Re-occupation : buildings, ideology and decolonization in Northeastern China

Buildings often survive longer than a single human generation, and many witness significant transitions from generation to generation. When we approach varied eras that have washed over an unchangeable building like tides eroding a bank repeatedly, how can we distinguish the building’s primary identity and judge its fate? In Northeastern China, a Japanese dormitory survives as a witness of Manchurian colonization, early socialism and the economic recession that caused its abandonment until today. The city also suffers a swiftly aging population and brain drain as the brightest of the youth move away. How can an intervention build dialogue and revive a declining city? How can space reshape cultural cognition and confidence for migrated young people to return home? How can the architecture engage with the binary of history and ideology? Architecture is not an embodiment of form and function, but an armature for history and memory. This thesis not only proposes to change the situation and revitalize the local society but calls for research, contextualization, questioning, and reinterpretation of many epochs of history in Northeastern China. The paintings, videos, and architectural intervention that compose this thesis are an ensemble of this obsession and nostalgia. In the last two decades, a range of cultural phenomena, including popular music, comedy, sentimental literature and movies originate from the Northeast and influence all of China.This rich cultural landscape demands an equal architectural renaissance in the Northeast. The pioneers of this renaissance are an existing vernacular form: bathhouses, which contain multiple services and experiences. Inherited from the worker class “banya” in soviet Russia, today’s Northeastern bathhouse is a microcosmos to integrate different groups of people. By occupying the central public space in the dormitory as a water hub including bath and entertainments, I create a catalyst within the abandoned building. Programs including retirement accommodation and kindergarten engage many generations and aim to reuse the old dormitory for solving new social issues. A reincarnated Soviet-era theater commemorates divested collectivism. Tangled geometries decolonize the rigid plan and shape new relationships between different programs. The rest of the site remains empty, ready to embrace the local community and keep changing as identity shifts in the future. Architecture makes a new history, while history also makes a new architecture

Rel2Graph: Automated Mapping From Relational Databases to a Unified Property Knowledge Graph

Although a few approaches are proposed to convert relational databases to graphs, there is a genuine lack of systematic evaluation across a wider spectrum of databases. Recognising the important issue of query mapping, this paper proposes an approach Rel2Graph, an automatic knowledge graph construction (KGC) approach from an arbitrary number of relational databases. Our approach also supports the mapping of conjunctive SQL queries into pattern-based NoSQL queries. We evaluate our proposed approach on two widely used relational database-oriented datasets: Spider and KaggleDBQA benchmarks for semantic parsing. We employ the execution accuracy (EA) metric to quantify the proportion of results by executing the NoSQL queries on the property knowledge graph we construct that aligns with the results of SQL queries performed on relational databases. Consequently, the counterpart property knowledge graph of benchmarks with high accuracy and integrity can be ensured. The code and data will be publicly available. The code and data are available at github\footnote{https://github.com/nlp-tlp/Rel2Graph}

First-Principles Study of Doped

Isovalent doping offers a method to enhance the thermoelectric properties of semiconductors, yet its influence on the phonon structure and propagation is often overlooked. Here, we take CdX (X=Te, Se) compounds as an example to study the role of isovalent doping in thermoelectrics by first-principles calculations in combination with the Boltzmann transport theory. The electronic and phononic properties of Cd8Se8, Cd8Se7Te, Cd8Te8, and Cd8Te7Se are compared. The results suggest that isovalent doping with CdX significantly improves the thermoelectric performance. Due to the similar properties of Se and Te atoms, the electronic properties remain unaffected. Moreover, doping enhances anharmonic phonon scattering, leading to a reduction in lattice thermal conductivity. Our results show that optimized p-type(n-type) ZT values can reach 3.13 (1.33) and 2.51 (1.21) for Cd8Te7Se and Cd8Se7Te at 900 K, respectively. This research illuminates the potential benefits of strategically employing isovalent doping to enhance the thermoelectric properties of CdX compounds

Translation directionality and translator anxiety : evidence from eye movements in L1-L2 translation

While considerable research on the impact of anxiety on second language learning has been carried out in international contexts, the impact of anxiety on the translator’s undertaking L2 translation, a sort of anxiety arising from the translation directionality, as well as the structure of cognitive mechanism for translational anxiety, remain under-explored. Adopting the eye-tracking and key-logging approach to data collection, this study implemented an eye-tracking experiment with EFL learners at a Chinese university to probe into how the participants responded to L1 and L2 translation-tasks and the mechanism involved in these processes. It is found that translation directionality does have a great impact on the processing of translation, which causes the change of cognitive load and then leads to the change of levels in translator anxiety. The finding further confirms the key premises of the Processing Proficiency Model and the Revised Hierarchical Model with attendant implications for translation processes