Conflicts and order : controversies over municipal solid waste incineration in China

Au cours des dernières décennies, nous avons été témoins de la croissance des controverses relatives à l’incinération des déchets solides municipaux dans de nombreuses villes du monde. Cela est particulièrement vrai pour les grandes et moyennes villes en Chine. Diverses catégories d’acteurs, y compris l’État, les autorités locales, les acteurs du marché économique et de la société civile, tentent d’exercer leur influence sur la construction, l’extension et/ou l’opération des incinérateurs. Même si les controverses relatives à l’incinération des déchets solides municipaux abordées par le passé dans plusieurs disciplines, nous ne sommes pas en présence d’une véritable compréhension collective suffisante de la stabilité et du changement à l’échelle méso. La thèse traite de la question suivante: dans les débats et les affrontements autour de l’incinération, comment et jusqu’à quel point les interactions et les compétitions entre contestataires et adversaires contribuent-elles à définir un champ d’action stratégique où la structure industrielle et les politiques de gestion des déchets dominées par l’incinération sont remises en question ou reconduites ? Pour répondre à cette question, cette étude considère l’incinération des déchets solides municipaux en Chine sous l’angle d’un champ d’action stratégique. Elle essaie de clarifier ce qui se passe dans ce champ sous trois aspects: les acteurs, les actions stratégiques et les retombées politiques. Faisant appel à une démarche de recherche qualitative, un grand volume de données primaires et secondaires a été amassé, y compris 42 entretiens semi-structurés, 557 posts en ligne, des rapports de recherche, des documents d’archives, des rapports d’évaluation de l’impact sur l’environnement, des nouvelles en ligne, des données statistiques et des documents de politique. À l’aide de ces données, cette étude approfondi la compréhension des relations entre, d’un côté les acteurs s’opposant aux activités découlant de l’incinération – les contestataires – et, de l’autre, les adversaires dans le champ d’action stratégique, mettant en lumière leurs arguments respectifs. En outre, le processus par lequel les militants utilisent les réseaux sociaux pour la mobilisation du consensus a reçu une attention supplémentaire. De plus, cette étude a analysé l’évolution des interactions entre les militants et les décideurs politiques et a contextualisé la transformation du champ au cours des dernières décennies. Les résultats ont montré que les controverses autour de l’incinération des déchets solides municipaux sont allées au-delà des préoccupations pour les intérêts personnels et le bien-être environnemental. Cela permet d’introduire des explications plus nuancées comparativement aux discours conventionnels concernant les protestations contre l’incinération, fournissant une compréhension systématique de l’activisme local. Cette analyse exploratoire a permis également de mieux comprendre la signification politique et sociale des controverses publiques à travers des pratiques locales de gestion des déchets. Dans un sens plus large, la thèse permet de revoir les notions usuelles à l’égard des relations entre conflits et ordre.The past few decades have witnessed the growth of controversies regarding municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration in many cities around the world. This is especially true when it comes to large and medium-sized cities in China. Various categories of actors—including the state, local authorities, market actors, and the civil society—seek to exert their influence on the construction, expansion, and/or operation of incinerators. Even though the controversies over MSW incineration have been discussed across a range of disciplines in previous literature, we are not in the presence of a sufficient collective understanding of stability and change of the meso-level social order. This dissertation addresses the following question: How and to what extent do interactions and competition between pro-incineration and anti-incineration groups contributes to defining a strategic action field (SAF) where the incineration-dominated industrial structure and waste disposal policies are challenged or maintained? To answer the question, this study considers MSW incineration in China an SAF and attempts to clarify what is happening in this SAF from three aspects: actors, strategic action, and policy impacts. Based on a qualitative research design, a great volume of primary and secondary data were collected, including 42 semi-structured interviews, 557 online posts, research reports, archival materials, environmental impact assessment reports, online news, statistical data, and policy documents. With the help of collected data, this study deepened the understanding of the relationship between proponents and opponents in the field of incineration and shed light on their respective arguments. In addition, the process through which activists used social media for consensus mobilization was given additional attention. Moreover, by analyzing the dynamics of the interplay between activists and policy makers, this study revealed and contextualized the evolution of the SAF over the past few decades. The findings showed that controversies around MSW incineration had gone beyond the concerns for personal interests and environmental well-being. This allows to introduce more refined explanations compared to conventional discourses regarding anti-incineration protests and provide a more nuanced understanding of local activism. This exploratory analysis also helped to better understand the political and social significance of public controversies through local practices of MSW management. In a broad sense, this dissertation makes it possible to review the usual conceptions with regard to the relations between conflict and order

User Engagement with Mobile Technologies: A Multi-Dimensional Conceptualization of Technology Use

