627 research outputs found
The education of the ideal citizens: an ethnographic study of two schools in Hong Kong
Soon after the political handover in 1997, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
(HKSAR) government had introduced a series of education and curriculum reforms.
Such reforms is said to be proceeded in response to teenagers' lack of national
identification towards their motherland China, and also to the public discourse
addressing the economic challenges and competition in the universal trend of
globalization. Although a few studies had unveiled the underlying values of
Confucianism, neo- liberalism and market ideology under these objectives, how the
new definitions of "ideal citizens" is understood and promoted in the actual school
settings, and how those values influence the process of students' identity construction
and their vision on their life trajectories, remains unknown.Drawing on the data from an ethnographic research conducted in 2010, this thesis
illustrates how the qualities of an "ideal citizen" propagated in the education and
curriculum reform would be understood and transformed in two very different
schools in Hong Kong. One is a long- established girls' school located in a middle - class district, which has a reputation of providing "all- rounded" education and
nurturing future woman -leaders; the other one is being considered as a
"academically -low band" school located in remote area, which struggled to survive
and started to admit "Non- Chinese speaking" (NCS) students from Pakistan, Nepal
and Philippines three years ago in order to solve the problem of insufficient intake of
local students. Apart from the half -year participant- observation in the two campuses,
in -depth interviews of the 2 school principals, 13 teachers, 19 students and 2 alumni
of the two schools have also been conducted. Other school documents including
official school magazines, school reports as well as students' publications have also
been collected as supporting information.Due to the different historical background, the school management strategy and most
of all, the composition of students from very different socio-economic and ethnic
backgrounds, the two schools had developed very different ideas and definition of an
"ideal citizen ", and thus led to different directions of school policies and expectations
on students. Through the examples of the provision of the "Other learning
Experience" (OLE) and students' participation patterns in Chapter Five, the different
language policies and students' ability in languages in Chapter Six, and the process
of the construction of femininities of young girls in Chapter Seven, this study shows
how the problematic of class, gender and ethnics domination still exist under the new
context of education reform. This study also reveals that while Hong Kong policy - maker claimed that the education reform `bears upon the equity and balance of our
society', the socio- economic backgrounds, ethnicity and gender which traditionally
being viewed as factors that differentiate education outcomes in sociological studies
are completely ignored in the reform
The Meaning Behind Responses And Changes In The IAPT Outcome Measures: Seeking Perspectives Of IAPT Service Users And Clinicians
The conceptual introduction of this thesis reviewed the existing literature and studies of responses to questionnaire measures of mental health and wellbeing. In the conceptual introduction I found that a range of factors can impact on the response process but also highlighted the lack of a unified theory and approach in this area. The empirical paper details a three-phase qualitative study on service users’ and clinicians’ views of the meaning behind responses and changes in questionnaires used in the IAPT setting. I identified a range of personal, interpersonal, contextual and questionnaire factors that influenced questionnaire responses. The study supported the acceptability of the Global Rating of Improvement measure and the utility in using this alongside the symptom measures to capture a holistic sense of wellbeing. Clinicians and service users might hold different understanding of the questionnaire scores, and the study emphasised the importance of taking a collaborative approach to interpret responses and changes of questionnaire scores for them to be clinically meaningful and beneficial. I subsequently proposed a conceptual framework of questionnaire response in a clinical setting to illustrate the findings and guide future research in this area. The critical appraisal includes further thoughts and personal reflections on this study and the wider research topic
Gas hydrate inhibition and its unique thermodynamic behaviors within the Porous clay sediment
The fundamental understanding of gas and water system in geological sediments is necessary for greenhouse gas sequestration and future energy production. Depending on the surrounding environments that water, gas, and other substrate material coexist, several unique phases such as supercritical, dissolved gas, gas oversatu-rated, and hydrate could be formed. Especially, gas hydrates which are composed of water frameworks and several gaseous guest molecules have drawn people’s attention for its application such as methane production with carbon dioxide sequestration. For these reasons, to produce methane from natural gas hydrate and store carbon dioxide by replacement reaction, the thermodynamic behaviors of gas hydrate and its stability have become an important issue.
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Pregnancy lipidomic profiles and DNA methylation in newborns from the CHAMACOS cohort.
