bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Towards modeling of human skilling for electrical circuitry using augmented reality applications
Authors: Villanueva Ana , Liu Ziyi , Kitaguchi Yoshimasa , Zhu Zhengzhe , Peppler Kylie , Redick Thomas , Ramani Karthik
Published: June 2021

Augmented reality (AR) is a unique, hands-on tool to deliver information. However, its educational value has been mainly demonstrated empirically so far. In this paper, we present a modeling approach to provide users with mastery of a skill, using AR learning content to implement an educational curriculum. We illustrate the potential of this approach by applying this to an important but pervasively misunderstood area of STEM learning, electrical circuitry. Unlike previous cognitive assessment models, we break down the area into microskills—the smallest segmentation of this knowledge—and concrete learning outcomes for each. This model empowers the user to perform a variety of tasks that are conducive to the acquisition of the skill. We also provide a classification of microskills and how to design them in an AR environment. Our results demonstrated that aligning the AR technology to specific learning objectives paves the way for high quality assessment, teaching, and learning.
A retrospective study of cases diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at a single care center in Syria
Authors: Al-Baba Raghad , Zetoune Almoutassem Billah
Published: June 2021

Background

Although there is relatively much information about the status of cystic fibrosis disease in different countries of the world, limited data are available on this disease among Syrian children. Therefore, we did a retrospective study that included 173 children diagnosed with cystic fibrosis according to the diagnostic criteria. This study was conducted to determine the diagnostic, clinical, and genetic characteristics of patients with cystic fibrosis in Syria and to assess the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype of disease in these patients.

Results

As a result of the early classical manifestations, CF diagnosis was established in the present study by the age of 1 year in 78.6%; the mortality rate was 23.1% (82.5% of them were in the first year of life). The prevalence of respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms was 81.5% and 78.6%, respectively with an average age of 7.8 and 3.4 months. Consanguinity was reported in 75.7% of the families. The most common pathogenic variant in the sample was F508del (36%) followed by W1282X (17%). There was a statistical correlation between incidence of steatorrhea and the presence of class I pathogenic variants. A relationship between the mortality rate and the presence of class II pathogenic variants (pathogenic deletion variants) was also observed. There was no statistical relationship between other clinical manifestation and pathogenic variant classes. However, the incidence of most CF-related conditions was a little higher in the presence of classes I, II, and III pathogenic variants compared to their incidence in the presence of classes IV and V pathogenic variants.

Conclusions

The number of cases diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in Syria is less than the number of real cases, and there is a need to perform CFTR gene sequencing on large sample sizes, to determine all CFTR pathogenic variants that could exist in Syrian patients and to make a better evaluation of the relationship between genotype and phenotype of the disease.
Introduction
Authors: Zeigler James
Published: June 2021

This introduction to the first of two special issues on “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women” describes the investigation of feminist literary maximalism. A summary and critical response to James Wood's influential negative review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the introduction objects to his designation “hysterical realism” to characterize Smith's and other writer's publishing novels in the genre that literary scholarship has called encyclopedic, systems, maximalist, mega, and novels of information. The current debate in literary studies over the methods of postcritique and critique is referenced in order to recommend the issue's articles as models of an intermediate approach: generous reading. Described as an affirmative mode of interpretation that matches the tenor of postcritique, generous reading retains the central importance of critique by attending to the ways in which texts enact critique through the resources of literary form. Generous reading interprets novels as critique. The final section presents summaries of each article's argument about exemplary big, ambitious novels.
“Kill the Monster!”:My Favorite Thing Is Monstersand the Big, Ambitious (Graphic) Novel
Authors: Ahmed Maaheen , Kwa Shiamin
Published: June 2021

In his discussion of the “big, ambitious novel,” James Wood dismisses both male and female authors but singles out Zadie Smith's White Teeth for most of his critique of what he terms “hysterical realism.” For Wood, recent long novels display too much imagination but not enough substance and depth of character; the new novel has become “a picture of life.” With its deliberate foregrounding of inhumanness and spectacularity, Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters commits many of Wood's list of transgressions against the traditional novel. This article examines how Ferris's book is unaffected by negative reactions to this transgressiveness, championing transgression and ignored voices as the mode of expression best suited to the big, ambitious novel of our times. The book's heroine and purported author of the book touches readers and moves them through the monstrous form she imagines for herself. Her reproductions of comics covers and art works negotiate diverse visual vocabularies and their resulting aesthetic and historical scope. In filtering its story through a young protagonist who is marginalized on all counts (age, class, race, sex, sexual orientation), Ferris's “big, ambitious (graphic) novel” is also a layered response against the criticisms of childishness levied against comics. Transgression in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters becomes a way of rethinking tradition—of comics, of novels, and of graphic novels—in the broader terms of cultural history.
Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon:Lost Children Archive's Reenactment Play
Authors: Stuelke Patricia
Published: June 2021

