, the acoustic variability and discriminative power of liquids were studied with the mel-frequency band energy coefficients as acoustic parameter. Analysis of variance shows that the inter-speaker variability of /r/ is larger than any other phonemes except /sh/, /s/ and /zh/. On average, /r/ and /l/ have larger inter-speaker variability than any other broad phonetic class. The F-ratio averages of liquids are larger than glides, fricatives, affricates and stops, but smaller than nasals. The speaker identification experiments show that the ranking of the average discriminative power for liquids and other broad phonetic classes is: /r/ > Glides > /l/ > Affricates > Fricatives > Stops > Nasals > Vowels

Comparative study of “Mimeyori zoshi” and “Ruiyun”: With a Focus on protagonist’s bizarre incident of going through physical transformation

“Liaozhani Zhiyi” is a short story collection by Pu Shongling (1640-1715) in The Qing Dynasty. This book spread to Japan during the Edo Period and adapted by Yomihon writers. “Mimeyori zoshi”, was published between 1843 and 1848. It depicts common people’s life and interpersonal relationships of the Edo era. In the epilogue Ryutei Senka describes the protagonist’s in the original play. He also had mentioned that his plots derived from “Ruiyun”. More than simply borrowing content from “Liaozhani Zhiyi” in “Mimeyori zoshi”, Senka also wove in cultural elements from traditional Japanese literature, giving the work a new life that is a sense of reality and local elements tand for Edo’s readers. In this article, I will discuss Ryutei Senka’s Yomihon “Mimeyori zoshi”. Parts of plots are adapted from “Ruiyun” of “Liaozhani Zhiyi”. I will explore the relations between the two works, their characteristics and value in order to examine a facet of the influence by “Liaozhani Zhiyi” on the Edo literature. Through these two works, we not only perceive the ways Senka adapted “Liaozhani Zhiyi”, but also gain a view of the cultural interchange between China and Japan in the Edo Period

GANS-based data augmentation for citrus disease severity detection using deep learning

Recently, many Deep Learning models have been employed to classify different kinds of plant diseases, but very little work has been done for disease severity detection. However, it is more important to master the severities of plant diseases accurately and timely, as it helps to make effective decisions to protect the plants from being further infected and reduce financial loss. In this paper, based on the Huanglongbing (HLB)-infected leaf images obtained from PlantVillage and crowdAI, we created a dataset with 5,406 citrus leaf images infected by HLB. Then six different kinds of popular models were trained to perform the severity detection of citrus HLB with the goal to find which types of models are more suitable to detect HLB severity with the same training circumstance. The experimental results show that the Inception_v3 model with epochs=60 can achieve higher accuracy than that of other models for severity detection with an accuracy of 74.38% due to its highly computational efficiency and small number of parameters. Additionally, aiming for evaluating whether GANs-based data augmentation can contribute to improve the model learning performance, we adopted DCGANs (Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks) to augment the original training dataset up to two times itself. Finally, a new training dataset with 14,056 leaf images composed by the original training images and the augmented ones were used to train the Inception_v3 model. As a result, we achieved an accuracy of 92.60%, about 20% higher than that of the Inception_v3 model trained by the original training dataset, which suggested that the GANs-based data augmentation is very useful to improve the model learning performance

LE-SSL-MOS: Self-Supervised Learning MOS Prediction with Listener Enhancement

Recently, researchers have shown an increasing interest in automatically predicting the subjective evaluation for speech synthesis systems. This prediction is a challenging task, especially on the out-of-domain test set. In this paper, we proposed a novel fusion model for MOS prediction that combines supervised and unsupervised approaches. In the supervised aspect, we developed an SSL-based predictor called LE-SSL-MOS. The LE-SSL-MOS utilizes pre-trained self-supervised learning models and further improves prediction accuracy by utilizing the opinion scores of each utterance in the listener enhancement branch. In the unsupervised aspect, two steps are contained: we fine-tuned the unit language model (ULM) using highly intelligible domain data to improve the correlation of an unsupervised metric - SpeechLMScore. Another is that we utilized ASR confidence as a new metric with the help of ensemble learning. To our knowledge, this is the first architecture that fuses supervised and unsupervised methods for MOS prediction. With these approaches, our experimental results on the VoiceMOS Challenge 2023 show that LE-SSL-MOS performs better than the baseline. Our fusion system achieved an absolute improvement of 13% over LE-SSL-MOS on the noisy and enhanced speech track. Our system ranked 1st and 2nd, respectively, in the French speech synthesis track and the challenge's noisy and enhanced speech track.Comment: accepted in IEEE-ASRU202

High-Mobility and Bias-Stable Field-Effect Transistors Based on Lead-Free Formamidinium Tin Iodide Perovskites

