A comparative study of Polish and Chinese student migrants in the UK motivation, integration and national identity

This thesis is about international student migrants (ISM). It compares the migration process of international students pursuing degree studies (BA, MA or PhD) abroad, using the case study of student migration to London from Poland and China. The research method includes in-depth interviews and participant observation with Polish and Chinese international students in London. The study adopted a grounded theory approach and data from the research revealed different strands of migration motivations and integration processes. The first of the empirical chapters investigates motivations to study abroad. The second examines how Polish and Chinese students integrate into university life in London. The third chapter probes into their social integration, using Fox and Miller-Idriss’s (2008) concept of everyday nationhood and Berry’s (1997) acculturation model as a theoretical framework. Several important findings are disclosed. First, Polish participants generally behave as ‘elite cosmopolitan Europeans’, who are rich in mobility capital. Study abroad is a natural outcome of their migrant identity and they find it easy to integrate into multicultural London. Second, Chinese participants generally apply a ‘getting-gilded’ strategy and tend to stay only temporarily in London and then return home to outshine others with their received cultural capital. This return-home intention hinders their desire for integration and makes them stick to co-national networks. Language barriers constrain their possibility of deeper integration, too, while Polish students are confident about their English skills. Third, students’ behaviour is conditioned by their family backgrounds and socialisation, although they also can make choices when abroad - they have agency. However, Chinese students are much more likely than their Polish counterparts to make ‘national’ choices (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). Their national identity is even strengthened, while Polish students generally possess a more cosmopolitan identity. On the integration spectrum, Polish students are more likely to be situated towards the assimilation end, while Chinese students are closer to separation. It is argued that more attention should be paid to the influence of ISMs’ agency on their integration, and universities should explore tailored support to the diverse ISM populations considering their backgrounds and cultures

Caffeine intake antagonizes salt sensitive hypertension through improvement of renal sodium handling

High salt intake is a major risk factor for hypertension. Although acute caffeine intake produces moderate diuresis and natriuresis, caffeine increases the blood pressure (BP) through activating sympathetic activity. However, the long-term effects of caffeine on urinary sodium excretion and blood pressure are rarely investigated. Here, we investigated whether chronic caffeine administration antagonizes salt sensitive hypertension by promoting urinary sodium excretion. Dahl salt-sensitive (Dahl-S) rats were fed with high salt diet with or without 0.1% caffeine in drinking water for 15 days. The BP, heart rate and locomotor activity of rats was analyzed and urinary sodium excretion was determined. The renal epithelial Na+ channel (ENaC) expression and function were measured by in vivo and in vitro experiments. Chronic consumption of caffeine attenuates hypertension induced by high salt without affecting sympathetic nerve activity in Dahl-S rats. The renal α-ENaC expression and ENaC activity of rats decreased after chronic caffeine administration. Caffeine increased phosphorylation of AMPK and decrease α-ENaC expression in cortical collecting duct cells. Inhibiting AMPK abolished the effect of caffeine on α-ENaC. Chronic caffeine intake prevented the development of salt-sensitive hypertension through promoting urinary sodium excretion, which was associated with activation of renal AMPK and inhibition of renal tubular ENaC

Laws and Mechanism of the Fe (III) Clogging of Porous Media in Managed Aquifer Recharge

The use of stormwater for managed aquifer recharge (MAR) has become one of the most important ways to deal with water shortages and the corresponding environmental geological problems, especially in the north of China. The Fe (III) clogging of porous media is a common and significant problem that influences the effect of the infiltration rate. This paper focuses on the migration characteristics and clogging mechanisms of iron hydroxides in sand columns. The results indicate that the permeability of porous media significantly decreased at the inlet of the fine sand column and inside the coarse sand column. We demonstrated that, when the Fe (III) concentration was higher, a smaller infiltration medium size was produced more rapidly, and there was more significant clogging. More than 80% of the injected Fe (III) remained in the sand column, and more than 50% was retained within 1 cm of the column inlet. The mass retention increased with the decrease in the size of the infiltration medium particles and with the increase in the injected Fe (III) concentration. The main material that caused Fe (III) clogging was iron hydroxide colloids, which were in the form of a granular or flocculent membrane coating the quartz sand. The mechanisms of clogging and retention were blocking filtration and deep bed filtration, adsorption, and deposition, which were strongly affected by the coagulation of Fe (III) colloidal particles

