Search

Abstract This research scrutinizes expressions of modality at both word and clause ranks. Expressions at the former rank encompass modal verbal operators, modal adjuncts, and modal nominalizations, and expressions at the latter rank encompass ‘explicit subjective’ orientation such as I think and ‘explicit objective’ orientation, such as it is possible. These latter expressions are designated as interpersonal metaphors of modality within the framework proposed by Halliday. Previous studies delimited the distribution of expressions of modality either at word rank or at clause rank; in addition, they undertheorized the relationship between this distribution of modality and formality of registers because the register is testified to be an influential factor in the distribution of expressions of modality. This study, drawing on such statistical methods as variation analysis and correlation analysis, explored the distribution of expressions of modality at both word and clause ranks across registers with different degrees of formality by employing the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings are summarized as follows. First, registers in COCA employ expressions of modality with low and/or median values to judge the proposition at issue for the purpose of entertaining other varying voices. Second, in more formal registers, language users seem to prefer modal nominalizations to modal verbal operators and modal adjuncts at word rank, and ‘explicit objective’ orientation to ‘explicit subjective’ orientation at clause rank. In doing so, they could efficiently conceal the commentators’ subjective meaning, and thus, the objectivity of propositions is highlighted. This study will shed light on the full understanding of the distribution of expressions of modality across registers and the application of such theory as interpersonal metaphor of modality in SFL.

As an overarching policy and development model, transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely used to promote the integration of land use and transit services, which arguably brings about many benefits. TOD advocates have continuously paid much attention to metro station areas (MSAs), i.e., areas within a reasonable walking distance to a metro station. To TOD advocates, well-planned MSAs should have a sufficient supply of TOD-nesses encapsulating characteristics such as destinations, density, diversity, and design. In the existing scholarship, however, little has been done on (a) TOD-nesses’ potential “consumers,” the population that is only a short metro ride away from an MSA, i.e., the metro-based accessibility (MBA) to the consumers of the MSA; and (b) whether and how TOD-nesses of one MSA and several MSAs in proximity are affected by the MBA. With the help of big and/or open data, we examine whether and to what degree the MBA of an MSA cluster (MSAC), a set of MSAs within t minutes of a metro ride from a metro station is correlated to that MSAC’s TOD-nesses in Shenzhen, China. We measure the MBA by the daytime/nighttime population in the same MSAC. We quantify TOD-nesses using the published indices or the averages of the indices in a refereed article. Coefficient of geography association, Gini index, pairwise correlation, and linear regression analyses are carried out. We find that the MBA in one period significantly predicts MSAC-level TOD-nesses in ensuing periods. However, the MBA’s prediction power decreases or even disappears over time. Besides, metro station characteristics such as the jurisdiction membership significantly predict the overall TOD-nesses and individual aspects of the TOD-nesses after controlling for the MBA. Our study thus sheds new light on meso- or MSAC-level TOD-nesses and related policy and planning evaluation.

Multifunctional magneto-plasmonic nanoparticles with magnetic hyperthermia and photothermal therapy could kill cancer cells efficiently. Herein, carbon-encapsulated Au/Fe3O4 (Au/Fe3O4@C) was fabricated using an enclosed flame spray pyrolysis. The nanostructures, including an Fe3O4 core (51.9–55.2 nm) with a decreasing carbon shell thickness and an Au core (4.68–8.75 nm) coated with 2–4 graphite layers, were tailored by tuning the C2H4 content in the reacting gas mixture. Saturation magnetization (33.7–48.2 emu/g) and optical absorption were determined. The carbon shell facilitated the dispersion of Au/Fe3O4 and restrained their laser-induced and magnetic field-induced coalescence and growth. Au/Fe3O4@C exhibited excellent magnetic resonance imaging capability (91.4 mM−1 s−1) and photothermal performance (65.4°C for 0.8 mg/mL Au/Fe3O4@C at a power density of 1.0 W/cm2 after 300 s near-IR laser irradiation (808 nm)). Moreover, the combined application of photothermal and magnetic-heating properties reduced the required intensity of both laser and magnetic field compared to the intensity of separate situations. Our work provides a unique, intriguing approach to preparing multicomponent core/shell nanoaggregates that are promising candidates for esophageal cancer cell therapy.

