Contemporary Art and the Exhibitionary System: China as a Case Study

The challenge of contemporary art, unlike in art history, has only recently been identified in sociology. Furthermore, an overly philosophical orientation, has undermined sociological expla- nations of artistic production. To remedy this, I propose a sociology of exhibitions. This entails a shift of focus from the elusive subject matter of art towards the tangible exhibition, and the construction of a new framework: the exhibitionary system, which also stands for the physical, institutional, and network environment of exhibitions. The central question in the sociology of exhibitions is to explain how the exhibitionary system shapes artistic production. The answer was sought by observing exhibition making in the Chinese exhibitionary system, from which quantitative data about 1,525 exhibitions, held in 43 exhibition spaces between 2010 and 2016, were also collected. I argue that the exhibition context shapes the physical basis of individual artworks and the construction of an artist’s oeuvre. Through the contextualised creation of artworks for public viewing, artists aim to raise their visibility, which is crucial for artists’ career prospects and symbolic consecration. An artist’s visibility is, however, constrained by where she exhibits and with whom she co-exhibits. My method for measuring visibility reveals its binary nature, divided along a singular dimension and a collective dimension. Yet no binary division between the non- profit and for-profit is found within the exhibitionary system with regards to the selection of artists. Rather, both sectors contribute to a dual selection of marketable artists. A model of professional autonomy, which reconciles “art and the market” on the level of practices and awareness, prevails in the exhibitionary system. The sociology of exhibitions has solved persistent theoretical problems in the sociology of art. My empirical findings give rise to new research questions. Finally, I have offered a dialogue between studies of non-western and western cases within the same framework.CSC Cambridg

Solution of AntiSeepage for Mengxi River Based on Numerical Simulation of Unsaturated Seepage

Lessening the leakage of surface water can reduce the waste of water resources and ground water pollution. To solve the problem that Mengxi River could not store water enduringly, geology investigation, theoretical analysis, experiment research, and numerical simulation analysis were carried out. Firstly, the seepage mathematical model was established based on unsaturated seepage theory; secondly, the experimental equipment for testing hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated soil was developed to obtain the curve of two-phase flow. The numerical simulation of leakage in natural conditions proves the previous inference and leakage mechanism of river. At last, the seepage control capacities of different impervious materials were compared by numerical simulations. According to the engineering actuality, the impervious material was selected. The impervious measure in this paper has been proved to be effectible by hydrogeological research today

Gradient Attention Balance Network: Mitigating Face Recognition Racial Bias via Gradient Attention

Although face recognition has made impressive progress in recent years, we ignore the racial bias of the recognition system when we pursue a high level of accuracy. Previous work found that for different races, face recognition networks focus on different facial regions, and the sensitive regions of darker-skinned people are much smaller. Based on this discovery, we propose a new de-bias method based on gradient attention, called Gradient Attention Balance Network (GABN). Specifically, we use the gradient attention map (GAM) of the face recognition network to track the sensitive facial regions and make the GAMs of different races tend to be consistent through adversarial learning. This method mitigates the bias by making the network focus on similar facial regions. In addition, we also use masks to erase the Top-N sensitive facial regions, forcing the network to allocate its attention to a larger facial region. This method expands the sensitive region of darker-skinned people and further reduces the gap between GAM of darker-skinned people and GAM of Caucasians. Extensive experiments show that GABN successfully mitigates racial bias in face recognition and learns more balanced performance for people of different races.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2023 worksho

The Ginger-shaped Asteroid 4179 Toutatis: New Observations from a Successful Flyby of Chang'e-2

On 13 December 2012, Chang'e-2 conducted a successful flyby of the near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis at a closest distance of 770 $\pm$ 120 meters from the asteroid's surface. The highest-resolution image, with a resolution of better than 3 meters, reveals new discoveries on the asteroid, e.g., a giant basin at the big end, a sharply perpendicular silhouette near the neck region, and direct evidence of boulders and regolith, which suggests that Toutatis may bear a rubble-pile structure. Toutatis' maximum physical length and width are (4.75 $\times$ 1.95 km) $\pm$10$\%$, respectively, and the direction of the +$z$ axis is estimated to be (250$\pm$5$^\circ$, 63$\pm$5$^\circ$) with respect to the J2000 ecliptic coordinate system. The bifurcated configuration is indicative of a contact binary origin for Toutatis, which is composed of two lobes (head and body). Chang'e-2 observations have significantly improved our understanding of the characteristics, formation, and evolution of asteroids in general.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Deep Learning for Automated Contouring of Gross Tumor Volumes in Esophageal Cancer

