Athletic Career Transition in Former Chinese Elite Athletes : An Empirical Investigation and Cross-Cultural Comparison with Findings from Germany

The effects of competitive sport participation on the life-span development of elite athletes are receiving increasing amounts of research interests. An action theory framework is proposed in the present study (a) to integrate various theoretical approaches that are applied in the studies in this field, (b) to interpret the influences of different cultural backgrounds and sport system on the athletic career development and career transition process in former athletes from Germany and China, (c) to provide a methodological background for the quantitative and qualitative measurements used in the present study. An in-depth investigation was held in China in 1998. 350 covered questionnaires with simple introduction were delivered via post to former athletes in China. 149 (42.6%) valid answers are returned at the deadline. 28 individual interviews were carried out with the volunteers in the 149 final participants. All the quantitative and qualitative empirical results were analyzed and interpreted from an action theory perspective and compared with the empirical findings of a previous study conducted in Germany in 1997. Interesting differences and commonalities were detected with regard to the quantitative and qualitative data. Other than isolated cases, most interviewed athletes reported that they were rather satisfied with athletic careers. Differences in educational and occupational aspects were found between the two country (cultural) groups. Due to a close relationship and co-operation between universities and the sport system, more former Chinese elite athletes achieved an academic degree, mostly with a strong connection to sport. Further qualitative comparisons between the interviews provided a comprehensive description and understanding of the athletic career processes. Characteristics of the actors (elite athletes as intentional subjects developed in different social cultural backgrounds and sport systems), the task (athletic career transition, post-athletic career development in different value systems, norms etc.) and the environment (social-cultural and institutional characteristics of the competitive sport system) were considered. The results of the present study provided a meaningful theoretical perspective for the elaboration of an action theory based sport specific transition concept including life development intervention aspects (career counselling and environmental management). The action theory perspective has been proved to have unique advantages in the study of life-span career development process, the interpretation of social cultural influences on actions, as well as the methodological issues in both fields. A comprehensive understanding of athletic career transition and post-athletic career development process in different sport systems will be useful in the development and implementation of future career assistance programs

Impact of Total Rewards on Animation Employees’ Engagement

The researchers examine the impact of total rewards on engagement by multiple regression analysis in this paper. The sample for the study is 800 animation employees in South China. SPSS17.0 and AMOS18 are used in exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The study proves that: (a) Total rewards are a multi-hierarchical and multi-dimensional construct which includes 7 first-order factors and 4 second-order factors. (b) Challenging working environment, appreciation and recognition, promotion opportunity and individual variable pay have significant positive impacts on employee engagement, and the contribution rate are 42.0%, 11.6%, 1.4% and 0.9% respectively. (c) Individual fixed salary, collective salary and spiritual rewards have no significant positive impacts on employee engagement. The study has further enriched the theories of total rewards and employee engagement and has provided the theoretical basis and empirical evidence supports to the management of the animation companies for them to carry out the incentive programs to the employees

Evolution of timing jitter in nonlinearly-guided, dispersion managed transmission systems

Timing jitter is a major factor limiting the performance of any high-speed, long-haul data transmission system. It arises from a number of reasons, such as interaction with accumulated spontaneous emission, inter-symbol interference (ISI), electrostriction etc. Some effects causing timing jitter can be reduced by means of non-linear filtering, using, for example, a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) [1]. The NOLM has been shown to reduce the timing jitter by suppressing the ASE and by stabilising the pulse duration [2, 3]. In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of timing jitter in a 2R regenerated system, nonlinearly guided by NOLMs at bit rates of 10, 20, 40, and 80- Gbit/s. Transmission performance of an equivalent non-regenerated (generic) system is taken as a reference