Electronic devices based on tin halide perovskites often exhibit a poor operational stability. Here, we report an additive engineering strategy to realize high-performance and stable field-effect transistors (FETs) based on 3D formamidinium tin iodide (FASnI3) films. By comparatively studying the modification effects of two additives, i.e., phenethylammonium iodide and 4-fluorophenylethylammonium iodide via combined experimental and theoretical investigations, we unambiguously point out the general effects of phenethylammonium (PEA) and its fluorinated derivative (FPEA) in enhancing crystallization of FASnI3 films and the unique role of fluorination in reducing structural defects, suppressing oxidation of Sn2+ and blocking oxygen and water involved defect reactions. The optimized FPEA-modified FASnI3 FETs reach a record high field-effect mobility of 15.1 cm2/(V·s) while showing negligible hysteresis. The devices exhibit less than 10% and 3% current variation during over 2 h continuous bias stressing and 4200-cycle switching test, respectively, representing the best stability achieved so far for all Sn-based FETs.</p

High-Mobility and Bias-Stable Field-Effect Transistors Based on Lead-Free Formamidinium Tin Iodide Perovskites

Electronic devices based on tin halide perovskites often exhibit a poor operational stability. Here, we report an additive engineering strategy to realize high-performance and stable field-effect transistors (FETs) based on 3D formamidinium tin iodide (FASnI3) films. By comparatively studying the modification effects of two additives, i.e., phenethylammonium iodide and 4-fluorophenylethylammonium iodide via combined experimental and theoretical investigations, we unambiguously point out the general effects of phenethylammonium (PEA) and its fluorinated derivative (FPEA) in enhancing crystallization of FASnI3 films and the unique role of fluorination in reducing structural defects, suppressing oxidation of Sn2+ and blocking oxygen and water involved defect reactions. The optimized FPEA-modified FASnI3 FETs reach a record high field-effect mobility of 15.1 cm2/(V·s) while showing negligible hysteresis. The devices exhibit less than 10% and 3% current variation during over 2 h continuous bias stressing and 4200-cycle switching test, respectively, representing the best stability achieved so far for all Sn-based FETs.</p

Microbial traits determine soil C emission in response to fresh carbon inputs in forests across biomes

Soil priming is a microbial-driven process, which determines key soil–climate feedbacks in response to fresh carbon inputs. Despite its importance, the microbial traits behind this process are largely undetermined. Knowledge of the role of these traits is integral to advance our understanding of how soil microbes regulate carbon (C) emissions in forests, which support the largest soil carbon stocks globally. Using metagenomic sequencing and C-glucose, we provide unprecedented evidence that microbial traits explain a unique portion of the variation in soil priming across forest biomes from tropical to cold temperature regions. We show that microbial functional profiles associated with the degradation of labile C, especially rapid simple sugar metabolism, drive soil priming in different forests. Genes involved in the degradation of lignin and aromatic compounds were negatively associated with priming effects in temperate forests, whereas the highest level of soil priming was associated with β-glucosidase genes in tropical/subtropical forests. Moreover, we reconstructed, for the first time, 42 whole bacterial genomes associated with the soil priming effect and found that these organisms support important gene machinery involved in priming effect. Collectively, our work demonstrates the importance of microbial traits to explain soil priming across forest biomes and suggests that rapid carbon metabolism is responsible for priming effects in forests. This knowledge is important because it advances our understanding on the microbial mechanisms mediating soil–climate feedbacks at a continental scale.This work were financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41907031), the Chinese Academy of Sciences “Light of West China” Program for Introduced Talent in the West, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31570440, 31270484), the Key International Scientific and Technological Cooperation and Exchange Project of Shaanxi Province, China (2020KWZ-010), the 2021 First Funds for Central Government to Guide Local Science and Technology Development in Qinghai Province (2021ZY002), the i-LINK +2018 (LINKA20069) from CSIC, and a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (RYC2018-025483-I

Colorimetric and Fluorescent Dual-Mode Detection of Aflatoxin B1 Using Composite Nanomaterial

In this study, a highly sensitive portable platform with colorimetric and fluorescent dual-mode signal output for the detection of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) was developed based on the reaction between glutathione and a composite nanomaterial consisting of manganese dioxide (MnO2) nanoparticles and graphene quantum dots (GQDs) as a substrate. The recognition probe was prepared by using silica nanoparticles as a carrier to enrich glutathione and AFB1 aptamers. Under optimal conditions, analytical figures of merit such as specificity of this method were studied. The regression equation for colorimetric signal was ΔA = − 0.275 − 0.021lgC and the detection limit was 2.732 × 10-12 g/mL; the regression equation for fluorescence signal was ΔF = 928.733 + 71.779lgC and the detection limit was 1.667 × 10-12 g/mL. Both methods had good detection specificity. The proposed method was applied in the detection of food samples, such as milk, rice, oatmeal, soy sauce and white vinegar with higher accuracy, compared with the traditional method