Paying homage to the ‘Heavenly Mother’: Cultural-geopolitics of the Mazu pilgrimage and its implications on rapprochement between China and Taiwan

Much has been researched on tourism across (former) borders of conflict and on pilgrimage as a socio-cultural activity, but the relationship between the two remains poorly understood. Pilgrimage-tours carried out by Taiwanese devotees to the birthplace of Mazu (or Tianshang Shengmu – the Heavenly Mother) in Putian, China offer a significant platform to further our understanding of how religion can play a part in the rapprochement between China and Taiwan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper goes beyond the conventional state-level analysis to discuss interactions and encounters forged at the levels of the temple organisations and the individual. It utilises Victor Turner’s concept of ‘communitas’ to understand how spiritual spaces are being performed through the pilgrimage rather than already existing before the pilgrimage. Importantly, the Mazu pilgrimage-tour is conceptualised not as a tourism product, but as both a social activity and a socialising one, producing opportunities for different forms of interactions between the Chinese and Taiwanese devotees. These ‘interactions along the side’ as opposed to state-level diplomatic exchanges offer insights into the ‘more-than-state’ and ‘more-than-human’ relationships that bind/divide devotees on both sides of the Taiwan Strait

Electrically controllable surface magnetism on the surface of topological insulator

We study theoretically the RKKY interaction between magnetic impurities on the surface of three-dimensional topological insulators, mediated by the helical Dirac electrons. Exact analytical expression shows that the RKKY interaction consists of the Heisenberg-like, Ising-like and DM-like terms. It provides us a new way to control surface magnetism electrically. The gap opened by doped magnetic ions can lead to a short-range Bloembergen-Rowland interaction. The competition among the Heisenberg, Ising and DM terms leads to rich spin configurations and anomalous Hall effect on different lattices.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

sscMap: An extensible Java application for connecting small-molecule drugs using gene-expression signatures

Background: Connectivity mapping is a process to recognize novel pharmacological and toxicological properties in small molecules by comparing their gene expression signatures with others in a database. A simple and robust method for connectivity mapping with increased specificity and sensitivity was recently developed, and its utility demonstrated using experimentally derived gene signatures. Results: This paper introduces sscMap (statistically significant connections' map), a Java application designed to undertake connectivity mapping tasks using the recently published method. The software is bundled with a default collection of reference gene-expression profiles based on the publicly available dataset from the Broad Institute Connectivity Map 02, which includes data from over 7000 Affymetrix microarrays, for over 1000 small-molecule compounds, and 6100 treatment instances in 5 human cell lines. In addition, the application allows users to add their custom collections of reference profiles and is applicable to a wide range of other 'omics technologies. Conclusions: The utility of sscMap is two fold. First, it serves to make statistically significant connections between a user-supplied gene signature and the 6100 core reference profiles based on the Broad Institute expanded dataset. Second, it allows users to apply the same improved method to custom-built reference profiles which can be added to the database for future referencing. The software can be freely downloaded from http://purl.oclc.org/NET/sscMapComment: 3 pages, 1 table, 1 eps figur

Detection of Scammers Impersonating Authentic Merchants in Online Payment Systems

In some online payment systems, scammers may use a fake company name that is visually similar to that of an authentic merchant. Due to the similarity in name, unsuspecting customers who fail to notice the similarity may inadvertently pay the scammer rather than the authentic merchant. This disclosure describes automated techniques to detect if a candidate merchant has a name that is similar to an authentic merchant. For such detection, alphabetic and alphanumeric maps are used to generate permutations of authentic merchant names. Soundex encodings are generated for the permutations. When a candidate merchant name is selected for payment, the Soundex encoding for the candidate merchant is compared to those for known authentic merchants. If there is a match, a warning is provided to the user attempting payment. For candidate merchant names for which Soundex encoding cannot be generated, a string match with permutations of authentic merchant name is performed to detect similarity. The described techniques can detect fraudulent merchants that attempt to leverage phonetic and/or visual similarity to an authentic merchant name

Formation of artificial granules for proving gelation as the main mechanism of aerobic granulation in biological wastewater treatment

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Microwave assisted heterogeneous catalysis: effects of varying oxygen concentrations on the oxidative coupling of methane

The oxidative coupling of methane was investigated over alumina supported La2O3/CeO2 catalysts under microwave dielectric heating conditions at different oxygen concentrations. It was observed that, at a given temperature using microwave heating, selectivities for both ethane and ethylene were notably higher when oxygen was absent than that in oxygen/methane mixtures. The differences were attributed to the localised heating of microwave radiation resulting in temperature inhomogeneity in the catalyst bed. A simplified model was used to estimate the temperature inhomogeneity; the temperature at the centre of the catalyst bed was 85 °C greater than that at the periphery when the catalyst was heated by microwaves in a gas mixture with an oxygen concentration of 12.5% (v/v), and the temperature difference was estimated to be 168 °C in the absence of oxygen