225 research outputs found
IDENTITY MANAGEMENT POLITICS IN GLOCALIZED ENGLISH HEGEMONY: CULTURAL STRUGGLES, FACEWORK STRATEGIES, AND INTERCULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS IN TAIWANESE ENGLISH EDUCATION
The globalization of the English language has rendered both positive and negative impacts to countries around the world. With the ever-increasing pervasiveness of the English language, many non-native-English-speaking (NNES hereafter) people and countries have shown growing interests in teaching and learning English. Some governments of these NNES countries have decided to implement “English” as a mandatory school subject into their compulsory curriculum in order to “connect with the world” and/or to increase their nation’s international image. However, in these NNES countries, English often does not hold official capacity and is taught as a foreign language (EFL). Although English (language) education can bring positive changes to a nation, it is not free of problems. Essentially, English education influences many NNES countries and their citizens in sociocultural, economic, and educational arenas. Some scholars, such as Tsuda (2008), assert that the “problems” and impacts are inseparable from “English language hegemony.” My country of origin, Taiwan, is one of the EFL and NNES countries that implements English education in our nation’s compulsory education. In recent decades, communicative-based English educational approaches have received great support from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. In an EFL setting, such as that in Taiwan, the said educational approaches have complicated English education even further. In particular, the communicative-based approaches focus on teaching and practicing English oral proficiency, which average Taiwanese citizens do not need in their daily lives. Many Taiwanese people experience identity struggles and self-esteem issues because of their less-than-desirable English oral proficiency. In addition to Taiwanese, native-English-speaking (NES) teachers who are recruited to teach English in Taiwan are an integral part of the Taiwanese English education. As a Taiwanese citizen and an intercultural communication scholar, I recognize the intricate complexity of Taiwanese English education and am compelled to examine it in this dissertation as it has not received much attention in the discipline of Communication Studies. In this dissertation, I employ Identity Management Theory (IMT) (Cupach & Imahori, 1993; Imahori & Cupach, 2005) as the primary theoretical framework to examine Taiwanese English education. Particularly, I utilize IMT to study the identity construction and management (such as identity freezing), facework strategies, and intercultural relationship development among NES teachers, Taiwanese English teachers, and Taiwanese students. To carry out this research, I employ critical complete-member ethnography (CCME) (Toyosaki, 2011) as the central research methodology, because I see myself as a complete-member researcher with my research participants. I share complete-memberships with them in nuanced, complex, and contextual manners. Methodologically, CCME entails ethnography of communication, autoethnography, and critical ethnography; all are informative of my data collection methods, including ethnographic participant observation, ethnographic interview, and autoethnographic journaling inside and outside of English classes at different Taiwanese universities. These three methods helped me gather rich data for this research. To analyze and discuss the data, I employed thematic analysis (Owen, 1984) and critical examinations of consensual and conflictual theorization (Fiske, 1991; Toyosaki, 2011). Both methods render complex findings. In particular, the analysis and discussion reveal and explain (a) how the research participants manage cultural identities through marking scope, salience, and intensity with different English educational participants, (b) how they apply facework strategies to cope with identity freezing experiences, and (c) how they establish and maintain intercultural relationships with other English educational participants as they transition across different relational phases of their relationships. I deliver the findings thematically in an analytical and narrative-like manner, as I layer and weave together the field notes, the interview responses, and my autoethnographic journaling. Ultimately, I argue that English hegemony has glocalized in Taiwanese English education and is manifested through research participants’ identity management politics and their intercultural relationships. Essentially, my research shows that identity management politics is inseparable from the power differentials and inequalities imbued in Taiwanese English education. Voluntarily and/or involuntarily, the research participants and I have normalized English hegemony, embodied its presence in our knowledge production and consumption, and given English/Western ideologies consent to dominate our communicative choices, our (sub)consciousness, and our intercultural relationships. Aside from perpetuating English hegemony, I have also observed resistance against the said hegemonic impacts inside and outside of the English classrooms. In a power-laden intercultural communication context, such as Taiwanese English education, critical analyses and examinations play essential roles in revealing the identity management politics and power differentials embedded in the (mythically) “innocent” English classrooms. I further recognize how this research serves as an example to other EFL and NNES countries. In due course, I conclude that my research makes contributions to the scholarships of intercultural communication and to English education in Taiwan and beyond
On the Periods of Twisted Moments of the Kloosterman Connection
This paper aims to study the Betti homology and de Rham cohomology of twisted
symmetric powers of the Kloosterman connection of rank two on the torus. We
compute the period pairing and, with respect to certain bases, interpret these
associated period numbers in terms of the Bessel moments. Via the rational
structures on Betti homology and de Rham cohomology, we prove the
-linear and quadratic relations among these Bessel moments.Comment: 36 page
Special Issue Introduction: Coming to Terms in the Muddy Waters of Qualitative Inquiry in Communication Studies
DIVE in the cosmic web: voids with Delaunay Triangulation from discrete matter tracer distributions
We present a novel parameter-free cosmological void finder (\textsc{dive},
Delaunay TrIangulation Void findEr) based on Delaunay Triangulation (DT), which
efficiently computes the empty spheres constrained by a discrete set of
tracers. We define the spheres as DT voids, and describe their properties,
including an universal density profile together with an intrinsic scatter. We
apply this technique on 100 halo catalogues with volumes of 2.5\,Gpc
side each, with a bias and number density similar to the BOSS CMASS Luminous
Red Galaxies, performed with the \textsc{patchy} code. Our results show that
there are two main species of DT voids, which can be characterised by the
radius: they have different responses to halo redshift space distortions, to
number density of tracers, and reside in different dark matter environments.
