A Comparative study of Chinese and American address terms

In cross-cultural situations, choices of address terms often reflect cultural differences. Although a good number of studies have discussed address terms in mono-linguistic settings, literature directly related to cross-cultural address terms is scarce. The current study intends to investigate common forms of address terms in Chinese and American cultures. Two hypotheses are examined: 1) Differences between Americans and Chinese in their choices of address terms are governed by cultural norms such as politeness, as well as by contexts or styles, and 2) The Chinese students in the U.S., who are undergoing the process of assimilation and acculturation, tend to accommodate the American culture and be more like the Americans in their choices of address terms. Twenty-seven American and 24 Chinese subjects completed a 12-item survey. Data was analyzed by descriptive statistics and visual presentations and through the Kolmogorov-Smimov tests of population difference. The results indicate that while most American respondents tend to use either first name or no name in most informal settings or status conscious settings, Chinese respondents under the context in China would use more diversified choices. In addition, acculturation plays a role in Chinese respondents’ language change in terms of the choices of address terms. The relationship between age and the choice of address terms is also discussed

Preservice and K–12 Inservice Teachers\u27 Perceptions of Appropriateness of Teacher Self-Disclosure and Its Teaching Effectiveness

Situating teacher self-disclosure within a curriculum and instruction context, this research explored preservice and K-12 inservice teachers\u27 perceptions of appropriateness of teacher self-disclosure and its teaching effectiveness as a component of the informal curriculum as well as an instructional tool. The following research questions were explored: (1) Is there any difference among preservice teachers and K-12 inservice teachers in their perceptions of appropriateness of teacher self-disclosure? (2) Is there any difference between preservice teachers and K-12 inservice teachers in their perceptions of appropriateness of teacher self-disclosure? (3) Is there any difference among K-12 inservice teachers in their application of teacher self-disclosure? (4) Is there any difference among preservice teachers and K-12 inservice teachers in their perceptions of effects of teacher self-disclosure on teaching effectiveness? (5) Is there any difference between preservice teachers and K-12 inservice teachers in their perceptions of effects of teacher self-disclosure on teaching effectiveness? Data from 180 preservice and 135 K-12 inservice teachers were analyzed. Descriptive and inferential analyses were used to examine the dimensions and items in each survey. One-way MANOVAs were conducted to investigate the differences across different levels of K-12 inservice teachers\u27 gender, ethnic group, grade level of teaching (elementary, junior, and high school), type of teaching (general and special education), years of teaching, and award status in the perceptions and application of teacher self-disclosure. Results of this study indicated: (a) differences in K-12 inservice teachers\u27 perceptions of appropriateness of teacher self-disclosure topics across grade levels of teaching; (b) differences in K-12 inservice teachers\u27 consideration of students while using teacher self-disclosure across gender and years of teaching, and differences in K-12 inservice teachers\u27 using inappropriate topics and inappropriate purposes across grade levels of teaching; (c) no difference in inservice teachers\u27 perceptions of appropriateness of teacher self-disclosure across gender, ethnic group, type of education, years of teaching, and award status; (d) no difference in inservice teachers\u27 or preservice teachers\u27 perceptions of teaching effectiveness across selected demographic variables. Independent-samples t tests were conducted to examine the differences between preservice and K-12 inservice teachers in their perceptions of appropriateness of teacher self-disclosure and its teaching effectiveness. Significant differences were identified in perceptions of inappropriate topics, inappropriate purposes of teacher self-disclosure and consideration of students. No significant differences were identified in perceptions of appropriate topics and purposes of teacher self-disclosure. Significant differences were identified in two groups of perceptions of effects of teacher self-disclosure on students\u27 learning effects and classroom participation and classroom behavior, and descriptive analyses were provided to reveal the differences in each item. No significant difference was identified in the two groups\u27 perceptions of effects of teacher self-disclosure on teacher-student relationships and classroom communication environment. Explanations and implications of the results were discussed based on perspectives of practice and theories of teaching and learning and those of educational policies. Suggestions to improve teacher education programs as well as the limitations of the study also were provided. It is recommended that future studies of teacher self-disclosure reexamine and discuss teacher self-disclosure as a component of informal curriculum

Effect of Cooperation on Economic Growth of Both China and Japan

This paper tries to measure the effect of cooperation on economic growth of both China and Japan by setting up an econometric model. This measuring is based on the basic framework of cooperation economics (Huang shao-an,2000) . The structure of the paper is as follows: The first part introduces the basic idea and analytical methods of cooperation economics; the second part establishes an econometric model for measuring the effect of cooperation on economic growth of both China and Japan; The third part measures degree of cooperation between China and Japan from two dimensions which are political factor and bilateral trade between China and Japan, and lists all the macroeconomic data that the econometric model needs; The fourth part employs the econometric model and the macroeconomic data to calculate the effect of cooperation on economic growth of both China and Japan; the final part is a brief conclusion

Data of the Constructivist Practices in the Learning Environment Survey From Engineering Undergraduates: An Exploratory Factor Analysis

This paper presents the dataset of a questionnaire on first-year engineering undergraduates’ perceptions of constructivist practices in the learning environment. The questionnaire with a 5-Likert scale was adapted from previous research. The sample consisted of 293 first-year engineering undergraduates in the southwest region of the United States. The online questionnaire was sent to participants who completed it voluntarily at the end of Fall 2019. A total of 274 of 293 participants completed the questionnaire with a response rate of 93.515%. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to test the underlying factor structure of the questionnaire, which serves as a good reference for future research