This essay analyzes Valeria Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive's attempt to imagine anti-imperialist solidarity aesthetics in a moment of the increasing imbrication of the US literary sphere and settler colonial capitalist surveillance of the US-Mexico border, as well as the nonprofit care regime that has arisen to oppose and ameliorate its effects. Because these structures converge around overt and subterranean investments in settler colonial frontier fantasy, the essay focuses particularly on Lost Children Archive's engagement with the tradition of the white male road novel Western in the Americas—Luiselli's attempts to write both through and against this form—as part of the novel's larger attempt to grapple with the formal problems that adhere in representing the temporality and scale of ongoing Central American Indigenous dispossession and refugee displacement in settler colonial capitalism. In exploring the degree to which the Western genre's tradition of, per Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” might oppose the brutal bureaucratic violence of the xenophobic carceral settler US state, the novel builds a critique of the frontier road novel fantasy that it cannot quite sustain.
Two Paths for the Big Book: Olga Tokarczuk's Shifting Voice
Authors: Bartoszyńska Katarzyna
Published: June 2021

This essay argues for the power of free indirect discourse in the third-person narrative perspective to serve as a collective voice, encompassing a diversity of perspectives, through a reading of two novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Bieguni (Flights) and Księgi Jakubowe (Books of Jacob). Both novels investigate the challenges inherent in the project of providing an image of the world, and alongside various interventions on the level of content, each examines the kind of world-image that different approaches to narrative voice can produce. In Flights, the narrator's striving to arrive at a more expansive and synthetic knowledge of the world is accompanied by an effort to go beyond the first-person voice, to a broader perspective. The novel subtly demonstrates the impossibility of such efforts, but, the essay argues, Books of Jacob continues this project, albeit from the opposite direction, examining the affordances of the third-person voice. Its innovative use of free indirect discourse produces a perspective that, while appearing to be a single voice, contains multiple, contradictory points of view.
“We'll Make Magic”: Zen Writers and Autofictional Readers inA Tale for the Time Being
Authors: Worthington Marjorie
Published: June 2021

Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being is an autofiction—a novel whose protagonist is a characterized version of its author and thereby straddles the line between memoir and fiction. In an American literary context, autofiction is a genre dominated by white male authors. This article argues that Ozeki's approach to autofiction is vastly different from that of most of her white, male counterparts in that the author-character “Ruth” does not lay sole claim to authorial authority, but rather works collaboratively with other characters to share creative power and the responsibility that comes with it. This innovative tactic helps chart a potential course for autofiction by women writers and writers of color.
A “Hair-Trigger Society” and the Woman Who Felt Something in Anna Burns'sMilkman
Authors: White Siân
Published: June 2021

This article responds to debates about the “big, ambitious novel” and “hysterical realism” by challenging several prevailing scholarly orthodoxies about large-scale fiction: that whole world-building precludes the rendering of a single, feeling human; that mimesis and “hysterical” traits, like absurdity, are mutually exclusive; or that a whole-world view requires third-person narrative omniscience. The analysis centers on Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a novel set in Troubles-era Northern Ireland that connects a young woman's experience with gendered and sexual power to the behavior, prejudices, and tacit understandings that undergird a society locked in sectarian conflict. The article argues that the novel's form—a first-person, past-tense narration—lends the character-narrator unique credibility as a teller because she has both firsthand experience and the critical distance of hindsight. To avoid postures of certainty and authority that come with both political power and narrative omniscience, the narrator uses irony and self-consciousness to critique storyworld power dynamics and expectations of literary realism. Burns's big, ambitious novel reveals that conveying a whole world and portraying a single, feeling human are in fact mutually constitutive aims. Moreover, the digressive and often absurd narration is precisely what makes the storyworld a persuasively plausible, if not verisimilar, rendering of Troubles-era Northern Ireland. By linking nationalism to problems of gender and sexual politics at the time, Burns's novel issues a warning about the reactionary postures and polarization in the contemporary moment surrounding Brexit, the #MeToo movement, and surging violence in Northern Ireland.
“Is an Archive Enough?”: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Authors: Fest Bradley J.
Published: June 2021

In the twenty-first century, digital technologies have made it possible for writers and artists to create massively unreadable works through computational and collaborative composition, what the author has elsewhere called megatexts. The ubiquity of texts appearing across media that are quite literally too big to read—from experimental novels to television, film, and video games—signals that the megatext is an emergent form native to the era of neoliberalism. But what happens to other long forms, such as the twentieth-century long poem, when written in an era of megatextuality? Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work, including Drafts (1987–2013) and Traces, with Days (2017–), readily suggests itself as a case study for thinking through a megatextual impulse in the twenty-first-century long poem. Though her work is plainly indebted to its modernist precursors (H.D., Pound, Williams, etc.) while disavowing at every level of its composition a patriarchal will toward totality, DuPlessis's various experiments in the long poem are also thoroughly contemporary and respond to the economic, military, political, and environmental transformations of the neoliberal era by drawing upon and producing fragmentary, megatextual debris. This essay positions DuPlessis's work amidst a larger twenty-first-century media ecology, which includes both the megatext and the big, ambitious novel, and argues that rather than simply (and futilely) resist the neoliberal cultural logic of accumulation without end, DuPlessis hypertrophically uses the megatext's phallogocentric form against itself in order to interrogate more broadly what it means—socially, culturally, economically—to write a long poem in the age of hyperarchival accumulation.
The Death of His Husband
Authors: Xin Zhaokun
Published: June 2021

