Bicycles and plants : designing for conviviality and meaningful social relations through collaborative services

In our modern times, people’s daily needs and affairs are largely arranged by goods and services provided through institutional and market mechanisms. There is little space left for people’s capabilities of doing things by themselves. This thesis looks at alternative services bypassing institutional and monetary mechanisms: the type of services where people work with and for each other. It investigates how service design can provide opportunities for people to contribute to and with each other as capable individuals and develop meaningful social relations. Two service cases are investigated. One is an existing service of a self-repair bicycle workshop run by a subcultural community. The other is a series of design interventions called ‘Plant Hotel’ where people help water other’s plants as a form of collaborative care. The study of the first case of a self-repair bicycle workshop looks at services as capability building. The workshop supports and strengthens people’s capabilities in bicycle repair and building. By ethnographically studying the mundane and situated practices, experiences, and materials in the workshop, the study investigates how this kind of service is actually organized and experienced. The findings show that instead of helping make visitors’ repair work faster and easier, the community insists on leaving adequate space for people to struggle and negotiate the repair process. Through this finding, differences between the self-repair service where people act as capable agents and commercial ones where people are as served customers are revealed. With this, the study calls awareness to re-examining some taken-for-granted design assumptions, such as the construction of users and the use, and articulated values, especially in the tradition of user-centred design. The second case of the design interventions of Plant Hotel explores a service as new social relation creation. The series includes five Plant Hotels addressing five types of social relation. By involving people in watering other’s plants in the specific context, it discusses what meaningful social relations can be generated from collaborative care for plants. Instead of aiming to provide direct answers, the interventions create opportunities to support and provoke people to look for and negotiate with the meaningfulness. Through the interventions, the thesis proposes a discursive and provocative role of service design that goes beyond the solution-orientated tradition. The new role indicates that the new social relations to be designed do not suggest solutions or preferred models. Rather, they become enquiries into articulating issues of social distinctions and boundaries, and reflecting and challenging existing social relations. All in all, this doctoral work proposes service design as an agent of capability building and a relational agent of creating new social relations and challenging social boundaries. It demonstrates the ways in which daily services are designed to support individuals’ long-term learning and capability building rather than the easy and fast completion of tasks, and also to open up new spheres for meaningful social relations outside institutionally and economically structured boundaries

Low frequency noise in chemical vapor deposited MoS2

Inherent low frequency noise is a ubiquitous phenomenon, which limits operation and performance of electronic devices and circuits. This limiting factor is very important for nanoscale electronic devices, such as 2D semiconductor devices. In this work, low frequency noise in high mobility single crystal MoS2 grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is investigated. The measured low frequency noise follows an empirical formulation of mobility fluctuations with Hooge' s parameter ranging between 1.44E-3 and 3.51E-2. Small variation of Hooge's parameter suggests superior material uniformity and processing control of CVD grown MoS2 devices than reported single-layer MoS2 FET. The extracted Hooge's parameter is one order of magnitude lower than CVD grown graphene. The Hooge's parameter shows an inverse relationship with the field mobility

Shanzhai products in everyday life: Ethnographic fieldwork in China

In China, authentic and shanzhai (which is related to English words of copy, fake, counterfeit and grassroots) products coexist. Widely used by a large amount of Chinese users, shanzhai products that play a significant role in users’ everyday life have integrated in the Chinese society. My master thesis is an ethnographic research to investigate shanzhai phenomenon from the perspective of users. In my work, I aim to write a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) in details of the situated behaviors of shanzhai users focusing on everyday use of particular product categories, as well as users’ perceptions. Therefore, the materiality of use and users will be described through real-life stories of my informants and their cultural context. By doing so, shanzhai products will not be over-simplified merely as “brand-alike products with lower price”, but rather as the extensions of the user (subject) who purchases and uses particular shanzhai product categories in a socially accepted way in which s/he carefully enacts the identity, solicits comfort, pride and avoids anxiety, shame

Dynamic capabilities of media entrepreneurial firms : a case study of Chinese new media startups

