Absent or Ambivalent Mothers and Avoidant Children – An Evolutionary Reading of Zhang Kangkang’s Motherhood Stories

This evolutionary reading of the Chinese writer Zhang Kangkang’s maternal stories explores the specificities and agency of mothers and of children. The dilemma confronted by physically absent and/or emotionally detached mothers, depicted in Zhang’s stories, entails women’s strategic intelligence to make tradeoffs between their reproductive efforts and their life stage and conditions. It sheds light on conditional maternal commitment, the necessity and feasibility of cooperative childrearing, and various mother–child conflicts.Zhang’s texts also describe insecurely attached infants and children who sink into a nonchalant and avoidant state after experiencing distress, terror, or resentment due to insensitive and unpredictable mothering. Absent and ambivalent mothers are generally harassed by the feeling of guilt, resulting from conditional maternal commitment, mother-child conflicts, and the high expectations of the motherhood myth. Children’s counterstrategies also regulate and enhance maternal or alloparental care

Zhang Kangkangin feminismi ja evoluutio : Vuoropuhelu darwinismin ja sukupuolentutkimuksen välillä

This dissertation studies the work of Zhang Kangkang (a contemporary Chinese woman writer, 1950- ) in the light of evolutionary feminism (also called Darwinian feminism, which studies gender issues from an evolutionary perspective, brings feminist concerns into the fields of evolutionary biology, psychology and sociobiology, and illuminates and rectifies androcentric biases in these fields). I have three main research goals: the first is to present the similarities and congeniality of Zhang and evolutionary feminism, the second to explore whether Zhang has strong feminist concerns, and the third to try to bring Darwinism and feminism together and show their compatibility. Lying at the intersection of literature, feminist criticism, and evolutionary studies, my approach is based on transcultural and transdisciplinary comparisons. My primary texts include Zhang s writings and the literature on evolutionary feminist theory by scholars including Anne Campbell, Patricia Gowaty, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Barbara Smuts, Griet Vandermassen, and Marlene Zuk. I find that these two textual corpuses converge around five topics: sex differences, the mother-child bond, mating systems, violence, and infanticide. I discuss in depth how Zhang s descriptions of motherhood, love and political activity in China highlight these intersections. Both Zhang and evolutionary feminists try to uncover the evolved tendencies of sex differences in reproductive interests and strategies, understand women s reproductive behavior, highlight both male and female competitiveness and violence, as well as other predispositions that we may consider morally undesirable. Even Zhang, who has much in common with evolutionary insights, several times disproves or even tries to deny what she has revealed about female behavior in her stories. But evolutionary theory is descriptive and does not pursue science and value together. On the other hand, while evolutionary theory can describe human origins and propensities, and the roots of gender and social inequality, solving possible moral dilemmas entails the involvement of ethics, literature, and feminist studies for prescriptive guidance in order to improve our societies and strengthen gender equality.Väitös on vertaileva tutkimus kiinalaisen nykykirjailijan Zhang Kangkangin ja evoluutiotriaa hyödyntävän feminismin jota kutsutaan myös darwinilaiseksi feminismiksi välillä. Darwinilainen feminismi tutkii sukupuolta kehitysopillisesta perspektiivistä, tuo esille feminismin näkökulmia kehitysbiologiaan ja sosiobiologiaan, ja pyrkii korjaamaan näiden alojen mieskeskeisiä oletuksia. Työssä on kolme tutkimustavoitetta: Ensiksi, paikantaa yhtäläisyyksiä ja samanlaisia painotuksia Zhangin ja darwinilaisen feminismin välillä. Toiseksi, selivttää onko Zhangilla vahvoja feministisiä kysymyksenasetteluja. Kolmanneksi, yritän lähentää darwinismia ja feminismiä jo osoittaa niiden yhteensopivuutta.. Tutkimus on kirjallisuuden, feminismin ja evoluutio-oppien leikkauskohdassa ja se hyödyntää vertailevaa poikkikulttuurista ja poikkitieteellistä lähestymistapaa. Luen Zhangin kirjoituksia ja darwinilaisiä feministejä kuten Anne Campbellin, Patricia Gowatyn, Sarah Blaffer Hrdyn, Barbara Smutsin, Griet Vandermassenin ja Marlene Zukin tulkintoja. Ilmeni, että on viisi teemaa, jossa Zhang ja darwinilainen feminismi kohtaavat: sukupuolten erot, äiti-lapsi suhde, partnerin valinta, väkivalta, ja lapsensurma. Teos synvetyy näihin yhtenäisen kiinnostuksen alueisiin ja sijoittaa Zhangin kuvailemia kokemuksia äitiydestä, rakkaudesta ja poliittisesta toiminnasta evoluutioteoreettiseen keskusteluun. Sekä Zhang että darwinilaiset feministit pyrkivät ymmärtämään sukupuolitettuja seksuaalisia strategioita ja lisääntymiseen liittyvää käyttäytymistä. Tähän kuuluu ilmiöitä, joita voi pitää poliittisesti ja moraalisesti epätoivottavina. Jopa Zhang usein hylkää tai yrittää kieltää sen, mitä hän on tarinoissaan paljastanut naisten käyttytymisestä. Mutta evoluutioteoria ei ota moraalisesti kantaa eikä pyri sekoittamaan tiedettä ja arvoja. Toisaalta, vaikka evoluutioteoria auttaa ymmärtämään ihmisen alkuperää ja taipumuksia ja sukupuolten välisen epätasa-arvon juuria, se tarvitsee eettistä johdatusta muilta aloilta kuten filosofiasta, kirjallisuudesta ja feministisestä tutkimuksessa, jotta voisimme parantaa yhteiskuntaa ja tukea tasa-arvoa

