National Identity and Intercultural Outlook: a Critical Review of Hong Kong's Civic Education Since the 1980's

This paper argues that in the new landscape of a postmodernist world, civic education would need to nurture national identity and promote intercultural outlook hand in hand. This article reviews development of Hong Kong’s civic education development in this light. In the case of post-colonial Hong Kong, a sensible balance is most needed as the city is to continue as an international city that functions as one of China’s windows to the world.Civic education; National identity; Intercultural outlook.

Teaching politics: A study of the subject government and public affairs ， in Hong Kong’s schools

Government and Public Affairs (GPA), a subject at senior secondary level, was set up in Hong Kong in 1980's, as part of the civic education drive to prepare for the change of sovereignty in 1997. It still is the only subject whose content is entirely about the study of politics and government. This study investigates the perceptions of GPA teachers with regard to how the subject is taught and how the subject may have an impact on the students with regard to the key concerns of civic education m Hong Kong, namely national identity, patriotism, democratic learning and international outlook. It aims at filling the literature gap about the implementation of GPA in schools. Results of the study may also be used as reference when politics is considered as a subject taught in the formal curriculum. Qualitative analysis was used and it was done in the tradition of the grounded theory. GPA teachers and other pertinent parties, namely curriculum planners, public examination setters and the Subject Officer at the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority were interviewed. In line with the tradition of grounded theory, theoretical sampling was used and academics were invited to comment on significant concepts that emerged in the study. The results of the study show that didactic methods are commonly adopted by many teachers and the subject may only have very little or even negative effect on enhancing national identity and patriotism of the students. The subject's contribution to democratic learning and the development of international perspectives in understanding politics is also limited. These need to be understood against an analysis that takes into account milieu, curriculum design and personal beliefs of the teachers. A model is proposed to explain the salient features of the analysis. Based on the findings of the study, recommendations for improving the effectiveness of the subject's delivery are made

The meiosis-specific Cdc20 family-member Ama1 promotes binding of the Ssp2 activator to the Smk1 MAP kinase.

Smk1 is a meiosis-specific MAP kinase (MAPK) in budding yeast that is required for spore formation. It is localized to prospore membranes (PSMs), the structures that engulf haploid cells during meiosis II (MII). Similar to canonically activated MAPKs, Smk1 is controlled by phosphorylation of its activation-loop threonine (T) and tyrosine (Y). However, activation loop phosphorylation occurs via a noncanonical two-step mechanism in which 1) the cyclin-dependent kinase activating kinase Cak1 phosphorylaytes T207 during MI, and 2) Smk1 autophosphorylates Y209 as MII draws to a close. Autophosphorylation of Y209 and catalytic activity for substrates require Ssp2, a meiosis-specific protein that is translationally repressed until anaphase of MII. Ama1 is a meiosis-specific targeting subunit of the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome that regulates multiple steps in meiotic development, including exit from MII. Here, we show that Ama1 activates autophosphorylation of Smk1 on Y209 by promoting formation of the Ssp2/Smk1 complex at PSMs. These findings link meiotic exit to Smk1 activation and spore wall assembly

Incorporating epistemic uncertainty into the safety assurance of socio-technical systems

In system development, epistemic uncertainty is an ever-present possibility when reasoning about the causal factors during hazard analysis. Such uncertainty is common when complicated systems interact with one another, and it is dangerous because it impairs hazard analysis and thus increases the chance of overlooking unsafe situations. Uncertainty around causation thus needs to be managed well. Unfortunately, existing hazard analysis techniques tend to ignore unknown uncertainties, and system stakeholders rarely track known uncertainties well through the system lifecycle. In this paper, we outline an approach to managing epistemic uncertainty in existing hazard analysis techniques by focusing on known and unknown uncertainty. We have created a reference populated with a wide range of safety-critical causal relationships to recognise unknown uncertainty, and we have developed a model to systematically capture and track known uncertainty around such factors. We have also defined a process for using the reference and model to assess possible causal factors that are suspected during hazard analysis. To assess the applicability of our approach, we have analysed the widely-used MoDAF architectural model and determined that there is potential for our approach to identify additional causal factors that are not apparent from individual MoDAF views. We have also reviewed an existing safety assessment example (the ARP4761 Aircraft System analysis) and determined that our approach could indeed be incorporated into that process. We have also integrated our approach into the STPA hazard analysis technique to demonstrate its feasibility to incorporate into existing techniques. It is therefore plausible that our approach can increase safety assurance provided by hazard analysis in the face of epistemic uncertainty

Incorporating epistemic uncertainty into the safety assurance of socio-technical systems

