#li jianghong

[ratkingdotsai2]

[image ids contain light joyful reunion spoilers]

rough joyful reunion sketches I've done today, as you can see the brainrot is still very real

[cranky-otaku]

Done with Joyful Reunion.

I don’t think I’ve felt like this in a long while after finishing a story. If ever? It’s quite novel to still feel devastated after a happy ending …

But overall I think I have to rank this pretty high not just on my list of favorite Feitian novels, but even in my top 10. Though that means I’ll have to bump something off the list then. But which one?

Story wise, I’m reminded a lot of Luan Shi Wei Wang because of the wars and imperial shenanigans. In terms of characters though, I think Joyful Reunion has an edge - LSWW has one of my most beloved MLs in Li Zhifeng, and I loved You Miao for his brilliance. But other than the leads, I didn’t get attached to any of the side characters. (In fact, I wasn’t a fan of Zhao Chao at all.) Now with JR … not just Duan Ling and Wu Du, but Li Jianghong, Li Yanqiu, Mu Qing, Chang Liujun, Batu, Zongzheng, Helian Bo, Xunchun, Ding Zhi, Master Fei, even Sun Ting and Shulu Rui … but most of all LANG JUNXIA. This may be the first time my favorite character from a story was not one of the leads. Without spoiling much, let’s just say that the angst I felt was because of Li Jianghong and Lang Junxia.

[bpod-bpod]

Life’s First Hurdle

For a successful pregnancy, there are thousands of steps that need to go right, but one of the earliest hurdles is embryo implantation where the fertilised egg needs to grab onto the lining of the uterus so it can start to adapt for pregnancy. Any mistakes in this process result in a failed pregnancy. In fact, approximately 75% of failed pregnancies are linked to defects in this implantation stage, and unfortunately, we know little about how this process works. Shp2 is a protein that becomes increasingly abundant as embryos implant into the uterine lining. Researchers discovered in mice that a lack of Shp2 (bottom row) resulted in a smaller size of implantation site (the central circular shape), which ultimately meant that the embryo couldn’t survive. For women who suffer from recurring early pregnancy loss, Shp2 may be a critical target to not only more effectively diagnose but also treat those with infertility issues.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Image from work by Jianghong Cheng, Jia Liang and Yingzhe Li, and colleagues

School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Cellular Stress Biology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Genetics, January 2022

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[djgblogger-blog]

Our 24/7 economy and the wealth of nations

http://bit.ly/2w7FUrI

This article is the third in our series, Globalisation Under Pressure, on what the changing nature of work means for families and society.

We now live in a world where – thanks to information and communication technologies – we are able to produce and distribute goods, services and capital around the globe virtually nonstop.

To keep merchandise and consumers moving across time zones and national borders, employers must increasingly staff workplaces around the clock. And after worldwide labour deregulation during the past decades’ neoliberal reforms, they are now free to hire workers on a casual or on-call basis to reduce labour costs.

This relentless schedule has led prominent sociologist Harriert Presser to call ours the “24/7 economy” – a market that works relentlessly, 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Working nonstandard schedules

Shift work is on the rise in the 24/7 economy. The definition of this phenomenon, which is also known as “nonstandard work schedules”, varies somewhat among scholars and across countries. But it essentially refers to schedules in which the majority of an employee’s work hours fall outside a typical daytime Monday-to-Friday schedule.

This includes evenings, nights, rotating shifts (alternating between day, evening, or night shifts but on a fixed schedule), split shifts, irregular hours and regular weekend work.

In the United States, some groups are more likely to work nonstandard hours than others. Young people, men, those with less education and low-skilled workers have higher incidence of nonstandard hours. As do married couples with young children and single mothers.

Broadly speaking, jobs in the private sector, the service industry and in sales are more likely than other occupations to require nonstandard hours. These include janitors, waitresses, retail workers, nurses and personal-services providers, among other frequent shift workers.

