Search

Because of its unprecedented speed and scale, urbanization in China during the 1990s is one of the most representative fields in which to explore compressed modernity considering East Asian experiences. This article focuses on a collective litigation including 10,357 people suing the local government for the infringements on their property rights and citizenship during that period of urbanization. To make this massive movement possible under an authoritarian state, a new type of state-individual relationship was created, and a selection mechanism applied to the traditional, subordinate state-individual relationship and the modern, egalitarian state-individual relationship was constructed by the activists. The grassroots development of a strategic use of the law is the key to understanding how this selection mechanism was created. Activists distinguished multiple facets of “law”—literal law, symbolic law and practical law–to conceptualize the new egalitarian relationship through self-empowerment, in order to set the necessary preconditions for protesting, by segmenting the traditional state and to mobilize the network of participation by drawing upon the socialist memory of the “movement to popularize legal knowledge”. The selection mechanism described in this article could be considered as the response from individuals to the state during a time of transformation and shows the implication of temporality in the push and pull between individual rights and government overall control connected to the new and old systems. Tensions exist in this selection mechanism, and a paradox lies in the fact that the struggle for this egalitarian relationship should be based on the precondition that the subordinate relationship be internalized. By analyzing this complex process, this article points to China’s special social-historical process as it heads into modernity in an incremental and continuous way within such a short and compressed period of time, and also tackles the theoretical discussion of individualization from an East Asian perspective.

Abstract A novel reversible watermarking algorithm with two-stage data hiding strategy is presented in this paper. The core idea is two-stage data hiding (i.e., hiding data twice in a pixel of a cell), where the distortion after the first stage of embedding can be rarely removed, mostly reduced, or hardly increased after the second stage. Note that even the increased distortion is smaller compared to that of other methods under the same conditions. For this purpose, we compute lower and upper bounds from ordered neighboring pixels. In the first stage, the difference value between a pixel and its corresponding lower bound is used to hide one bit. The distortion can be removed, reduced, or increased by hiding another bit of data by using a difference value between the upper bound and the modified pixel. For the purpose of controlling capacity and reducing distortion, we determine appropriate threshold values. Finally, we present an algorithm to handle overflow/underflow problems designed specifically for two-stage embedding. Experimental study is carried out using several images, and the results are compared with well-known methods in the literature. The results clearly highlight that the proposed algorithm can hide more data with less distortion.

In this paper, the DBR all-visible mercury-free high-temperature and high-pressure multifunctional formation fluid PVT analyzer developed and produced by Schlumberger company is used to conduct an experimental study on phase behavior characteristics of one offshore high CO2 condensate gas wells. The experiments include two-phase flash experiment, constant composition expansion experiment (CCE experiment), and constant volume depletion experiment (CVD experiment). Experimental results show that the higher the CO2 content in the condensate gas system, the higher the gas-oil ratio of condensate gas, the greater the density of condensate oil, the higher the dew point pressure of condensate gas, the greater the relative volume of condensate gas, the smaller the amount of retrograde condensate oil. And the higher the CO2 content in the condensate gas system, the phase diagram is shifted to the left and up, the critical point of the phase diagram is shifted to the lower left, the smaller the area of the two-phase envelope, the lighter the condensate gas system, the condensate oil recovery is higher. The above experimental results revealed that CO2 is well soluble with condensate gas, the expansion capacity of the condensate gas system was slightly enhanced, and because CO2 has a good extraction capacity, the light components of condensate gas were constantly extracted, the retrograde condensate rate of condensate oil decreases, and the maximum retrograde condensate volume also decreased. However, the condensate oil was produced along with the natural gas, and the higher the CO2 content, the stronger the extraction, the more condensate oil was produced. It is mainly because CO2 has the strong gasification and extraction capacity, on the one hand, the retrograde condensation of condensate gas was inhibited, and on the other hand, reverse evaporation of condensate oil was enhanced. The above experimental results indicate the law of the effect of CO2 on the phase behavior characteristics of condensate gas reservoirs, providing theoretical basis and guidance for the efficient development of condensate gas reservoirs at sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In these studies, we have taken advantage of a transient transgenic strategy in Xenopus embryos to demonstrate that BMP signaling is required in vivo for heart formation in vertebrates. Ectopic expression of dominant negative Type I (tALK3) or Type II (tBMPRII) BMP receptors in developing Xenopus embryos results in reduction or absence of heart formation. Additionally, blocking BMP signaling in this manner downregulates expression of XNkx2-5, a homeobox gene required for cardiac specification, prior to differentiation. Notably, however, initial expression of XNkx2-5 is not affected. Mutant phenotypes can be rescued by co-injection of mutant with wild-type receptors or co-injection of mutant receptors with XSmad1, a downstream mediator of BMP signaling. Whole-mount in situ analyses indicate that ALK3 and XSmad1 are coexpressed in cardiogenic regions. Together, our results demonstrate that BMP signaling is required for maintenance of XNkx2-5 expression and heart formation and suggest that ALK3, BMPRII, and XSmad1 may mediate this signaling. [C] 2000 Academic Press Key Words: BMP; truncated BMPR; cardiogenesis; tinman homologues; ALK3; BMPRII; Smad1.

