Acoustic and perceptual correlates of Vietnamese folk poetry rhythmic structure

This paper reports a study on the acoustic realization and the perception of the rhythmic structure of Vietnamese folk poetry. Ten speakers of Sài Gòn dialect recite four folk poems that were made up of three-word, five-word, six-word, seven-word, and eightword lines. The acoustic analysis showed that the duration and intensity results mirror each other in indicating a strong iambic pattern of prominence, supporting the literature that a line of folk verse with even number of syllables tend to have a series of iambs and when there is an odd number of syllables, the line usually ends with an iamb, not an anapaest (Durand and Nguyễn, 1985Fhe perception results showed that listeners relied on duration cues in judging the rhythmic patterns of the poetic lines while intensity was not used. Also, majority of listeners were not finely tuned to these acoustic cues and only a few listeners could detect them in parsing the poetic lines into detail bi-syllabic iambic units.Australian National Universit

Engagement with Ethnic Practices: How Ethnic Communities Contribute to Second-Generation Asian American Assimilation

Previous research on spatial assimilation has described ethnic enclaves as places withmany recently arrived immigrants and fewer socioeconomic resources. As immigrants become more assimilated, they move to more affluent neighborhoods in proximity to Anglos. However, recent studies on resurgent ethnicity challenge the idea of the spatial assimilation by suggesting that Asian immigrants and subsequent generations continue to live near co-ethnics, despite gaining socioeconomic status. The transition from traditional ethnic enclaves to resurgent ethnic communities or ‘ethnoburbs’ indicate shifting understandings of what ethnic communities mean to Asian Americans. Although, Asian Americans are, on average, attaining higher socioeconomic status, the emergent importance of ethnic communities may still offer a social and physical space for engaging with ethnic practices. This indicates that Asian Americans are finding pathways to assimilation that allow them to retain their ethnic practices. Spatial assimilation theory remains important when considering Asian American residential patterns. However, weakening links between suburbanization and acculturation, weakening native-born advantages, and the growth of suburban Asian communities indicate that Asian Americans may not fit as neatly into the spatial assimilation model as previously thought. As the population of second-generation Asian Americans grows, understanding how they engage with ethnic practices has broader implications for understanding assimilation within an American mainstream which embraces ethnic distinctions. This research addresses the question: How do contemporary ethnic communities contribute to ethnic practices of second-generation Asian Americans? I interviewed 20 second-generation Asian Americans and found that ethnic communities shaped how they were able to engage and maintain ethnic practices in a way that still allowed them to belong to the American mainstream. Many described that as they found ethnic communities, they felt a renewed sense of desire to reconnect with their ethnic practices and gained confidence in what it means to be Asian. However, moving forward many are looking for more diverse communities and see the importance of racial and cultural diversity in their friend groups and neighborhoods. Future research should expand the study population to include considerations for how Asian Americans, who are unable to assimilate, may engage with ethnic practices given their ethnic communities, or lack thereof. It is especially important to consider how those who are low income and have low socioeconomic status engage with ethnic practices in ways that do or do not lead to upward mobility and assimilation

Examples of noncompact nonpositively curved manifolds

We give a simple construction of new, complete, finite volume manifolds $M$ of bounded, nonpositive curvature. These manifolds have ends that look like a mixture of locally symmetric ends of different ranks and their fundamental groups are not duality groups

Examples of noncompact nonpositively curved manifolds

We give a simple construction of new, complete, finite volume manifolds of bounded, nonpositive curvature. These manifolds have ends that look like a mixture of locally symmetric ends of different ranks and their fundamental groups are not duality groups

Adult L2 Japanese learners’ production and perception of Vietnamese monophthong vowels