Li Yu's two huaben stories, “A Male Mencius's Mother Raises Her Son Properly by Moving House Three Times” and “House of Gathered Refinements,” stand out from the writer's brief yet highly novel dabbling in the genre thanks to their similar concern with male same-sex desire. But rarely have the two stories been examined in tandem. Furthermore, both stories feature a shared character of a dead penetrator, which is scarcely seen in homoerotic fiction of early modern China. This article first probes factors contributing to such casualties and singles out the contestation between the monopolizing penetrators and the homoerotic public over the penetrated. It further argues that the penetrators' fatal failure in the struggle with the desiring public for the penetrated evidences consistent disapprobation of self-interested monopolization in both stories. Nonetheless, the male homoerotic public similarly suffers from frustration, being unable to keep the objects of desire due to the penetrated characters' efforts to escape from the homoerotic economy. Only successful via the mediation of state power, such eschewal in turn reveals that the homoerotic public is both vulnerable to the monopolizer's external threats and prone to collapse into possessive claims to the penetrated.
Hybrid Subjects, Fluid Bonds
Authors: Guo Li
Published: June 2021

This essay offers a study of male homoeroticism in an unconventional and yet seminal nineteenth-century woman-authored tanci work, Fengshuangfei 鳳雙飛 (Phoenixes Flying Together; preface dated 1899) by Cheng Huiying 程蕙英 (before 1859–after 1899). Perhaps the only tanci known today that focuses centrally on male same-sex relations, Phoenixes Flying Together offers a vital example of early modern queer literary tradition by illustrating fluid male-male bonds and hybrid ideals of homosexuality. Such textual representations shift Confucian cardinal relations, redefine the power of nanse, and demonstrate queer identifications beyond heteronormative relations. Reading women's tanci through the intersectional lenses of early modernity, queer theory, and narrativity, this study examines such narratives as an inspiration to initiate a more contextualized epistemological, historical, and methodical understanding of the dynamic textual spaces that harbor same-sex intimacies, erotic desires, and clandestine longings in vernacular traditions. Narratives of male intimacy, camaraderie, and homosexual love in Cheng's text facilitate the construction of queer subjectivities through character focalization and embedded frames of storytelling and thereby reconfigure patrilineal norms of personal, familial, societal, and political relations. Ultimately, when engaged in conversation with global queer discourses, early modern Chinese vernacular narratives foster a culturally situated understanding of queer historiography, as well as the shifting social structures of power that often condition and facilitate nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality.
“Queering” the Nation?
Authors: Chen Jasmine Yu-Hsing
Published: June 2021

This article explores how gendered Chineseness is represented, circulated, and received in Huangmei musical films for audiences in martial-law Taiwan. Focusing on Love Eterne (1963), the analysis examines how theatrical impersonations in the film provided a “queer” social commentary on aspects of Chinese nationalism that conflicted with the Kuomintang's military masculinities. Love Eterne features dual layers of male impersonations: diegetically, the female character Zhu Yingtai masquerades as a man to attend school with other men; nondiegetically, the actress Ling Po performs the male character Liang Shanbo, Zhu's lover. In addition to the “queer” imagination generated by Ling's cross-dressing performance, the author considers how the feminine tone of Love Eterne allowed the Taiwanese audience to escape from masculine war preparations. Although the Kuomintang promoted Ling as a model patriotic actress, it was her background, similar to many Taiwanese adopted daughters, that attracted the most attention from female audiences. This female empathy and the queer subjectivity arguably disturbed the Kuomintang's political propaganda. Hence, this study adds to the breadth of queerness in studies on the cinematic performance of same-sex subjectivities and invites new understandings of queer performance in Love Eterne as a vehicle that can inspire alternative imaginings of gendered selfhoods and nations.
The Male Dan at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Guo Jie
Published: June 2021

Reading the Taiwanese author Wu Jiwen's 1996 novel Fin-de-siècle Boylove Reader (Shijimo shaonian’ai duben), this essay considers the age-old figure of the male dan and the critical role it played in the emerging gay scene in the Sinophone world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Based on the Qing author Chen Sen's novel Precious Mirror for the Appreciation of Flowers (Pinhua baojian), Wu's version resorts to the figure of the male dan, often referred to as xianggong, to explore male same-sex intimacies, which were gaining increasing visibility in the 1990s Sinophone world. While scholars generally agree that the male dan in Wu's novel bears considerable resemblance to the figure of the contemporary gay man, some read the ending of Wu's novel, where the two protagonists, Mei Ziyu and Du Qinyan, part ways, as representing a compromise. I contend that this “unhappy ending” points to Wu's most radical departure from Chen's novel. The original novel's ending, where Ziyu lives happily ever after with both his wife and Qinyan, reaffirms the centrality of the “polygamous” patron-patronized relationship in the late imperial imagination of male-male relations. In contrast, the failed relationship between Ziyu and Qinyan in Wu's version points to the obsoleteness of the xiangong system, as well as the polygamous mode in the 1990s, which required new modes, categories, and symbols for the imagination of male same-sex relationships. Arguing that in this novel forces past and present, local and global converge, the author uses it to explore the larger question of how to approach the queer Sinophone.
Breaking the Circle
Authors: Men Bozhou
Published: June 2021

