Learning and Teaching Chinese Language and Culture in Dublin: Attitudes and Expectations

In response to a world-wide tide of Chinese language learning, educational institutions in Ireland have begun, in the last five years, to put in place degree courses and an increasing number of classes for the teaching of Chinese. It is helpful to understand the attitudes and expectations of students and teachers concerning the learning and teaching of Chinese language and culture in an Irish teaching environment. Language is part of a particular culture. The learning and acquisition of a target culture are as important as learning the language per se. In a non-target language environment, the learning and teaching of culture helps build comparisons and connections. A heightened understanding of culture is essential in furthering study, encouraging long-term learning and in resolving possible misunderstandings in language. Chinese language and culture have deep roots and a long history. Successful language learning evolves in tandem with cultural understanding. The teaching of Chinese characters is a part of the teaching of culture, because the written language not only carries many cultural elements, but also shows the logic and philosophy of the language through its characters. Moreover, Chinese educational concepts have a strong influence on the learning and teaching of the language. Questionnaires were devised and distributed to 130 students aged between 15 and 24. The purpose was to obtain fundamental information about the learning situation and to investigate students’ expectations of Chinese language learning and their attitudes and reactions to it. The aim was also to evaluate the likelihood of continued engagement in a learning process. The inclusion of students from different educational levels and cultural backgrounds exhibits the diversity of reactions to learning Chinese. Non Irish-born respondents show more positive attitudes, seem keener about learning than Irish-born respondents including those from a Chinese family background. As a counterpart to the questionnaire survey of students, qualitative interviews were conducted. Six Chinese-language teachers in Dublin were interviewed. They stressed the importance of maintaining and developing students’ learning interests. They also sought to encourage an active and committed involvement on the part of their students in cooperating with their teachers’ approaches. They believe it is important to develop positive attitudes towards learning the language and culture. Pedagogical proposals originating from the author’s own practice, especially at the beginner level, use Chinese culture to promote learning interests and long-term motivation. Further research is needed to fully develop the use of culture of TCFL pedagogy in a non

On the global existence for the modified Camassa-Holm equation via the inverse scattering method

In this paper, we address the existence of global solutions to the Cauchy problem of the modified Camassa-Holm (mCH) equation, which is known as a model for the unidirectional propagation of shallow water waves. Based on the spectral analysis of the Lax pair, we apply the inverse scattering transform to rigorously analyze the mCH equation with zero background. By connecting the Cauchy problem to the Riemann-Hilbert (RH) problem, we establish a bijective map between potential and reflection coefficients within the $L^2$-Sobolev space framework. Utilizing a reconstruction formula and estimates on the time-dependent RH problem, we obtain a unique global solution to the Cauchy problem for the mCH equation.Comment: 29 page

Predictability of temperature and precipitation on interannual to decadal time scales in perfect-model experiments

This thesis examines the potentially achievable prediction skill of temperature and precipitation on interannual to decadal time scales by analyzing predictability in perfect-model experiments using coupled climate models. I develop a framework which (1) compares perfect‐model prediction experiments with predictions of the real world, and (2) assesses the added value from capturing the initial state in the climate system in decadal predictions. I find that for the annual average near‐surface air temperature, ideal initialization may substantially improve the predictions during the first two forecast years particularly in parts of the Southern Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the tropical Pacific and North Atlantic, and some surrounding land areas. On longer time scales, the predictions rely more on model performance in simulating low‐frequency variability and long‐term changes due to external forcing. This thesis also investigates conditional predictability dependent on initial states, in particular multi-year predictability conditional on the state of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) at the time of prediction initialization. I find that predictions starting with El Niño or La Niña conditions exhibit higher skill in predicting near-surface air temperature and precipitation multiple years ahead, compared to predictions initialized with neutral ENSO conditions. This thesis also compares the predictability for mean and extreme temperature and precipitation on interannual to decadal time scales. The results show that both the mean and likelihood of near-surface air temperature extremes are predictable in many regions in the first lead year, while the areas exhibiting precipitation predictability tend to be mostly located in low-latitude regions. On decadal time scales, significant potential prediction skill for mean and extreme temperatures is found over the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean and also over some land areas. Indices of moderate temperature extremes tend to show a higher predictability than the mean. This work suggests potentially improvable skill of current decadal prediction systems under the assumption of idealized initialization and identifies climate states that enable more skillful predictions relative to other climate states. This will ultimately lead to improved decadal forecasts, something that is critical for decision-makers requiring information on climate parameters for future planning across a range of sectors, such as water and bushfire management and agriculture

Evaluating Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models on Code Comprehension and Generation

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code comprehension and generation tasks and sometimes even better than small SOTA models specifically fine-tuned on each downstream task. We also find that larger instructed LLMs are not always better on code-related tasks. Second, for the few-shot setting, we find that adding demonstration examples substantially helps instructed LLMs perform better on most code comprehension and generation tasks; however, the examples would sometimes induce unstable or even worse performance. Furthermore, we find widely-used BM25-based shot selection strategy significantly outperforms the basic random selection or fixed selection only on generation problems. Third, for the fine-tuning setting, we find that fine-tuning could further improve the model performance on downstream code comprehension and generation tasks compared to the zero-shot/one-shot performance. In addition, after being fine-tuned on the same downstream task dataset, instructed LLMs outperform both the small SOTA models and similar-scaled LLMs without instruction tuning. Based on our findings, we further present practical implications on model and usage recommendation, performance and cost trade-offs, and future direction

Exploring the potential effect and mechanisms of protocatechuic acid on human hair follicle melanocytes

This study aims to evaluate the effect of Protocatechuic acid (PCA) on human hair follicle melanocytes (HFM). Normal primary HFM were isolated and cultured till logarithmic period of second passage, then treated with different concentrations of PCA (0.1~200 μmol L–1) to study the cell proliferation, melanin contents, tyrosinase activity and protein and mRNA expression of melanogenic genes (tyrosinase-related protein 1 (TRP-1), tyrosinase-related protein 2 (TRP-2), and microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF)) in the cultured HFM. In addition, we have also measured the contents of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione (GSH) in PCA treated HFM. Vitamin C was used as a positive control. The result showed that PCA can decrease the synthesis of melanin and the tyrosinase activity with IC50 = 8.9 μmol L–1 and IC50 = 6.4 μmol L–1, respectively, at the treatment time of 24 hours, without inducing any cytotoxicity in HFM cells. In addition, the mRNA transcription and protein expression levels of TRP-1, TRP-2 and MITF significantly decreased with a dose-dependent manner after 24-hour PCA treated in HFM cells. Furthermore, PCA has significantly increased the SOD and GSH activity in a dose-dependent manner for 24-hour PCA treatment. This study suggested that PCA has an inhibitory effect on the production of melanin through down-regulation of the expression of melanogenesis-related protein and the effect of anti-oxidation, which could be useful for the therapy of melanin overproduction or skin whitening