scholarly journals Contemporary Chinese anthropology: reflections, developments and prospects

Author(s):  
Shigang Liu

AbstractSince the 16th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) was successfully held in Kunming in July 2009, Chinese anthropologists have been committed to exploring the new direction of Chinese anthropology, striving to build the discipline system of Chinese anthropology in the new era, thus making it a prominent discipline in the study of contemporary Chinese society. After more than ten years’ efforts, Chinese anthropologists have made great progress both in theory and practice, which is embodied in two aspects: the first one is interdisciplinary comprehensive researches and cross-cultural comparative researches based on the thinking and efforts of prestigious anthropologists such as Qiao Jian, Fei Xiaotong, and Li Yiyuan; the second one is the new direction and construction of discipline system of Chinese anthropology in the new era pursued by contemporary Chinese anthropologists. Over the past decades, significant achievements have been made in Chinese anthropology, especially in three aspects. The first is localization of anthropology with less dependency on Western theories and more self-dependence, so as to establish Chinese anthropological schools enjoying localized concepts and theories. The second is modernization of anthropology which demands more adaptability and less discipline inertia and calls for practical researches on current social topics and modernization transformation from the perspective of anthropology. The third is internationalization of anthropology to reduce discipline closeness by conducting overseas researches and exchanges, thereby strengthening international communication and cooperation.

Author(s):  
Mark Liponis ◽  
Bettina Martin

The past two decades have seen great progress in recognizing the importance of inflammation in medicine. Increased focus on inflammation in both prevention and treatment has improved outcomes and quality of life in chronic diseases. Science has improved our understanding of inflammation’s many causes and effects on health, and many advances have been made in the availability of targeted therapeutic options for treating inflammation. This chapter gives an overview of recognizing the many causes of inflammation, its many targeted treatments strategies, and the questions that still surround it. It discusses several integrative approaches to reducing inflammation, including exercise, diet, and different strategies for managing sleep, mood, and stress, such as meditation and massage.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Bothe ◽  
Igor Schneider ◽  
Nadia B. Fröbisch

Regeneration, the replacement of body parts in a living animal, has excited scientists for centuries and our knowledge of vertebrate appendage regeneration has increased significantly over the past decades. While the ability of amniotes to regenerate body parts is very limited, members of other vertebrate clades have been shown to have rather high regenerative capacities. Among tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates), only salamanders show unparalleled capacities of epimorphic tissue regeneration including replacement of organ and body parts in an apparently perfect fashion. The closest living relatives of Tetrapoda, the lungfish, show regenerative abilities that are comparable to those of salamanders and recent studies suggest that these high regenerative capacities may indeed be ancestral for bony fish (osteichthyans) including tetrapods. While great progress has been made in recent years in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms deployed during appendage regeneration, comparatively few studies have investigated gross morphological and histological features of regenerated fins and limbs. Likewise, rather little is known about how fin regeneration compares morphologically to salamander limb regeneration. In this study, we investigated the morphology and histology of regenerated fins in all three modern lungfish families. Data from histological serial sections, 3D reconstructions, and x-ray microtomography scans were analyzed to assess morphological features, quality and pathologies in lungfish fin regenerates. We found several anomalies resulting from imperfect regeneration in regenerated fins in all investigated lungfish species, including fusion of skeletal elements, additional or fewer elements, and distal branching. The similarity of patterns in regeneration abnormalities compared to salamander limb regeneration lends further support to the hypothesis that high regenerative capacities are plesiomorphic for sarcopterygians.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 2462-2476
Author(s):  
Yi Liu ◽  
Puying Luo ◽  
Yang Fu ◽  
Tianxin Hao ◽  
Xuan Liu ◽  
...  