First appearing in 1892 as a serialized novel, Han Bangqing's Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai) demonstrates the problematic of an “atypical” novel and the challenges it poses to the notion of the Chinese literary “modern.” This article examines Haishanghua's departure from the traditional circular narrative in terms of its narrative perspective, narrative time, and narrative structure and further notes that this circle-breaking pattern on the technical levels is repeated on the more profound semantic/thematic level of the novel as well. By exploring the sociohistorical context that gives rise to such modern narratives, this article draws links between Han's pioneering experimentations with Haishanghua and the rise of literary naturalism in the West. In this way, the author sheds light on the significance of this atypical novel in the periodization of the Chinese literary modern.
Acoustically Embodied
Authors: Chen Hazel Shu
Published: June 2021

In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (tiankong xiaoshuo dianying 天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother's Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.
What Does Tang Poetry Mean to Contemporary Chinese Writers?
Authors: Klein Lucas
Published: June 2021

Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the Tang—in particular, the poetry and the figure of Li Bai 李白 (701–762)—this article questions the epistemological divide, common to scholarship, between premodern and modern Chinese poetry. The texts come from Shenqing shi 深情史 (Histories of Affection) by Liu Liduo 劉麗朵 (1979–); The Banished Immortal, Chinese-American poet and novelist Ha Jin's 哈金 (1956–) biography of Li Bai; the book-length poem-sequence Tang 唐, by Yi Sha 伊沙 (1966–); and poet Xi Chuan's 西川 (1963–) scholarly book Tang shi de dufa 唐詩的讀法 (Reading Tang Poetry). The author contends not only that these writers' dealings with Tang poetry make it part of a still-living tradition but also that such engagement offers a way to understand the dynamic, rather than static, canonicity of Tang poetry.
The Geopolitical Aesthetics
Authors: Hui Calvin
Published: June 2021

This article focuses on contemporary Chinese film director Jia Zhangke 賈樟柯 (b. 1970–) and his engagement with what critical/cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (b. 1934- ) calls geopolitical aesthetics or cognitive mapping. Through the county-level city (xiancheng 縣城) perspective, the block (bankuai 板塊) structure, the interplay of real and fictional, and the intertextual and transmedial references, Jia explores the possibilities of representational forms and aspires to map and scan the otherwise unrepresentable totality that is global capitalism in China. In this essay, the author engages with Jia's film Shijie 世界 (The World; 2004) and examines the portrayal of the migrant workers and their performances in the World Park in Beijing, China. Focusing on political economy and social class, he suggests that The World renders visible the dialectic of mobility and immobility of the migrant workers within the context of global capitalism in China. Shifting gears to gender, he explains how the female migrant workers, dressed in lavish and extravagant costumes and performing exotic dances for the tourists in the World Park, can be regarded as a productive site for deciphering the otherwise imperceptible contradictions of globalizing China. In particular, the author analyzes the film's opening sequence to show that the world featured on-screen is located at the disjuncture between reality and fantasy.
Life outside the Dome
Authors: Chang Chia-Ju
Published: June 2021

This article uses a non-Western, scientific, and ecocritical perspective to explore the nature-cultural phenomenon of “smog life,” that is, outdoor activities taking place on a smog day, such as hiking, enjoying the fog, or practicing taiji. It presents a sharp contrast with environmentally focused, avant-garde smog art. Although avant-garde smog art is in line with today's scientific correctness by virtue of its strong commitment to activism, I believe that everyday smog life, which is viewed either as “ecoambiguous” or as “smog Ah-Q,” is in effect more subversive than its avant-garde smog art counterpart. What has undergirded smog life is a collective ecological unconsciousness—the premodern “mist” consciousness—that is suppressed in “smog modernity,” of which scientific discourse pertaining to topics such as toxic smog (mai) has become the predominant way of conceptualizing air. The author reads this suppressed mist (wu) or qi consciousness as a form of resistance against the current scientific-corrective discourse and scientism. If we situate smog life in the context of how traditional Chinese culture has been systematically marginalized in the imperialization of technological modernity, today's air-pollution-induced smog life is in actuality an invitation to explore other cognitive possibilities for air beyond the scientific. The hidden ecological consciousness and its discourse help subvert the cyberization of life and the legitimacy of an exclusive scientific epistemology as the only means of knowing.
Between the World Ship and the Spaceship
Authors: Wang Zhuoyi
Published: June 2021

