Death Metaphors in Chinese TV Series: Four Case Studies

Death has been a taboo subject in Chinese culture. Studying how Chinese people conceptualize death is an important way to better understanding Chinese culture. The current paper adopts the multimodal metaphor theory as the theoretical foundation and explores the death metaphors in some Chinese TV series. The present study finds five death metaphors, and they are DEATH IS DOWN, DEATH IS SETTING, DEATH IS GOING OUT, DEATH IS BIRTH and DEATH IS DARKNESS. The source domains are presented in the mode of pictorial signs and color while the target domain is presented by the mode of pictorial signs alone, or the mode of spoken signs alone, or sometimes by the two simultaneously

Security mechanisms for next-generation mobile networks

Basic concepts and definitions -- Motivation and research challenges -- Research objectives -- Mobile value-added service access -- UMTS access security -- DoS attacks in mobile networks -- A lightweight mobile service access based on reusable tickets -- Background work and motivation -- Service access through tickets -- System security analysis -- Comparisons with related work -- Enhancing UMTS AKA with vector combination -- Overview of UMTS AKA -- UMTS AKA weaknesses- -- Vector combination based AKA -- Security analysis of VC-AKA -- Mobility-oriented AKA in UMTS -- Mobility-oriented authentication -- Security analysis of MO-AKA -- A fine-grained puzzle against DOS attacks -- Quasi partial collision -- Fine-grained control over difficulties -- Lightweight to mobile devices -- Against replay attacks -- Confidentiality, integrity and user privacy

Perfect Transfer of enhanced entanglement and asymmetric steering in a cavity magnomechanical system

We propose a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system to realize and transfer the bipartite entanglements and EPR steerings between magnons, photons and phonons in the regime of the stability of the system. Satisfying the PT -like-symmetry relevant to the passive-active-cavity structure and the proper Stokes/anti-Stokes nonlinear processes, the system can enhance the robust distant quantum entanglement and generate the relatively obvious asymmetric (even directional) EPR steering that is useful for the task with the highly asymmetric trusts of the bidirectional local measurements between two entangled states. It is of great interest that, based on such a tunable magnomechanical system, the perfect transfer between near and distant entanglements/steerings of different mode pairs is realized by adjusting the coupling parameters; especially, the transfer scheme of steerings is first proposed here. These transferring processes can suggest a novel method for the quantum information storage and manipulation. In addition, the entanglements and steerings can also be exchanged between different mode pairs by adjusting the detunings between different modes. This work may provide a potential platform for distant/asymmetric quantum modulation.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Decay dynamics of a giant atom in a structured bath with broken time-reversal symmetry

We study in this paper the decay dynamics of a two-level giant atom, which is coupled to a quasi-one-dimensional sawtooth lattice exposed to uniform synthetic magnetic fluxes. In the case where the two sublattices have a large detuning, the giant atom is effectively coupled to a single-band structured bath with flux-controlled energy band and time-reversal symmetry. This feature significantly affects the decay dynamics of the giant atom as well as the propagation of the emitted photon. In particular, the giant atom can exhibit chiral spontaneous emission and allow for nonreciprocal delayed light, which are however unattainable by coupling a small atom to this lattice. Giant atoms with different frequencies can be designed to emit photons towards different directions and with different group velocities. Our results pave the way towards engineering quantum networks and manipulating giant-atom interference effects.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

Evaporative Enrichment of Oxygen-18 and Deuterium in Lake Waters on the Tibetan Plateau

Stable isotopes (δ18O and δD) are useful tracers for investigating hydrologic and climatic variability on a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Since the early isotopic studies on mountainous glaciers in the late 1960s, a great deal of information has been generated on the isotopic composition of rainfall, snow, ice, surface waters, and lake carbonate sediments across the Tibetan Plateau. However, measurements of δ18O and δD values of lake water are scarce. Here we present a new dataset of δ18O and δD values of lake waters collected from 27 lakes across the plateau during a reconnaissance survey in summer 2009. δ18O and δD values of lake water range from −19.9 to 6.6‰ and from −153 to −16‰, respectively. The average values of δ18O and δD are −6.4 and −72‰, considerably greater than those of precipitation observed in this region. The derived Tibetan lake water line, δD = 5.2δ18O − 38.9, is significantly different from the global meteoric water line. Most of the lakes, including some freshwater lakes, contain water with negative values of d-excess (d). There is a negative correlation between d and total dissolved solids (TDS). Each of these findings indicates that evaporation-induced isotopic enrichment prevails in Tibetan lakes. Moreover, we develop an isotope modeling scheme to calculate E/P ratios for Tibetan lakes, using a combination of existing isotopic fractionation equations and the Rayleigh distillation model. We use the intersection of the local evaporation line and GMWL as a first approximation of δ18O and δD values of lake water inputs to infer an E/P ratio for each lake. Our modeling calculations reveal that although variable from lake to lake, the water budget across the plateau is positive, with an average E/P of 0.52. This is in good agreement with other observational and model data that show varying degrees of increases in lake size from satellite imagery and significant decreases in lake salinity in many lakes on the plateau over the last several decades. Together with the new isotopic dataset, the proposed modeling framework can be used to examine and quantify past changes in a lake’s hydrologic balance from the isotopic record of downcore carbonate sediments in the region

Accurate and stable measurement of ash in coal by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry based on partial least squares

Coal resources play a very important role in the energy structure, especially in the field of thermal power generation. However, in thermal power generation, coal resources can’t be used efficiently for various reasons, resulting in a waste of energy. Due to the advantages of many kinds of elements and rapid measurement, X-fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) can rapid measurement a variety of metal elements in coal. Combined with partial least squares (PLS), the relationship between a variety of elements and ash in coal can be established, and the ash value in the measured coal can be quickly obtained, which can effectively guide the coal combustion process of power plant, so as to improve the utilization rate of coal. The experimental results show that under the PLS model, XRF technology has good measurement results for the ash content of 45 calibration set coal samples, in which the determination coefficient of the fitting curve (R2) reaches 0.946, and the root mean square error (RMSE) is only 1.177%. The accuracy of the model is further predicted under a cross validation. 15 validation set coal samples are brought into the model for prediction. According to the prediction results, the R2 reaches 0.982, and RMSE is only 0.726%. Finally, four of the 60 samples are randomly selected for stability test, and the relative standard deviation (RSD) is less than 1%. Therefore, the quantitative analysis method of XRF method based on PLS model has high accuracy and stability, which can provide guidance for rapid online measurement of coal ash and coal blending