In system development, epistemic uncertainty is an ever-present possibility when reasoning about the causal factors during hazard analysis. Such uncertainty is common when complicated systems interact with one another, and it is dangerous because it impairs hazard analysis and thus increases the chance of overlooking unsafe situations. Uncertainty around causation thus needs to be managed well. Unfortunately, existing hazard analysis techniques tend to ignore unknown uncertainties, and system stakeholders rarely track known uncertainties well through the system lifecycle. In this paper, we outline an approach to managing epistemic uncertainty in existing hazard analysis techniques by focusing on known and unknown uncertainty. We have created a reference populated with a wide range of safety-critical causal relationships to recognise unknown uncertainty, and we have developed a model to systematically capture and track known uncertainty around such factors. We have also defined a process for using the reference and model to assess possible causal factors that are suspected during hazard analysis. To assess the applicability of our approach, we have analysed the widely-used MoDAF architectural model and determined that there is potential for our approach to identify additional causal factors that are not apparent from individual MoDAF views. We have also reviewed an existing safety assessment example (the ARP4761 Aircraft System analysis) and determined that our approach could indeed be incorporated into that process. We have also integrated our approach into the STPA hazard analysis technique to demonstrate its feasibility to incorporate into existing techniques. It is therefore plausible that our approach can increase safety assurance provided by hazard analysis in the face of epistemic uncertainty

Quantization of deformed cluster Poisson varieties

Fock and Goncharov described a quantization of cluster $\mathcal{X}$-varieties (also known as cluster Poisson varieties) in [FG09]. Meanwhile, families of deformations of cluster $\mathcal{X}$-varieties were introduced in [BFMNC18]. In this paper we show that the two constructions are compatible -- we extend the Fock-Goncharov quantization of $\mathcal{X}$-varieties to the families of [BFMNC18]. As a corollary, we obtain that these families and each of their fibers have Poisson structures. We relate this construction to the Berenstein-Zelevinsky quantization of $\mathcal{A}$-varieties ([BZ05]). Finally, inspired by the counter-example to quantum positivity of the quantum greedy basis in [LLRZ14], we compute a counter-example to quantum positivity of the quantum theta basis.Comment: 40 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

Topics in Computational Advertising

<p>Computational advertising is an emerging scientific discipline that incorporates tools and ideas from fields such as statistics, computer science, and economics. Although a consequence of the rapid growth of the Internet, computational advertising has since helped transform the online advertising business into a multi-billion dollar industry.</p><p>The fundamental goal of computational advertising is to determine the ``best'' online ad to display to any given user. This ``best'' ad, however, changes depending upon the specific context that is under consideration. This leads to a variety of different problems, three of which are discussed in this thesis.</p><p>Chapter 1 briefly introduces the topics of online advertising and computational advertising. Chapter 2 proposes a numerical method to approximate the pure strategy Nash equilibrium bidding functions in an independent private value first-price sealed-bid auction where bidders draw their types from continuous and atomless distributions---a setting in which solutions cannot generally be analytically derived, despite the fact that they are known to exist and be unique. Chapter 3 proposes a cross-domain recommender system that is a multiple-domain extension of the Bayesian Probabilistic Matrix Factorization model. Chapter 4 discuss some of the tools and challenges of text mining by using the Trayvon Martin shooting incident as a case study in analyzing the lexical content and network connectivity structure of the political blogosphere. Finally, Chapter 5 presents some concluding remarks and briefly discusses other problems in computational advertising.</p>Dissertatio

Transmission Estimation at the Cram\'er-Rao Bound for Squeezed States of Light in the Presence of Loss and Imperfect Detection

Enhancing the precision of a measurement requires maximizing the information that can be gained about the quantity of interest from probing a system. For optical based measurements, such an enhancement can be achieved through two approaches, increasing the number of photons used to interrogate the system and using quantum states of light to increase the amount of quantum Fisher information gained per photon. Here we consider the use of quantum states of light with a large number of photons, namely the bright single-mode and two-mode squeezed states, that take advantage of both of these approaches for the problem of transmission estimation. We show that, in the limit of large squeezing, these states approach the maximum possible quantum Fisher information per photon for transmission estimation that is achieved with the Fock state and the vacuum two-mode squeezed state. Since the bright states we consider can be generated at much higher powers than the quantum states that achieve the maximum quantum Fisher information per photon, they can achieve an much higher absolute precision as quantified by the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound. We discuss the effects of losses external to the system on the precision of transmission estimation and identify simple measurements techniques that can saturate the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound for the bright squeezed states even in the presence of such external losses

BOSS-LDG: A Novel Computational Framework that Brings Together Blue Waters, Open Science Grid, Shifter and the LIGO Data Grid to Accelerate Gravitational Wave Discovery

We present a novel computational framework that connects Blue Waters, the NSF-supported, leadership-class supercomputer operated by NCSA, to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Data Grid via Open Science Grid technology. To enable this computational infrastructure, we configured, for the first time, a LIGO Data Grid Tier-1 Center that can submit heterogeneous LIGO workflows using Open Science Grid facilities. In order to enable a seamless connection between the LIGO Data Grid and Blue Waters via Open Science Grid, we utilize Shifter to containerize LIGO's workflow software. This work represents the first time Open Science Grid, Shifter, and Blue Waters are unified to tackle a scientific problem and, in particular, it is the first time a framework of this nature is used in the context of large scale gravitational wave data analysis. This new framework has been used in the last several weeks of LIGO's second discovery campaign to run the most computationally demanding gravitational wave search workflows on Blue Waters, and accelerate discovery in the emergent field of gravitational wave astrophysics. We discuss the implications of this novel framework for a wider ecosystem of Higher Performance Computing users.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. Accepted as a Full Research Paper to the 13th IEEE International Conference on eScienc