Empowering or Disempowering? Online Support Among Seafarer-Partners

Past research in sociology and social psychology has revealed two aspects of online support. This mutual support among members of online support groups brings about empowerment as well as produces common values. The interaction between the two, however, has not been explicitly explored. This paper fills in this gap by examining the activities of a group of seafarer-partners in an online support group. It shows that common beliefs and values in groups can make online support, which is supposed to be empowering, serve disempowering purposes. This suggests that online support can produce a tension between empowerment and disempowerment. The finding leads to the conclusion that group values condition the empowerment potential of online support.Cyberspace, Empowerment, Gender, Relationships, Seafaring, Support Groups, Values

Some New Results on Abel Equations

AbstractAbel equations of the form r′=a(t)r2+b(t)r3,t∈[t0,t1], are of interest because of their close relation to planar vector fields. In this paper three new results on Abel equations are presented: (1) An asymptotic expansion of the solutions of Abel equations in terms of the coefficient functions a(·) and b(·). (2) A simple recurrence relation for Bautin quantities of Abel equations. (3) A center condition for a class of polynomial Abel equations

The Living Predicaments of Chinese-Australians in Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage

This thesis studies the two protagonists in Birds of Passage: Lo Yunshan and Seamus O’Young, analyzing their living predicaments and the fate of being discriminated against in Australian. With Said’s Orientalism as its guiding theory, this thesis analyzes from two perspectives: individual and society. It reveals that the essence of living predicaments of Chinese-Australians is the imbalance of relationship between man and society, man and the self. Meanwhile, the loss of discourse power leads them to be discriminated against in the whites dominated society. The aim of this thesis is to enable readers to understand the living predicaments of Chinese-Australian in different times and inspire people to care about the living conditions of Chinese-Australian in modern times

Ontology-Based Semantic Retrieval for Education Management Systems

The traditional information retrieval technologies are based on keywords, and therefore provide limited capabilities to capture the conceptualizations associated with user needs and contents. As a new technology of information retrieval, semantic retrieval can retrieve information resource fully and precisely based on the knowledge understanding and knowledge reasoning. Ontology, which can well represent and reason about the domain knowledge, is proved to be very useful in the semantic retrieval. On this basis, in this paper, we propose a complete ontology-based semantic retrieval approach and framework for education management system. Firstly, we present some rules for constructing domain ontology from the education management system; Then, a semantic annotation method of the constructed ontology is given; Further, the ontologybased semantic retrieval algorithmis proposed; Finally, a complete framework is developed and some experiments are done. Conducted experiments show that our semantic retrieval model obtained comparable and better performance results than the traditional information retrieval technology for education management system