A DSP controlled multi-level inverter providing DC-link voltage balancing, ride-through enhancement and common-mode voltage elimination

With the development of high performance power electronic and semiconductor technologies, Adjustable Speed Drive (ASD) systems are increasingly applied in residential, commercial and industrial applications. Due to the advantages at higher power ratings, the three-level Neutral-Point-Clamped (NPC) Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) is being employed in industrial and traction applications, static VAR compensation systems, active filtering and utility interconnection applications. The NPC-VSI is suitable for high voltage and high power applications due to the use of series-connected switching devices. Furthermore, Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI) and the voltage stress across the inverter switches and load can be reduced because of increased levels of the output voltages compared with the conventional 2-level inverters. However, an excessively high voltage may be applied to switching devices if the Neutral-Point (NP) voltage varies from the center voltage of the dc-bus voltage. This is the inherent problem caused by the unbalanced switching states of the NPC inverter. In addition, common-mode voltages may be generated by the NP voltage variation. In response to these drawbacks, various strategies including carrier-based PWM schemes and Space Vector Modulation (SVM) based PWM schemes have been proposed to balance the NP voltage. All the above methods can operate successfully under given operating conditions, but they do result in limitations in the performance. The major objective of this research is to investigate and enhance the application issues of the NPC-VSI including balancing the dc-bus voltage, in addition to reducing the common-mode voltage and improving the ride-through ability. Therefore, analysis of the NP voltage generation is presented and existing NP voltage balancing techniques are evaluated. It is found that common-mode voltage cancellation and NP voltage control are difficult to be realized at the same time, by the arithmetic methods. Thus, a hardware method to keep the NP voltage balanced is proposed and implemented while the mitigation of common-mode voltage is being implemented by an arithmetic method. In addition, the ride-through ability is also enhanced through the proposed topology. Correlation of the simulation and experimental results are provided

Advancing Counterfactual Inference through Quantile Regression

The capacity to address counterfactual "what if" inquiries is crucial for understanding and making use of causal influences. Traditional counterfactual inference usually assumes a structural causal model is available. However, in practice, such a causal model is often unknown and may not be identifiable. This paper aims to perform reliable counterfactual inference based on the (learned) qualitative causal structure and observational data, without a given causal model or even directly estimating conditional distributions. We re-cast counterfactual reasoning as an extended quantile regression problem using neural networks. The approach is statistically more efficient than existing ones, and further makes it possible to develop the generalization ability of the estimated counterfactual outcome to unseen data and provide an upper bound on the generalization error. Experiment results on multiple datasets strongly support our theoretical claims

A Pareto Criterion on Systemic Risk

Perfect risk sharing is not an optimal design for the financial system because it can increase systemic risk by facilitating risk contagion among financial institutions. However, risk sharing dominates betting according to most Pareto efficiency criteria. One reason for this might be that those Pareto criteria consider individual risk rather than systemic risk and neglect that betting may reduce systemic risk by segmenting the financial system and preventing financial contagion. Refining Pareto criterion to cover systemic risk, I propose the systemic Pareto criterion which has two features: 1) satisfying facts that betting dominates risk sharing when systemic risk is considered. 2) being applicable to scenarios with the constant aggregate endowment to which current criteria cannot provide compelling suggestions. One implication from this paper is that betting can act as the stabilizer of the economy and prohibiting betting is not always helpful for financial stability

Cost allocation for the problem of pollution reduction: a dynamic cooperative game approach

This paper studies CO2 emissions at a global level. The authors use Dynamic Optimisation to derive the minimum penalty cost on countries every single time. They then use an Imputation Distribution Procedure to allocate the minimum penalty cost among countries. Their work provides the extension of the Shapley value cost allocation as a penalty to reduce CO2 emissions. The paper has implications for how to provide initiatives to improve cooperation on reducing CO2 emissions at an international level. Results show that a reduction in cost of only one country can be harmful for other countries. In this way, some countries can end up or worse off in a case where all countries experience a uniform decrease in their penalty cost. Therefore, the findings of this work suggest a low penalty-cost scenario that helps the countries fight for pollution reduction and provide fruitful links for policy-makers. They show that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol could be implemented by the Shapley value cost allocation

SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model

Generic image inpainting aims to complete a corrupted image by borrowing surrounding information, which barely generates novel content. By contrast, multi-modal inpainting provides more flexible and useful controls on the inpainted content, \eg, a text prompt can be used to describe an object with richer attributes, and a mask can be used to constrain the shape of the inpainted object rather than being only considered as a missing area. We propose a new diffusion-based model named SmartBrush for completing a missing region with an object using both text and shape-guidance. While previous work such as DALLE-2 and Stable Diffusion can do text-guided inapinting they do not support shape guidance and tend to modify background texture surrounding the generated object. Our model incorporates both text and shape guidance with precision control. To preserve the background better, we propose a novel training and sampling strategy by augmenting the diffusion U-net with object-mask prediction. Lastly, we introduce a multi-task training strategy by jointly training inpainting with text-to-image generation to leverage more training data. We conduct extensive experiments showing that our model outperforms all baselines in terms of visual quality, mask controllability, and background preservation