The Usability of Bridge-A Course Book of Intermediate Practical Chinese at Chinese Department Binus University

This article discusses about the USAbility of Bridge-A Course Book of Intermediate Practical Chinese at Chinese Department BINUS University. Based on research, lecturers and students agree that this book has fulfilled the requirements as classroom textbook for Intermediate level including grammar, vocabulary and reading text. However, some materials cannot be easily understood due to cultural differences. Therefore, in order to get the most out of the book, teachers are expected to explain vocabularies in its specific context and background, and select appropriate reading text that relates to Indonesian values such as religion and culture

Staged events in the conduct of elite philanthropy

Ph. D. Thesis.Drawing on Bourdieusian and Goffmanian social theory, this thesis is the first exhaustive research on staged events in the conduct of elite philanthropy. Other scholars, within different domains, have focused on specific types of events such as festivals and meetings, but no prior researcher has conducted a systematic, field-wide study of the nature and purpose of staged events and their role in the functioning, maintenance and development of the philanthropic field. Elite staged philanthropic events are regular social occurrences and in various ways are critical to the effective management and performance of the third sector. Following consideration of relevant literature and theoretical perspectives, the thesis examines in turn the context and frequency of different types of staged events, power and the performativity of elite philanthropic events, frontstage and backstage interactions in the conduct of staged events, and the processes involved in delivering them. In conclusion, I answer the focal research question framing the thesis: what is the role of staged events in the functioning, maintenance and development of organizational fields? The empirical foundation of my thesis consists of eight in-depth case studies of highprofile staged philanthropic events within the UK, four addressing local audiences and four addressing national audiences. I observed 12 staged events in total (one case study involved multiple events), attended 15 related meetings, and conducted 41 semi-structured interviews with event managers, event owners, event sponsors, venue providers and event guests. I also collected internal and external documents relating to the organization and conduct of the events sponsored by my eight case study organizations. The data were coded and analysed iteratively using abductive reasoning to identify important themes and issues. These were explored and interpreted with reference to my theoretical schema to develop fresh insights regarding elite power and the performativity of staged events within the philanthropic field. Little has been published on the role of staged events within the philanthropic field or indeed within any organizational field. My research contributes to the literature in five ways. First, I find that elite staged philanthropic events are a form of performative agency connecting entities with processes, outcomes with experiences. Secondly, I specify an elite philanthropic event as a non-routine class reproducing structuring-structure operating through performative interactions within the field of power. Thirdly, I develop a dramaturgical perspective on staged events by comparing and contrasting frontstage performances with backstage interactions. Fourthly, I contribute to the process literature by identifying five generic phases through which elite staged philanthropic events unfold as conceiving, preparing, selling, performing and learning. Finally, I move beyond the existing philanthropy literature in putting forward a new typology of elite staged philanthropic events, classified as ritual performers, societal stabilizers, community navigators and transformational change drivers