Planetarianism, proposed by Masao Miyoshi for literature and literary studies, calls for a new sense and organization of human totality truly inclusive of all and against neoliberal division, exclusion, repression, and egocentric consumption. Ironically, it is also the global neoliberal economy that lays the only realistic foundation for such a totality, albeit under negative circumstances. This economy has caused a rapid environmental deterioration that involves everyone on the planet, regardless of identity. Human beings are left with just two choices: either collectively forge new relationships among ourselves and with the planet or perish in the environmental devastation wrought by our continuous consumption, exploitation, division, and conflict. Imagining a totalizing environmental disaster and a global unity fighting for the survival of humanity and Earth, the 2019 Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth is an important case for illustrating what complex forms the idea of planetarianism may take in a concrete ideological and creative context. The author argues that the film's future imagination bears laudable potential to promote a turn from exclusionist individualism, represented by the Hollywood science fiction model, to inclusive planetarianism. However, the film's persuasiveness is significantly limited by the double-layered restraint imposed on it by the state and the market. This article traces the turn and the restraint to their historical sources, closely analyzes where the film succeeds and fails in moving beyond the Hollywood vision of the planet's future, and thereby enriches our understanding of the cinematic imagination of planetarianism.
The Analogy of Race and Species in Animal Studies
Authors: Ahuja Neel
Published: June 2021

The emerging field of animal studies builds on ethical insights from the animal rights philosophies that involve an analogy between racism and speciesism, or discrimination based on species. Analyzing recent works addressing human-animal relationships in Black studies, this essay contends that it has been necessary for emerging scholarship on race to transcend this analogy in order to confront the persistence of anti-Black racism and contemporary environmental crisis.
Unnatural Causes
Authors: Douglass Patrice D.
Published: June 2021

This essay approaches Blackness as a social contagion to examine the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence. By placing the COVID-19 deaths of Black people who are refused hospital treatment in critical conversation with police murders during the pandemic, this essay argues that a focus on social violence helps clarify how the same racial taxonomies are at play in producing these deadly outcomes. As such, the essay concludes with a broadening of the concept of police power to illustrate how, outside of the private and public political spheres, the amorphous nature of the social drives the demand for collective health and safety through the excision of Blackness as a contagion or coercive element.
COVID Cough and Fukushima Novels
Authors: Long Margherita
Published: June 2021

This essay introduces three works of post-Fukushima Japanese literature, by Hayashi Kyoko (1930–2017), Kimura Yusuke (1970–) and Kobayashi Erika (1978–), to offer an environmental humanities alternative to Giorgio Agamben's response to COVID-19. Politically, Hayashi is probably closest to Agamben in that her work has been embraced by antinuclear activists in Japan and upheld as evidence of the injustice of the state of exception into which victims of both Fukushima and Hiroshima/Nagasaki were thrust. The author focuses instead on how these three authors acknowledge the cruelties of biopolitics but nevertheless celebrate the fact that “life” is never bare. For them, ionizing radiation acts like the COVID cough did for many of us: not as an invitation to critique the state but as a material intrusion that forces an awareness of what Rocco Ronchi, in his response to Agamben, called “the destiny of the community of man with nature.” What are the material forces immanent to that destiny? What does it do to our mental health to engage them directly? The three works analyzed answer these questions in creative, powerful ways.
Synthesis and Characterization of a Series of Diarylgermylenes and Dihalodigermenes Having Fused-Ring Bulky “Rind” Groups
Authors: Ohno Ryoma , Numata Yasuyuki , Konaka Shigeaki , Yagura Shogo , Kuroda Airi , Harada Mao , Fujita Naoko , Hayakawa Naoki , Nakai Hidetaka , Rosas-Sánchez Alfredo , Hashizume Daisuke , Matsuo Tsukasa
Published: June 2021

A series of diarylgermylenes, (Rind)2Ge: (1) [Rind = EMind (a), Eind (b), and MPind (c)], bearing the fused-ring bulky 1,1,3,3,5,5,7,7-octa-R-s-hydrindacen-4-yl (Rind) groups has been obtained as purple to blue crystals by the reaction of GeCl2·dioxane with 2 equiv. of (Rind)Li. A similar reaction using 1 equiv. of (Rind)Li affords the 1,2-dibromodigermenes, (Rind)BrGe=GeBr(Rind) (2) [Rind = Eind (b) and MPind (c)], as yellow to orange crystals. The ligand redistribution reaction between 1 and GeCl2·dioxane in toluene leads to the formation of the 1,2-dichlorodigermenes, (Rind)ClGe=GeCl(Rind) (3) [Rind = EMind (a), Eind (b), and MPind (c)]. The molecular structures of 1a, 1c, 2c, and 3c have been newly determined by X-ray crystallographic analysis. The 1,2-dihalodigermenes, (Rind)XGe=GeX(Rind) [X = Br (2) and Cl (3)], show a dimeric form with a Ge=Ge double bond in the solid state, but exist as a monomeric halogermylene, (Rind)XGe: [X = Br (4) and Cl (5)], in solution. The electronic properties of the Rind-based diarylgermylenes, dihalodigermenes, and halogermylenes have been experimentally and theoretically investigated.
Ein altsteinzeitliches Geröllartefakt aus Riehen
Authors: Jagher Reto , Rentzel Philippe , Schwarz Peter-Andrew , Hilgers Alexandra , Radtke Ulrich
Published: June 2021

Im Jahre 1999 wurde aus dem Aushub einer Baugrube in der Flur Gehrhalde in Riehen (BS) ein knapp 13 Zentimeter langer, aus alpinem Metaquarzit gefertigter Chopper geborgen. 