Reprogramming towards Endothelial Cells for Vascular Regeneration

AbstractEndothelial damage and dysfunction are implicated in cardiovascular pathological changes and the development of vascular diseases. In view of the fact that the spontaneous endothelial cell (EC) regeneration is a slow and insufficient process, it is of great significance to explore alternative cell sources capable of generating functional ECs to repair damaged endothelium. Indeed, recent achievements of cell reprogramming to convert somatic cells to other cell types provide new powerful approaches to study endothelial regeneration. Based on progress in the research field, the present review aims to summarize the strategies and mechanisms of generating endothelial cells through reprogramming from somatic cells, and to examine what this means for the potential application of cell therapy in the clinic

Effect of Zn doping on magnetic order and superconductivity in LaFeAsO

We report Zn-doping effect in the parent and F-doped LaFeAsO oxy-arsenides. Slight Zn doping in LaFe$_{1-x}$Zn$_{x}$AsO drastically suppresses the resistivity anomaly around 150 K associated with the antiferromagnetic (AFM) spin density wave (SDW) in the parent compound. The measurements of magnetic susceptibility and thermopower confirm further the effect of Zn doping on AFM order. Meanwhile Zn doping does not affect or even enhances the $T_c$ of LaFe$_{1-x}$Zn$_{x}$AsO$_{0.9}$F$_{0.1}$, in contrast to the effect of Zn doping in high-$T_c$ cuprates. We found that the solubility of Zn content ($x$) is limited to less than 0.1 in both systems and further Zn doping (i.e., $x$ $\geq$ 0.1) causes phase separation. Our study clearly indicates that the non-magnetic impurity of Zn$^{2+}$ ions doped in the Fe$_2$As$_2$ layers affects selectively the AFM order, and superconductivity remains robust against the Zn doping in the F-doped superconductors.Comment: 7 figures, 13 pages; revised version with more dat

Global distributions of age- and sex-related arterial stiffness:systematic review and meta-analysis of 167 studies with 509,743 participants

