“My Work Constitutes a Form of Participatory Action”

Ai Xiaoming, born in 1953 in Wuhan, is a retired professor in the literature department of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-Sen University. Following an academic career in comparative literature, she came out as a public intellectual, initially through involvement in defending women’s and gays rights. She organised many activities to raise awareness on issues such as discrimination and violence against women, the most famous of which was the translation and staging of The Vagina Monologueswith her students. While she initially used documentary filmmaking as a tool to record and disseminate these activities for educative purposes, she quickly extended her work on video to the documenting of current cases of public violations of rights. In the past few years, she has produced a corpus of around ten independent documentaries on subjects such as village elections and property rights, AIDS, and the Sichuan earthquake scandal. (JP

The Power of Electronic Channels and Electronic Political Efficacy: Electronic Participation Discourse

Electronic participation (e-participation) has become an increasingly important phenomenon. Drawing from the information system success model and political efficacy, we built a research model that investigates how government feedback quality, information quality, and channel quality associated with an e-participating channel can affect people’s electronic political efficacy, which, in turn, can influence users’ post-adoption attitudes and behaviors. We also explored the relationship between offline political efficacy and electronic political efficacy. Based on data that we collected from a survey, we found that electronic political efficacy distinctly differs from offline political efficacy though the latter influences the former one. Four channel features (i.e., government feedback quality, information quality, media richness, and social presence of citizens) can affect electronic political efficacy, which, in turn, has a positive influence on e-participation continuance intention and positive word of mouth. We also found that government feedback quality negatively moderated the impact that offline political efficacy had on electronic political efficacy. This study provides useful insights for both researchers and practitioners on the power of electronic channels in electronic participation in public discourse

Photoconductivity of Single-crystalline Selenium Nanotubes

Photoconductivity of single-crystalline selenium nanotubes (SCSNT) under a range of illumination intensities of a 633nm laser is carried out with a novel two terminal device arrangement at room temperature. It's found that SCSNT forms Schottky barriers with the W and Au contacts, and the barrier height is a function of the light intensities. In low illumination regime below 1.46x10E-4 muWmum-2, the Au-Se-W hybrid structure exhibits sharp switch on/off behavior, and the turn-on voltages decrease with increasing illuminating intensities. In the high illumination regime above 7x10E-4 muWmum-2, the device exhibits ohmic conductance with a photoconductivity as high as 0.59Ohmcm-1, significantly higher that reported values for carbon and GaN nanotubes. This finding suggests that SCSNT is potentially a good photo-sensor material as well we a very effective solar cell material.Comment: 12pages including 5 figures, submitted to Nanotechnolog

“My Work Constitutes a Form of Participatory Action”

Ai Xiaoming, born in 1953 in Wuhan, is a retired professor in the literature department of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-Sen University. Following an academic career in comparative literature, she came out as a public intellectual, initially through involvement in defending women’s and gays rights. She organised many activities to raise awareness on issues such as discrimination and violence against women, the most famous of which was the translation and staging of The Vagina Monologueswith her students. While she initially used documentary filmmaking as a tool to record and disseminate these activities for educative purposes, she quickly extended her work on video to the documenting of current cases of public violations of rights. In the past few years, she has produced a corpus of around ten independent documentaries on subjects such as village elections and property rights, AIDS, and the Sichuan earthquake scandal. (JP

« Mon travail représente une forme d’action participative »

Ai Xiaoming, née à Wuhan en 1953, est professeure retraitée du Département de littérature de l’Université Sun Yat- Sen de Canton. Après une carrière universitaire en littérature comparée, elle se distingue en tant qu’intellectuelle engagée en s’impliquant dans un premier temps dans la défense des droits des femmes et des homosexuels. Elle organise alors de nombreuses actions ayant pour but de sensibiliser à la discrimination et à la violence exercée à l’égard des femmes, dont la plus célèbre est la traduction et la mise en scène, avec ses étudiants, des Monologues du vagin. Utilisé tout d’abord comme un outil visant à enregistrer et diffuser ces activités dans un cadre purement pédagogique, la vidéo devient rapidement, pour Ai Xiaoming le moyen de rendre compte des cas de violation des droits des citoyens par les institutions publiques en Chine. Ces dernières années, elle a constitué un corpus d’une dizaine de documentaires indépendants abordant des sujets tels que l’élection des comités de village, le droit de propriété des terres, le VIH/SIDA, et le scandale qui a suivi le tremblement de terre du Sichuan. (JP

