Idealization of Motherhood in Advertisements of Maternal and Child Products

Advertisements both reflect and shape ideology; they influence motherhood ideology without failure. This study aims to examine the mother images in advertisements of maternal and child products in China and then investigate the social meanings behind the representations. First, advertisements were collected from TMALL.com, the largest e-commerce platform in China; then a multimodal discourse analysis method with a content analysis method was adopted to explore the details of the advertisements. Through the analysis, the study found that mothers in the advertisements were typically portrayed as attractive, well-groomed middle-class women, which can be termed as “yummy mummy”. In addition, intensive mothering is emphasized among mothers, in which mothers are primarily caregivers. Several reasons contribute to this phenomenon. First, the prevalence of idealized mothers is due to the emergence of a new generation of mothers, who grew up in a more affluent era in China. Second, it is propelled by consumerism in contemporary consumer culture, though the trend indicates aesthetic freedom

The Extended Wronskian Determinant Approach and the Iterative Solutions of One-Dimensional Dirac Equation

An approximation method, namely, the Extended Wronskian Determinant Approach, is suggested to study the one-dimensional Dirac equation. An integral equation which can be solved by iterative procedure to find the wave functions is established. We employ this approach to study the one-dimensional Dirac equation with one-well potential, and give the energy levels and wave functions up to the first order iterative approximation. For double-well potential, the energy levels up to the first order approximation are given.Comment: 3 figures, 21 page

Analysis and application of the En transposable element and genetic study of resistance to Bipolaris maydis in maize

Since its original isolation and molecular characterization, the En (Enhancer) transposable element has been studied extensively. It also has been used as a tool to tag and isolate genes and to elucidate mechanisms of transposition and gene regulation. The first aspect of this dissertation is on the analysis and application of En. Three En-mutable alleles at the maize A2 locus harboring an autonomous En element, but showing different somatic variegation patterns, were studied by PCR and sequence analysis. It is shown that a fine variegation type (late reversions) is caused by En insertion in the 5[superscript]\u27 region, whereas two coarse variegation types (early reversions) are caused by En insertions in the 3[superscript]\u27 region, in the coding sequence of the intronless A2 gene. In the second project, at least one En-mutable allele has been relocated to each of the 20 maize chromosome arms. Because En has been shown to transpose more frequently to closely linked sites, the relocation of En elements to chromosome arms (chromosome labeling) should facilitate the gene tagging process. Progress in transposon tagging of Rp1, a resistance gene to Puccinia sorghi, is reported in the third project. Instability of Rp1 in different transposable element-laden lines is compared;The second aspect of this dissertation is the genetic study of resistance to Bipolaris maydis. This resistance was determined to be monogenically controlled in the 1970\u27s. However, non-monogenic types of resistance were also reported. Data are reported that support a two-gene model of resistance. Two transposable element lines, one chromosome labeling line, the T line, and a Cy (Cycler) line (both Rhm/Rhm) showed ~10[superscript]-5 mutation rates of Rhm to rhm when tested against the recessive rhm/rhm line. The hybrid of the two lines, however, produced ~5% resistant individuals when tested against the same rhm line. It is hypothesized that these two lines possessed two different dominant genes and recombination between the two genes yielded the ~5% resistant individuals. A genetic test showed results consistent with the two-gene model. The possibility of adjacent-1 segregation with the T line has not been excluded, which might result in viable gametes lacking Rhm and expose the effect of the tester rhm allele which will then produce resistant seedlings. A molecular marker exchange analysis is proposed to exclude this possibility

SCOPE: Scalable Composite Optimization for Learning on Spark

Many machine learning models, such as logistic regression~(LR) and support vector machine~(SVM), can be formulated as composite optimization problems. Recently, many distributed stochastic optimization~(DSO) methods have been proposed to solve the large-scale composite optimization problems, which have shown better performance than traditional batch methods. However, most of these DSO methods are not scalable enough. In this paper, we propose a novel DSO method, called \underline{s}calable \underline{c}omposite \underline{op}timization for l\underline{e}arning~({SCOPE}), and implement it on the fault-tolerant distributed platform \mbox{Spark}. SCOPE is both computation-efficient and communication-efficient. Theoretical analysis shows that SCOPE is convergent with linear convergence rate when the objective function is convex. Furthermore, empirical results on real datasets show that SCOPE can outperform other state-of-the-art distributed learning methods on Spark, including both batch learning methods and DSO methods