Based on dynamical arguments using the tidal field tensor, we demonstrate that
large DT voids are hosted in expanding regions, whereas the haloes used to
construct them reside in collapsing ones. Our approach is therefore able to
efficiently determine the troughs of the density field from galaxy surveys, and
can be used to study their clustering. We further study the power spectra of DT
voids, and find that the bias of the two populations are different,
demonstrating that the small DT voids are essentially tracers of groups of
haloes.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure
Linear redshift space distortions for cosmic voids based on galaxies in redshift space
Cosmic voids found in galaxy surveys are defined based on the galaxy
distribution in redshift space. We show that the large scale distribution of
voids in redshift space traces the fluctuations in the dark matter density
field \delta(k) (in Fourier space with \mu being the line of sight projected
k-vector): \delta_v^s(k) = (1 + \beta_v \mu^2) b^s_v \delta(k), with a beta
factor that will be in general different than the one describing the
distribution of galaxies. Only in case voids could be assumed to be quasi-local
transformations of the linear (Gaussian) galaxy redshift space field, one gets
equal beta factors \beta_v=\beta_g=f/b_g with f being the growth rate, and b_g,
b^s_v being the galaxy and void bias on large scales defined in redshift space.
Indeed, in our mock void catalogs we measure void beta factors being in good
agreement with the galaxy one. Further work needs to be done to confirm the
level of accuracy of the beta factor equality between voids and galaxies, but
in general the void beta factor needs to be considered as a free parameter for
RSD studies.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures; matches the version accepted by PR
SERVE 4U: evaluación de competencias de servicio al cliente a través de cuestionario virtual
Curso de Especial InterésSe diseña un plan de mercadeo para crear el cuestionario SERVE4U, este evalúa las
competencias con relación al servicio al cliente. El cuestionario contó con la validación
de jueces, coeficiente RGW y el estadístico Kolmogorov Smirnov y finalmente se
compone por 28 ítems. Concluyendo que el instrumento es válido y confiable para ser
aplicado en aspirantes a cargos comerciales.1. RESUMEN.
2. JUSTIFICACIÓN.
3. MARCO REFERENCIAL.
4. OBJETIVOS.
5. MÉTODO.
6. ESTUDIO DE MERCADO.
7. RESULTADOS.
8. CONCLUSIONES.
9. REFERENCIAS.PregradoPsicólog
UNIT project: Universe -body simulations for the Investigation of Theoretical models from galaxy surveys
We present the UNIT -body cosmological simulations project, designed to
provide precise predictions for nonlinear statistics of the galaxy
distribution. We focus on characterizing statistics relevant to emission line
and luminous red galaxies in the current and upcoming generation of galaxy
surveys. We use a suite of precise particle mesh simulations (FastPM) as well
as with full -body calculations with a mass resolution of M to investigate the recently suggested
technique of Angulo & Pontzen 2016 to suppress the variance of cosmological
simulations We study redshift space distortions, cosmic voids, higher order
statistics from down to . We find that both two- and three-point
statistics are unbiased. Over the scales of interest for baryon acoustic
oscillations and redshift-space distortions, we find that the variance is
greatly reduced in the two-point statistics and in the cross correlation
between halos and cosmic voids, but is not reduced significantly for the
three-point statistics. We demonstrate that the accuracy of the two-point
correlation function for a galaxy survey with effective volume of 20
(Gpc) is improved by about a factor of 40, indicating that two
pairs of simulations with a volume of 1 (Gpc) lead to the
equivalent variance of 150 such simulations. The -body simulations
presented here thus provide an effective survey volume of about seven times the
effective survey volume of DESI or Euclid. The data from this project,
including dark matter fields, halo catalogues, and their clustering statistics,
are publicly available at http://www.unitsims.org.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures. This version matches the one accepted by MNRAS.
The data from this project are publicly available at: http://www.unitsims.or
Covariance matrices for variance-suppressed simulations
Cosmological -body simulations provide numerical predictions of the
structure of the universe against which to compare data from ongoing and future
surveys. The growing volume of the surveyed universe, however, requires
increasingly large simulations. It was recently proposed to reduce the variance
in simulations by adopting fixed-amplitude initial conditions. This method has
been demonstrated not to introduce bias in various statistics, including the
two-point statistics of galaxy samples typically used for extracting
cosmological parameters from galaxy redshift survey data. However, we must
revisit current methods for estimating covariance matrices for these
simulations to be sure that we can properly use them. In this work, we find
that it is not trivial to construct the covariance matrix analytically, but we
demonstrate that EZmock, the most efficient method for constructing mock
catalogues with accurate two- and three-point statistics, provides reasonable
covariance matrix estimates for variance-suppressed simulations. We further
investigate the behavior of the variance suppression by varying galaxy bias,
three-point statistics, and small-scale clustering.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
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