Adaptive Representations for Image Restoration

In the �eld of image processing, building good representation models for natural images is crucial for various applications, such as image restora- tion, sampling, segmentation, etc. Adaptive image representation models are designed for describing the intrinsic structures of natural images. In the classical Bayesian inference, this representation is often known as the prior of the intensity distribution of the input image. Early image priors have forms such as total variation norm, Markov Random Fields (MRF), and wavelets. Recently, image priors obtained from machine learning tech- niques tend to be more adaptive, which aims at capturing the natural image models via learning from larger databases. In this thesis, we study adaptive representations of natural images for image restoration. The purpose of image restoration is to remove the artifacts which degrade an image. The degradation comes in many forms such as image blurs, noises, and artifacts from the codec. Take image denoising for an example. There are several classic representation methods which can generate state- of-the-art results. The �rst one is the assumption of image self-similarity. However, this representation has the issue that sometimes the self-similarity assumption would fail because of high noise levels or unique image contents. The second one is the wavelet based nonlocal representation, which also has a problem in that the �xed basis function is not adaptive enough for any arbitrary type of input images. The third is the sparse coding using over- complete dictionaries, which does not have the hierarchical structure that is similar to the one in human visual system and is therefore prone to denoising artifacts. My research started from image denoising. Through the thorough review and evaluation of state-of-the-art denoising methods, it was found that the representation of images is substantially important for the denoising tech- nique. At the same time, an improvement on one of the nonlocal denoising method was proposed, which improves the representation of images by the integration of Gaussian blur, clustering and Rotationally Invariant Block Matching. Enlightened by the successful application of sparse coding in compressive sensing, we exploited the image self-similarity by using a sparse representation based on wavelet coe�cients in a nonlocal and hierarchical way, which generates competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art denoising algorithms. Meanwhile, another adaptive local �lter learned by Genetic Programming (GP) was proposed for e�cient image denoising. In this work, we employed GP to �nd the optimal representations for local im- age patches through training on massive datasets, which yields competitive results compared to state-of-the-art local denoising �lters. After success- fully dealt with the denoising part, we moved to the parameter estimation for image degradation models. For instance, image blur identi�cation uses deep learning, which has recently been proposed as a popular image repre- sentation approach. This work has also been extended to blur estimation based on the fact that the second step of the framework has been replaced with general regression neural network. In a word, in this thesis, spatial cor- relations, sparse coding, genetic programming, deep learning are explored as adaptive image representation models for both image restoration and parameter estimation. We conclude this thesis by considering methods based on machine learning to be the best adaptive representations for natural images. We have shown that they can generate better results than conventional representation mod- els for the tasks of image denoising and deblurring

How much can news shocks account for aggregate fluctuations?

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of news shocks in the literature on business cycles, that is, a-priori information that agents receive about future developments in the economy. To examine whether the news shocks can be a major source of aggregate fluctuations, in the first chapter I quantify the relative importance of the news shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) and surprised technology changes by employing two methods. The first method is the Beaudry and Portier’s identification schemes (2006) and the second method is a two-step approach I develop in this study. Empirical results on the US quarterly data show that the news shocks play an important role in generating the business cycles, while the surprised technology changes is not a potential source of macro-economic fluctuations. In addition, the two-step approach seems to be able to solve the identification problem raised in the high dimensional systems in SVAR analysis. In the second chapter, I extend the empirical study of the news shocks to the European countries to test for the generality of the issues about the news shocks raised in the US literature. The empirical results are supportive for the hypothesis of news driven business cycles

An Analysis of Ju Xian in Movie Farewell My Concubine 浅析《霸王别姬》中菊仙一角

As the main female character in movie "Farewell My Concubine", Ju Xian was a brave, smart, worldly-wise but kindhearted woman. Even though she was a prostitute, she was longing for an ordinary life. She loved Xiao Lou, moreover, in order to engross Xiao Lou, she even tried to drive a wedge between Die Yi and Xiao Lou. She used her wisdom to save and protect Xiao Lou, but on the other hand, she was also the one who destroyed Xiao Lou and her own life. Article tried to through close reading analyze the character of Ju Xian and her relationships with Die Yi and Xiao Lou. Article revealed the inescapable tragic fate of Ju Xian

The Role of Mediators in Diffusing the Community Foundation Model of Philanthropy

We examine the role of mediators in locally embedding the community foundation model of philanthropy to enable its global diffusion. We hold that mediators, as trusted agents within elite networks, promote and legitimate institutional innovation by tailoring the model to satisfy local requirements. They thereby limit resistance while creating future potentialities. Our novel addition to the community foundation literature stems from research n the transatlantic diffusion of the community foundation template from the United States to the United Kingdom focused on an in-depth case study of one of Europe’s largest community foundation, that serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland in North East England. Our findings suggest that success in embedding the community foundation model depends on rendering it fit-for-context and fit-for-purpose. Mediators operating at both the macro and micro level matter because they have the cultural, social and symbolic capital needed to win acceptance for initially alien philanthropic principles, practices and structures