Organizational capabilities greatly affect the performance of media firms in an uncertain and fast-moving environment. As such, media firms especially those new ventures should develop strong capabilities that would enable them to sustain competitive advantages and adapt to the changing situation. This study addresses some of the challenges faced by Chinese media entrepreneurial firms in adapting to the uncertain market. To address this problem, this study explains the organizational capabilities creation in a Chinese social media entrepreneurial firm —T company. This study adopts the Dynamic Capabilities (DC) framework (Teece et al, 1997) as the theoretical proposition and conduct a qualitative research based on a case study to obtain in-depth insights. As a result, 4 research gaps related to dynamic capabilities were filled: 1) insufficient attention to the DC of new ventures; 2) lack of attention to the creation of DC; 3) need for more literature on media management of DC; 4) lack of theoretical depth based on the context of Chinese media. At the end of the study, it was observed that leaders’ cognition, perception, human capital, social capital and leadership all positively contribute to the creation of dynamic capabilities, and the entrepreneurial instinct and expectation of entrepreneurs also facilitate the formation process. Meanwhile, for some specific elements, venture capital triggers sensing of the external environment, and the mobility of managers also serves as a guarantee

Anesthetic Isoflurane Increases Phosphorylated Tau Levels Mediated by Caspase Activation and Aβ Generation

Anesthetic isoflurane has been shown to promote Alzheimer’s disease (AD) neuropathogenesis by inducing caspase activation and accumulation of β-amyloid (Aβ). Phosphorylation of tau protein is another important feature of AD neuropathogenesis. However, the effects of isoflurane on phosphorylated tau levels remain largely to be determined. We therefore set out to determine whether isoflurane can increase phosphorylated tau levels. 5 to 8 month-old wild-type and AD transgenic mice [B6.Cg-Tg (APPswe, PSEN1dE9)85Dbo/J] were treated with 1.4% isoflurane for two hours. The mice brain tissues were harvested at six, 12 and 24 hours after the anesthesia. For the in vitro studies, primary neurons from wild-type and the AD transgenic mice were exposed to 2% isoflurane for six hours, and were harvested at the end of anesthesia. The harvested brain tissues and neurons were subjected to Western blot analysis by which the levels of phosphorylated tau protein at Serine 262 (Tau-PS262) were determined. Here we show that the isoflurane anesthesia increased Tau-PS262 levels in brain tissues and primary neurons from the wild-type and AD transgenic mice. Moreover, the isoflurane anesthesia may induce a greater increase in Tau-PS262 levels in primary neurons and brain tissues from the AD transgenic mice. Finally, caspase activation inhibitor Z-VAD and Aβ generation inhibitor L-685,458 attenuated the isoflurane-induced increases in Tau-PS262 levels. In conclusion, clinically relevant isoflurane anesthesia increases phosphorylated tau levels, which may result from the isoflurane-induced caspase activation and Aβ generation. These findings will promote more studies to determine the effects of anesthetics on tau phosphorylation

Effects of Individual Differences on Measurements’ Drowsiness-Detection Performance

Individual differences (IDs) may reduce the detection-accuracy of drowsiness-driving by influencing measurements’ drowsiness-detection performance (MDDP). The purpose of this paper is to propose a model that can quantify the effects of IDs on MDDP and find measurements with less impact by IDs to build drowsiness-detection models. Through field experiments, drivers’ naturalistic driving data and subjective-drowsiness levels were collected, and drowsiness-related measurements were calculated using the double-layer sliding time window. In the model, MDDP was represented by |Z-statistics| of the Wilcoxon-test. First, the individual driver’s measurements were analysed by Wilcoxon-test. Next, drivers were combined in pairs, measurements of paired-driver combinations were analysed by Wilcoxon-test, and measurement’s IDs of paired-driver combinations were calculated. Finally, linear regression was used to fit the measurements’ IDs and changes of MDDP that equalled the individual driver’s |Z-statistics| minus the paired-driver combination’s |Z-statistics|, and the slope’s absolute value (|k|) indicated the effects of ID on the MDDP. As a result, |k| of the mean of the percentage of eyelid closure (MPECL) is the lowest (4.95), which illustrates MPECL is the least affected by IDs. The results contribute to the measurement selection of drowsiness-detection models considering IDs