Lipids play a role in many biological functions and the newly emerging field of lipidomics aims to characterize the varying classes of lipid molecules present in biological specimens. Animal models have shown associations between maternal dietary supplementation with fatty acids during pregnancy and epigenetic changes in their offspring, demonstrating a mechanism through which prenatal environment can affect outcomes in children; however, data on maternal lipid metabolite levels during pregnancy and newborn DNA methylation in humans are sparse. In this study, we assessed the relationship of maternal lipid metabolites measured in the blood from pregnant women with newborn DNA methylation profiles in the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas cohort. Targeted metabolomics was performed by selected reaction monitoring liquid chromatography and triple quadrupole mass spectrometry to measure 92 metabolites in plasma samples of pregnant women at ∼26 weeks gestation. DNA methylation was assessed using the Infinium HumanMethylation 450K BeadChip adjusting for cord blood cell composition. We uncovered numerous false discovery rate significant associations between maternal metabolite levels, particularly phospholipid and lysolipid metabolites, and newborn methylation. The majority of the observed relationships were negative, suggesting that higher lipid metabolites during pregnancy are associated with lower methylation levels at genes related to fetal development. These results further elucidate the complex relationship between early life exposures, maternal lipid metabolites, and infant epigenetic status
Education of ideal citizens: an ethnographic study of two schools in Hong Kong
Soon after the political handover in 1997, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
(HKSAR) government had introduced a series of education and curriculum reforms.
Such reforms is said to be proceeded in response to teenagers' lack of national
identification towards their motherland China, and also to the public discourse
addressing the economic challenges and competition in the universal trend of
globalization. Although a few studies had unveiled the underlying values of
Confucianism, neo-liberalism and market ideology under these objectives, how the
new definitions of "ideal citizens" is understood and promoted in the actual school
settings, and how those values influence the process of students' identity construction
and their vision on their life trajectories, remains unknown.
Drawing on the data from an ethnographic research conducted in 2010, this thesis
illustrates how the qualities of an "ideal citizen" propagated in the education and
curriculum reform would be understood and transformed in two very different schools
in Hong Kong. One is a long-established girls' school located in a middle-class district,
which has a reputation of providing "all-rounded" education and nurturing future
woman-leaders; the other one is being considered as a "academically-low band" school
located in remote area, which struggled to survive and started to admit "Non-Chinese
speaking" (NCS) students from Pakistan, Nepal and Philippines three years ago in
order to solve the problem of insufficient intake of local students. Apart from the halfyear
participant-observation in the two campuses, in-depth interviews of the 2 school
principals, 13 teachers, 19 students and 2 alumni of the two schools have also been
conducted. Other school documents including official school magazines, school
reports as well as students’ publications have also been collected as supporting
information.
Due to the different historical background, the school management strategy and most
of all, the composition of students from very different socio-economic and ethnic
backgrounds, the two schools had developed very different ideas and definition of an
"ideal citizen", and thus led to different directions of school policies and expectations
on students. Through the examples of the provision of the “Other learning Experience”
(OLE) and students’ participation patterns in Chapter Five, the different language
policies and students’ ability in languages in Chapter Six, and the process of the
construction of femininities of young girls in Chapter Seven, this study shows how the
problematic of class, gender and ethnics domination still exist under the new context
of education reform. This study also reveals that while Hong Kong policy-maker
claimed that the education reform ‘bears upon the equity and balance of our society',
the socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity and gender which traditionally being
viewed as factors that differentiate education outcomes in sociological studies are
completely ignored in the reform
VI-Band Follow-Up Observations of Ultra-Long-Period Cepheid Candidates in M31
The ultra-long period Cepheids (ULPCs) are classical Cepheids with pulsation
periods exceeding days. The intrinsic brightness of ULPCs are ~1
to ~3 mag brighter than their shorter period counterparts. This makes them
attractive in future distance scale work to derive distances beyond the limit
set by the shorter period Cepheids. We have initiated a program to search for
