A Good Wife or A Greedy Wife? Women\u27s Roles as Wives in Chinese Corruption News Coverage

Xi Jinping, China’s president, has embarked on the largest anti-corruption campaign in modern Chinese history. This study provides insight into the media representing the wife figure in contemporary corruption news in China. To this end, this study employs critical discourse analysis to analyse news articles from the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). The data reveals news articles depict wives of corrupt cadres as greedy if they have participated in their husbands’ corrupt behaviors. In this sense, wives are represented as being responsible for their husbands’ corruption, while the ruling party’s role is marginalized. Thus, this representational strategy allows the government to deflect pressure onto the corrupt cadres’ wives and cover up the systematic flaws that allow corruption to flourish. By decoding the nature and role of the wife in news reports related to corruption, this study contributes to understanding how political power influences the construction of the wife figure in corruption news

Portable High Throughput Digital Microfluidics and On-Chip Bacteria Cultures

An intelligent, portable, and high throughput digital microfluidic (DMF) system is developed. Chapter 1 introduces microfluidics and DMF systems. In Chapter 2, a low-cost and high resolution capacitive-to-digital converter integrated circuit is used for droplet position detection. A field-programmable gate array FPGA is used as the integrated logic hub of the system for highly reliable and efficient control of the circuit. In this chapter a fast-fabricating PCB (printed circuit board) substrate microfluidic system is proposed. Smaller actuation threshold voltages than those previously reported are obtained. Droplets (3 µL) are actuated using 200 V, 500 Hz DC pulses. Droplet positions can be detected and displayed on a PC-based 3D animation in real time. The actuators and the capacitance sensing circuits are implemented on one PCB to reduce the size of the system. In Chapter 3, an intelligent EWOD (electrowetting on dielectric) top plate control system is proposed. The dynamic top plate is controlled by a piezoelectric (PZT) cantilever structure. A high resolution laser displacement sensor is used to monitor the deflection of the top plate. The gap height optimization and the harmonic vibration significantly improve the droplet velocity and decrease the droplet minimum threshold actuation voltage. The top plate vibration induced actuation improvement is magnitude and frequency dependent. 100 µm and 200 µm vibrations are tested at 25 Hz. Vibration frequencies at 5 Hz, 10 Hz, and 20 Hz are tested while the magnitude is 200 µm. Results show greater improvements are achieved at larger vibration magnitudes and higher vibration frequencies. With a vibrated top plate, the largest reduction of the actuation voltage is 76 VRMS for a 2.0 µl DI water droplet. The maximum droplet instantaneous velocity is around 9.3 mm/s, which is almost 3 times faster than the droplet velocity without top plate vibration. Liquid that has different hysteresis such as acetonitrile with various concentrations are used as a control to show its compatibility with the proposed DMF chip. Contact line depinning under top plate vibration is observed, which indicates the underlying mechanism for the improvements in actuation velocity and threshold voltage. The top plate control technique reported in this study makes EWOD DMF chips more reliable for point of care diagnostics. In Chapter 4, the mechanisms of the improvements were investigated by observing the detailed changes in the contact angle hysteresis using both parallel and nonparallel top plates. In Chapter 5, on-chip cell cultures are used for anti-biotic resistant bacteria detection. The passively dispensed on-chip cell cultures realize the isolated micro environment electrochemistry measurement, shorten the culturing time, and reduce the required sample volume. The design of the next generation ultra-portable DMF system is covered in the Appendix. Detailed technical notes and hardware design is covered in the Appendix. The proposed portable and high throughput DMF system with on-chip cell cultures have a great potential to change the standards for micro-environment culturing technologies, which will significantly improve the efficiency of actuation, sensing, and detecting performance of the DMF systems

A Computation Model for Nanoantenna-based Solar Cell with High Conversion Efficiency

Build a model of spiral nanoantenna and an antennaarray based solar cell collector. Using Rao-Wilton-Glisson (RWG) basis functions tosimulate the spiral nanoantennas. We calculate the frequency response of the radiationgain as the indicator of receiving bandwidth which is akey factor in conversion efficiency

Electrical & Magnetic Stimulation and Health

1, Introduction Most of the patients with neural diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Stroke and Depression, cannot be cured by taking pills or conducting surgery. In contrast to the conventional therapies, physical therapies such as TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) (Fig. 1) and tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) (Fig. 2) are the most popular methods in treating neural disorders with a non-invasive way. TMS employs electromagnetic (1-3 Tesla) induction generates an Electric field suitable for neural stimulation; tDCS employs a weak current (1-2 mA) to modulate neuronal excitabilities

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Sentiment in “COVID-19” Reportage of CCTV News and The New York Times

Drawing support from the artificial intelligence platform of Baidu Cloud and the natural language processing approach, this paper provides an empirically-grounded micro-analysis of Sino-American news discourses on “COVID-19” pandemic in China 2020 by using keyword wordcloud analysis on sentiment expressions, namely the discourses from the websites of CCTV News and The New York Times. The authors analyzed the media’s intended attitudes expressed with sentiment, and found that the attitude of the Chinese people and China’s media towards the epidemic was mostly positive; while New York Times was mostly negative about the epidemic, especially at the peak of the outbreak. Such a difference presents a prevalent manifestation of recognition towards the epidemic led by either government or media institutions while people face uncertainties caused by corona virus, which may further influence the public opinion and attitudes towards the epidemic, which in turn has broader social/political-interactional purposes and public cognitive construction.

Dietary Probiotic Bacillus licheniformis TC22 Increases Growth, Immunity, and Disease Resistance, against Vibrio splendidus Infection in Juvenile Sea Cucumbers Apostichopus japonicus

In this study we examined the effects of probiotic Bacillus licheniformis TC22 on growth, immunity, and disease resistance against Vibrio splendidus in juvenile sea cucumbers Apostichopus japonicus. For 30 days, sea cucumbers were fed diets with TC22 at 0 (control), 105, 107, and 109 CFU/g respectively. Results showed that dietary TC22 at 109 CFU/g significantly improved (P0.05). Dietary TC22 at 109 CFU/g significantly improved phagocytosis, and total nitric oxide synthase activity in sea cucumbers (P0.05). Respiratory burst in sea cucumbers fed dietary TC22 at 109 CFU/g was significantly higher than those fed dietary TC22 at 107 CFU/g (P<0.05). Cumulative mortality after V. splendidus challenge decreased significantly in the sea cucumbers fed with TC22 at 109 CFU/g (P<0.05). The present study confirmed dietary B. licheniformis TC22 at 109 CFU/g could significantly improve immunity and disease resistance in juvenile A. japonicus