Taiwanese College Students’ Perceptions of Integrating Multimedia into ESP Courses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the learning difficulties and the preferred learning strategies among Taiwanese college students while they were taking English for Specific Purpose (ESP) courses. Two different ESP courses are examined: one of the courses is an undergraduate Marketing English course and the other is an undergraduate Hospitality English course, both in a college of liberal arts and social science in the national university in Taiwan. The instructor in the ESP courses adopted the multimedia—integrated instruction. The multimedia—integrated instruction not only provided authentic materials for learners in the target ESP, but also offered students real situational settings and useful activities that based on individual need. The result of the study indicated that students’ self-learning effectiveness in both performance and linguistic skills were significantly improved. In addition, they reported satisfaction with the multimedia-integrated instruction. Thus, the multimedia—integrated instruction increase learners’ motivation and also offer a solution to learners’ problems in the development of ESP courses

Love and the Ethics of Subaltern Subjectivity in James Joyce's Ulysses

Abstract This thesis explores Joyce’s aesthetic enterprise in Ulysses from the perspective of ethics, arguing that my psychoanalytic study necessarily points to the entwinement of ontology, epistemology and ethics. Joyce’s literary experimentation not only revolutionised western literature, writing his name into world history, but also inaugurated an emergent subjectivity in modernity. In answering Spivak’s question, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’, one of my main theses is that the subaltern can speak through the process of self-naming, through the self-invention of a new subjectivity and a New Symbolic. In Chapter One, I critically review Lacan’s theorisation of the ethical models in his long career, engaging in the current debates among Lacanians regarding the definition and efficacy of Lacan’s theory of the (ethical) act and the interconnected ethico-political theories in the contemparay landscape. I evaluate Lacanians’ diverse stances toward Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan centered on the emphasis of negativity and Badiou’s theory of event and truth-procedures. After offering my own theoretical evaluation and intervention into the above-mentioned debates, I also seek to foreground the place of love in Lacanian psychoanalysis and to elucidate how love manifests itself ethically. In my reading of ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’ I argue that Joyce, through Stephen’s idiosyncratic theory of Shakespeare, articulates his artistic ambition as a work of/for a singular universal, endeavouring to transform the human subject by way of writing a book of himself, and of making a self out of writing. I take Joyce’s literary experiment in ‘Cyclops’ as an arrangement deployed through the narrative by the Nameless One that juxtaposes with the rhetorical excess of interpolated digressions. Drawing on Lacan’s theorization of the look and the gaze, I contend that Joyce conducts a literary traversal of fantasy, a working through of symptomatic nationalism. The interpretation of ‘fantasmatic’ working offers an alternative reading to the historicist approaches and critiques of Gibson and Nolan. I also argue that neighbour love has already prefigured in ‘Cyclops,’ in Bloom’s proclamation of the ideal of universal love and in the poetic justice of Bloom’s escape from his xenophobic, Cyclopean neighbours. The psychoanalytically-inspired theory of ‘de-activation of the law’ and Badiou’s conception of ideological ‘subtraction’ are enlisted in my interpretation of neighbour love. I read ‘Circe’ as Joyce’s experiment with a sinthomatic construction of subjectivity, contending that there is a constant process of unknotting and reknotting in the construction of textual subjectivity. I examine whether the sinthomatic construction of subjectivity, as it is evidenced in the fantasmatic episodes, truly invents a new structural stratification of subjectivity and alternative libidinal organization. By way of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Žižek’s theory, I argue that masochism in ‘Circe’ is not necessarily ethical but can function as a preparatory step towards the true ethical act. Pseudo-messianism and masochism are opposed to the true messianism manifested through neighbour love as a genuine ethical act. Enlightened by Lacan’s complex theory of the psychoanalytic act and Badiou’s idea of new neighbourhood, I try to capture the ethical impact of genuine messianism. I interpret Joyce’s modern version of ‘Penelope’ as a sinthomatic writing as well, finding this female countersign to be problematic by way of an ethical evaluation of the sinthome as a (singularised) sexual relation and an investigation of Joyce’s belief in his sinthome. Furthermore, my ethical reading is also explored through the productive tension between what I term ‘sinthomatic eroticism’ and love. I invoke both Lacan’s idea of love as ‘compensaiton’ of the non-existence of sexual relationship, and Badiou’s work on love as a way of creatively carving out what I term ‘the ethical space of love’ as a space (not entirely disengaged from but) distinct from the psychoanalytic domain of sexual desires or eros

Anonymous subject identification and privacy information management in video surveillance