Our study conceptualizes user engagement – a form of technology use targeting the emerging ubiquitous mobile technology generation such as mobile health (mHealth) and social network applications. User engagement manifests in three dimensions, including behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement. We validated the measures (in both objective and subjective forms) for the three-dimension user engagement in two different mobile technology contexts, i.e., an e-nursing mobile application and a question-and-answer social network application. We further delineated the relationships among the three dimensions: 1) prior behavioral engagement contributed to both emotional and cognitive engagement, 2) emotional engagement lead to post behavioral engagement, and 3) emotional engagement, compared with prior behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement, exerted a stronger influence predicting post behavioral engagement. Our study enriches both technology use and engagement literature

Sensitivity alteration of fiber Bragg grating sensors through on-fiber metallic coatings produced by a combined laser-assisted maskless microdeposition and electroless plating process

This thesis is concerned with sensitivity alterations of Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG), sensors through additive coatings produced by a combined Laser-Assisted Maskless Micro-deposition (LAMM) and electroless plating process. The coatings can also protect the brittle FBG used in harsh environments. The thesis encompasses design, fabrication procedures, modeling and comparison of experimental and modeling results to gain insight into the advantages and short-comings of the approach. Starting with the opto-mechanical modeling, a program is written in MAPLE to analyze the effect of different on-fiber metallic materials and coating thicknesses on the sensitivity of FBGs to temperature and axial force. On the basis of the proper material and thickness, the sensitivity of FBG at different thermal and loading strains are predicted. The optimal theoretical data suggests that if the thickness of the Ni layer is 30–50 μm, maximum temperature sensitivity is achieved. Some experiments are proposed to test the feasibility of the coated FBG sensors. LAMM is used to coat bare FBGs with a 1-2 μm thick conductive silver layer followed by the electroless nickel plating process to increase layer thickness to a desired level ranging from 1 to 80 μm. Our analytical and experimental results suggest that the temperature sensitivity of the coated FBG with 1 μm Ag and 33 μm Ni is increased almost twice compared to a bare FBG with sensitivity of 0.011±0.001 nm/°C. On the contrary, the force sensitivity is decreased; however, this sensitivity reduction is less than values reported in the literature

Evolution of fast root gravitropism in seed plants

An important adaptation during colonization of land by plants is gravitropic growth of roots, which enabled roots to reach water and nutrients, and firmly anchor plants in the ground. Here we provide insights into the evolution of an efficient root gravitropic mechanism in the seed plants. Architectural innovation, with gravity perception constrained in the root tips along with a shootward transport route for the phytohormone auxin, appeared only upon the emergence of seed plants. Interspecies complementation and protein domain swapping revealed functional innovations within the PIN family of auxin transporters leading to the evolution of gravitropism-specific PINs. The unique apical/shootward subcellular localization of PIN proteins is the major evolutionary innovation that connected the anatomically separated sites of gravity perception and growth response via the mobile auxin signal. We conclude that the crucial anatomical and functional components emerged hand-in-hand to facilitate the evolution of fast gravitropic response, which is one of the major adaptations of seed plants to dry land

Exploring the role and influence of Chinese millennial students in the UK based on a new developed model regarding their involvement in families’ decision-making in the purchase of luxury goods

Due to dissatisfaction of domestic luxury industry, two- thirds of Chinese luxury spending happens overseas. In addition to purchasing luxury goods on their global journey，asking friends and family members who stay abroad to help them purchase luxuries becomes a tradition in China. As a growing number of Chinese millennials which is also a significant segment for luxury consumption among Chinese consumers studying in the UK, in addition to themselves, they also provide a more wealth segment like their parents and other family members to the UK’ luxury market. This study aims to examine how Chinese millennial students help and influence their families' purchase of luxury goods in the UK. Qualitative research, more specifically, the in-depth interview was utilised in the research in order to investigate abundant insights regarding the shopping experience, buying process and the relationship between student agents and perception. This study recruited 20 of Chinese people including ten Chinese millennials studying in the UK and their family members in China for comparing and contrasting their different views. The author developed a new model based on the Engel-Blackwell-Miniard model and the gathered data to demonstrate Chinese millennial students’ roles and functions in their family members’ buying process. In addition, the reverse socialisation regarding students and their parent in the main stages of process can be identified

iLoRE: Dynamic Graph Representation with Instant Long-term Modeling and Re-occurrence Preservation

Continuous-time dynamic graph modeling is a crucial task for many real-world applications, such as financial risk management and fraud detection. Though existing dynamic graph modeling methods have achieved satisfactory results, they still suffer from three key limitations, hindering their scalability and further applicability. i) Indiscriminate updating. For incoming edges, existing methods would indiscriminately deal with them, which may lead to more time consumption and unexpected noisy information. ii) Ineffective node-wise long-term modeling. They heavily rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as a backbone, which has been demonstrated to be incapable of fully capturing node-wise long-term dependencies in event sequences. iii) Neglect of re-occurrence patterns. Dynamic graphs involve the repeated occurrence of neighbors that indicates their importance, which is disappointedly neglected by existing methods. In this paper, we present iLoRE, a novel dynamic graph modeling method with instant node-wise Long-term modeling and Re-occurrence preservation. To overcome the indiscriminate updating issue, we introduce the Adaptive Short-term Updater module that will automatically discard the useless or noisy edges, ensuring iLoRE's effectiveness and instant ability. We further propose the Long-term Updater to realize more effective node-wise long-term modeling, where we innovatively propose the Identity Attention mechanism to empower a Transformer-based updater, bypassing the limited effectiveness of typical RNN-dominated designs. Finally, the crucial re-occurrence patterns are also encoded into a graph module for informative representation learning, which will further improve the expressiveness of our method. Our experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our iLoRE for dynamic graph modeling

