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Navigating creative partnerships and cross-cultural collaboration: a case study between China and the UK
Get PDFWithin recent years, China has experienced growth in the construction and development of museums. Encouraged by financial and cultural policy measures, China’s public museums have opened to the world with the aim of introducing Chinese culture to a broad audience and connecting with the global cultural marketplace. Cross-cultural collaboration has formed a prominent part of this strategy, functioning as a diplomatic tool to nurture mutual understanding between nations. Using empirical data from a research project that examined the production and consumption of an overseas exhibition hosted by Nanjing Museum (南京博物院: nanjing bowuyuan), this paper explores the processes of negotiation and avenues of innovation that emerged from the production of the exhibition and collaborative research project. By reflecting on the lessons learned from this partnership, practical solutions are offered to help inform future strategies and ways of working that may promote sustainable engagement and collaboration between UK and Chinese cultural institutions
Why dairy farmers leave the industry: The role of control, autonomy, and self-efficacy
No full textWhile global demand for milk and dairy products grows, the number of dairy farms in the United Kingdom has fallen by 56% in the last 20 years, coupled with a decline in cows and farmers’ numbers. Research has explored a wide range of factors impacting dairy farmers’ decision to leave the industry early; however, these factors are collated from a diversity of individual studies, and we lack a comprehensive understanding of what individual factors are more prominent in driving dairy farmers’ decision and how factors may interplay within a single study context. To address this gap, we utilised an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design, including a questionnaire (n=335) followed by in-depth interviews (n=21) with current and former dairy farmers in the UK. Findings identified a complex interplay among Profitability, Compliance and Regulation, Milk Price, Investments, Mental Health, Physical Health, Availability of Labour, Animal Welfare, Anti-dairy Sentiment, Succession, Milk Contracts, Climate Change, and Family Pressure. Our paper contributes to existing literature in three ways. First, we offer a comprehensive overview of the factors influencing dairy farmers’ intention to leave the industry early; second, we discuss how these factors interrelate dynamically, providing a model of the phenomenon highlighting the central role of control, autonomy, and self-efficacy; third, we adopt a fruitful empirical context, as the UK study context captures current European trends on farm exit and includes a diversity of farm types found across different geographic contexts, increasing the wider applicability of findings
“If You Build It, They Will Buy It”: Exploring the Marketplace and Consumer Meanings of Professional Women’s Football Merchandise
No full textThe professionalization and rapid growth in consumption of elite women’s football presents an increasingly lucrative market, offering football associations, clubs, apparel companies, and league organizers the potential to diversify revenue streams through merchandise sales. Drawing on consumer culture theory with a materiality lens, this research explored the availability and consumer purchasing experiences of fan clothing in professional women’s football to better inform merchandising strategies. A database was compiled of all fan clothing offered on the websites of national and professional women’s teams in Australia, England, and the USA. This data was combined with a qualitative survey of fans from these locations to explore their symbolic purchasing experiences, which were analyzed thematically. Collectively, the findings reveal a limited and inconsistent availability of fan clothing across the industry, both at national and club levels, that consistently frustrates women’s football fans and perpetuates perceptions of gender inequality. Specifically, database analysis revealed the marketplace perceived demand for low cost, V-neck t-shirts, and headwear. This was juxtaposed with the preferences of women’s football consumers identified through analysis of the fan survey, namely jerseys with good fit and size range. The lack of availability prevents consumers from engaging in a significant, symbolic part of sports consumer culture and restricts their ability to fully construct fan identities. We uniquely demonstrate the dynamic relationship between the actions of women’s football consumers, marketplace offerings, and culturally embedded meanings, and highlight the stark gap between industry perceptions and fan preferences regarding professional women’s football fan merchandise
Faith and Finance: Understanding Muslim Consumers’ Identity in Pakistan’s Traditional Banking Sector.