Great progress has been made in the tandem annulation of enynes in the past few years. This review only presents the corresponding reactions of 1,3-enyne structural motifs to provide the functionalized pyridine and pyrrole derivatives. The functionalization reactions cover iodination, bromination, trifluoromethylation, azidation, carbonylation, arylation, alkylation, selenylation, sulfenylation, amidation, esterification, and hydroxylation. We also briefly introduce the applications of the products and the reaction mechanisms for the synthesis of corresponding N-heterocycles.


Author(s):  
Allen Rao ◽  
John Hilton III ◽  
Sarah Harper

<p class="3">Over the past decade, great progress has been made in improving the quality and availability of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER proponents often discuss the ability for users to revise and remix OER to make them more suitable for local contexts; however, much OER goes unmodified. This note from the field examines the efforts of NetEase Online Open Courses, a Chinese organization, to take more than two thousand Khan Academy videos and translate them into Chinese. We provide background on this initiative and also analyze site metrics to determine what type of use these derivative OER have received.</p>


1913 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Archdeacon W. Cunningham

During the past year the Society has sustained one loss that overshadows all others. It is not for me to attempt to appreciate the value of the substantial contributions to the published sources of English history to which Mr. James Gairdner devoted himself so assiduously; I can only attempt to express the feeling which many of us here must share on the loss of our friend. I well remember the intense interest with which I read his ‘Life of Richard III.’ when it was first published in 1878, and the pleasure which I felt many years after in coming into contact with a man whom I admired so much. His constant kindliness and readiness to interest himself in and encourage the work of young men are not things to be readily forgotten. The chronicling of the blanks left in the roll of our officials and members is the saddest part of a President's duty. In my first address I expressed our sense of loss sustained through the death of Dr. Charles Gross; at this distance of time we can see more clearly than was possible four years ago how fruitful his work was. This year great progress has been made in the attempt to carry on the Bibliography of British History which he began, and during the last few weeks I have been impressed anew with the freshness and thoroughness of his studies, as I have been trying to look into and amplify the argument of his essay on Scottish Municipal History.


2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-41
Author(s):  
Patrick Gibbons ◽  
Sharkey Scott ◽  
Cormac Mac Fhionnlaoich

Abstract This paper analyses the progress made in the field of strategic management over the past three decades. One approach to analysing a discipline’s trajectory is to explore its exemplary research. We review the papers awarded the Dan and Mary Lou Schendel, Strategic Management Society (SMS) Best Paper Award of the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) since 1993, to demonstrate the emergence of strategic management as a specific discipline with a distinct view of how firms generate competitive advantage. Our paper interprets the development of the discipline from its market-based and structural roots to attempts to decipher the ‘black box’ of the organisation in analysing capabilities, particularly dynamic capabilities, and resources. Our study shows how the conceptual breakthroughs of the exemplary papers are further developed by the field through theory testing and extension using increasingly sophisticated methodologies published by journals such as Irish Journal Of Management (IJM). Our review of both journals highlights that despite increasing market, social and cultural instability since these seminal papers were first conceived, their lessons are still relevant and increasingly critical to both theory and practice in establishing the future trajectory for strategic management and a framework for organisations to compete.


2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1639) ◽  
pp. 20130087 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. G. Jones ◽  
Kamil Witek ◽  
Walter Verweij ◽  
Florian Jupe ◽  
David Cooke ◽  
...  

Essentially all plant species exhibit heritable genetic variation for resistance to a variety of plant diseases caused by fungi, bacteria, oomycetes or viruses. Disease losses in crop monocultures are already significant, and would be greater but for applications of disease-controlling agrichemicals. For sustainable intensification of crop production, we argue that disease control should as far as possible be achieved using genetics rather than using costly recurrent chemical sprays. The latter imply CO 2 emissions from diesel fuel and potential soil compaction from tractor journeys. Great progress has been made in the past 25 years in our understanding of the molecular basis of plant disease resistance mechanisms, and of how pathogens circumvent them. These insights can inform more sophisticated approaches to elevating disease resistance in crops that help us tip the evolutionary balance in favour of the crop and away from the pathogen. We illustrate this theme with an account of a genetically modified (GM) blight-resistant potato trial in Norwich, using the Rpi-vnt1.1 gene isolated from a wild relative of potato, Solanum venturii , and introduced by GM methods into the potato variety Desiree.


