Suchergebnisse

AbstractA facile method was used to synthesize amorphous potassium ferricyanide (PF)@ZIF‐67 nanocages, a novel metal–organic framework derivative. The structure, composition and morphology of PF@ZIF‐67 were analysed by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscope, X‐ray diffraction and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The results show that PF@ZIF‐67 nanoparticles were successfully prepared and its nanostructure has high crystallinity. The prepared materials were employed as heterogeneous persulfate catalysts for the degradation of levofloxacin (LEV). The effects of some key parameters including sodium persulfate (PS) dosage, PF@ZIF‐67, initial solution pH and reaction time on LEV degradation were investigated. PF@ZIF‐67 showed higher catalytic capacity for LEV degradation compared to ZIF‐67, implying the iron‐cobalt synergy in the material. Under the optimized conditions of 8.4‐mM PS, 0.5 g/L PF@ZIF‐67 at an initial solution pH of 7.2, 85.8% of LEV could be removed within 240 min. The quenching experiments suggest that sulfate radicals were the predominant reactive species.

In the 2010s, feminism thrived in China amid a transformation in social stratification and a rise in women's social status. The focus of this study is on the representation of the images of women of various social strata in national news reports. Taking Xinwen Lianbo, a national news program produced by China Central Television, as an example, we analyzed visual representations of 360 female figures from 2011 to 2020. The findings revealed that, rather than reflecting China's Tǔ-shaped stratification structure, the program depicted an "olive-shaped" pseudo-society in which women of what we term the "middle" stratum constituted the largest portion and served as multifaceted role models, women of the "prominent" stratum served as bellwethers of socioeconomic development, and women of the "ordinary" stratum did not participate in social development. The program's imagery also created a double standard for domestic duties: Women of the prominent stratum were depicted as disembedded from the social role of housewife and breaking through the career "glass ceiling," though not achieving equality with men in terms of their positions in society or politics, while women of the ordinary stratum as bearing the ideological reshuffle of conservative gender values. This study suggests a fresh perspective on the great disparities in the representation of women in different strata, which differs from the status of gender and stratum in real society.

AbstractThe use of campaign‐style enforcement is often criticized for its lack of long‐term impacts and lack of impacts beyond campaign‐focused issues. Using a mixed approach that combines regression analysis and in‐depth interviews, we studied the campaigns against straw burning in several provinces of China, and found evidence to support the contrary. The campaigns did effectively reduce straw‐burning activities, and more importantly, the impact appears to be long lasting and may spill over to other environmental issues. We further found that informal institutions, such as Chinese face culture and the close ties between village cadres and farmers, play a very important role in determining the length and range of a campaign's impact. The values and limitations of campaign‐style enforcement are discussed.

This study investigates the re-entry acculturative experiences and challenges facing foreign-educated returnees working at Chinese universities. Fifteen returnees from five universities in a southwestern province of China participated in semi-structured interviews. The study, using the ABC theoretical framework, highlights the acculturative process of returned academics in terms of role expectations, transformed identities, and cultural learning. The process involves challenges and unmet expectations, including low salaries, heavy workloads, unsupportive administrative bureaucracy, political control, and lack of a healthy academic community culture. The findings show that re-entry acculturation is a never-ending process. Returnees need constantly to realign their expectations and to negotiate and reinterpret shifting realities.

AbstractThis paper presents a new and flexible prognostics framework based on a higher‐order hidden semi‐Markov model (HOHSMM) for systems or components with unobservable health states and complex transition dynamics. The HOHSMM extends the basic hidden Markov model (HMM) by allowing the hidden state to depend on its more distant history and assuming generally distributed state duration. An effective Gibbs sampling algorithm is designed for statistical inference of the HOHSMM. We conduct a simulation study to evaluate the performance of the proposed HOHSMM sampler and examine the impacts of the distant‐history dependency. We design a decoding algorithm to estimate the hidden health states using the learned model. Remaining useful life is predicted using a simulation approach given the decoded hidden states. The practical utility of the proposed prognostics framework is demonstrated by a case study on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) turbofan engines. We further compare the RUL prediction performance between the proposed HOHSMM and a benchmark mixture of Gaussians HMM prognostics method. The results show that the HOHSMM‐based prognostics framework provides good hidden health‐state assessment and RUL estimation for complex systems.

AbstractThis study aims to uncover the complexity of emoji usage on Chinese social media. We investigate emoji usage in comments on push notifications from the WeChat official account ofGuokr, which was chosen as a representative for an open forum for public communication. The data includes 2,552 comments from 90 articles pushed by the account. The analysis adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective within the framework of intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes 2014), taking into account both the local discourse environment and the cultural context. It is found that Chinese WeChat users show a preference for using emojis that are unique to the WeChat platform. Qualitative analyses were carried out on selected WeChat emojis used in comments fulfilling the speech acts of self-disclosure, self-praise, humor and complaining. Emojis are found to be used to perform and reinforce a sense of playfulness in social media, but underlying this playfulness there is a discursive conformity to social norms in real life. The use of emojis resolves the tension between the openness and freedom in social media and the conservative, constraint-bounded nature of established social norms.