China’s city diplomacy and legitimacy: a Shenzhen story

As cities have become a significant sub-state feature in world politics since the latter part of the twentieth century, their diplomacy has played an important role in general diplomacy in promoting global governance and improving local development. However, a larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in influencing the relative success or failure of city diplomacy is currently neglected in studies of city diplomacy. Furthermore, detailed first-hand information showing how China’s city diplomacy works is lacking in English language sources. I argue that in order to understand the operational nature of China’s city diplomacy, two factors must be taken into consideration: how the diplomacy of Chinese cities has become legitimate and how this legitimacy in return affects cities’ diplomatic outcomes. This thesis contributes both theory and data to these studies through introducing legitimacy theory and the diplomatic practice of Shenzhen, the pioneering city in the reform and opening up of China. The findings are based on participant observation undertaken while I was working part-time at the European Office of Shenzhen Government. Data were collected through observation notes from field work, published government documents, news articles and relevant secondary academic sources, which did not include any confidential or sensitive information. Drawing on insights provided by this supporting evidence, I argue that the legitimacy of city diplomacy is critical to its success. The legitimacy of city diplomacy comes from consent, which has two dimensions. The first is the support given by domestic politics, and the second is the recognition given by the overseas audience. The former standardizes the direction and behaviour of the diplomatic agent, while the latter determines the result of city diplomacy. The analytical framework of the thesis adopted two mainstream legitimation approaches in current research on legitimacy – favourable outcomes and procedural correctness – to show the legitimation process of Shenzhen’s diplomacy. In the domestic environment, it will be shown that the former is more decisive than the latter, because favourable outcomes which serve national and local development, especially to develop the economy, are the main duty of Chinese city diplomacy. Meanwhile, procedural correctness provides the institutional framework for legitimizing Shenzhen diplomacy and then enabling its agents to reach a desired outcome. In diplomacy, a favourable outcome is vital, and will determine whether audiences perceive Shenzhen diplomacy as having legitimacy. The thesis will first introduce the concept of legitimacy for the study of city diplomacy, outlining how the legitimation process takes place and the importance of branding and symbols in this process. It will then show how the Shenzhen European Office has become legitimized. Third, it will discuss how reform and opening up, as China’s national brand and the city brand of Shenzhen, influence the legitimacy of Shenzhen diplomacy. Finally, the way in which symbols work in raising the legitimacy of Shenzhen on the diplomatic stage will be examined

Intrinsic FGFR2 and Ectopic FGFR1 Signaling in the Prostate and Prostate Cancer

Advanced castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) is a poorly prognostic disease currently lacking effective cure. Understanding the molecular mechanism that underlies the initiation and progression of CRPC will provide new strategies for treating this deadly disease. One candidate target is the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling axis. Loss of the intrinsic FGF7/FGF10-type 2 FGF receptor (FGFR2) pathway and gain of the ectopic type 1 FGF receptor (FGFR1) pathway are associated with the progression to malignancy in prostate cancer (PCa) and many other epithelial originating lesions. Although FGFR1 and FGFR2 share similar amino acid sequences and structural domains, the two transmembrane tyrosine kinases elicit distinctive, even sometime opposite signals in cells. Recent studies have revealed that the ectopic FGFR1 signaling pathway contributes to PCa progression via multiple mechanisms, including promoting tumor angiogenesis, reprogramming cancer cell metabolism, and potentiating inflammation in the tumor microenvironment. Thus, suppression of FGFR1 signaling can be an effective novel strategy to treat CRPC

1,4-Dimeth­oxy-2,5-bis­{2-[4-(trifluoro­meth­yl)phen­yl]ethyn­yl}benzene

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C26H16F6O2, contains one half of the mol­ecule situated on an inversion centre. In the rod-like mol­ecule, the two terminal benzene rings form a dihedral angle of 71.9 (1)° with the central benzene ring. The trifluoro­methyl group is rotationally disordered over two orientations in a 0.53 (1):0.47 (1) ratio. The crystal packing exhibits no classical inter­molecular inter­actions

Two Candidate Obscured Tidal Disruption Events Coincident with High-energy Neutrinos

Recently, three optical tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) have been suggested to be coincident with high-energy neutrinos. They all exhibit unusually strong dust infrared (IR) echoes, with their peak times matching the neutrino arrival time even better than the optical peaks. We hereby report on two new TDE candidates that are spatially and temporally coincident with neutrinos by matching our sample of mid-infrared outbursts in nearby galaxies (MIRONG) with Gold alerts of IceCube high-energy neutrino events up to June 2022. The two candidates show negligible optical variability according to their ZTF light curves and can therefore be classified as part of the growing population of obscured TDE candidates. The chance probability of finding two such candidates about $\sim3\%$ by redistributing the MIRONG sources randomly in the SDSS footprint, which will be as low as $\sim0.1\%$ (or $\sim0.2\%$) if we limit to sources with increased fluxes (or variability amplitudes) comparable with the matched two sources. Our findings further support the potential connection between high-energy neutrinos and TDEs in dusty environments by increasing the total number of neutrino-associated TDE and TDE candidates to five, although the underlying physics remains poorly understood.Comment: Published, ApJL, 953, L1