Laws and Mechanism of the Fe (III) Clogging of Porous Media in Managed Aquifer Recharge

The use of stormwater for managed aquifer recharge (MAR) has become one of the most important ways to deal with water shortages and the corresponding environmental geological problems, especially in the north of China. The Fe (III) clogging of porous media is a common and significant problem that influences the effect of the infiltration rate. This paper focuses on the migration characteristics and clogging mechanisms of iron hydroxides in sand columns. The results indicate that the permeability of porous media significantly decreased at the inlet of the fine sand column and inside the coarse sand column. We demonstrated that, when the Fe (III) concentration was higher, a smaller infiltration medium size was produced more rapidly, and there was more significant clogging. More than 80% of the injected Fe (III) remained in the sand column, and more than 50% was retained within 1 cm of the column inlet. The mass retention increased with the decrease in the size of the infiltration medium particles and with the increase in the injected Fe (III) concentration. The main material that caused Fe (III) clogging was iron hydroxide colloids, which were in the form of a granular or flocculent membrane coating the quartz sand. The mechanisms of clogging and retention were blocking filtration and deep bed filtration, adsorption, and deposition, which were strongly affected by the coagulation of Fe (III) colloidal particles

Potential friendship discovery in social networks based on hybrid ensemble multiple collaborative filtering models in a 5G network environment

At present, 5G network technology is being applied to various social network modes, and it can provide technical and traffic support for social networks. Potential friendship discovery technology in 5G-enabled social networks is beneficial for users to make potential friends and expand their range of activities and social hierarchy, which is highly sought after in today's social networks and has great economic and application value. However, the sparsity of the dominant user association dataset in 5G-enabled social networks and the limitations of traditional collaborative filtering algorithms are two major challenges for the friend recommendation problem. Therefore, in order to overcome these problems regarding previous models, we propose a Hybrid Ensemble Multiple Collaborative Filtering Model (HEMCF) for discovering potential buddy relationships. The HEMCF model draws on a special autoencoder method that can effectively exploit the association matrix between friends and additional information to extract a hidden representation of users containing global structural information. Then, it uses the random walk-based graph embedding algorithm DeepWalk to extract another hidden representation of users in the buddy network containing local structural information. Finally, in the output module, the HEMCF model stacks and multiplies the two types of hidden representations of users to ensure that the information mentioned above is concentrated in the final output to generate the final prediction value. The magnitude of the prediction value represents the probability of the users being friends, with larger values representing a high probability of the two users being friends, and vice versa. Experimental results show that the proposed method boosts the accuracy of the relationship prediction over baselines on 3 real-world public datasets dramatically

Design and Experiment of a Lifting Tool for Hoisting Offshore Single-Pile Foundations

Experiments with a cam-type clamp tool were carried out to overcome the difficulty of transporting and installing large-diameter mono-piles for offshore wind turbines. Using the experiments method to design a small wedge-type clamping mechanism and using cam teeth made of 40Cr material resulted in the maximum friction for the mechanism. A single clamping design was created for the cam-type clamp tool to hoist mono-piles for offshore wind turbines. Through force analysis and Automatic Dynamics Analysis of Mechanical System (ADAMS) dynamic simulation of the lifting tool, it was calculated that the clamping force of the lifting tool meets application requirements. A prototype was built in order to carry out an experiment in which the lifting tool hoisted a mono-pile. It was concluded from the experiment that the proposed design of the lifting tool is feasible in practical applications