Zusammenfassend ist festzuhalten, dass die geologisch-pedologischen Untersuchungen sowie die naturwissenschaftlichen Altersbestimmungen nicht alle Imponderabilien, welche mit der Datierung des Choppers aus Riehen in das Altpaläolithikum verknüpft sind, ausräumen konnten. Dies ist unter anderem darauf zurückzuführen, dass der Chopper nicht in situ gefunden wurde und nicht mit anderen Funden vergesellschaftet war.
Real-time 3D single-molecule localization microscopy analysis using lookup tables
Authors: Hauser Fabian , Jacak Jaroslaw
Published: June 2021

Herein, we present a new algorithm for real-time analysis of 3D single molecule localization microscopy images with a small impact on fitting accuracy using lookup-tables with discrete xyz-positions. The algorithm realizes real-time visualization during acquisition. We demonstrate its performance on simulated and measured data. Additionally, combining real-time fitting with a feedback loop controlling the activation laser pulse keeps the number of emitters per image frame constant.
Brightfield, fluorescence, and phase-contrast whole slide imaging via dual-LED autofocusing
Authors: Guo Chengfei , Bian Zichao , Alhudaithy Soliman , Jiang Shaowei , Tomizawa Yuji , Song Pengming , Wang Tianbo , Shao Xiaopeng
Published: June 2021

Whole slide imaging (WSI) systems convert the conventional biological samples into digital images. Existing commercial WSI systems usually require an expensive high-performance motorized stage to implement the precise mechanical control, and the cost is prohibitive for most individual pathologists. In this work, we report a low-cost WSI system using the off-the-shelf components, including a computer numerical control (CNC) router, a photographic lens, a programmable LED array, a fluorescence filter cube, and a surface-mount LED. To perform real-time single-frame autofocusing, we exploited two elements of a programmable LED array to illuminate the sample from two different incident angles. The captured image would contain two copies of the sample with a certain separation determined by the defocus distance of the sample. Then the defocus distance can be recovered by identifying the translational shift of the two copies. The reported WSI system can reach a resolution of ∼0.7 µm. The time to determine the optimal focusing position for each tile is only 0.02 s, which is about an 83% improvement compared to our previous work. We quantified the focusing performance on 1890 different tissue tiles. The mean focusing error is ∼0.34 µm, which is well below the ± 0.7 µm depth of field range of our WSI system. The reported WSI system can handle both the semitransparent and the transparent sample, enabling us to demonstrate the implementation of brightfield, fluorescence, and phase-contrast WSI. An automatic digital distortion correction strategy is also developed to avoid the stitching errors. The reported prototype has an affordable cost and can make it broadly available and utilizable for individual pathologists as well as can promote the development of digital pathology.
Optical coherence microangiography of the mouse kidney for diagnosis of circulatory disorders
Authors: Abdurashitov Arkady S. , Prikhozhdenko Ekaterina S. , Mayorova Oksana A. , Plastun Valentina O. , Gusliakova Olga I. , Shushunova Natalia A. , Kulikov Oleg A. , Tuchin Valery V. , Sukhorukov Gleb B. , Sindeeva Olga A.
Published: June 2021

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become widespread in clinical applications in which precise three-dimensional functional imaging of living organs is required. Nevertheless, the kidney is inaccessible for the high resolution OCT imaging due to a high light attenuation coefficient of skin and soft tissues that significantly limits the penetration depth of the probing laser beam. Here, we introduce a surgical protocol and fixation scheme that enables functional visualization of kidney’s peritubular capillaries via OCT microangiography. The model of reversible/irreversible glomerulus embolization using drug microcarriers confirms the ability of OCT to detect circulatory disorders. This approach can be used for choosing optimal carriers, their dosages and diagnosis of other blood flow pathologies.
Flexible ptychography platform to expand the potential of imaging at free electron lasers
Authors: Kharitonov Konstantin , Mehrjoo Masoud , Ruiz-Lopez Mabel , Keitel Barbara , Kreis Svea , Seyrich Martin , Pop Mihai , Plönjes Elke
Published: June 2021