Abstract The NP de VP construction in modern Chinese has been of constant interest to theoretical linguists. Previous studies foregrounded word classes of lexical items in the VP slot, semantic relationships between the VP and the NP, and lexical items that could fill both the VP and the NP slots of the construction. However, in this research, we highlighted typical meanings of this construction and the denoted meaning patterns of lexical items in both the VP and the NP slots by drawing on the covarying collexeme analysis and the hierarchical cluster analysis, respectively. The findings demonstrate that typical meanings of this construction generally include the pairing of “regulations” in the NP slot and “implementation” in the VP slot, the pairing of “systems” in the NP slot and “establishment” in the VP slot, and the pairing of “results” in the NP slot and “achievement” in VP slot. Meaning patterns of the lexical items with significant attraction in the VP slot briefly incorporate such clusters as “cognition”, “augmentation”, “implementation”, “achievement”, “establishment”, and “report”; and those in the NP slot generally include such patterns as “internal traits”, “medical names”, “regulations”, “results”, “systems”, and “business”. The significance of this study lies in that it scientifically identified instances that are capable of expressing the typical meaning of the NP de VP construction and uncovered objectively and precisely the denoted meaning patterns of lexical items in the VP slot and the NP slot of the construction.

The node–place model has been widely used to classify and evaluate transit stations, which sheds light on individuals’ travel behaviors and supports urban planning through effectively integrating land use and transportation development. This study adapts this model to investigate whether and how node, place, and mobility would be associated with the transmission risks and presences of the local COVID-19 cases in a city. Moreover, the unique metric drawn from detailed visit history of the infected, i.e., the COVID-19 footprints, is proposed and exploited. This study then empirically uses the adapted model to examine the station-level factors affecting the local COVID-19 footprints. The model accounts for traditional measures of the node and place as well as actual human mobility patterns associated with the node and place. It finds that stations with high node, place, and human mobility indices normally have more COVID-19 footprints in proximity. A multivariate regression is fitted to see whether and to what degree different indices and indicators can predict the COVID-19 footprints. The results indicate that many of the place, node, and human mobility indicators significantly impact the concentration of COVID-19 footprints. These are useful for policy-makers to predict and monitor hotspots for COVID-19 and other pandemics’ transmission.

Considered a total social phenomenon, mobility is at the center of intricate social dynamics in cities and serves as a reading lens to understand the whole society. With the advent of big data, the potential for using mobility as a key social analyzer was unleashed in the past decade. The purpose of this research is to systematically review the evolution of big data's role in revealing social dimensions of urban mobility and discuss how they have contributed to various research domains from early 2010s to now. Six major research topics are detected from the selected online academic corpuses by conducting keywords-driven topic modeling techniques, reflecting diverse research interests in networked mobilities, human dynamics in spaces, event modeling, spatial underpinnings, travel behaviors and mobility patterns, and sociodemographic heterogeneity. The six topics reveal a comprehensive, research-interests, evolution pattern, and present current trends on using big data to uncover social dimensions of human mobility activities. Given these observations, we contend that big data has two contributions to revealing social dimensions of urban mobility: as an efficiency advancement and as an equity lens. Furthermore, the possible limitations and potential opportunities of big data applications in the existing scholarship are discussed. The review is intended to serve as a timely retrospective of societal-focused mobility studies, as well as a starting point for various stakeholders to collectively contribute to a desirable future in terms of mobility.