Not coincidentally, these are among the fastest-growing sectors in the US and globally.

Health, well-being and relationships

We wanted to know the consequences of the 24/7 economy on workers, family life and children, so we conducted a comprehensive review of the evidence from 23 quantitative empirical studies spanning three decades (1980-2012) and five countries: the US, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Croatia.

Our research mainly focused on studies that examined the impact of 24/7 economy on children’s development – their social and emotional well-being, physical health, cognitive ability and academic outcomes – but reviewed the evidence on how families, parents and couples are affected as well.

When it comes to adults, the evidence that working nonstandard schedules are associated with poor physical and mental health is clear. Physical health problems include increased fatigue, insomnia, stomach and digestive issues, higher cardiovascular risks, being overweight. And the group is also tends to make unhealthy lifestyle choices, such as smoking and drinking alcohol.

Chronic fatigue, sleep deprivation and the resulting stress are all major obstacles to productivity. There are also psychological disturbances associated with sleep deprivation, including adverse effects on memory and reaction time, as well as chronic anxiety and depression.

Such stressors are correlated with a greater risk of workplace accidents among employees on nonstandard schedules.

There is also evidence that shift work can negatively impact the relationship between parents and couples, and that working evenings or nights is associated with greater depressive symptoms among mothers and fathers.

Overall, people who work nonstandard hours tend to have lower life satisfaction and higher levels of family conflict and marital instability.

Such schedules do have one notable benefit, though: greater paternal involvement in child rearing. Regardless of whether it is the mother or the father who does shift work, in such families fathers spend more time with children than in those where both parents work standard day schedules.

Whether greater paternal involvement in child rearing might counterbalance some of the negative effects that nonstandard work schedules have on family life is a question that merits further study.

Impact on children

What’s clear is that the negative impact of the 24/7 economy clearly trickles down to kids.

Research shows consistent evidence that nonstandard parental work schedules are linked to adverse developmental outcomes, with children more likely to exhibit social and emotional problems or have lower maths and language skills.

These children are also more likely to be overweight or obese, engage in risk-taking behaviors (smoking, drinking, using drugs, delinquency and risky sexual activity) and to be at higher risk for depression compared to those whose parents work standard day schedules.

This impact has been observed throughout child developmental stages, from infancy to adolescence, and across countries. Our review revealed several pathways that can lead parental nonstandard schedules to correlate with poor childhood outcomes.

When parents show signs of depression, are harsh and insensitive with their children or create a generally unsupportive home environment, for example, those are vectors. So, too, are reduced child-parent interaction and intimacy and a lack of quality time spent doing developmentally important activities such as homework, parent-teacher meetings, sports and music lessons.

Our research also reveals that the 24/7 economy does not uniformly impact families and children. While shift work does have a negative effect on children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, disadvantaged families are hit hardest – that’s kids of low-income or single-parent families – along with families in which one or both parents work full-time on a nonstandard basis.

National differences

While the negative impact of the 24/7 economy on families and children has been reported across different developed countries, it is pronounced in some places and muted in others.

Consequences seem most pronounced in the US. Generally speaking, American workers do not benefit from many family-friendly workplace policies, such as flexible arrangements and sick or leave days. This is particularly true in low-wage and low-level jobs, and it impacts most directly those who work outside normal business hours.

In Australia, on the contrary, the adverse effect of shift work on adolescent children’s mental health was limited to those who come from single-parent households.

While in the Netherlands, working nonstandard schedules does not seem to have any detrimental impact on family well-being. One study comparing the UK, the Netherlands and Finland found that nonstandard parental work schedules are associated with less sociable behaviour among children in the UK but not elsewhere.

A plausible explanation for this difference is that in Finland the government provides early childhood education during nonstandard work hours, while the Netherlands offers flexible and reduced work hours. Such policies enable parents to organise child care during work hours, whereas in the UK – which is, like the US, a typical neoliberal state – no such provisions exist.

