This study examines how and when labor control and management leads to collective resistance in China’s food-delivery platform economy. I develop the concept of “platform architecture” to examine the ...technological, legal, and organizational aspects of control and management in the labor process and the variable relationships between them. Analyzing 68 in-depth interviews, ethnographic data, and 87 cases of strikes and protests, I compare the platform architecture of service and gig platforms and examine the relationship between their respective architecture and labor contention. I argue that specific differences in platform architecture diffuse or heighten collective contention. Within the service platform, technological control and management generates work dissatisfaction, but the legal and organizational dimensions contain grievances and reduce the appeal of, and spaces for, collective contention. Conversely, within the gig platform, all three dimensions of platform architecture reinforce one another, escalating grievances, enhancing the appeal of collective contention, and providing spaces for mobilizing solidarity and collective action. As a result, gig platform couriers are more likely to consider their work relations exploitative and to mobilize contention, despite facing higher barriers to collective action due to the atomization of their work.
The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is an emerging key technology to provide clean, renewable energy. Current state‐of‐the‐art catalysts still rely on expensive and rare noble metals, however, the ...relatively cheap and abundant transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have emerged as exceptionally promising alternatives. Early studies in developing TMD‐based catalysts laid the groundwork in understanding the fundamental catalytically active sites of different TMD phases, enabling a toolbox of physical, chemical, and electronic engineering strategies to improve the HER catalytic activity of TMDs. This report focuses on recent progress in improving the catalytic properties of TMDs toward highly efficient production of H2. Combining theoretical and experimental considerations, a summary of the progress to date is provided and a pathway forward for viable hydrogen evolution from TMD driven catalysis is concluded.
Building on the fundamental understanding of the catalytic process and advancements in chemical, electronic, and structural tuning of transition metal chalcogenides, the key concepts for the electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are provided and their potential as the next‐generation of HER catalysts is discussed, providing a clear pathway forward for viable hydrogen evolution.
"Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this ...happen? This book shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China--one the state must now endeavor to control. The author examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded. Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, the author shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. The author demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere--and its uncertain future--is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people. Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, this book offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations."--.
Mussel‐inspired polydopamine (PDA) deposition offers a promising route to fabricate multifunctional coatings for various materials. However, PDA deposition is generally a time‐consuming process, and ...PDA coatings are unstable in acidic and alkaline media, as well as in polar organic solvents. We report a strategy to realize the rapid deposition of PDA by using CuSO4/H2O2 as a trigger. Compared to the conventional processes, our strategy shows the fastest deposition rate reported to date, and the PDA coatings exhibit high uniformity and enhanced stability. Furthermore, the PDA‐coated porous membranes have excellent hydrophilicity, anti‐oxidant properties, and antibacterial performance. This work demonstrates a useful method for the environmentally friendly, cost‐effective, and time‐saving fabrication of PDA coatings.
Mussel‐inspired surfaces: A facile and robust approach to rapidly construct polydopamine (PDA) coatings on various substrates is presented. The CuSO4/H2O2‐triggered PDA coatings show high uniformity, enhanced stability, excellent hydrophilicity, antioxidant ability, and antibacterial performance.
The rational design of cathode host materials is significant in fulfilling high-efficiency sulfur electrochemistry as well as boosting the energy density of lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries. Herein, ...we develop a stringed “tube on cube” nanohybrid (CPZC) with a ternary hierarchical architecture, which contains a fibrous carbon skeleton, highly porous carbon cube filler, and abundant CNT tentacles as an advanced matrix for sulfur electrodes. The as-developed CPZC delivers excellent conductivity, abundant active interfaces, and strong confinement to polysulfide, and thus is capable of significantly expediting the sulfur redox kinetics and promoting battery durability. The fabricated sulfur electrode achieves a superb rate capability up to 10C, outstanding cyclability over 2000 cycles, and more importantly, excellent performance under high a sulfur loading and sparing electrolyte with a high energy density of 348.8 W h kg −1 and 327.6 W h L −1 at the system level, which reveals its potential in promoting the practical application of Li–S batteries.
Flexible electrochemical energy storage (FEES) devices have received great attention as a promising power source for the emerging field of flexible and wearable electronic devices. Carbon nanotubes ...(CNTs) and graphene have many excellent properties that make them ideally suited for use in FEES devices. A brief definition of FEES devices is provided, followed by a detailed overview of various structural models for achieving different FEES devices. The latest research developments on the use of CNTs and graphene in FEES devices are summarized. Finally, future prospects and important research directions in the areas of CNT‐ and graphene‐based flexible electrode synthesis and device integration are discussed.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene for flexible electrochemical energy storage are reviewed. A definition of flexible devices, followed by an overview of the various structural models for achieving different flexible devices is provided. The use of CNTs and graphene in flexible devices is summarized. Future prospects and important research directions of flexible electrode are introduced.