PurposeThe aim of this study was to propose and evaluate a novel three-dimensional (3D) V-Net and two-dimensional (2D) U-Net mixed (VUMix-Net) architecture for a fully automatic and accurate gross tumor volume (GTV) in esophageal cancer (EC)–delineated contours.MethodsWe collected the computed tomography (CT) scans of 215 EC patients. 3D V-Net, 2D U-Net, and VUMix-Net were developed and further applied simultaneously to delineate GTVs. The Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (95HD) were used as quantitative metrics to evaluate the performance of the three models in ECs from different segments. The CT data of 20 patients were randomly selected as the ground truth (GT) masks, and the corresponding delineation results were generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Score differences between the two groups (GT versus AI) and the evaluation consistency were compared.ResultsIn all patients, there was a significant difference in the 2D DSCs from U-Net, V-Net, and VUMix-Net (p=0.01). In addition, VUMix-Net showed achieved better 3D-DSC and 95HD values. There was a significant difference among the 3D-DSC (mean ± STD) and 95HD values for upper-, middle-, and lower-segment EC (p<0.001), and the middle EC values were the best. In middle-segment EC, VUMix-Net achieved the highest 2D-DSC values (p<0.001) and lowest 95HD values (p=0.044).ConclusionThe new model (VUMix-Net) showed certain advantages in delineating the GTVs of EC. Additionally, it can generate the GTVs of EC that meet clinical requirements and have the same quality as human-generated contours. The system demonstrated the best performance for the ECs of the middle segment

TAMEP are brain tumor parenchymal cells controlling neoplastic angiogenesis and progression

Aggressive brain tumors like glioblastoma depend on support by their local environment and subsets of tumor parenchymal cells may promote specific phases of disease progression. We investigated the glioblastoma microenvironment with transgenic lineage-tracing models, intravital imaging, single-cell transcriptomics, immunofluorescence analysis as well as histopathology and characterized a previously unacknowledged population of tumor-associated cells with a myeloid-like expression profile (TAMEP) that transiently appeared during glioblastoma growth. TAMEP of mice and humans were identified with specific markers. Notably, TAMEP did not derive from microglia or peripheral monocytes but were generated by a fraction of CNS-resident, SOX2-positive progenitors. Abrogation of this progenitor cell population, by conditional Sox2-knockout, drastically reduced glioblastoma vascularization and size. Hence, TAMEP emerge as a tumor parenchymal component with a strong impact on glioblastoma progression

Fieldwork in the contemporary Chinese art world

This video is about my field research on exhibitions of contemporary art in China

Integrated Stratigraphy and Fluvial Cyclicity of the Westphalian B in the southern North Sea Basin

The upper Carboniferous in the southern North Sea, especially the Westphalian B and lower Westphalian C stage is characterized by the deposited cyclothems that are a series of coarsening-upward fluvial sediments cycles. These cyclothems are often coal-bearing and no more than 15 m. Studying the fluvial cyclicity has a good potential for improved stratigraphy because the cyclothems show cyclic signals and provide a possible way of high-resolution correlation. An integrated approach using multiple approaches to come to a solid outcome also enables improving the stratigraphy. The previous studies mainly focused on large-scale stratigraphy with a vertical resolution of a few hundred meters. This study has analyzed the fluvial cyclicity and constructed an improved stratigraphic framework of Westphalian B and lower Westphalian C to better understand the sedimentary system. An integrated approach including lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and Integrated Predictive Error Filter Analysis (INPEFA) is applied to the series. Six intermediate-scale biozones with a thickness of tens of meters to around 150 m are applied. Six intermediate-scale units named stratigraphic packages were recognized by INPEFA curves of the gamma-ray log. The correlations of the biozones and the stratigraphic packages are consistent with each other, and the offset between the boundaries of these two zonations is generally between 2-15 m. Individual intermediate-scale units have a highly variable thickness and the standard deviation of one unit can be up to 42 m. Constrained by the biozones and INPEFA stratigraphic packages, four main coal seams are correlated and their lateral extent can reach 15 km. The small-scale cyclothems that range from 7 to 15 m can be extracted by INPEFA of potassium content log, referring to the small-scale INPEFA cyclicity. The cyclothems and the corresponding INPEFA cycles are thicker and better developed in the southern area. The average thickness of small-scale cycles is 12 m and these cycles are related to obliquity with a duration of approximately 35 kyr. The duration of Westphalian B calculated by the number and the time span of obliquity-scale cycles is nearly 1.2 Myr. No long-period, 100 & 400 kyr eccentricity cycles were recognized in this study