From caterpillar to butterfly: an action research of educational program based on the Satir model for women in Taiwan

The way toward autonomy and individuality for Chinese women in Taiwan is an unavoidable learning process while they were impacted by modernization. They have been struggled between conformity and rebellion with traditional Chinese culture for more than half a century. The Satir Model was characterized as an experiential and growing approach to change by the field of family therapy in Western world. The objective of this research project was to look at the process of how the 24 Taiwanese women experienced the educational program based on the Satir Model, and what they have learned about themselves and the group process. This project was designed as an action research. The participants, as coresearchers, offered their journal and oral feedback during each session of the group process to adjust the development of the program. They were interviewed about their learning and changes after the program. By analyzing the journal of the participants and the researcher, the audiotapes of group process, and the transcripts of post-group interviews, there were several main themes were identified. First, the causes for the urge to change towards self-growth come from group interaction and personal commitment. Second, non-defensive acceptance of those in one\u27s family of origin can be the turning point for generating an urge towards self-growth. Third, in the process toward self-growth, awareness and reflection are critical factors. The internal transformation--changing one\u27s mind, the authority issue and the way that Taiwanese women learned were discussed

Radiation Damping of Soil - Foundations Interaction Systems

Based on the theory of wave scatter and the velocity, the wave radiation which is caused in soil of dynamic foundation and the range of the affected depth are presented in this paper. It is pointed out that the mass ratio of foundation and the location of the foundation in the layered soil, and its propagation velocity in the affected depth, are the major factors affecting radial damping of soil-foundation system on the half space

Jointly Modeling Topics and Intents with Global Order Structure

Modeling document structure is of great importance for discourse analysis and related applications. The goal of this research is to capture the document intent structure by modeling documents as a mixture of topic words and rhetorical words. While the topics are relatively unchanged through one document, the rhetorical functions of sentences usually change following certain orders in discourse. We propose GMM-LDA, a topic modeling based Bayesian unsupervised model, to analyze the document intent structure cooperated with order information. Our model is flexible that has the ability to combine the annotations and do supervised learning. Additionally, entropic regularization can be introduced to model the significant divergence between topics and intents. We perform experiments in both unsupervised and supervised settings, results show the superiority of our model over several state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 201

Thermodynamic analysis of a dual-loop organic Rankine cycle (ORC) for waste heat recovery of a petrol engine

Huge amounts of low-grade heat energy are discharged to the environment by vehicular engines. Considering the large number of vehicles in the world, such waste energy has a great impact on our environment globally. The Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC), which uses an organic fluid with a low boiling point as the working medium, is considered to be the most promising technology to recover energy from low-grade waste heat. In this study, a dual-loop ORC is presented to simultaneously recover energy from both the exhaust gases and the coolant of a petrol engine. A high-temperature (HT) ORC loop is used to recover heat from the exhaust gases, while a low-temperature (LT) ORC loop is used to recover heat from the coolant and the condensation heat of the HT loop. Figure 1 shows the schematic of the dual-loop ORC. Differing from previous research, two more environmentally friendly working fluids are used, and the corresponding optimisation is conducted. First, the system structure and operating principle are described. Then, a mathematical model of the designed dual-loop ORC is established. Next, the performance of the dual-loop cycle is analysed over the entire engine operating region. Furthermore, the states of each point along the cycle and the heat load of each component are compared with the results of previous research. The results show that the dual-loop ORC can effectively recover the waste heat from the petrol engine, and that the effective thermal efficiency can be improved by about 20 ~ 24%, 14~20%, and 30% in the high-speed, medium-speed, and low-speed operation regions, respectively. The designed dual-loop ORC can achieve a higher system efficiency than previous ORCs of this structure. Therefore, it is a good choice for waste heat recovery from vehicle engines

Empirical Research on the Impacts of Geographic Boundary-spanning Search on Innovation Performance

Boundary-spanning search has been argued to be important for the success of innovation. There are various kinds of dimensions about organizational search activities. Past studies on boundary-spanning search have focused mainly on technological dimension. We characterize the boundary-spanning search on geographic dimension. We propose a conceptual model and 6 hypotheses. Data from 156 firms were collected to test above hypotheses. The results show that both local search and nonlocal search have positive effect on incremental innovation. What’s more, local search is more positive than nonlocal search on incremental innovation. Meanwhile, both local search and nonlocal search have positive effect on breakthrough innovation. However, it is not supported by data that nonlocal is more positive than local search on breakthrough innovation