The Chinese higher education system and the impact of gender : The structure of Chinese education system and previous research and an empirical study

The focus of the dissertation lies on the situation of males and females in Chinese universities, including the allocation between males and females in different positions and disciplines, as well as an analysis of reasons for these differences and the meaning of women’s involvement in universities. The dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is based on theories and previous research by different researchers; the second part is an empirical study from the authors. There are 4 chapters in the theoretical part. The first chapter offers an overview of the Chinese education system; the second chapter describes the students’ situation in Chinese higher education; the third chapter focuses on recent developments in teacher training; the last chapter is dealing with the female teachers in Chinese higher education. The second part, chapter 5, presents the results of an empirical study concerning biographies, motivations and orientations of Chinese male and female university teachers. The final chapter, chapter 6, presents a summary of the main research results. In addition, this chapter opens up for an international comparison between Chinese and German universities

Towards Grouping in Large Scenes with Occlusion-aware Spatio-temporal Transformers

Group detection, especially for large-scale scenes, has many potential applications for public safety and smart cities. Existing methods fail to cope with frequent occlusions in large-scale scenes with multiple people, and are difficult to effectively utilize spatio-temporal information. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework,GroupTransformer, for group detection in large-scale scenes. To deal with the frequent occlusions caused by multiple people, we design an occlusion encoder to detect and suppress severely occluded person crops. To explore the potential spatio-temporal relationship, we propose spatio-temporal transformers to simultaneously extract trajectory information and fuse inter-person features in a hierarchical manner. Experimental results on both large-scale and small-scale scenes demonstrate that our method achieves better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. On large-scale scenes, our method significantly boosts the performance in terms of precision and F1 score by more than 10%. On small-scale scenes, our method still improves the performance of F1 score by more than 5%. The project page with code can be found at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/GroupTrans.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Towards grouping in large scenes with occlusion-aware spatio-temporal transformers

Group detection, especially for large-scale scenes, has many potential applications for public safety and smart cities. Existing methods fail to cope with frequent occlusions in large-scale scenes with multiple people, and are difficult to effectively utilize spatio-temporal information. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework, GroupTransformer , for group detection in large-scale scenes. To deal with the frequent occlusions caused by multiple people, we design an occlusion encoder to detect and suppress severely occluded person crops. To explore the potential spatio-temporal relationship, we propose spatio-temporal transformers to simultaneously extract trajectory information and fuse inter-person features in a hierarchical manner. Experimental results on both large-scale and small-scale scenes demonstrate that our method achieves better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. On large-scale scenes, our method significantly boosts the performance in terms of precision and F1 score by more than 10%. On small-scale scenes, our method still improves the performance of F1 score by more than 5%. We will release the code for research purposes

Germline-Competent Mouse-Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Generated on Human Fibroblasts without Exogenous Leukemia Inhibitory Factor

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have attracted enormous attention due to their vast potential in regenerative medicine, pharmaceutical screening and basic research. Most prior established iPS cell lines were derived and maintained on mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEF) cells supplemented with exogenous leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF). Drawbacks of MEF cells impede optimization as well as dissection of reprogramming events and limit the usage of iPS cell derivatives in therapeutic applications. In this study, we develop a reproducible protocol for efficient reprogramming mouse neural progenitor cells (NPCs) on human foreskin fibroblast (HFF) cells via retroviral transfer of human transcriptional factors OCT4/SOX2/KLF4/C-MYC. Two independent iPS cell lines are derived without exogenous LIF. They display typical undifferentiated morphology and express pluripotency markers Oct4 and Sox2. Transgenes are inactivated and the endogenous Oct4 promoter is completely demethylated in the established iPS cell lines, indicating a fully reprogrammed state. Moreover, the iPS cells can spontaneously differentiate or be induced into various cell types of three embryonic germ layers in vitro and in vivo when they are injected into immunodeficient mice for teratoma formation. Importantly, iPS cells extensively integrate with various host tissues and contribute to the germline when injected into the blastocysts. Interestingly, these two iPS cell lines, while both pluripotent, exhibit distinctive differentiation tendencies towards different lineages. Taken together, the data describe the first genuine mouse iPS cell lines generated on human feeder cells without exogenous LIF, providing a reliable tool for understanding the molecular mechanisms of nuclear reprogramming

Xenopus as a Model System for the Study of GOLPH2/GP73 Function: Xenopus golph2 Is Required for Pronephros Development

GOLPH2 is a highly conserved protein. It is upregulated in a number of tumors and is being considered as an emerging biomarker for related diseases. However, the function of GOLPH2 remains unknown. The Xenopus model is used to study the function of human proteins. We describe the isolation and characterization of Xenopus golph2, which dimerizes and localizes to the Golgi in a manner similar to human GOLPH2. Xenopus golph2 is expressed in the pronephros during early development. The morpholino-mediated knockdown of golph2 results in edema formation. Additionally, Nephrin expression is enhanced in the glomus, and the expression of pronephric marker genes, such as atp1b1, ClC-K, NKCC2, and NBC1, is diminished in the tubules and duct. Expression patterns of the transcription factors WT1, Pax2, Pax8, Lim1, GATA3, and HNF1β are also examined in the golph2 knockdown embryos, the expression of WT1 is increased in the glomus and expanded laterally in the pronephric region. We conclude that the deletion of golph2 causes an increase in the expression of WT1, which may promote glomus formation and inhibit pronephric tubule differentiation