Confucius the Chameleon: Dubious envoy for Brand China

In the last century, scholars and politicians in China have attempted both in theory and in practice to advocate and carry out radically different social policies and political reforms, often in the name of Confucius. With China's rise and her increasing international power and status in recent years, Chinese policy makers have again used the Confucius label as part of their charm offensive to win friends and influence in the world. This essay traces the major interpretations of Confucius and the social manifestations of those evaluations in the twentieth century, culminating in the establishment and mushrooming of Confucius Institutes throughout the world in the last few years. While the globalization of Chinese culture is inevitable, the attempts to name and institutionalize it as modernized Confucianism has the effect of injecting inconsistencies into a system that is already overflowing with internal contradictions and inequities. © 2011 by Duke University Press.published_or_final_versio

Defining Modern Chinese Culture

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Coupling of Nonlocal Potentials to Electromagnetic Fields

Nonlocal Hamiltonians are used widely in first-principles quantum calculations; the nonlocality stems from eliminating undesired degrees of freedom, e.g. core electrons. To date, attempts to couple nonlocal systems to external electromagnetic (EM) fields have been heuristic or limited to weak or long wavelength fields. Using Feynman path integrals, we derive an exact, closed-form coupling of arbitrary EM fields to nonlocal systems. Our results justify and clarify the couplings used to date and are essential for systematic computation of linear and especially nonlinear response.Comment: 1 figure, 1 tabl

LANDSAT D local user terminal study

The effect of the changes incorporated in the LANDSAT D system on the ability of a local user terminal to receive, record and process data in real time was studied. Alternate solutions to the problems raised by these changes were evaluated. A loading analysis was performed in order to determine the quantities of data that a local user terminal (LUT) would be interested in receiving and processing. The number of bits in an MSS and a TM scene were calculated along with the number of scenes per day that an LUT might require for processing. These then combined to a total number of processed bits/day for an LUT as a function of sensor and coverage circle radius

A Multiorgan Trafficking Circuit Provides Purifying Selection of Listeria monocytogenes Virulence Genes.

Listeria monocytogenes can cause a life-threatening illness when the foodborne pathogen spreads beyond the intestinal tract to distant organs. Many aspects of the intestinal phase of L. monocytogenes pathogenesis remain unknown. Here, we present a foodborne infection model using C57BL/6 mice that have been pretreated with streptomycin. In this model, as few as 100 L. monocytogenes CFU were required to cause self-limiting enterocolitis, and systemic dissemination followed previously reported routes. Using this model, we report that listeriolysin O (LLO) and actin assembly-inducing protein (ActA), two critical virulence determinants, were necessary for intestinal pathology and systemic spread but were dispensable for intestinal growth. Sequence tag-based analysis of microbial populations (STAMP) was used to investigate the within-host population dynamics of wild-type and LLO-deficient strains. The wild-type bacterial population experienced severe bottlenecks over the course of infection, and by 5 days, the intestinal population was highly enriched for bacteria originating from the gallbladder. In contrast, LLO-deficient strains did not efficiently disseminate and gain access to the gallbladder, and the intestinal population remained diverse. These findings suggest that systemic spread and establishment of a bacterial reservoir in the gallbladder imparts an intraspecies advantage in intestinal occupancy. Since intestinal L. monocytogenes is ultimately released into the environment, within-host population bottlenecks may provide purifying selection of virulence genes.IMPORTANCE Listeria monocytogenes maintains capabilities for free-living growth in the environment and for intracellular replication in a wide range of hosts, including livestock and humans. Here, we characterized an enterocolitis model of foodborne L. monocytogenes infection. This work highlights a multiorgan trafficking circuit and reveals a fitness advantage for bacteria that successfully complete this cycle. Because virulence factors play critical roles in systemic dissemination and multiple bottlenecks occur as the bacterial population colonizes different tissue sites, this multiorgan trafficking circuit likely provides purifying selection of virulence genes. This study also serves as a foundation for future work using the L. monocytogenes-induced enterocolitis model to investigate the biology of L. monocytogenes in the intestinal environment

Electronic properties of metal induced gap states at insulator/metal interfaces -- dependence on the alkali halide and the possibility of excitonic mechanism of superconductivity

Motivated from the experimental observation of metal induced gap states (MIGS) at insulator/metal interfaces by Kiguchi {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 90}, 196803 (2003)], we have theoretically investigated the electronic properties of MIGS at interfaces between various alkali halides and a metal represented by a jellium with the first-principles density functional method. We have found that, on top of the usual evanescent state, MIGS generally have a long tail on halogen sites with a $p_z$-like character, whose penetration depth ($\lambda$) is as large as half the lattice constant of bulk alkali halides. This implies that $\lambda$, while little dependent on the carrier density in the jellium, is dominated by the lattice constant (hence by energy gap) of the alkali halide, where $\lambda_{\rm LiF} < \lambda_{\rm LiCl} < \lambda_{\rm LiI}$. We also propose a possibility of the MIGS working favorably for the exciton-mediated superconductivity.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure

Doppler echocardiography assessment of impaired left ventricular filling in patients with right ventricular pressure overload due to primary pulmonary hypertension

In patients with primary pulmonary hypertension, competition between the right and left ventricles for the limited pericardial space results in distortion of left ventricular geometry reflected in displacement of the ventricular septum toward the left ventricular cavity. Left ventricular shape is most dramatically deranged at end-systole and early diastole, suggesting the possibility that the distribution of left ventricular diastolic filling might be altered. To investigate this hypothesis, nine patients with primary pulmonary hypertension and nine normal individuals were studied with echocardiographic techniques. Left ventricular isovolumic relaxation time was significantly prolonged in patients with primary pulmonary hypertension by comparison with normal individuals (129 ± 36 versus 53 ± 9 ms, p < 0.005) and the fraction of the transmitral flow velocity integral occurring in the first half of diastole was significantly less than in normal individuals (38 ± 14% versus 70 ± 9%, p < 0.005). Measurement of fractional changes in short-axis left ventricular cavity area similarly demonstrated that in patients with primary pulmonary hypertension fractional early diastolic cavity expansion (32 ± 11%) was significantly less than in normal individuals (78 ± 9%, p < 0.005).In patients with primary pulmonary hypertension, the ventricular septum was abnormally flattened toward the left ventricular cavity at end-systole (normalized septal curvature 0.04 ± 0.19) and remained that way throughout early diastolic filling but returned toward normal at end-diastole (normalized septal curvature 0.68 ± 0.19, p < 0.005). Thus, in patients with primary pulmonary hypertension end-systolic and early diastolic deformation of the left ventricle by septal flattening toward the left ventricular cavity is associated with relative underfilling of the left ventricle in early diastole and redistribution of left ventricular filling into late diastole. The reliance on late diastolic filling and atrial systole to maintain left ventricular preload in primary pulmonary hypertension may have important implications for the use of vasodilators in this disease