The widespread deployment of surveillance cameras has raised serious privacy concerns, and many privacy-enhancing schemes have been recently proposed to automatically redact images of selected individuals in the surveillance video for protection. Of equal importance are the privacy and efficiency of techniques to first, identify those individuals for privacy protection and second, provide access to original surveillance video contents for security analysis. In this paper, we propose an anonymous subject identification and privacy data management system to be used in privacy-aware video surveillance. The anonymous subject identification system uses iris patterns to identify individuals for privacy protection. Anonymity of the iris-matching process is guaranteed through the use of a garbled-circuit (GC)-based iris matching protocol. A novel GC complexity reduction scheme is proposed by simplifying the iris masking process in the protocol. A user-centric privacy information management system is also proposed that allows subjects to anonymously access their privacy information via their iris patterns. The system is composed of two encrypted-domain protocols: The privacy information encryption protocol encrypts the original video records using the iris pattern acquired during the subject identification phase; the privacy information retrieval protocol allows the video records to be anonymously retrieved through a GC-based iris pattern matching process. Experimental results on a public iris biometric database demonstrate the validity of our framework

Transient Global Amnesia After Ablation of the Left Lateral Accessory Pathway

Transient global amnesia (TGA) could be encountered in many situations even during invasive procedures. In ablation therapy for arrhythmia, there was only one reported case in the ablation of premature ventricular beats. We report a 31-year-old man having paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia who underwent TGA at the end of ablation and recovered quickly after 8-9 hours later. Long-term follow-up showed no neurologic deficits for 8 months

When chiral photons meet chiral fermions - Photoinduced anomalous Hall effects in Weyl semimetals

The Weyl semimetal is characterized by three-dimensional linear band touching points called Weyl nodes. These nodes come in pairs with opposite chiralities. We show that the coupling of circularly polarized photons with these chiral electrons generates a Hall conductivity without any applied magnetic field in the plane orthogonal to the light propagation. This phenomenon comes about because with all three Pauli matrices exhausted to form the three-dimensional linear dispersion, the Weyl nodes cannot be gapped. Rather, the net influence of chiral photons is to shift the positions of the Weyl nodes. Interestingly, the momentum shift is tightly correlated with the chirality of the node to produce a net anomalous Hall signal. Application of our proposal to the recently discovered TaAs family of Weyl semimetals leads to an order-of-magnitude estimate of the photoinduced Hall conductivity which is within the experimentally accessible range.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Ensemble learning of model hyperparameters and spatiotemporal data for calibration of low-cost PM2.5 sensors.

he PM2.5 air quality index (AQI) measurements from government-built supersites are accurate but cannot provide a dense coverage of monitoring areas. Low-cost PM2.5 sensors can be used to deploy a fine-grained internet-of-things (IoT) as a complement to government facilities. Calibration of low-cost sensors by reference to high-accuracy supersites is thus essential. Moreover, the imputation for missing-value in training data may affect the calibration result, the best performance of calibration model requires hyperparameter optimization, and the affecting factors of PM2.5 concentrations such as climate, geographical landscapes and anthropogenic activities are uncertain in spatial and temporal dimensions. In this paper, an ensemble learning for imputation method selection, calibration model hyperparameterization, and spatiotemporal training data composition is proposed. Three government supersites are chosen in central Taiwan for the deployment of low-cost sensors and hourly PM2.5 measurements are collected for 60 days for conducting experiments. Three optimizers, Sobol sequence, Nelder and Meads, and particle swarm optimization (PSO), are compared for evaluating their performances with various versions of ensembles. The best calibration results are obtained by using PSO, and the improvement ratios with respect to R2, RMSE, and NME, are 4.92%, 52.96%, and 56.85%, respectively

The Impact of Multimedia Materials Teaching on EFL Elementary School Learners

Nowadays, it is hard for EFL students to learn a foreign language well because of the learning environment and limited teaching materials. Therefore, if we are willing to create a successful foreign language learning classroom, the use of multimedia will be very important. Besides, learning with multimedia has become the latest tendency among the education field. For instance, many researches and professionals all approve that various materials of multimedia learning can make the learning more productive, impressive, abundant, and memorable. In this research, multimedia materials were constructed by video clips. Furthermore, after adopting multimedia materials, some findings showed that multimedia-material teaching can strongly increase the vocabulary acquisition in a short period of time. In addition, students can learn not only by spelling and images, but also by vivid of video clips presentation and sounds to make connections to their daily life. Furthermore, through the interect program, their learning motivation is higher than the traditional teaching styles. Students get more positive learning attitude and their self-efficacy all been improved. Therefore, multimedia-material teaching can make learners learning more productive, abundant and efficient; therefore, using multimedia-material teaching will be one of the important teaching materials that can be applied in the classroom