ULPCs in M31, using the single-band data taken from the Palomar Transient
Factory, and identified eight possible candidates. In this work, we presented
the VI-band follow-up observations of these eight candidates. Based on our
VI-band light curves of these candidates and their locations in the
color-magnitude diagram and the Period-Wesenheit diagram, we verify two
candidates as being truly ULPCs. The six other candidates are most likely other
kinds of long-period variables. With the two confirmed M31 ULPCs, we tested the
applicability of ULPCs in distance scale work by deriving the distance modulus
of M31. It was found to be mag. The large error
in the derived distance modulus, together with the large intrinsic dispersion
of the Period-Wesenheit (PW) relation and the small number of ULPCs in a given
host galaxy, means that the question of the suitability of ULPCs as standard
candles is still open. Further work is needed to enlarge the sample of
calibrating ULPCs and reduce the intrinsic dispersion of the PW relation before
re-considering ULPCs as suitable distance indicators.Comment: 13 pages, with 14 Figures and 4 Tables (one online table). AJ
accepte
Efficient Recovery of CO2 from Flue Gas by Clathrate Hydrate Formation in Porous Silica Gels
Thermodynamic measurements and NMR spectroscopic analysis were used to show that it is possible to recover CO2 from flue gas by forming a mixed hydrate that removes CO2 preferentially from CO2/N2 gas mixtures using water dispersed in the pores of silica gel. Kinetic studies with 1H NMR microimaging showed that the dispersed water in the silica gel pore system reacts readily with the gas, thus obviating the need for a stirred reactor and excess water. Hydrate phase equilibria for the ternary CO2-N2-water system in silica gel pores were measured, which show that the three-phase hydrate-water-rich liquid-vapor equilibrium curves were shifted to higher pressures at a specific temperature when the concentration of CO2 in the vapor phase decreased. 13C cross-polarization NMR spectral analysis and direct measurement of the CO2 content in the hydrate phase suggested that the mixed hydrate is structure I at gas compositions of more than 10 mol % CO2, and that the CO2 molecules occupy mainly the more abundant 51262 cages. This makes it possible to achieve concentrations of more than 96 mol % CO2 gas in the product after three cycles of hydrate formation and dissociation. 1H NMR microimaging showed that hydrate yields of better than 85%, based on the amount of water, could be obtained in 1 h when a steady state was reached, although ~90% of this yield was achieved after ~20 min of reaction time.NRC publication: Ye
A multi band study of the optically dark GRB 051028
Observations were made of the optical afterglow of GRB 051028 with the Lulin
observatory's 1.0 m telescope and the WIDGET robotic telescope system. R band
photometric data points were obtained on 2005 October 28 (UT), or 0.095-0.180
days after the burst. There is a possible plateau in the optical light curve
around 0.1 days after the burst; the light curve resembles optically bright
afterglows (e.g. GRB 041006, GRB 050319, GRB060605) in shape of the light curve
but not in brightness. The brightness of the GRB 051028 afterglow is 3
magnitudes fainter than that of one of the dark events, GRB 020124. Optically
dark GRBs have been attributed to dust extinction within the host galaxy or
high redshift. However, the spectrum analysis of the X-rays implies that there
is no significant absorption by the host galaxy. Furthermore, according to the
model theoretical calculation of the Ly absorption to find the limit of
GRB 051028's redshift, the expected band absorption is not high enough to
explain the darkness of the afterglow. While the present results disfavor
either the high-redshift hypothesis or the high extinction scenario for
optically dark bursts, they are consistent with the possibility that the
brightness of the optical afterglow, intrinsically dark.Comment: 5page, 5 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in PASJ Letter.
PASJ styl
Be Stars in the Open Cluster NGC 6830
We report the discovery of 2 new Be stars, and re-identify one known Be star
in the open cluster NGC 6830. Eleven H-alpha emitters were discovered using the
H-alpha imaging photometry of the Palomar Transient Factory Survey. Stellar
membership of the candidates was verified with photometric and kinematic
information using 2MASS data and proper motions. The spectroscopic confirmation
was carried out by using the Shane 3-m telescope at Lick observatory. Based on
their spectral types, three H-alpha emitters were confirmed as Be stars with
H-alpha equivalent widths > -10 Angstrom. Two objects were also observed by the
new spectrograph SED-Machine on the Palomar 60 inch Telescope. The SED-Machine
results show strong H-alpha emission lines, which are consistent with the
results of the Lick observations. The high efficiency of the SED-Machine can
provide rapid observations for Be stars in a comprehensive survey in the
future.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, AJ in pres
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