Yu-Jung Sun

© 2016 American Society of Plant Biologists. All rights reserved.Calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase has been shown to play an important role in abscisic acid -induced antioxidant defense and enhance the tolerance of plants to drought stress. However, its downstream molecular events are poorly understood. Here, we identify a NAC transcription factor, ZmNAC84, in maize, which physically interacts with ZmCCaMK in vitro and in vivo. ZmNAC84 displays a partially overlapping expression pattern with ZmCCaMK after ABA treatment, and H2O2 is required for ABA-induced ZmNAC84expression. Functional analysis reveals that ZmNAC84 is essential for ABA-induced antioxidant defense in a ZmCCaMK-dependent manner. Furthermore, ZmCCaMK directly phosphorylates Ser-113 of ZmNAC84 in vitro, and Ser-113 is essential for the ABA-induced stimulation of antioxidant defense by ZmCCaMK. Moreover, overexpression of ZmNAC84 in tobacco can improve drought tolerance and alleviate drought-induced oxidative damage of transgenic plants. These results define a mechanism for ZmCCaMK function in ABA-induced antioxidant defense, where ABA-produced H2O2 first induces expression of ZmCCaMK and ZmNAC84 and activates ZmCCaMK. Subsequently, the activated ZmCCaMK phosphorylates ZmNAC84 at Ser-113, thereby inducing antioxidant defense by activating downstream genes.

This study focuses on the grassroots data practices of an environmental non-government organization (ENGO), examining the constitutive role of data in environmental activism in China. Drawing on the concept of contentious publicness, it analyses the processual and relational dynamics of the ENGO-led data activism to tackle environmental pollution at the interrelated material, spatial and temporal levels. Through participatory observations and in-depth interviews, it first examines the material agency of data infrastructure in enabling environmental participation. Then, it explores the spatiality and temporality of activists’ action repertoires. The findings demonstrate that the activist engagement with data follows a non-confrontational approach, evolving in the compromised middle ground between embeddedness and marginalization. Environmental data serves as a relational mediator in activists’ continuous process of making tactical responses to disrupt the status quo while not completely denying or subverting existing power relations. Moving beyond the contestational view of data, the study applies a non-binary and processual account of data activism, contributes to a deeper understanding of the relational configurations of power in data politics. It sheds light on the institutional, technological, and social imaginaries of environmentalism that shape the building of environmental data infrastructure and cultivate new forms of environmental action in the specific sociopolitical context of China. Moreover, the situated analysis of data activism contributes to diversifying the Western-centric understanding of the transformative potentials of data and calls for more scholarly attention to the relational dynamics of data politics in the Global South.

This article attempts to develop the techno-moral governance approach to critically examine the expansion of moral governance infrastructure in rural China, where data media technologies are deployed to experiment with a new form of social governance. Since 2020, the state has promoted the use of data scoring systems as an effective way to enhance rural governance. Using the smartphone app Xiangcun Ding, deployed in rural areas of Zhejiang province as a case study, we draw on fieldwork data collected in Jiande to explore the operation of Xiangcun Ding's data scoring system as a national example of digital rural governance. By analysing the algorithmic construction and nudging of villagers’ social morality, we argue that the data-scoring system has become a new moral governing infrastructure that has enabled and been embedded in the government's expanding capacity to manage everyday life in rural China. Focusing on techno-moral governance in rural settings allows critical inquiry to move beyond the construction of discursive politics, which has dominated scholarship on digital governance in urban China, to examine the reconfiguration of social material lives and relations through data technologies.

Dans la République, le poète est condamné sans appel et expulsé de la cité pour avoir introduit la fausseté dans l’âme des citoyens à l’aide d’images. Or, dans ce dialogue, comme dans tous les autres, Platon n’hésite jamais à produire lui-même des images, en créant des mythes et des personnages imaginaires. « Parler par images » (δι’ εἰκόνων λέγειν), ou par ce qui semble être sans être, est ainsi le point de convergence et le point de divergence entre Platon et les poètes. Comment comprendre alors cette double attitude de Platon que l’on retrouve dans ses critiques du faux et dans les usages qu’il en fait dans les dialogues? Comment le faux, en faisant naître le non-être, dispose-t-il d’une telle puissance sur l’âme, capable d’orienter celle-ci tantôt vers la vérité, tantôt vers un monde d’illusions où elle se réjouit de ce qui n’a aucun moyen d’exister?

This article foregrounds the great translation movement (GTM), initially mobilised on X (formerly Twitter) in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as an example of activist journalism countering China's 'mainstream' narrative of the war and its broader implications. Using Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach, adapted to the specifics of social media communication, we examine GTM postings throughout the first calendar year of the war, highlighting how the GTM evolves into a broader activist-journalistic initiative that challenges the party-state beyond its involvement in the war. This paradigm of intervention unfolds as GTM activists report on evidential events within China that bear the potential to spark public contention outside of the party-state’s censorship reach. By examining the dialectical relations between reportage and advocacy, this analysis demonstrates how activist journalism constitutes an emerging cross-border civic engagement, challenging a Southern authoritarian regime from the outside. A critical evaluation of activist journalism and its broader societal impacts is also provided, highlighting its progressive potential and future development in the Chinese context and beyond.

Knowledge sharing is the major driving force to maintain enterprises’ competitiveness. This study extends the current knowledge-sharing research by considering knowledge sharing as comprising four types: automatic response, rational reflection, ridiculed reflection, and deprived reflection, based on Kahneman’s types of system thinking. Drawing on the motivation-action-outcome model, this study explored how individuals’ intrinsic motivation can guide the action of knowledge sharing and reflect the outcome of creative self-efficacy in intelligent transportation jobs. By snowball sampling in intelligent transportation companies, a total of 232 effective questionnaires were collected, and confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modeling was performed. The research results showed that: intrinsic motivation was positively related to the four types of knowledge sharing tendencies; automatic response was not significantly related to creative self-efficacy; rational reflection was positively associated with creative self-efficacy; but ridiculed and deprived reflection were negatively related to creative self-efficacy. These results can be applied to encourage employees to practice rational reflection in knowledge sharing to enhance their creative self-efficacy in intelligent transportation jobs.

Conventional wisdom suggests mid-task rest as a potential approach to relieve the time-on-task (TOT) effect while accumulating evidence indicated that acute exercise might also effectively restore mental fatigue. However, few studies have explored the neural mechanism underlying these different break types, and the results were scattered. This study provided one of the first looks at how different types of fatigue-recovery break exerted influence on the cognitive processes by evaluating the corresponding behavioral improvement and neural response (EEG power spectral) in a sustained attention task. Specifically, 19 participants performed three sessions of psychomotor vigilance tasks (PVT), with one session including a continuous 30-min PVT while the other two sessions additionally inserted a 15-min mid-task cycling and rest break, respectively. For behavioral performance, both types of break could restore objective vigilance transiently, while subjective feeling was only maintained after mid-task rest. Moreover, divergent patterns of EEG change were observed during post-break improvement. In detail, relative theta decreased and delta increased immediately after mid-task exercise, while decreased delta was found near the end of the rest-inserted task. Meanwhile, theta and delta could serve as neurological indicators to predict the reaction time change for exercise and rest intervention, respectively. In sum, our findings provided novel evidence to demonstrate divergent neural patterns following the mid-task exercise and rest intervention to counter TOT effects, which might lead to new insights into the nascent field of neuroergonomics for mental fatigue restoration.