Relocation of Cultural Identity in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Maxine Hong Kingston, born in California, America in 1940, is a celebrated Chinese-American writer. And she is the most representative female writer in promoting the prosperity of Chinese-American literature in the late 20 century. As a Chinese American writer’s unique identity, she pays special attention to Chinese-Americans in her works. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book is her first real novel published in 1989. Its publication brought strong social shock and numerous literary critics and scholars to evaluate her works from different perspectives in a variety of literary theory. Unlike her previous works, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book transfers the focus from the reconstruction of Chinese-American history to the Chinese American cultural identity. Through careful reading of the text, this paper, with Homi K. Bhabha’s post-colonial theory as a theoretical base, aims to explore the reconstruction and relocation of cultural identity after cultural perplexity and disillusionment, trying to open up a new way out for Chinese-Americans.

Americans’ Eastward Journey - Intercultural Communication in The Portrait of a Lady

In the late 19th century, a heat of travel abroad especially to Europe arose among Americans. With The portrait of a Lady, noted for its international theme as the research subject, this paper intends to interpret some leading causes including context, prejudice and ethnocentrism resulting in cultural conflicts. Meanwhile, a closer observation will be given to the process and types of cultural adaptation, containing culture shock, assimilation and integration. This paper, lastly, expresses that a more smooth intercultural communication is urgently needed for an ideal culture integration

Literature Review on Morrison’s Beloved From the Perspective of New Historicism

As one of the most formally sophisticated novelists in the history of African American literature, Toni Morrison (1931-) has exerted vibrating influence upon the literary world. Her achievement in literature marks another monument in African American literature after the summit reached by Richard Wright (1908-1960) and Ralph Ellison (1914-1994). Beloved (1987), Morrison’s masterpiece, deals with the legacy of slavery in its depiction of a runaway slave’s struggle to claim the freed self. Since its publication, Beloved has inspired a considerable quantity of reviews, essays and book-length studies on various subjects with different critical methodologies both at home and abroad. Through analyzing these studies on Beloved, it can be found that part of Morrison’s project in Beloved is to subvert the mainstream white culture’s tampering of the black culture, restore their survival condition, and reconstruct the marginalized black history. Her unique way of dealing with history in fiction and the relationship between history and fiction coincides with the core of New Historicism

A New Historicist Interpretation of Beloved

According to New Historicism, there are plural histories instead of single History. For a long time, blacks’ miserable history was marginalized. This paper thinks, Morrison, in Beloved, presented their histories in the form of eye-catching stories. Such juxtaposition of literature and history rightly accords with the idea of New Historicism that literature and history have no clear border line. Thus, under the guidance of New Historicism, this paper intends to explore the hidden African Americans’ histories by analyzing Beloved so as to reconstruct the part of the blacks’ history under slavery.

A Multitask Deep Learning Model for Parsing Bridge Elements and Segmenting Defect in Bridge Inspection Images

The vast network of bridges in the United States raises a high requirement for maintenance and rehabilitation. The massive cost of manual visual inspection to assess bridge conditions is a burden to some extent. Advanced robots have been leveraged to automate inspection data collection. Automating the segmentations of multiclass elements and surface defects on the elements in the large volume of inspection image data would facilitate an efficient and effective assessment of the bridge condition. Training separate single-task networks for element parsing (i.e., semantic segmentation of multiclass elements) and defect segmentation fails to incorporate the close connection between these two tasks. Both recognizable structural elements and apparent surface defects are present in the inspection images. This paper is motivated to develop a multitask deep learning model that fully utilizes such interdependence between bridge elements and defects to boost the model's task performance and generalization. Furthermore, the study investigated the effectiveness of the proposed model designs for improving task performance, including feature decomposition, cross-talk sharing, and multi-objective loss function. A dataset with pixel-level labels of bridge elements and corrosion was developed for model training and testing. Quantitative and qualitative results from evaluating the developed multitask deep model demonstrate its advantages over the single-task-based model not only in performance (2.59% higher mIoU on bridge parsing and 1.65% on corrosion segmentation) but also in computational time and implementation capability.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the 2023 TRB Annual Meeting and publication in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board (TRR

Hemoconcentration is associated with early faster fluid rate and increased risk of persistent organ failure in acute pancreatitis patients.

Background:Controversies existed surrounding the use of hematocrit to guide early fluid therapy in acute pancreatitis (AP). The association between hematocrit, early fluid therapy, and clinical outcomes in ward AP patients needs to be investigated. Methods:Data from prospectively maintained AP database and retrospectively collected details of fluid therapy were analyzed. Patients were stratified into three groups: Group 1, hematocrit 44% at 24 h; Group 3: hematocrit >44% on admission and decreased thereafter during first 24 h. "Early" means first 24 h after admission. Baseline characteristics, early fluid rates, and clinical outcomes of the three groups were compared. Results:Among the 628 patients, Group 3 had a higher hematocrit level, greater baseline predicted severity, faster fluid rate, and more fluid volume in the first 24 h compared with Group 1 or 2. Group 3 had an increased risk for persistent organ failure (POF; odds ratio 2, 95% confidence interval [1.1-3.8], P = 0.03) compared with Group 1 after adjusting for difference in baseline clinical severity scores, there was no difference between Group 2 and Group 3 or Group 1. Multivariate regression analyses revealed that hemoconcentration and early faster fluid rate were risk factors for POF and mortality (both P < 0.05). Conclusions:Hemoconcentration is associated with faster fluid rate and POF in ward AP patients. Randomized trials comparing standardized early fast and slow fluid management is warranted