Background: Arterial stiffening is central to the vascular ageing process and a powerful predictor and cause of diverse vascular pathologies and mortality. We investigated age and sex trajectories, regional differences, and global reference values of arterial stiffness as assessed by pulse wave velocity (PWV). Methods: Measurements of brachial-ankle or carotid-femoral PWV (baPWV or cfPWV) in generally healthy participants published in three electronic databases between database inception and August 24th, 2020 were included, either as individual participant-level or summary data received from collaborators (n = 248,196) or by extraction from published reports (n = 274,629). Quality was appraised using the Joanna Briggs Instrument. Variation in PWV was estimated using mixed-effects meta-regression and Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape. Findings: The search yielded 8920 studies, and 167 studies with 509,743 participants from 34 countries were included. PWV depended on age, sex, and country. Global age-standardised means were 12.5 m/s (95% confidence interval: 12.1–12.8 m/s) for baPWV and 7.45 m/s (95% CI: 7.11–7.79 m/s) for cfPWV. Males had higher global levels than females of 0.77 m/s for baPWV (95% CI: 0.75–0.78 m/s) and 0.35 m/s for cfPWV (95% CI: 0.33–0.37 m/s), but sex differences in baPWV diminished with advancing age. Compared to Europe, baPWV was substantially higher in the Asian region (+1.83 m/s, P = 0.0014), whereas cfPWV was higher in the African region (+0.41 m/s, P &lt; 0.0001) and differed more by country (highest in Poland, Russia, Iceland, France, and China; lowest in Spain, Belgium, Canada, Finland, and Argentina). High vs. other country income was associated with lower baPWV (−0.55 m/s, P = 0.048) and cfPWV (−0.41 m/s, P &lt; 0.0001).Interpretation: China and other Asian countries featured high PWV, which by known associations with central blood pressure and pulse pressure may partly explain higher Asian risk for intracerebral haemorrhage and small vessel stroke. Reference values provided may facilitate use of PWV as a marker of vascular ageing, for prediction of vascular risk and death, and for designing future therapeutic interventions. Funding: This study was supported by the excellence initiative VASCage funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, by the National Science Foundation of China, and the Science and Technology Planning Project of Hunan Province. Detailed funding information is provided as part of the Acknowledgments after the main text.</p

Visual and Textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble for Few-Shot Segmentation and Beyond

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the novel classes with a few annotated images. Due to CLIP's advantages of aligning visual and textual information, the integration of CLIP can enhance the generalization ability of FSS model. However, even with the CLIP model, the existing CLIP-based FSS methods are still subject to the biased prediction towards base classes, which is caused by the class-specific feature level interactions. To solve this issue, we propose a visual and textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble Network (PGMA-Net). It employs a class-agnostic mask assembly process to alleviate the bias, and formulates diverse tasks into a unified manner by assembling the prior through affinity. Specifically, the class-relevant textual and visual features are first transformed to class-agnostic prior in the form of probability map. Then, a Prior-Guided Mask Assemble Module (PGMAM) including multiple General Assemble Units (GAUs) is introduced. It considers diverse and plug-and-play interactions, such as visual-textual, inter- and intra-image, training-free, and high-order ones. Lastly, to ensure the class-agnostic ability, a Hierarchical Decoder with Channel-Drop Mechanism (HDCDM) is proposed to flexibly exploit the assembled masks and low-level features, without relying on any class-specific information. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in the FSS task, with mIoU of $77.6$ on $\text{PASCAL-}5^i$ and $59.4$ on $\text{COCO-}20^i$ in 1-shot scenario. Beyond this, we show that without extra re-training, the proposed PGMA-Net can solve bbox-level and cross-domain FSS, co-segmentation, zero-shot segmentation (ZSS) tasks, leading an any-shot segmentation framework