Functional innovations of PIN auxin transporters mark crucial evolutionary transitions during rise of flowering plants

Flowering plants display the highest diversity among plant species and have notably shaped terrestrial landscapes. Nonetheless, the evolutionary origin of their unprecedented morphological complexity remains largely an enigma. Here, we show that the coevolution of cis-regulatory and coding regions of PIN-FORMED (PIN) auxin transporters confined their expression to certain cell types and directed their subcellular localization to particular cell sides, which together enabled dynamic auxin gradients across tissues critical to the complex architecture of flowering plants. Extensive intraspecies and interspecies genetic complementation experiments with PINs from green alga up to flowering plant lineages showed that PIN genes underwent three subsequent, critical evolutionary innovations and thus acquired a triple function to regulate the development of three essential components of the flowering plant Arabidopsis: shoot/root, inflorescence, and floral organ. Our work highlights the critical role of functional innovations within the PIN gene family as essential prerequisites for the origin of flowering plants

In Vitro Antimicrobial Activities of Organic Acids and Their Derivatives on Several Species of Gram-Negative and Gram-Positive Bacteria.

The objective of this study was to determine the in vitro antimicrobial activity of several organic acids and their derivatives against Gram-positive (G+) and Gram-negative (G-) bacteria. Butyric acid, valeric acid, monopropionin, monobutyrin, monovalerin, monolaurin, sodium formate, and ProPhorce-a mixture of sodium formate and formic acid (40:60 w/v)-were tested at 8 to 16 concentrations from 10 to 50,000 mg/L. The tested bacteria included G- bacteria (Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica Typhimurium, and Campylobacter jejuni) and G+ bacteria (Enterococcus faecalis, Clostridium perfringens, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Streptococcus suis). Antimicrobial activity was expressed as minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of tested compounds that prevented growth of tested bacteria in treated culture broth. The MICs of butyric acid, valeric acid, and ProPhorce varied among bacterial strains with the lowest MIC of 500-1000 mg/L on two strains of Campylobacter. Sodium formate at highest tested concentrations (20,000 mg/L) did not inhibit the growth of Escherichia coli, Salmonella Typhimurium, and Enterococcus faecalis, but sodium formate inhibited the growth of other tested bacteria with MIC values from 2000 to 18,800 mg/L. The MIC values of monovalerin, monolaurin, and monobutyrin ranged from 2500 to 15,000 mg/L in the majority of bacterial strains. Monopropionin did not inhibit the growth of all tested bacteria, with the exception that the MIC of monopropionin was 11,300 mg/L on Clostridia perfringens. Monolaurin strongly inhibited G+ bacteria, with the MIC value of 10 mg/L against Streptococcus pneumoniae. The MIC tests indicated that organic acids and their derivatives exhibit promising antimicrobial effects in vitro against G- and G+ bacteria that are resistant to antimicrobial drugs. The acid forms had stronger in vitro antimicrobial activities than ester forms, except that the medium chain fatty acid ester monolaurin exhibited strong inhibitory effects on G+ bacteria

Historical Trends in Air Temperature, Precipitation, and Runoff of a Plateau Inland River Watershed in North China

Understanding historical trends in temperature, precipitation, and runoff is important but incomplete for developing adaptive measures to climate change to sustain fragile ecosystems in cold and arid regions, including the Balagaer River watershed on the Mongolian Plateau of northeast China. The objective of this study was to detect such trends in this watershed from 1959 to 2017. The detection was accomplished using a Mann-Kendall sudden change approach at annual and seasonal time scales. The results indicated that the abrupt changes in temperature preceded that in either runoff or precipitation; these abrupt changes occurred between 1970 and 2004. Significant (α = 0.05) warming trends were found at the minimum temperatures in spring (0.041 °C a−1), summer (0.037 °C a−1), fall (0.027 °C a−1), and winter (0.031 °C a−1). In contrast, significant decreasing trends were found in the precipitation (−1.27 mm a−1) and runoff (−0.069 mm a−1) in the summer. Marginally increasing trends were found in the precipitation in spring (0.18 mm a−1) and fall (0.032 mm a−1), whereas an insignificant decreasing trend was found in the runoffs in these two seasons. Both precipitation and runoff in the wet season exhibited a significant decreasing trend, whereas in the dry season, they exhibited a marginally increasing trend. Sudden changes in spring runoff and sudden rises in temperature are the main causes of sudden changes in basin rainfall