Flow Velocity Effects on Fe(III) Clogging during Managed Aquifer Recharge Using Urban Storm Water

Storm water harvesting and storage has been employed for nearly a hundred years, and using storm water to recharge aquifers is one of the most important ways to relieve water scarcity in arid and semi-arid regions. However, it cannot be widely adopted because of clogging problems. The risk of chemical clogging is mostly associated with iron oxyhydroxide precipitation; anhydrous ferric oxide (HFO) clogging remains a problem in many wellfields. This paper investigates Fe(III) clogging levels at three flow velocities (Darcy velocities, 0.46, 1.62 and 4.55 m/d). The results indicate that clogging increases with flow velocity, and is mostly affected by the first 0–3 cm of the column. The highest water velocity caused full clogging in 35 h, whereas the lowest took 53 h to reach an stable 60% reduction in hydraulic conductivity. For the high flow velocity, over 90% of the HFO was deposited in the 0–1 cm section. In contrast, the lowest flow velocity deposited only 75% in this section. Fe(III) deposition was used as an approximation for Fe(OH)3. High flow velocity may promote Fe(OH)3 flocculent precipitate, thus increasing Fe(III) deposition. The main mechanism for a porous matrix interception of Fe(III) colloidal particles was surface filtration. Thus, the effects of deposition, clogging phenomena, and physicochemical mechanisms, are more significant at higher velocities

Equalized shape feature enhancement method for multiple ferromagnetic objects

When magnetic measuring instruments are used to measure the shape of ferromagnetic objects, the objects far away from the observation plane are likely to have blurred shape features because the magnetic field decays rapidly with distance. A bigger challenge is to measure multiple objects at the same time. When the relative positions of multiple measured objects and the observation plane are inappropriate, it is easy to have problems that the shape features of the deeper measured objects are not obvious and the magnetic signals of multiple measured objects are aliased, which usually leads to shape feature measurement failed. To address this issue, we propose an equalized shape feature enhancement method for multiple ferromagnetic objects. The method enhances shape features by evaluating the trends of the total horizontal derivative and vertical derivative of the magnetic field within the measurement area using the standard deviation. Meanwhile, the method combines the theory of ratio equalization and normalization to improve the shape features convergence of deeper objects and balance the signal aliasing interference between objects of different depths. Model simulation and experimental results show that the shape feature measurement results of the proposed method are clear and in good agreement with the ideal model. The method can effectively balance the magnetic anomaly amplitudes of the measured objects with different depths, and improve the accuracy and stability of shape feature measurement. We compare and analyze the processing effects of the proposed method and the traditional normalized standard deviation method (NSTD). It is calculated that the standard deviations of the results obtained by the proposed method and the NSTD method are 0.146 and 0.136, and the average peak-to-trough differences are 0.368 and 0.352, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method can better enhance the shape characteristics of ferromagnetic objects and has more practical application value

Improving Simultaneous Machine Translation with Monolingual Data

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is usually done via sequence-level knowledge distillation (Seq-KD) from a full-sentence neural machine translation (NMT) model. However, there is still a significant performance gap between NMT and SiMT. In this work, we propose to leverage monolingual data to improve SiMT, which trains a SiMT student on the combination of bilingual data and external monolingual data distilled by Seq-KD. Preliminary experiments on En-Zh and En-Ja news domain corpora demonstrate that monolingual data can significantly improve translation quality (e.g., +3.15 BLEU on En-Zh). Inspired by the behavior of human simultaneous interpreters, we propose a novel monolingual sampling strategy for SiMT, considering both chunk length and monotonicity. Experimental results show that our sampling strategy consistently outperforms the random sampling strategy (and other conventional typical NMT monolingual sampling strategies) by avoiding the key problem of SiMT -- hallucination, and has better scalability. We achieve +0.72 BLEU improvements on average against random sampling on En-Zh and En-Ja. Data and codes can be found at https://github.com/hexuandeng/Mono4SiMT