Video clip retrieval and captioning tasks play an essential role in multimodal research and are the fundamental research problem for multimodal understanding and generation. The CLIP (Contrastive ...Language-Image Pre-training) model has demonstrated the power of visual concepts learning from web collected image-text datasets. In this paper, we propose a CLIP4Clip model to transfer the knowledge of the image-text pretrained CLIP model to video-text tasks in an end-to-end manner. Furthermore, we conduct several empirical studies including 1) Whether image feature is enough for video-text retrieval and captioning? 2) How a post-pretraining on a large-scale video-text dataset based on the CLIP affect the performance? 3) What is the practical mechanism to model temporal dependency between video frames? And 4) The Hyper-parameters sensitivity of the model. Extensive experimental results present that the CLIP4Clip model transferred from the CLIP can achieve SOTA results on various video-text datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, and DiDeMo for multimodal understanding and generation tasks.
The serious shuttle effect of lithium‐sulfur batteries limits the efficient realization of high rate charging and discharging under high sulfur loading in practical applications. Herein, this work ...reports a strong mitigation toward lithium polysulfide (LiPSs) adsorption/catalysis by introducing defective graphite phase carbon nitride (g‐C3N4) as an effective additive. Without significant weight increase, the nitrogen deficient g‐C3N4, in the form of ultrafine spindle‐like nitrogen deficient g‐C3N4−x (sCN), can be easily combined with commercial poly‐propylene (PP) separators after hydrophilic modification of polydopamine, which corresponds to an ultralow overall weightiness contribution of 0.17 mg cm−2. Physical/electrochemical characterizations and theoretical studies reveal that sCN exhibits strong electrostatic attraction with LiPSs by nitrogen defects and new formation of cyano groups near edges, thereby maintaining rapid and reliable LiS electrochemistry. Of particular importance is the chainmail catalyst design with separators that enable magic polysulfides adsorption effect and desirable thermostability/wettability, which guarantees the sCNPP‐assembled cells with long and stable durability over 500 cycles at 5.0 C (capacity fading rate: 0.05% per cycle), and a high capability of 476 mAh g−1 is obtained.
A commercial Celgard membrane is uniformly coated with a thin polydopamine layer (acting as the defensive chainmail to enhance the electrolyte‐philicity and thermostability) and then modified with defective graphitic carbon nitride nano spindles (acting as the magic stone to accelerate sulfur related electrochemistry). This deliberated structural design provides a new perspective on separator modifications without sacrificing the mass energy density feature.
This article analyses how local states, electronics manufacturers and low-skilled workers perceive and make decisions about automation under China’s techno-developmentalism. Since the early 2010s, ...local states have made automation – specifically, the substitution of robots for human workers – the linchpin of their techno-developmentalist strategy and set statistical targets to facilitate policy implementation. Although manufacturers realised the limitations of such substitution, most continue to overstate the power of robots in order to receive material and symbolic benefits from local states, which rely on manufacturers to achieve their statistical targets. Meanwhile, most low-skilled workers embrace the state’s vision and see automation as beneficial for national progress, although these workers are the most excluded by state policy. Essentially, China’s techno-developmentalism has led to symbiotic state-capital relations that marginalise low-skilled workers, while reproducing a national sociotechnical imaginary that prioritises abstract notions of technological progress over the actual efficacy of automation, labour protection and social equality.
The objectives of the present study were to investigate heavy metal accumulation in 22 vegetable species and to assess the human health risks of vegetable consumption. Six vegetable types were ...cultivated on farmland contaminated with heavy metals (Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, and As). The target hazard quotient (THQ) method was used to assess the human health risks posed by heavy metals through vegetable consumption. Clear differences were found in the concentrations of heavy metals in edible parts of the different vegetables. The concentrations of heavy metals decreased in the sequence as leafy vegetables > stalk vegetables/root vegetables/solanaceous vegetables > legume vegetables/melon vegetables. The ability of leafy vegetables to uptake and accumulate heavy metals was the highest, and that of melon vegetables was the lowest. This indicated that the low accumulators (melon vegetables) were suitable for being planted on contaminated soil, while the high accumulators (leafy vegetables) were unsuitable. In Shizhuyuan area, China, the total THQ values of adults and children through consumption of vegetables were 4.12 and 5.41, respectively, suggesting that the residents may be facing health risks due to vegetable consumption, and that children were vulnerable to the adverse effects of heavy metal ingestion.
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