Direct numerical simulation of Taylor-Couette flow with vertical asymmetric rough walls

Direct numerical simulations are performed to explore the effects of rotating direction of the vertical asymmetric rough wall on the transport properties of Taylor-Couette (TC) flow up to a Taylor number of $\textit{Ta} = 2.39 \times 10^7$. It is shown that compared to the smooth wall, the rough wall with vertical asymmetric strips can enhance the dimensionless torque \textit{Nu}$_\omega$, and more importantly, at high \textit{Ta} clockwise rotation of the inner rough wall (the fluid is sheared by the steeper slope side of the strips) results in a significantly bigger torque enhancement as compared to the counter-clockwise rotation (the fluid is sheared by the smaller slope side of the strips) due to the larger convective contribution to the angular velocity flux, although the rotating direction has a negligible effect on the torque at low \textit{Ta}. The larger torque enhancement caused by the clockwise rotation of vertical asymmetric rough wall at high \textit{Ta} is then explained by the stronger coupling between the rough wall and the bulk due to the larger biased azimuthal velocity towards the rough wall at the mid-gap of TC system, the increased intensity of turbulence manifesting by larger Reynolds stress and thinner boundary layer, and the more significant contribution of the pressure force on the surface of rough wall to the torque.Comment: 17 pages,11 figure

DEM Study of Wet Cohesive Particles in the Presence of Liquid Bridges in a Gas Fluidized Bed

A modified discrete element method (DEM) was constructed by compositing an additional liquid-bridge module into the traditional soft-sphere interaction model. Simulations of particles with and without liquid bridges are conducted in a bubbling fluidized bed. The geometry of the simulated bed is the same as the one in Müller’s experiment (Müller et al., 2008). A comparison between the dry and the wet particular systems is carried out on the bubble behavior, the bed fluctuation, and the mixing process. The bubble in the dry system possesses a regular round shape and falling of scattered particles exists while the bubble boundary of the wet particles becomes rough with branches of agglomerates stretching into it. The mixing of the dry system is quicker than that of the wet system. Several interparticle liquid contents are applied in this work to find their influence on the kinetic characteristic of the wet particle flow. With an increase of liquid content, the mixing process costs more time to be completed. Symmetrical profiles of the velocity and granular temperature are found for two low liquid contents (0.001% and 0.01%), while it is antisymmetrical for the highest liquid content (0.1%)

Highly Efficient Blue-Emitting CsPbBr3 Perovskite Nanocrystals through Neodymium Doping.

Colloidal CsPbX3 (X = Br, Cl, and I) perovskite nanocrystals exhibit tunable bandgaps over the entire visible spectrum and high photoluminescence quantum yields in the green and red regions. However, the lack of highly efficient blue-emitting perovskite nanocrystals limits their development for optoelectronic applications. Herein, neodymium (III) (Nd3+) doped CsPbBr3 nanocrystals are prepared through the ligand-assisted reprecipitation method at room temperature with tunable photoemission from green to deep blue. A blue-emitting nanocrystal with a central wavelength at 459 nm, an exceptionally high photoluminescence quantum yield of 90%, and a spectral width of 19 nm is achieved. First principles calculations reveal that the increase in photoluminescence quantum yield upon doping is driven by an enhancement of the exciton binding energy due to increased electron and hole effective masses and an increase in oscillator strength due to shortening of the Pb-Br bond. Putting these results together, an all-perovskite white light-emitting diode is successfully fabricated, demonstrating that B-site composition engineering is a reliable strategy to further exploit the perovskite family for wider optoelectronic applications