Towards General Low-Light Raw Noise Synthesis and Modeling

Modeling and synthesizing low-light raw noise is a fundamental problem for computational photography and image processing applications. Although most recent works have adopted physics-based models to synthesize noise, the signal-independent noise in low-light conditions is far more complicated and varies dramatically across camera sensors, which is beyond the description of these models. To address this issue, we introduce a new perspective to synthesize the signal-independent noise by a generative model. Specifically, we synthesize the signal-dependent and signal-independent noise in a physics- and learning-based manner, respectively. In this way, our method can be considered as a general model, that is, it can simultaneously learn different noise characteristics for different ISO levels and generalize to various sensors. Subsequently, we present an effective multi-scale discriminator termed Fourier transformer discriminator (FTD) to distinguish the noise distribution accurately. Additionally, we collect a new low-light raw denoising (LRD) dataset for training and benchmarking. Qualitative validation shows that the noise generated by our proposed noise model can be highly similar to the real noise in terms of distribution. Furthermore, extensive denoising experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on different sensors.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. Accepted by ICCV 202

Transdifferentiated Human Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells are a New Potential Cell Source for Endothelial Regeneration

Endothelial dysfunction is widely implicated in cardiovascular pathological changes and development of vascular disease. In view of the fact that the spontaneous endothelial cell (EC) regeneration is a slow and insufficient process, it is of great interest to explore alternative cell sources capable of generating functional ECs. Vascular smooth muscle cell (SMC) composes the majority of the vascular wall and retains phenotypic plasticity in response to various stimuli. The aim of this study is to test the feasibility of the conversion of SMC into functional EC through the use of reprogramming factors. Human SMCs are first dedifferentiated for 4 days to achieve a vascular progenitor state expressing CD34, by introducing transcription factors OCT4, SOX2, KLF4 and c-MYC. These SMC-derived progenitors are then differentiated along the endothelial lineage. The SMC-converted ECs exhibit typical endothelial markers expression and endothelial functions in vitro, in vivo and in disease model. Further comprehensive analysis indicates that mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition is requisite to initiate SMCs reprogramming into vascular progenitors and that members of the Notch signalling pathway regulate further differentiation of the progenitors into endothelial lineage. Together, we provide the first evidence of the feasibility of the conversion of human SMCs towards endothelial lineage through an intermediate vascular progenitor state induced by reprogramming.British Heart Foundation [RG/14/6/31144, RM/13/2/30158]; Oak Foundation; International Cooperation and Exchanges NSFC [81220108004]; China Scholarship CouncilSCI(E)ARTICLE

Learning with Noisy Low-Cost MOS for Image Quality Assessment via Dual-Bias Calibration

Learning based image quality assessment (IQA) models have obtained impressive performance with the help of reliable subjective quality labels, where mean opinion score (MOS) is the most popular choice. However, in view of the subjective bias of individual annotators, the labor-abundant MOS (LA-MOS) typically requires a large collection of opinion scores from multiple annotators for each image, which significantly increases the learning cost. In this paper, we aim to learn robust IQA models from low-cost MOS (LC-MOS), which only requires very few opinion scores or even a single opinion score for each image. More specifically, we consider the LC-MOS as the noisy observation of LA-MOS and enforce the IQA model learned from LC-MOS to approach the unbiased estimation of LA-MOS. In this way, we represent the subjective bias between LC-MOS and LA-MOS, and the model bias between IQA predictions learned from LC-MOS and LA-MOS (i.e., dual-bias) as two latent variables with unknown parameters. By means of the expectation-maximization based alternating optimization, we can jointly estimate the parameters of the dual-bias, which suppresses the misleading of LC-MOS via a gated dual-bias calibration (GDBC) module. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exploration of robust IQA model learning from noisy low-cost labels. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on four popular IQA datasets show that the proposed method is robust toward different bias rates and annotation numbers and significantly outperforms the other learning based IQA models when only LC-MOS is available. Furthermore, we also achieve comparable performance with respect to the other models learned with LA-MOS