Get PDFAlthough research on religion has gained increasing attention, few studies have examined its connection to consumer identity and how it influences purchasing decisions. This gap is especially noticeable when it comes to decision-making around religious services. Previous studies on what influences consumers’ choice of banks have produced mixed findings on the role of religion. This study explores how multiple identities shape the decision to use non-Islamic banking services in Pakistan, where Muslim consumers can choose between Islamic (religious) and non-Islamic (non-religious) banking options. Using a qualitative approach, the research focuses on Muslims who opt for non-Islamic banking to understand the factors behind their choice. Findings reveal that role identity—especially as a son or daughter—plays a key role in bank selection, even when religion is important to the individual. However, identity conflicts arise as people navigate different aspects of their identity. Surprisingly, group identity had little influence on these banking decisions
Grain refinement and solute distribution in Zircaloy-4 following high-pressure torsion
No full textZirconium (Zr) alloys such as Zircaloy-4 are widely used for structural components and fuel cladding in industrial nuclear fission applications. High-pressure torsion (HPT), a severe plastic deformation process, produces an ultra-fine grain structure with properties that may have benefits in the nuclear industry, but the microstructural implications of processing of Zr alloys using this technique have not yet been extensively explored. Here, electron microscopy and atom probe tomography were used to investigate the microstructure and solute distribution in an as-received Zircaloy-4 and a fine-grained HPT-processed sample. Fe segregates to grain
boundaries in both samples, however at much lower concentrations after HPT-processing, indicating that Fe diffuses to the newly formed grain boundaries during the severe plastic deformation. Although Sn segregates to the grain boundaries of the as-received sample, it is
distributed almost homogenously in the HPT-processed sample, which may provide advantages for corrosion resistance. Very low concentrations of Cr alloying elements at the matrix and grain boundaries of both samples is attributed to precipitation
On Technological Innovation, Inequality, Regulations and Governance: A Interview with Roger Brownsword
Get PDFIn this eighth interview in the series conducted by the Research Group on Transhumanism and Human Bioenhancement (GIFT-H+/CNPq), we have the precious opportunity of interviewing Professor Roger Brownsword, one of the leading experts on technological regulation and governance. We asked him about the impacts of technological innovation and the possibilities of regulating and governing it. We focus on the role and limits of laws in this fundamental process for societies profoundly influenced by rapid technological progress
FaTNET: Feature-alignment transformer network for human pose transfer
No full textPose-guided person image generation involves converting an image of a person from a source pose to a target pose. This task presents significant challenges due to the extensive variability and occlusion. Existing methods heavily rely on CNN-based architectures, which are constrained by their local receptive fields and often struggle to preserve the details of style and shape. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework for human pose transfer with transformers, which can employ global dependencies and keep local features as well. The proposed framework consists of transformer encoder, feature alignment network and transformer synthetic network, enabling the generation of realistic person images with desired poses. The core idea of our framework is to obtain a novel prior image aligned with the target image through the feature alignment network in the embedded and disentangled feature space, and then synthesize the final fine image through the transformer synthetic network by recurrently warping the result of previous stage with the correlation matrix between aligned features and source images. In contrast to previous convolution and non-local methods, ours can employ the global receptive field and preserve detail features as well. The results of qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model in human pose transfer
The winter movements of two fish species in a temperate lowland river
No full textWinter involves long periods of low water temperatures, with the activities and movements of many temperate fish species being much reduced compared with summer. In very cold periods, individuals can be winter quiescent. The extent to which activities and movements decrease in winter, is however, unknown in many fishes, including how these decrease in relation to water temperatures. Here, acoustic telemetry (using transmitters implanted internally) measured the body temperatures and movements of European barbel Barbus barbus (barbel) across winter 2020/21 and 2021/22, and common bream Abramis brama (bream) in winter 2022/23 in the River Severn, western Britain. The body temperatures of barbel were measured from 1.9 to 11.3oC and bream 0.4 to 12.8oC. The tagged fish generally remained active throughout the winters, including in periods of very low water temperatures (<4 oC). The median total distance moved by bream was 106 km, which was higher than that measured in summer (103 km). Barbel moved less than bream and had total ranges that were similar in winter and summer (median range: 3.9 km in both seasons). These two temperate fishes thus remained active throughout winter, with no quiescence even in the coldest periods, and with aspects of their movements being similar to summer
Editorial July 2025 - Midwifery models and more
Get PDFEditorial for Volume 12 Issue 1 of the Journal of Asian Midwive
Emotional overload in bulimia nervosa: An ERP study of emotion processing and regulation
Get PDFAbstract
Objective
People with Bulimia Nervosa (BN) self-report difficulties processing and regulating emotions. However, self-reports have been shown to be biased, particularly with people with BN who have difficulties describing their emotions. Self-reports also cannot easily disentangle between early processing and later regulatory stages, so it is not clear whether people with BN really do process their emotions more intensely or whether this is due to the aftermath of regulatory difficulties. This study aimed to use an objective way to measure (1) whether people with BN process their emotions with higher intensity compared to healthy controls (HC) and (2) whether they can successfully implement an emotion regulation strategy called cognitive reappraisal.
Methods
We developed a neuroimaging task using electroencephalography to answer these questions, using the Late Positive Potential (LPP) as an objective measure of emotional arousal at the processing and regulatory stages. We tested the task in females with BN (N = 32) and matched HC (N = 35).
Results
We found that our BN group showed higher LPP compared to our HC group when viewing emotional pictures, demonstrating increased emotional intensity at the processing stage. We also found that the LPP for reappraisal took longer to get back to baseline for our BN group compared to the maintain condition and our HC group.
Discussion
Our results suggest that people with BN process their emotions with higher intensity and may struggle to implement subsequent cognitive reappraisal strategies when affect is high. This has direct implications for clinicians who should be aware that when evoking affect in treatment, people with BN may need greater support in understanding and managing their emotions. Clinicians may also want to offer distress tolerance skills to reduce emotional arousal before suggesting using cognitive reappraisal skills to manage strong emotions.
Plain English summary
Research has shown that people with Bulimia Nervosa (BN) often have trouble managing their emotions. We wanted to understand why this happens. For example, we were wondering whether people with BN feel emotions more strongly than others, or do they just have trouble finding ways to cope with their feelings? Or maybe both? We created a new task to look at what the brain is doing when people with BN experience and manage their emotions. We tested the task in 32 females with BN and 35 healthy females with no eating disorders. The results showed two main things. First, we showed that women with BN tend to feel emotions more intensely than those without BN. Second, we found that women with BN may have difficulties using cognitive reappraisal, a strategy that involves looking at situations from different angles to find more positive aspects. These findings are important because they suggest that people with BN might need extra help in two areas: they may need support in dealing with the strength of their emotions, and in finding alternative ways to manage their feelings and reduce distress. This research could lead to better ways to support people with BN in the future