Prostrating Walk in the Campaign against Sino-Hong Kong Express Railway: Collective Identity of Native Social Movement

Occupation, blockage and storming are not rare in social movements a decade after China resuming sovereignty in Hong Kong. The organizers and participants usually involve locally born young people. Some of them are secondary school students in their teens. They are known as the fourth generation or post-1980s born Hongkongers. The paper examines the cultural context of social movements involving these youth activists. It mainly studied the campaign against the Sino-Hong Kong Express Railway development project. The project called for the demolition of the Tsoi Yuen Village, a small rural village located on its designed route. Since then, the role of younger generation in social movements has been generally recognized. Social media are widely employed in all stages of the movements with citizen journalists actively involved. The impressive ‘prostrating walk’ imitating Tibetan pilgrims becomes the symbol of these youth activists. It keeps appearing in other campaigns including Occupy Central in Hong Kong in 2014. This paper argues that the rise of nativism, advancement in ICT technology and shifting towards new social movements contribute to the dominant role of youth in recent social movements of Hong Kong. Collective identity of Hongkonger in response to the top-down assimilation by China, strengthens the movement

Migration, Brokerage and Recruitment

This research examines the unskilled labor migration using private intermediaries in South Korea. The study also reviews the Employment Permit System of South Korea in this regard. The empirical study took place in South Korea with a supplementary trip visiting the migration origin, Bangkok, Thailand. A qualitative method was used with the predominant part being a semi-structured interview with Thai undocumented workers in Daegu. This research fills the gap in the existing body of research by uncovering the process of undocumented labor migration in the discourse of culture of migration. The tolerant practice of the Thai Government towards undocumented workers has set an example to prospective Thai migrant workers who follow the undocumented path to go to Korea. The unique fuzzy attitude of some Thais led them to try their luck without a concrete plan to go to work in South Korea on a whim. The informal brokers find their role even they are excluded in the Employment Permit System of South Korea. They actively convey a positive but biased image of an easy path of undocumented labor migration as an alternative to the formal procedure

High Resolution Thermal Imaging for Electrical and Optical Characterization of Electronic and Photonic Devices.

The impact of heating on electronic and optoelectronic devices is becoming increasingly severe as devices scale to smaller and smaller sizes. High temperature not only reduces most performance metrics, but also decreases device lifetime. In order to study and understand these problems, an important step is to measure temperature at small size scales. Here we show how CCD-based thermoreflectance temperature measurement can be successfully applied to heterojunction bipolar transistors, quantum well lasers, and quantum dot lasers for device thermal characterization with a spatial resolution of 400 nm and a temperature resolution of 10 mK. Indeed, the high spatial resolution of this technique allows one to resolve separate heat sources within a device itself; rather than viewing the entire device as a monolithic heat source, we are able to study the separate internal heat transport mechanisms that often exist. Specifically, in applying CCD-based thermoreflectance to SiGe-based heterojunction bipolar transistors, we show how temperature mapping can be used to spatially profile device current, including asymmetric behavior such as current hogging. In examining a type of high-power laser, we show how (with proper light filtering) 2D temperature profiles of the facet can be measured and linked to thermal lensing. We then describe how the CCD-based thermoreflectance setup can be modified to accommodate pulsed devices, demonstrating the technique on pulsed InGaAs quantum dot lasers and identifying separate temperature peaks due to active region heating and contact heating. Finally, we discuss how the measurement of thermal and thermoelectric properties in organic thin films can be used to derive fundamental and device-relevant electrical properties related to interface transport. By measuring the Seebeck coefficient of an OTFT, we show that one can for the first time successfully evaluate the channel thickness in a non-destructive fashion without further fabrication processes.Ph.D.Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57661/2/klchan_1.pd

Brain tumor boundary detection in MR image with generalized fuzzy operator

Boundary detection in MR image with brain tumor is an important image processing technique applied in radiology for 3D reconstruction. The nonhomogeneities density tissue of the brain with tumor can result in achieving the inaccurate location in any boundary detection algorithms. Recently, some studies using the contour deformable model with regional base technique, the performance is insufficient to obtain the fine edge in the tumor, and the considerable error in accuracy is existed. Moreover, even in some of the normal tissue region, edge created by this method has also been encompassed. In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect the boundary of brain tumor based on the generalized fuzzy operator (GFO). One typical example is used for evaluating this method with the contour deformable model.published_or_final_versio

Estimation of the gray level variations in soft and hard peri-implant tissue from X-ray images

In the treatment and assessment of periodontal disease periapical films are taken at regular intervals. The films are compared around the region of the implant to monitor the changes that have taken place. A computer-assisted method to automate this process is presented here. To compare two images, a pair of X-ray images are superimposed on top of each other. The images are normalized and transformed to obtain the best fit. These images are subtracted and the difference in pixel values are used as a basis for analysis. A method for improving the alignment accuracy and contrast compensation is highlighted.published_or_final_versio

Thyroid cancer cells boundary location by a fuzzy edge detection method

Morphometric assessment of tumor cells is important in the prediction of biological behavior of thyroid cancer. In order to automate the process, the computer-based system has to recognize the boundary of the cells. Many methods for the boundary detection have appeared in the literature and some of them applied to microscopic slice analysis. However, there is no reliable method since the gray-levels in the nuclei are uneven and are similar to the background. In the paper, a fuzzy edge detection method is used and is based on an improved generalized fuzzy operator. The method enhances the nuclei and effectively separates the cells from the background.published_or_final_versio

The well-being of community-dwelling near-centenarians and centenarians in Hong Kong a qualitative study

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OMMA enables population-scale analysis of complex genomic features and phylogenomic relationships from nanochannel-based optical maps.

BackgroundOptical mapping is an emerging technology that complements sequencing-based methods in genome analysis. It is widely used in improving genome assemblies and detecting structural variations by providing information over much longer (up to 1 Mb) reads. Current standards in optical mapping analysis involve assembling optical maps into contigs and aligning them to a reference, which is limited to pairwise comparison and becomes bias-prone when analyzing multiple samples.FindingsWe present a new method, OMMA, that extends optical mapping to the study of complex genomic features by simultaneously interrogating optical maps across many samples in a reference-independent manner. OMMA captures and characterizes complex genomic features, e.g., multiple haplotypes, copy number variations, and subtelomeric structures when applied to 154 human samples across the 26 populations sequenced in the 1000 Genomes Project. For small genomes such as pathogenic bacteria, OMMA accurately reconstructs the phylogenomic relationships and identifies functional elements across 21 Acinetobacter baumannii strains.ConclusionsWith the increasing data throughput of optical mapping system, the use of this technology in comparative genome analysis across many samples will become feasible. OMMA is a timely solution that can address such computational need. The OMMA software is available at https://github.com/TF-Chan-Lab/OMTools

The Eye4HK Meme and the Construction of an Injustice Frame

The territory-wide protest in Hong Kong in 2019, originated from a proposed amendment bill on the extradition of fugitives to China which triggered massive protests. In an incident, the police shot a female medic in the eye which outraged the public. A Korean celebrity initiated an online movement by uploading a selfie covering his right eye to Twitter showing solidarity with the victim. The eye-covered image signifies the girl who lost her eye as a political victim, gaining wide sympathy. The sub-campaign constructed an image of resistance against police brutality which strengthened the wider movement in Hong Kong and helped to win support in other parts of the world. The campaign also linked the emotions of the two places by recalling Koreans’ memory of their historical struggle for democracy. The sub-campaign generated symbolic resources accumulating through the production and reproduction process online and subsequently benefited the wider social movement for political change