Ptychography, a scanning coherent diffraction imaging method, can produce a high-resolution reconstruction of a sample and, at the same time, of the illuminating beam. The emergence of vacuum ultraviolet and X-ray free electron lasers (FELs) has brought sources with unprecedented characteristics that enable X-ray ptychography with highly intense and ultra-fast short-wavelength pulses. However, the shot-to-shot pulse fluctuations typical for FEL pulses and particularly the partial spatial coherence of self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) FELs lead to numerical complexities in the ptychographic algorithms and ultimately restrict the application of ptychography at FELs. We present a general adaptive forward model for ptychography based on automatic differentiation, which is able to perform reconstructions even under these conditions. We applied this model to the first ptychography experiment at FLASH, the Free electron LASer in Hamburg, and obtained a high-resolution reconstruction of the sample as well as the complex wavefronts of individual FLASH pulses together with their coherence properties. This is not possible with more common ptychography algorithms.
High-accuracy room temperature planar absolute radiometer based on vertically aligned carbon nanotubes
Authors: Vaskuri Anna K. , Stephens Michelle S. , Tomlin Nathan A. , Spidell Matthew T. , Yung Christopher S. , Walowitz Andrew J. , Straatsma Cameron , Harber David , Lehman John H.
Published: June 2021

We have developed a planar absolute radiometer for room temperature (PARRoT) that will replace the legacy C-series calorimeter as the free-space continuous-wave laser power detector standard at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This instrument will lower the combined relative expanded measurement uncertainty (k = 2) from 0.84 % to 0.13 %. PARRoT’s performance was validated by comparing its response against a transfer standard silicon trap detector traceable to NIST’s primary standard laser optimized cryogenic radiometer (LOCR) and against the C-series calorimeter. On average, these comparisons agreed to better than 0.008 % and 0.05 %, respectively.
Topology optimization of 3D photonic crystals with complete bandgaps
Authors: Swartz Kenneth E. , White Daniel A. , Tortorelli Daniel A. , James Kai A.
Published: June 2021

The design of photonic crystals with complete bandgaps has recently received considerable research focus for numerous reasons. This work leverages well-known nonlinear programming techniques to alleviate the non-smoothness caused by degenerate eigenvalues such that topology optimization problems can be solved with the open-source IPOPT software. A fully-vectorial plane wave expansion technique is used with an iterative eigensolver to efficiently predict dispersion properties of candidate structures. Nonlinear programming is employed to solve the inverse problem of designing three-dimensional periodic structures that exhibit complete two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) photonic bandgaps. Mesh refinement is performed to alleviate the large computational burden of designing and analyzing photonic crystals, and a periodic density filter is implemented to impose a minimum feature size for manufacturability considerations.
Cross talk compensation in multimode continuous-variable entanglement distribution
Authors: Kovalenko Olena , Usenko Vladyslav C. , Filip Radim
Published: June 2021

Two-mode squeezed states are scalable and robust entanglement resources for continuous-variable and hybrid quantum information protocols that are realized at a distance. We consider the effect of a linear cross talk in the multimode distribution of two-mode squeezed states propagating through parallel similar channels. First, to reduce degradation of the distributed Gaussian entanglement, we show that the initial two-mode squeezing entering the channel should be optimized already in the presence of a small cross talk. Second, we suggest simultaneous optimization of relative phase between the modes and their linear coupling on a receiver side prior to the use of entanglement, which can fully compensate the cross talk once the channel transmittance is the same for all the modes. For the realistic channels with similar transmittance values for either of the modes, the cross talk can be still largely compensated. This method relying on the mode interference overcomes an alternative method of entanglement localization in one pair of modes using measurement on another pair and feed-forward control. Our theoretical results pave the way to more efficient use of multimode continuous-variable photonic entanglement in scalable quantum networks with cross talk.
Disk-loaded silicon micro-ring resonator for high-Q resonance
Authors: Zarebidaki Homa , Fathipour Morteza , Shahabadi Mahmoud , Bogaerts Wim
Published: June 2021

By adding two disks to a standard silicon micro-ring resonator, a very high-quality factor (Q) asymmetric resonance with Q values as high as 7.773 × 105 and slope rates in excess of 880 dB/nm can be achieved. A circuit model has been proposed for this device based on which an analysis has been carried out that can predict the effect of reflections in the coupling components. Depending on the coupling coefficient between the disks and the micro-ring resonator (MRR), it is possible to use this design in three regimes, with different spectral features. Moreover, it is shown that the disks introduce a discontinuity in the transmission spectrum and the relative positioning of the disks in the ring provides a new degree of freedom in the design step. The proposed device features a high extinction ratio (ER) around 1550 nm and could be fabricated in any standard silicon photonics technology without requiring any extra materials or processing steps. The proposed resonator has a high sensitivity of Δλ
Res
(nm)/Δn > 299 nm/RIU, which makes it suitable for sensing applications and efficient modulators.
Holographic near-eye display based on complex amplitude modulation with band-limited zone plates
Authors: Chen Yun , Hua Minjie , Zhang Tianshun , Zhou Mingxin , Wu Jianhong , Zou Wenlong
Published: June 2021