Unsupervised Low Light Image Enhancement Using SNR-Aware Swin Transformer

Image captured under low-light conditions presents unpleasing artifacts, which debilitate the performance of feature extraction for many upstream visual tasks. Low-light image enhancement aims at improving brightness and contrast, and further reducing noise that corrupts the visual quality. Recently, many image restoration methods based on Swin Transformer have been proposed and achieve impressive performance. However, On one hand, trivially employing Swin Transformer for low-light image enhancement would expose some artifacts, including over-exposure, brightness imbalance and noise corruption, etc. On the other hand, it is impractical to capture image pairs of low-light images and corresponding ground-truth, i.e. well-exposed image in same visual scene. In this paper, we propose a dual-branch network based on Swin Transformer, guided by a signal-to-noise ratio prior map which provides the spatial-varying information for low-light image enhancement. Moreover, we leverage unsupervised learning to construct the optimization objective based on Retinex model, to guide the training of proposed network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is competitive with the baseline models

ADRC Method for Noncascaded Integral System Based on the Total Derivative of Composite Functions of Several Variables

The standard ADRC controller usually selects the canonical plant in the form of cascaded integrators. However, the condition variables of practical system do not necessarily have the cascaded integral relationship. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of total derivative of composite functions of several variables and a structure, which can convert the state space system of noncascaded integral form into the cascaded integral form. In this way, the converted system can be directly controlled with ADRC. Meanwhile, the control of Chen chaotic system is discussed in detail to show the conversion and the controller design. The control performances under different levels of complication and different strengths of disturbance are comparably researched. The converted system achieves significantly better control effects under ADRC than that of the PID. This converting method solves the control problem of some noncascaded integral systems in both theory and application and greatly expands the application scope of the standard ADRC method

X線回折技術による微細粒鋼およびマイクロ波焼結したセラミックスの強度評価

取得学位：博士(工学)，学位授与番号：博甲第1055号，学位授与年月日：平成20年9月26

Farmer Participation, the Dairy Industry, and the Rise of Dairy Production in China

With rapid income growth, dairy production and consumption in China have increased significantly. This emergence of the dairy sector will provide opportunities for farmers to participate in a high-value, potentially more lucrative enterprise. The overall goal of this paper is to analyze the major determinants of farmers’ participation in dairy production. Our main question is whether or not the pace of the emergence of the dairy processing industry has affected the ability of farmers to participate in dairy production and whether or not it has limited the expansion of their herd size. Based on household, village and processor surveys conducted in the Greater Beijing region, our analysis shows that the location of dairy processing firms is one of the key factors that determines the participation of farmers in dairy production. Although other factors affect participation and herd size—for example, access to roads and the ability to get a job off the farm (which affects the opportunity cost of household members)—access to dairy processors is shown to be the major factor that has encouraged the growth of dairy production over the past decade. The results also show that poor, less educated farmers with relatively less access to land are not excluded from the rapid expansion of the Greater Beijing dairy market

Characterization, phylogeny, alternative splicing and expression of Sox30 gene

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Members of the Sox gene family isolated from both vertebrates and invertebrates have been proved to participate in a wide variety of developmental processes, including sex determination and differentiation. Among these members, <it>Sox30 </it>had been considered to exist only in mammals since its discovery, and its exact function remains unclear.</p> <p>Results</p> <p><it>Sox30 </it>cDNA was cloned from the Nile tilapia by RT-PCR and RACE. Screening of available genome and EST databases and phylogenetic analysis showed that <it>Sox30 </it>also exists in non-mammalian vertebrates and invertebrates, which was further supported by synteny analyses. Tissue expression in human, mouse and tilapia suggested that <it>Sox30 </it>was probably a gonad-specific gene, which was also supported by the fact that <it>Sox30 </it>EST sequences were obtained from gonads of the animal species. In addition, four alternatively spliced isoforms were isolated from tilapia gonad. Their temporal and spatial expression patterns during normal and sex reversed gonadal development were investigated by RT-PCR and <it>in situ </it>hybridization. Our data suggest that expressions of <it>Sox30 </it>isoforms are related to stage and phenotypic-sex, observed in the germ cells of male gonad and in somatic cells of the female gonad.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p><it>Sox30 </it>is not a gene only existed in mammals, but exists widely throughout the animal kingdom as supported by our bioinformatic, phylogenetic and syntenic analyses. It is very likely that <it>Sox30 </it>is expressed exclusively in gonads. Expression analyses revealed that <it>Sox30 </it>may be involved in female and male gonadal development at different stages by alternative splicing.</p