Author(s):  
Rachel Correia ◽  
Shonal D’mello ◽  
Primeya Dmonti ◽  
Jerina Figer

Much of the progress made in image processing in the past decades can be attributed to better modeling of image content, and a wise deployment of these models in relevant applications. In this paper, we review the role of this recent model in image processing, its rationale, and models related to it. As it turns out, the field of image processing is one of the main beneficiaries from the recent progress made in the theory and practice of sparse and redundant representations. Sparse coding is a key principle that underlies wavelet representation of images. Sparse representation based classification has led to interesting image recognition results, while the dictionary used for sparse coding plays a key role in it. In general, the choice of a proper dictionary can be done using one of two ways: i) building asparsifying  dictionary based on a mathematical model of the data, or ii) learning a dictionary to perform best on a training set.


During the past five years great progress has been made in the theory of the diamagnetic and paramagnetic properties of matter. Langevin’s theory of paramagnetism, long recognised as insufficient, has been replaced by a more general treatment due to B. Cabrera. The magnetism of metals for which no theory existed at all has been explained by W. Pauli as due to the spin of the free electrons contained in the volume V occupied by the metal. Owing to their enormous concentration in addition to their small mass, the electrons within the metal do not follow the ordinary laws for the gaseous state; in particular, the energy distribution is not Maxwellian. For a Maxwellian distribution, that is, for strongly decreasing energy with decreasing temperature, the electrons could not remain in the free state at low temperature, but would combine with the metallic ions between which they move. The electrons are instead subject to quantisation and the energy is distributed according to the principle of Pauli-Fermi. If ε k be the energy in the quantum state k , of one of the electrons contained in the volume V, ε m its spin, then there can be at the most up to G = 2 electrons representing this state, and then they must spin in opposite directions. Moreover, if mξ, mη, mζ are the components of the angular momentum of the electron along the three axes of the system of co-ordinates so that E = 1/2 mv 2 = 1/2 m (ξ 2 + η 2 + ζ 2 ), then there exist, in the interval between ε and ε + dε, 4πGV ( m/h ) 3 v 2 dv = 2πVG h -3 (2 m ) 3/2 ε1/2 dε possible states. Evidently the total energy will be E = Σ n k (ε k + ε m ), the only values for n , being either 0 or 1, with the condition that the total number N of electrons is N = Σ k n k . Now ε m , the energy due to the electron spin, is small compared with ε k and can be neglected in most problems. We may say that the state of the gas is defined if we know the most probable values of n k for the ε k , that is, whether n k is equal to 0 or 1 for a certain ε k . Owing to the presence of the electronic spin ε s = ± eh /4π mc (Bohr magneton) the energy distribution will be slightly changed when an external field H is applied. We have for the number of atoms with an orientation parallel to the field


PhotoniX ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingying Wang ◽  
Shixun Dai

AbstractChalcogenide (ChG) glasses have the characteristics of a wide transparency window (over 20 μm) and high optical nonlinearity (up to 103 times greater than that of silica glasses), exhibiting great advantages over silica and other soft glasses in optical property at mid-infrared (MIR) wavelength range. These make them excellent candidates for MIR supercontinuum (SC) generation. Over the past decades, great progress has been made in MIR SC generation based on ChG fibers in terms of spectral extension and output power improvement. In this paper, we introduce briefly the properties of ChG glasses and fibers including transmission, nonlinearity, and dispersion, etc. Recent progress in MIR SC generation based on ChG fibers is reviewed from the perspective of pump schemes. We also present novel ChG fibers such as As-free, Te-based, and chalcohalide fibers, which have been explored and employed as nonlinear fibers to achieve broadband SC generation. Moreover, the potential applications of MIR SC sources based on ChG fibers are discussed.


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