Letters Block-by-Block Growth of Single-Crystalline Si/SiGe Superlattice Nanowires

ABSTRACT Heterojunction and superlattice formation is essential for many potential applications of semiconductor nanowires in nanoscale optoelectronics. We have developed a hybrid pulsed laser ablation/chemical capor deposition (PLA-CVD) process for the synthesis of semiconductor nanowires with longitudinal ordered heterostructures. The laser ablation process generates a programmable pulsed vapor source, which enables the nanowire growth in a block-by-block fashion with a well-defined compositional profile along the wire axis. Single-crystalline nanowires with longitudinal Si/SiGe superlattice structure have been successfully synthesized. This unique class of heterostructured one-dimensional nanostructures holds great potential in applications such as light emitting devices and thermoelectrics

Prognostic Value of Elevated Serum Ceruloplasmin Levels in Patients With Heart Failure

Background: Ceruloplasmin (Cp) is a copper-binding acute-phase protein that is increased in inflammatory states and deficient in Wilson\u27s disease. Recent studies demonstrate that increased levels of Cp are associated with increased risk of developing heart failure. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that serum Cp provides incremental and independent prediction of survival in stable patients with heart failure. Methods and Results: We measured serum Cp levels in 890 patients with stable heart failure undergoing elective cardiac evaluation that included coronary angiography. We examined the role of Cp levels in predicting survival over 5 years of follow-up. Mean Cp level was 26.6 ± 6.9 mg/dL and demonstrated relatively weak correlation with B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP; r = 0.187; P \u3c .001). Increased Cp levels were associated with increased 5-year all-cause mortality (quartile [Q] 4 vs Q1 hazard ratio [HR] 1.9, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.4–2.8; P \u3c .001). When controlled for coronary disease traditional risk factors, creatinine clearance, dialysis, body mass index, medications, history of myocardial infarction, BNP, left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), heart rate, QRS duration, left bundle branch blockage, and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator placement, higher Cp remained an independent predictor of increased mortality (Q4 vs Q1 HR 1.7, 95% CI 1.1–2.6; P \u3c .05). Model quality was improved with addition of Cp to the aforementioned covariables (net reclassification improvement of 9.3%; P \u3c .001). Conclusions: Ceruloplasmin is an independent predictor of all-cause mortality in patients with heart failure. Measurement of Cp may help to identify patients at heightened mortality risk

Trimethylamine N-Oxide and Mortality Risk in Patients With Peripheral Artery Disease

Background: Production of the proatherogenic metabolite, trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), from dietary nutrients by intestinal microbiota enhances atherosclerosis development in animal models and is associated with atherosclerotic coronary artery disease in humans. The utility of studying plasma levels of TMAO to risk stratify in patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD) has not been reported. Methods and Results: We examined the relationship between fasting plasma TMAO and all-cause mortality (5-year), stratified by subtypes of PAD and presence of coronary artery disease in 935 patients with PAD who underwent elective angiography for cardiac evaluation at a tertiary care hospital. Median plasma TMAO was 4.8 μmol/L (interquartile range, 2.9–8.0 μmol/L). Elevated TMAO levels were associated with 2.7-fold increased mortality risk (fourth versus first quartiles, hazard ratio 2.86, 95% CI 1.82–3.97, P\u3c0.001). Following adjustments for traditional risk factors, inflammatory biomarkers, and history of coronary artery disease, the highest TMAO quartile remained predictive of 5-year mortality (adjusted hazard ratio 2.06, 95% CI 1.36–3.11, P\u3c0.001). Similar prognostic value for elevated TMAO was seen for subjects with carotid artery, non–carotid artery, or lower extremity PAD. TMAO provided incremental prognostic value for all-cause mortality (net reclassification index, 40.22%; P\u3c0.001) and improvement in area under receiver operator characteristic curve (65.7% versus 69.4%; P=0.013). Conclusions: TMAO, a pro-atherogenic metabolite formed by gut microbes, predicts long-term adverse event risk and incremental prognostic value in patients with PAD. These findings point to the potential for TMAO to help improve selection of high-risk PAD patients with or without significant coronary artery disease, who likely need more aggressive and specific dietary and pharmacologic therapy