Understanding country-based differences in how the 24/7 economy impacts families and children is critical. So we are currently developing a larger international comparative project involving scholars from eight countries across three continents to elucidate national variations.

Help, please

The past four decades have witnessed the rise and triumph of neoliberalism worldwide. This has gone hand-in-hand with the deregulation of labour and financial markets, privatisation and cutbacks on social spending.

The process culminated in the global financial crisis of 2008 and persistently rising social inequality. Both have spurred a larger debate on the benefits and disadvantages of neoliberal globalisation.

Even so, the 24/7 economy is likely to continue expanding, particularly since digitalisation worldwide has rendered it increasingly feasible to work outside the office and beyond normal business hours.

It is critical for governments to make policies that support parents, enabling them to balance work and family so that children may grow and flourish. Families are the social and economic fabric of society, and the future prosperity of the world depends on the healthy development of the next generation.

Jianghong Li is affiliated with Telethon KIDS Institute, The University of Western Australia; Centre for Population Health Research, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University, Perth Western Australia

Wen-Jui Han does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

[datadrivendecisions-blog]

Does female empowerment drives democracy or is an outcome of the latter ?

I am interested in studying whether female empowerment leads to democratic development or if democratic development drive the social female empowerment. In other words interested in finding out the association of the form of government and female empowerment variables; and also check the causality/reverse causality if any.

To study this  I have selected the Gapminder data set. 

Will be using Polity score variable from the gapminder data-set as indicative of democratic development and female employment rate variable as indicative female empowerment.

Hypothesis: Female Empowerment has a positive causal effect on democratic development; and this should reflect in the analysis of the variables and polity score and Female employment rate. 

(Have created a separate data file from gapminder date-set with variables polityscore and femaleemployrate.)

Literature Review-

1.  Female Empowerment as a Core Driver of Democratic Development: A Dynamic Panel Model from 1980 to 2005-Paula Wyndow, Jianghong Li and  Eugen Mattes :- This study concludes that there are empirical evidence that female empowerment has a causal effect on democratic development.

2. Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values-Inglehart and Baker (2000) and Inglehart and Welzel (2009, 2010):   They propose that gains in economic security and development shift people’s focus from survival to selfexpression values, such as trust, tolerance, political activism, support for gender equality, and emphasis on freedom of expression.

and

Gender equality and democracy- Inglehart, R., Norris, P., & Welzel, C. (2002). -Rather than being a consequence of democratic transition, these authors suggest that gender equality is an important part of the broad cultural changes taking place that supports the spread of democracy 

Implicit in these studies is the presumption that both gender equality and democratic development occur as a consequence of economic development.

3. Islam, authoritarianism, and female empowerment—What are the linkages?Donno, D., & Russett, B. (2004).- They found that the indicators of women’s rights had no causal or independent effect on regime type.

4. Oil, Islam, and women. American Political Science Review : Ross, M. L. (2008) - Women’s exclusion from the labor force appears to be a key factor in explaining the persistence of autocratic regimes in Muslim countries

The following gives good support towards using female employment rate as indicative of female empowerment-

The expansion of economic rights for women is an important tool for female empowerment and raising women’s status (Blumberg, 1984, 2007; Chafetz, 1990; Collins, Chafetz, Blumberg, Coltrane, & Turner, 1993).

Female labor force participation, like education, appears to play an important role in raising women’s political consciousness (Iversen & Rosenbluth, 2008; Ross, 2006; Staeheli & Cope, 1994)

Looking forward to further analysis of the data.

[seippelabel]

https://soundcloud.com/seippelab…/03-li-jianhong-waste-light 这是李剑鸿的一轨现场吉他solo音轨。是他于2013年11月5日在北京XP酒吧演出的一个现场记录。 This is a solo guitar piece by Li Jianhong. It was performed at XP Beijing on November 5th, 2013.