Always Open, Seven-Eleven: Education Targeting Healthier Food Choices in a High Convenience Store Density Area in Taipei

To enhance children's health, the promotion of nutrition literacy in school is vital as it helps prevent the development of health conditions and diseases and maintain healthy lifestyles. Taiwan features the top highest ratio of convenience stores per population density. Convenience stores, an increasingly popular dining place, were linked to the development of eating behavior and body weight issues in children. An eight-week classroom-based nutrition intervention, employing the Traffic Light Diet as a framework, targeting children's perception of and intention to visit the convenience store was implemented. The study conducted a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest research design with a comparison group. A total of 49 students participated in the study, with 25 in the intervention and 24 in the comparison group. Data were collected by utilizing surveys, interviews, and observations. The study's findings demonstrated the positive trajectory of the impact of this intervention on increasing food-and-nutrition-related knowledge and improving healthier diet choices at convenience stores among children. One main theme was identified in coding interviews: parent involvement in meal preparation may reduce convenience store use and increase consumption of vegetables among children. Assessing the influence of parental support for healthy dietary choices, eating nutritious foods at home, and involving the family in meal preparation is an area for future research

Fuzzy-NMS: Improving 3D Object Detection with Fuzzy Classification in NMS

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an essential post-processing module used in many 3D object detection frameworks to remove overlapping candidate bounding boxes. However, an overreliance on classification scores and difficulties in determining appropriate thresholds can affect the resulting accuracy directly. To address these issues, we introduce fuzzy learning into NMS and propose a novel generalized Fuzzy-NMS module to achieve finer candidate bounding box filtering. The proposed Fuzzy-NMS module combines the volume and clustering density of candidate bounding boxes, refining them with a fuzzy classification method and optimizing the appropriate suppression thresholds to reduce uncertainty in the NMS process. Adequate validation experiments are conducted using the mainstream KITTI and large-scale Waymo 3D object detection benchmarks. The results of these tests demonstrate the proposed Fuzzy-NMS module can improve the accuracy of numerous recently NMS-based detectors significantly, including PointPillars, PV-RCNN, and IA-SSD, etc. This effect is particularly evident for small objects such as pedestrians and bicycles. As a plug-and-play module, Fuzzy-NMS does not need to be retrained and produces no obvious increases in inference time

Adaptive variable-grid least-squares reverse-time migration

Variable-grid methods have the potential to save computing costs and memory requirements in forward modeling and least-squares reverse-time migration (LSRTM). However, due to the inherent difficulty of automatic grid discretization, conventional variable-grid methods have not been widely used in industrial production. We propose a variable-grid LSRTM (VG-LSRTM) method based on an adaptive sampling strategy to improve computing efficiency and reduce memory requirements. Based on the mapping relation of two coordinate systems, we derive variable-grid acoustic wave equation and its corresponding Born forward modeling equation. On this basis, we develop a complete VG-LSRTM framework. Numerical experiments on a layered model validate the feasibility of the proposed VG-LSRTM algorithm. LSRTM tests on a modified Marmousi model demonstrate that our method can save computational costs and memory requirements with little accuracy loss

META-SELD: Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation to the new environment in Sound Event Localization and Detection

For learning-based sound event localization and detection (SELD) methods, different acoustic environments in the training and test sets may result in large performance differences in the validation and evaluation stages. Different environments, such as different sizes of rooms, different reverberation times, and different background noise, may be reasons for a learning-based system to fail. On the other hand, acquiring annotated spatial sound event samples, which include onset and offset time stamps, class types of sound events, and direction-of-arrival (DOA) of sound sources is very expensive. In addition, deploying a SELD system in a new environment often poses challenges due to time-consuming training and fine-tuning processes. To address these issues, we propose Meta-SELD, which applies meta-learning methods to achieve fast adaptation to new environments. More specifically, based on Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), the proposed Meta-SELD aims to find good meta-initialized parameters to adapt to new environments with only a small number of samples and parameter updating iterations. We can then quickly adapt the meta-trained SELD model to unseen environments. Our experiments compare fine-tuning methods from pre-trained SELD models with our Meta-SELD on the Sony-TAU Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2023 (STARSSS23) dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of Meta-SELD when adapting to new environments.Comment: Submitted to DCASE 2023 Worksho