Recent advances of terahertz (THz) science and technology are witnessing the rapid development of disruptive applications in THz wireless communication and radars, intelligent sensing, and imaging among others. However, the lack of sufficiently multifunctional devices, such as THz modulators, is impeding the proliferation of THz applications, expecting breakthroughs in new materials, structures, and phenomena. Herein, for the first time, anomalously enhanced THz transmission phenomenon in vertically standing molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) nanoplates integrated onto silicon (Si) substrates under active tailoring of photoheating and photodoping is reported. The formation of MoS2/Si heterojunction enables a heat‐induced broadband amplitude improvement exceeding 10%, while photodoping reduces the THz absorption by ≈70% in the measurement frequency region of 0.2–2.0 THz. Through systematically discriminating the transmitted and reflected THz responses from MoS2/Si heterojunction and those from Si substrates, the photothermally decreased THz conductivity can be attributed to the scattering effects, while photodoping‐induced enhancement originates from the decreased carrier density. Further verification experiments are implemented on a 100 GHz video imaging system, and the THz transmission spots become brighter under both stimuli. The observations not only enable an impellent understanding of low‐dimensional light–matter interactions but also provide possible routes for developing novel, integrated, multifunctional THz optoelectronic devices.

By implementing such corpus approaches as collexeme analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, this paper investigates the semantic categorizations of adjectives that are extremely significantly attracted to the it BE ADJ clause construction in English. The findings demonstrate that these adjectives could be at least subdivided into seven different semantic clusters that denote (1) importance, necessity, and possibility; (2) appropriateness, reasonability, and unreality; (3) impracticability and irrelevance; (4) undeniability and axiomaticity; (5) obviousness; (6) dubiety, desirability, and ease; (7) improbability and anomalousness.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world hard. It has induced many abrupt changes, including lockdowns and business closures. Using changes in local public transit usage as proxies of mobility patterns in a typical high-density city where public transit carries ≥ 90% of passenger trips, this featured graphic geovisualizes to what degree human mobility patterns in Hong Kong were affected by the pandemic and related local and remote events such as the Wuhan lockdown and the Hong Kong government’s ‘work from home’ policy, where the patterns are affected the most, and possibly by/after which event(s). The visuals show that trips to and from business and commercial districts, low- to middle-income new towns, and station areas near the checking point serving cross-border visitors/residents might be most affected.

As a sustainable mode of travel, walking for transportation has multiple environmental, social, and health-related benefits. In existing studies, however, such walking has rarely been differentiated between commuting and non-commuting trips. Using multilevel zero-inflated negative binomial regression and multilevel Tobit regression models, this study empirically examines the frequency and duration of commuting and non-commuting walking and their correlates in Xiamen, China. It finds that (1) non-commuting walking, on average, has a higher frequency and longer duration than commuting walking; (2) most socio-demographic variables are significant predictors, and age, occupation, and family size have opposite-direction effects on commuting and non-commuting walking; and (3) different sets of built environment variables are correlated with commuting and non-commuting walking, and the built environment collectively influences the latter more significantly than the former. The findings provide useful references for customized interventions concerning promoting commuting and non-commuting walking.

The ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ was announced in 2013 to better connect China economically, socially and culturally with the world by new transport infrastructures. Before forecasting the long-term impacts of the initiative on economic activities and population, one could learn from history about how transport infrastructures and the corresponding accessibility of different locales they engendered or enhanced might have shaped and reshaped the distribution of the population and economic activities in Europe. Historic maps of transport infrastructures and population statistics were collected from such sources as the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, and the Gridded Population of the World Version 4. By digitizing and synthesizing the maps and statistics, transport accessibility in Europe and its nearby areas was mapped during both the Roman Empire (27 BC–476 AD) and the Middle Ages (1000–1500 AD), as well as the population distribution in Europe and its nearby areas in 2015. The mapping efforts indicated that the transport network changed greatly over time for various reasons, and that transport accessibility is a sufficient but not necessary condition for different locales’ population growth and economic prosperity over time.