Passive video forensics has drawn much attention in recent years. However, research on detection of object-based forgery, especially for forged video encoded with advanced codec frameworks, is still a great challenge. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach to detect object-based forgery in the advanced video. The presented deep learning approach utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically extract high-dimension features from the input image patches. Different from the traditional CNN models used in computer vision domain, we let video frames go through three preprocessing layers before being fed into our CNNmodel. They include a frame absolute difference layer to cut down temporal redundancy between video frames, a max pooling layer to reduce computational complexity of image convolution, and a high-pass filter layer to enhance the residual signal left by video forgery. In addition, an asymmetric data augmentation strategy has been established to get a similar number of positive and negative image patches before the training. The experiments have demonstrated that the proposed CNN-based model with the preprocessing layers has achieved excellent results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Limited experiences of applying an on-pump beating-heart technique for surgical revascularization in patients with severe left ventricular dysfunction have been reported. Which strategy, either off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) or on-pump beating-heart CABG surgery, is the best strategy for surgical revascularization in patients with severe left ventricular dysfunction is still controversial. This single-center study aimed to evaluate the impacts of an on-pump beating-heart versus an off-pump technique for surgical revascularization on the early clinical outcomes in patients with a left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) of 35% or less to explore which technique would be more suitable for surgical revascularization in patients with severe left ventricular dysfunction.Methods: A total of 216 consecutive patients with an echocardiographic estimated LVEF of 35% or less who underwent non-emergency, primary, isolated CABG from January 2010 to December 2014 were included in this study and were divided into either an ONBEAT group (patients who received on-pump beating-heart CABG surgery, n = 88) or an OFF group (patients who received off-pump CABG surgery, n = 128). The early clinical outcomes were investigated and compared.Results: Patients in the ONBEAT group compared to the OFF group had a significant higher early postoperative LVEF (35.6 ± 2.9 vs. 34.8 ± 3.3%, p = 0.034) but shared a similar baseline LVEF (31.0 ± 2.8 vs. 31.0 ± 2.9%, p = 0.930). Patients in the ONBEAT group compared to the OFF group received a greater number of grafts and an increased amount of drainage during the first 24 h (3.7 ± 0.8 vs. 2.8 ± 0.6, p <0.001; 715 ± 187 ml vs. 520 ± 148 ml, p <0.001, respectively), without evidence of worse in-hospital mortality or major postoperative morbidity. Additionally, logistic regression analysis showed that surgical technique (on-pump beating-heart CABG vs. off-pump CABG) had no independent influence on in-hospital mortality or major postoperative morbidity in patients with preoperative LVEF of 35% or less.Conclusions: The on-pump beating-heart technique may be an acceptable alternative to the off-pump technique for surgical revascularization in patients with an estimated LVEF of 35% or less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]