This dissertation studies the construction of Chinese nationalism by the Chinese government and media companies through mass communication of government-staged and abrupt events in the reform era... Show moreThis dissertation studies the construction of Chinese nationalism by the Chinese government and media companies through mass communication of government-staged and abrupt events in the reform era between 2008 and 2012. It examines how Chinese audiences express online nationalist sentiments, representing whether the communication of media events meets the social demands established by “dream discourses.” Using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, it focuses on two case studies: the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands incident. The dissertation finds that these mass media events play a significant role in shaping Chinese state nationalism and popular nationalism. The related mass communication helps the Chinese government increase or, at least, maintain its legitimacy through various strategies. The findings of this dissertation also show that as Chinese audiences have increasingly voiced themselves in the information age, the government will keep treating the robust, uneasy entanglement of nationalism, globalization, and digital media more cautiously for its social development and stability. Show less
Systems with local constraints is a new finding in recent researches on complex systems. The heterogeneous spatial interactions and the temporal dependencies among those numerous units make it... Show moreSystems with local constraints is a new finding in recent researches on complex systems. The heterogeneous spatial interactions and the temporal dependencies among those numerous units make it difficult to describe by traditional statistical physics.These complex structures also make information storage and transmission in it is impossible to describe by the random variables with finite outcomes in the classical information theory. In this thesis, we use the statistical ensemble with local constraints to describe those complex systems with heterogeneous interactions and dependencies. This description also helps us find the new information-theoretical bounds in the systems with local constraints, even when the temporal dependencies among numerous units break the asymptotic equipartition property in the classical information theory.Furthermore, we find that the breaking of ensemble equivalence generally exists in systems with local constraints even without the presence of phase transition, and this ensemble nonequivalence in the systems with local constraints without phase transition can be the same strong as the one that only appears on the boundary of phase transitions caused by the long-range interactions. We also find that this breaking of ensemble equivalence will affect the limit of information storage and transmission in systems with local constraints.These results in this thesis extend our understanding of complex systems and information theory. Show less
The work in this thesis has been focused on two subjects. The first is the assembly of alginate oligosaccharides and the generation of building blocks for the enzymatic synthesis of alginate,... Show moreThe work in this thesis has been focused on two subjects. The first is the assembly of alginate oligosaccharides and the generation of building blocks for the enzymatic synthesis of alginate, and the second is the total synthesis of large fragments of the zwitterionic SP1 polysaccharide. With these fragments, details about alginate biosynthesis can be obtained through binding studies with biosynthesis enzymes, conjugate vaccines can be generated and binding studies with major histocompatibility complex II molecules can be studied. Show less