This paper reports a study that investigated the role of prior native or first language (L1) phonological and phonetic learning on the integration of vowel quality features in the acquisition of second language (L2) vowels by examining adult L2 Japanese learners’ perception and production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels in an identification, an imitation and a read aloud tasks. Two groups of participants took part in the study (11 control Vietnamese, 10 Japanese learners of Vietnamese).  The stimuli consisted of 9 Vietnamese monophthongs /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u, ɤ, ɯ/ and 5 simple Japanese vowels /i, e, a, o, ɯ/. The results showed that Japanese learners of Vietnamese failed to distinguish the Vietnamese vowel pairs /ɛ/-/e/, /o/-/ɔ/ and /u/-/ɯ/ accurately in their perception. In terms of production, Vietnamese vowels /ɛ/ and /e/ merged in vowel space. Moreover, the three Vietnamese vowels /ɔ/, /o/ and/ɤ/ produced by Japanese learners in both production tasks tend to cluster together. Vietnamese vowels /u/ and /ɯ/ produced by Japanese learners also overlapped in vowel space. In general, the findings of this study showed that Japanese learners transfer their L1 vowel quality features into the production of Vietnamese vowels.

Half dimensional collapse of ends of manifolds of nonpositive curvature

This paper accomplishes two things. First, we construct a geometric analog of the rational Tits building for general noncompact, complete, finite volume $n$-manifolds $M$ of bounded nonpositive curvature. Second, we prove that this analog has dimension less than $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$

"Settle in the bare desert and cause it to bloom."

Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2018.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 98-[100]).This is an imaginary for the town of Allensworth, an unincorporated community of about 600 inhabitants in the Central Valley of California, located 50 miles from both the city of Visalia in the north and the city of Bakersfield in the south. Based on a series of historic oral and written interviews and through informal conversations with inhabitants, the narrative is told by multiple voices across time to recover the past, understand the present, and project to a future environment in which the township will continue to develop. Proposed within the shaping of this "future" environment is the Saltbush Collectives, a series of experimental hubs run by the community to promote the cultivation of the saltbush plant. Each center is composed of a crop field of saltbushes and a unique water tower dedicated to one of the various usages provided by the shrub: a test kitchen, a medicinal lab, a dye works, a sauna, and a seed bank. The architecture defining the town's imagined future is dominated by images of the agricultural icons in California since the late 19th century. In a slow transformation of the local landscape by the ongoing expansion of the saltbush shrub, large billboards of a cornstalk, an almond tree, stalks of wheat, an alfalfa plant, and an orange tree present monuments as questions of the relationships between human sociology, economy, and ecology. Visitors near and far travel to Allensworth to learn of the estranged saltbush and the community which supports it. There, they experience a landscape of symbolic contradictions that begs one to ask "why??" Yet, the extent to which the author will answer this question straightforwardly, dear reader, sums up as this: the Saltbush Collectives is a gathering.by MỹDung T. Nguyễn.M. Arch

Thách thức công nghệ trong thực thi mục tiêu trung hòa các-bon của Trung Quốc nhìn từ ngành thép và xi-măng

Trung Quốc là nền kinh tế lớn hàng đầu thế giới, vận hành với hiệu suất cao để đáp ứng nhu cầu sinh kế của hơn 1,4 tỷ người dân, và cung cấp một lượng hàng hóa công nghệ, tiêu dùng và cả nông phẩm tới thế giới. Hệ quả tất yếu của quá trình tăng trưởng liên tục hơn 4 thập niên là việc sử dụng tài nguyên, và trong quá trình sản xuất, chế tạo, chế biến cũng sản sinh ra một lượng khí nhà kính (GHG) tích lũy khổng lồ phát thải vào khí quyển

Bài toán về hệ thống hóa quá trình sàng lọc thông tin trước sự trỗi dậy của thuật toán thông minh

Sự phát triển của công nghệ thông minh đã khiến bài toán về mô hình hóa quá trình chắt lọc từ biển thông tin hỗn loạn để tạo ra tri thức hữu ích ngày càng trở nên cấp thiết. Bài viết giới thiệu mô hình hành vi chấp nhận công nghệ qua tiếp biến văn hóa mindsponge, gọi tắt là mô hình MTAM

Bringing the countryside to the city: practices and imaginations of the rural in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam

10.1177/0042098014563031Urban Studies532324-33