In this study, transit-served areas (TSAs) are defined as areas within a reasonable distance (e.g., 800 meters) of transit services. TSAs have two key dimensions: physical features (e.g., land-use density and mix) and performance (regarding human behaviors). Non-traditional data (NTD) (e.g., social media check-ins and cellular network data) can supplement traditional data (TD) (e.g., interviews and censuses) to enhance studies and monitoring of TSAs. A case study of Shenzhen, China, illustrates how to combine NTD and TD to evaluate the features and performance of 167 TSAs along metro lines. It finds that NTD can be used to formulate new indicators to measure and monitor the two dimensions of TSAs; the features and performance of different TSAs vary significantly; point of interest (POI) efficiency, or the average users attracted by each POI, can be a useful indicator to differentiate TSAs’ performance; the POI efficiency of a single TSA can vary across days and the POI efficiency of an extremely efficient or inefficient TSA can be totally different across days; and the combination of NTD and TD can effectively help locate extreme TSAs and explain factors contributing to the extremity.

Universities are where innovations, face-to-face interactions and social capital are commonplace. Nevertheless, often regarded as ‘the ivory tower’, universities cannot be separated from the social and economic transformations outside of them. Traffic, information and financial flows between universities and other locations can be used to reveal connections between the ivory tower and other locales. Therefore, this paper uses the weekday public transit smartcard records from 6 to 9 April 2010 (158,262 transit trips in total, including bus-only, bus plus subway and subway-only trips) to identify and profile the most popular destinations of student riders from the ‘985 universities’ (a short list of top universities designated by the Chinese Central Government in 1999) and associated transit trip flows in Beijing. It identifies destination hotspots for the 985 universities’ students in Beijing, allocates traffic volume to major roads and delineates the transit trips of students from each campus. The results indicate that there exist only weak ties and little movement between the top universities and the most disadvantaged areas.

Investment casting based on stereolithography (SL) has the characteristics of short production cycle and low cost, which is especially suitable for fabricating complex aeronautical parts without metal dies. But there are some problems during the fabrication process, such as low surface accuracy caused by the staircases of resin prototype, shell cracking caused by higher thermal stress during the sintering process and so on. Taking an engine turbine stator as a fabrication example, the surface accuracy of resin prototype under the effect of coating method was investigated using the laser confocal microscopy; what’s more, both theoretical analysis and finite element analysis (FEA) were combined and compared to reveal the thermal stress field of ceramic shell during pyrolyzing and sintering process under different situation. It was founded that the surface staircases of the resin prototype was eliminated and the surface quality was improved after coating process, the thermal stress was decreased and shell cracking was avoided by sintering the ceramic shell with the inner hollow resin prototype under the heating rate of 5 °C/min. The result showed that, the metal turbine stator had high dimensional accuracy of CT4-CT6 and had a good surface finish within Ra 3.2.

Transit and land-use integration is regarded as one of the most important means of avoiding or reducing car dependence and urban sprawl, which are thought as major culprits of unsustainability. In developing countries, rail rapid transit could be too expensive to become the predominant component of their respective systems. However, bus rapid transit (BRT) as one of the cheapest forms of mass transit is a better alternative for those countries. In developing countries, BRT has transformed numerous cities such as Curitiba, Brazil; Bogota, Columbia; and Guangzhou, China. Can BRT have the same transformative impacts for cities in developed countries as well? Can the impacts of BRT be visualized using the transit population? Given that few cities in developed countries have BRT and ridership data of BRT are not always available, the above questions have not been well addressed before. To answer these two questions, we analysed smartcard swipes over a five-day weekday period (11–15 March 2013) for Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, and reconstructed trip trajectories of those 255,887 transit riders. We found that BRT serves a significant percentage and number of travellers, thus shaping travel behaviour and ultimately land use – when transit ridership and rate of transit usage are used as indicators. This is a significant achievement in Australia, a country known for its car dependence and urban sprawl.

This study uses smartcard data to quantify and visualize the most popular destinations (‘central places’) and corridors of transit riders in Brisbane, an emerging global city in Queensland, Australia. It shows that the number and distribution of central places vary significantly across different periods of the day and so are their respective scopes of influence, which are measured by a standard deviational ellipse, and the associated transit corridors, which connect visitors of central places to other locales in the city. As a whole, this study shows the potential of smartcard data in efficiently verifying and even extending existing economic geography theories, models or concepts.