14,289 research outputs found
Stay-at-home Fathers in Contemporary Urban China
This research investigates stay-at-home fathers (SAHFs) as an emerging gendered identity in contemporary urban China. Being a SAHF constitutes an unconventional gender role in China, which has been marginalised by longstanding prejudice against men who are not the main wage-earners in the family unit. My scrutiny of the discourse surrounding this new role contributes to existing literature on the social production of gender difference and hierarchy in urban China. This research is particularly significant now, at a time when gender inequalities in China coexist with an increasingly individualistic culture, and yet these inequalities remain largely unaddressed by government discourse and often reinforced through popular discourse.
This research seeks to answer three questions: What motivates men to become SAHFs? How do they perceive, experience, and enact their role as SAHFs? How does the construction of SAHF masculinity intersect with changing representations of urban family life and masculinity in contemporary urban China? To address these three interrelated questions, I examine three sources of data about SAHFs – TV dramas, social media articles, and interviews – focusing on how SAHFs’ perceptions, experiences, and practices are understood both by SAHFs themselves and wider society.
Current research on SAHFs has been predominantly focused on the Global North to the extent that this is the first research on SAHFs in mainland China that focuses on how multiple discourses contribute to the construction and reconstruction of familial masculinity and wider family relations. By highlighting the plurality and ongoing reconfiguration of masculinity that has emerged from my three data sources, I show how discourse produced by and about SAHFs not only sustains but also sometimes transforms conventional notions of gender. In doing so, my research adds new perspectives to existing literature on Chinese masculinities and family life, as well as studies of SAHFs and the family in other countries
The Inflaton Portal to a Highly decoupled EeV Dark Matter Particle
We explore the possibility that the dark-matter relic abundance is generated
in a context where the inflaton is the only mediator between the visible and
the hidden sectors of our universe. Due to the relatively large mass of the
inflaton field, such a portal leads to an extremely feeble interaction between
the dark and the visible sectors suggesting that the dark sector cannot reach
any thermal equilibrium with the visible sector. After the two sectors are
populated by the decay of the inflaton, a heavy dark-matter particle thermally
decouples within the dark sector. Later, a lighter dark particle, whose decay
width is naturally suppressed by the inflaton propagator, decays into the
visible sector after it dominates the energy density of universe. This process
dilutes the dark-matter relic density by injecting entropy in the visible
sector. We show that an inflaton mass of GeV together
with couplings of order one are fully compatible with a dark-matter relic
abundance . As a general feature of the model, the entropy
dilution mechanism is accompanied by a period of early matter domination, which
modifies the amount of e-folds of inflation necessary to accommodate Planck
data. Moreover, the coupling of the inflaton to the dark and visible sectors
brings loop contributions to the inflationary potential which can destabilize
the inflation trajectory. Considering all these complementary constraints, we
show that, in the context of a plateau-inflation scenario such as the
-attractor model, the inflaton can constitute a viable mediator between
the visible sector and a EeV dark-matter candidate. Furthermore, we
show that improved constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio and spectral index
could potentially rule out dark-matter scenarios of this sort in the future.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, new version after publicatio
Unsupervised Learning of Long-Term Motion Dynamics for Videos
We present an unsupervised representation learning approach that compactly
encodes the motion dependencies in videos. Given a pair of images from a video
clip, our framework learns to predict the long-term 3D motions. To reduce the
complexity of the learning framework, we propose to describe the motion as a
sequence of atomic 3D flows computed with RGB-D modality. We use a Recurrent
Neural Network based Encoder-Decoder framework to predict these sequences of
flows. We argue that in order for the decoder to reconstruct these sequences,
the encoder must learn a robust video representation that captures long-term
motion dependencies and spatial-temporal relations. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our learned temporal representations on activity
classification across multiple modalities and datasets such as NTU RGB+D and
MSR Daily Activity 3D. Our framework is generic to any input modality, i.e.,
RGB, Depth, and RGB-D videos.Comment: CVPR 201
A method for evaluating the design of websites for birthing hospitals in Shanghai
Identifying a problem for a target-oriented project and providing effective solutions within a specific social and cultural context is challenging for designers who work on cross-cultural projects. This thesis documents the process of developing an effective method to assist these designers. The design of websites for childbirthing hospitals in Shanghai will be used as an example to show how this methodology can be applied to a complex target-oriented design project and integrate design principles to fulfill specific social, cultural, and emotional needs of the consumers. Furthermore, this method is easy to follow and also can be easily adapted to study other target-oriented designs associated with social and cultural contexts
A method for mapping XML-based specifications between development methodologies
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is widely used by software engineers as the basis of analysis and design in software development. However, UML ignores human factors in the course of software development because of its strong emphasis on the internal structure and functionality of the application. This thesis presents a method of mapping human-computer interaction (HCI) requirement specifications generated by usability engineering (UE) methodologies (e.g. Putting Usability First (PUF)) into UML specifications. These two sets of requirement specification are specified, using Extensible Markup Language (XML) so that HCI requirement specifications can be integrated into UML ones. A Mapping Tool was developed to facilitate the creation of mappings between PUF XML tags and XMI tags. The Mapping Tool was used to create mappings between PUF and UML requirement specifications. This mapping process and its outputs were evaluated to demonstrate that the tool worked. The results of the evaluation show that the HCI requirement specification represented by the PUF XML tags can improve the UML specification by adding them into the XMI tags
Stay-at-home fathers in contemporary Chinese TV dramas
Stay-at-home fathers (SAHFs), as an emergent gendered identity, have recently featured in several family TV dramas in China. This article investigates the discourse of masculinity embodied by SAHFs in TV dramas, to provide a new perspective to academic debates about the cultural production of gender and hierarchy in contemporary China. In particular, it examines representations of SAHFs and their familial relationships in three popular TV programmes—Marriage Battle (Hunyin baoweizhan 婚姻保卫战, 2010), A Little Reunion (Xiao huanxi 小欢喜, 2019), and Super Dad and Super Kids (Xiong ba xiong haizi 熊爸熊孩子, 2017). Through the analysis of these three series, I identify a paradox in the televisual representations of SAHFs, that while the male characters all seemingly embody a new model of familial masculinity, namely a caring and sensitive figure, they still cling to patriarchal ideologies when negotiating family matters. My discussion of the paradoxical representations of SAHFs in the series offers an illustration of how patriarchal ideologies are sustained despite the ongoing renegotiation of gender roles within the Chinese family.Peer reviewe
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