A holographic near-eye display (NED) system based on complex amplitude modulation (CAM) with band-limited zone plates is proposed. The whole system mainly consists of a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM), an Abbe-Porter filter system, an eyepiece, and an image combiner. The point source method based on band limited zone plates is used to accurately control the bandwidth of the target complex amplitude. The effects of intensity modulation coefficient γ in the frequency-filtering method on the intensity and the quality of reconstructed images are analyzed, which provide a judgment basis for selecting the appropriate value of γ. We also derive the expressions of the field of view (FOV) and exit pupil of the NED system. Since the holographic image is magnified in two steps in this system, the large FOV can be obtained. The optical experimental results show that the proposed system can provide a dynamic holographic three-dimensional (3D) augmented reality (AR) display with a 23.5° horizontal FOV.
Optical adaptive power transmission using APC-EDFA for turbulence-tolerant FSO communications
Authors: Hong Yan-Qing , Li Gang , Liu Zhen-Yu
Published: June 2021

This paper proposes a novel optical adaptive power transmission using automatic power control (APC)-erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) for turbulence-tolerant free-space optical (FSO) communications. Based on the quasi-stationary characteristics of turbulence channel and average power dependent optical gain features of EDFA, the channel state information (CSI) of the received upstream on-off keying (OOK) signal is optically conveyed to the orthogonally polarized transmitted downstream OOK signal with channel inversion via EDFA in APC mode. The performance is analyzed under various dynamic gain frequencies of APC-EDFA and different power ratios between downstream and upstream signals. Simulation results revealed that the power of downstream signal was adaptively transmitted according to the received upstream signal under effective turbulence suppression, transmitted power efficiency, and required SNR reduction without the estimation of CSI.
Whispering gallery mode excitation using exposed-core fiber
Authors: Peng Lu , Riesen Nicolas , Li Jiawen , Han Mengke , Nguyen Linh Viet , Ebendorff-Heidepriem Heike , Warren-Smith Stephen C.
Published: June 2021

Whispering gallery modes (WGMs) in micro-resonators are of interest due to their high Q-factors. Ultra-thin fiber tapers are widely deployed to couple light into micro-resonators but achieving stable and practical coupling for out-of-lab use remains challenging. Here, a new WGM coupling scheme using an exposed-core silica fiber (ECF) is proposed, which overcomes the challenge of using fragile fiber tapers. Microspheres are deposited onto the exposed channel for excitation via the evanescent field of the fiber’s guided modes. The outer jacket of the ECF partially encapsulates the microspheres, protecting them from external physical disturbance. By varying the mode launching conditions in this few-mode ECF, in combination with a Fano resonance effect, we demonstrate a high degree of tunability in the reflection spectrum. Furthermore, we show multi-particle WGM excitation, which could be controlled to occur either simultaneously or separately through controlling the ECF mode launching conditions. This work can bring value towards applications such as optical switches and modulators, multiplexed/distributed biosensing, and multi-point lasing, integrated in a single optical fiber device that avoids fiber post-processing.
Asymmetric excitations of toroidal dipole resonance and the magnetic dipole quasi-bound state in the continuum in an all-dielectric metasurface
Authors: Li Bin , Yao Jin , Zhu Han , Cai Guoxiong , Liu Qing Huo
Published: June 2021

All-dielectric resonant metasurfaces are expected to boost Mie resonances with high Q-factors and enhanced electromagnetic fields owing to their large mode volumes and low material losses. However, the toroidal dipole (TD) and magnetic dipole (MD) are usually suppressed by other stronger multipoles due to their relatively weak coupling to the incident lights. In this work, the double resonances of TD and MD quasi-bound state in the continuum (quasi-BIC) are excited asymmetrically by breaking the geometric symmetry in an all-dielectric metasurface consisting of arrays of silicon I-bars and silicon Φ-disks, leading to their corresponding enhanced electric field confinements and high Q-factors. The sensing performances by these two resonances are investigated as well, achieving refractive index sensitivities of 784.8 nm/RIU and 630 nm/RIU, respectively. This work suggests a route to manipulate strong TD and MD quasi-BIC excitations and facilitates their practical applications such as nonlinear light sources and sensing.
Xenon implantation of nanodiamond films for targeted color center emission at sub-nanosecond time scales
Authors: Akomolede Oluseye , Bermel Peter
Published: June 2021

In this work, the lifetime of nitrogen-vacancy color centers within nanodiamonds is reduced from 550±13 ps to 297±10 ps through the implantation of xenon. Coupled-mode analysis is employed to characterize the mechanism responsible for the reduction in emission lifetime. The observed spectral lineshape is found to be consistent with a Voigt profile consisting of two Lorentzian resonant peaks at 637 nm and 811 nm that are inhomogeneously broadened by a Gaussian distribution. A convolution of the frequency-domain Lorentzian output, with linewidths less than 1 nm, from the coupled-mode system of equations with a Gaussian with standard deviation of 85 nm is performed to generate the Voigt profile. The shortened emission lifetime is found to be consistent with a coupled mode theory model incorporating coupling between nitrogen-vacancy and xenon-vacancy color centers.