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As a former treaty port and a current Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in China, Shantou occupies unique position in China's interaction with colonialism and globalisation. Through an analysis of English translations in the linguistic landscape (LL) in Shantou, it was found that international, local and regional factors work together to shape the city's LL. Shantou's resistance to the hegemony of English is encoded in the creative strategies that are adopted in translation, which include transliteration punning, cultural manipulation and hybrid translation. Drawing on the model of English as a lingua franca (ELF), this paper analyses how these strategies reflect the creative, flexible potential of English. These creative strategies can be interpreted as an expression of foreignisation, through which the sign writer consciously deviates from established norms in English to preserve local cultural traits and articulate local identity. Since LL reflects how meaning is negotiated in authentic social settings, incorporating LL projects in the classroom allows language learners and translator trainees to assume an active role in meaning negotiation in their sociolinguistic context. Ultimately, LL projects can empower students to exercise agency in articulating their own culture and constructing their social identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Extracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is an important signal molecule. In previous studies, intensive research had revealed the crucial roles of family with sequence similarity 3 member A (FAM3A) in controlling hepatic glucolipid metabolism, islet β cell function, adipocyte differentiation, blood pressure, and other biological and pathophysiological processes. Although mitochondrial protein FAM3A plays crucial roles in the regulation of glucolipid metabolism via stimulating ATP release to activate P2 receptor pathways, its mechanism in promoting ATP release in hepatocytes remains unrevealed. Methods: db/db, high-fat diet (HFD)-fed, and global pannexin 1 (PANX1) knockout mice, as well as liver sections of individuals, were used in this study. Adenoviruses and adeno-associated viruses were utilized for in vivo gene overexpression or inhibition. To evaluate the metabolic status in mice, oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), pyruvate tolerance test (PTT), insulin tolerance test (ITT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were conducted. Protein–protein interactions were determined by coimmunoprecipitation with mass spectrometry (MS) assays. Results: In livers of individuals and mice with steatosis, the expression of ATP-permeable channel PANX1 was increased (P < 0.01). Hepatic PANX1 overexpression ameliorated the dysregulated glucolipid metabolism in obese mice. Mice with hepatic PANX1 knockdown or global PANX1 knockout exhibited disturbed glucolipid metabolism. Restoration of hepatic PANX1 rescued the metabolic disorders of PANX1-deficient mice (P < 0.05). Mechanistically, ATP release is mediated by the PANX1-activated protein kinase B-forkhead box protein O1 (Akt-FOXO1) pathway to inhibit gluconeogenesis via P2Y receptors in hepatocytes. PANX1-mediated ATP release also activated calmodulin (CaM) (P < 0.01), which interacted with c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) to inhibit its activity, thereby deactivating the transcription factor activator protein-1 (AP1) and repressing fatty acid synthase (FAS) expression and lipid synthesis (P < 0.05). FAM3A stimulated the expression of PANX1 via heat shock factor 1 (HSF1) in hepatocytes (P < 0.05). Notably, FAM3A overexpression failed to promote ATP release, inhibit the expression of gluconeogenic and lipogenic genes, and suppress gluconeogenesis and lipid deposition in PANX1-deficient hepatocytes and livers. Conclusions: PANX1-mediated release of ATP plays a crucial role in maintaining hepatic glucolipid homeostasis, and it confers FAM3A's suppressive effects on hepatic gluconeogenesis and lipogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has shown a considerable potential to significantly improve processing efficiency but has not yet been widely deployed to production projects of seismic signal separation such as seismic interference attenuation. The main reasons are: First, the industry has high standards for signal fidelity, which are critical for the success of subsequent seismic imaging, and deep neural network methods have not yet matched the required level; second, the network's interpretability issue has affected many geophysicists and sponsors' trust in the deep learning technique. To develop deep neural network methods towards the end of benefiting real‐world production, we first attempt to better understand their performance, especially in how they make use of local and global features of the data. A novel quantitative research of the overall network model behaviour on synthetic data is conducted. We simulate three types of coherent seismic data components in the shot domain, blend them together and then train a network to separate them. In this process, random noise, a component having only learnable local features, is selectively injected into the network's training pairs. Three network models sharing the same architecture are trained individually, and they show distinctive behaviours when applied to the same test data. Step‐by‐step analysis of each of them reveals that training the network with additional random noise injected into both the input and the output channel of the desired signal can lead to a decent prediction of the coherent noise based on good learning of the global features and, in the meantime, preserve almost all the data information from being lost. We propose this key lesson we learnt as a new method to improve the network's signal fidelity for shot‐domain seismic interference attenuation, which is essentially a signal separation task. Its effectiveness is demonstrated on field data from Africa with a comparison to a conventional physics‐based seismic interference attenuation method used in production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how student motivations to study abroad are shaped by what might be called the 'rationality–emotion nexus'. Drawing from 15 months of ethnographic engagement at a Chinese university, we show how rational factors (e.g., pursuit of financial resources) interact with emotional forces (e.g., love for family members) in dynamic and diverse ways to shape the pathways of African student migrants to higher education overseas. More specifically, we identify three distinct dynamics in the nexus: (i) rationality is entangled with emotions; (ii) rationality parallels emotions; and (iii) rationality and emotions transform each other. By foregrounding this nexus, the present study offers a critical intervention into international student mobility/migration studies as it develops 'an integrative approach' that transcends either a widely established rational framework of capital conversion or the emerging emotional geographies of transnational education migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]