Voices from the diaspora: changing hierarchies and dynamics of Chinese multilingualism

The so-called Chinese diasporas, i.e. Chinese communities outside Greater China (China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), have traditionally been dialect dominant; that is, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants are speakers of (especially Southern) dialects. Cantonese and Hokkien are two of the most prominent dialects. With globalization and the rise of China as a world politico-economic power, the national, standardized variety, Putonghua, is gaining particular prestige amongst the Chinese diasporas. For example, all the Cantonese schools for British Chinese children in the UK now also teach Putonghua, but none of the Putonghua schools teach Cantonese. Using ethnographic interviews with and participant observation of Chinese people of different generations in various diasporic communities, this paper examines the changing hierarchies of varieties of Chinese, the implications of such changes for the education and identity development of the young, and the constitution of a (speech) community in the post-modern era. It focuses on language attitude and linguistic practices (including literacy practices). It also investigates the tensions between the competing ideologies and discourses on national and ethnic identities, nationalism, community relations and cultural values

Analytic smoothness effect of solutions for spatially homogeneous Landau equation

In this paper, we study the smoothness effect of Cauchy problem for the spatially homogeneous Landau equation in the hard potential case and the Maxwellian molecules case. We obtain the analytic smoothing effect for the solutions under rather weak assumptions on the initial datum.Comment: 16 page

Segmentation of ultrasound images of thyroid nodule for assisting fine needle aspiration cytology

The incidence of thyroid nodule is very high and generally increases with the age. Thyroid nodule may presage the emergence of thyroid cancer. The thyroid nodule can be completely cured if detected early. Fine needle aspiration cytology is a recognized early diagnosis method of thyroid nodule. There are still some limitations in the fine needle aspiration cytology, and the ultrasound diagnosis of thyroid nodule has become the first choice for auxiliary examination of thyroid nodular disease. If we could combine medical imaging technology and fine needle aspiration cytology, the diagnostic rate of thyroid nodule would be improved significantly. The properties of ultrasound will degrade the image quality, which makes it difficult to recognize the edges for physicians. Image segmentation technique based on graph theory has become a research hotspot at present. Normalized cut (Ncut) is a representative one, which is suitable for segmentation of feature parts of medical image. However, how to solve the normalized cut has become a problem, which needs large memory capacity and heavy calculation of weight matrix. It always generates over segmentation or less segmentation which leads to inaccurate in the segmentation. The speckle noise in B ultrasound image of thyroid tumor makes the quality of the image deteriorate. In the light of this characteristic, we combine the anisotropic diffusion model with the normalized cut in this paper. After the enhancement of anisotropic diffusion model, it removes the noise in the B ultrasound image while preserves the important edges and local details. This reduces the amount of computation in constructing the weight matrix of the improved normalized cut and improves the accuracy of the final segmentation results. The feasibility of the method is proved by the experimental results.Comment: 15pages,13figure

The Gevrey Hypoellipticity for linear and non-linear Fokker-Planck equations

In this paper, we study the Gevrey regularity of weak solution for a class of linear and quasilinear Fokker-Planck equations

Transnational experience, aspiration and family language policy

Transnational and multilingual families have become commonplace in the 21st century. Yet relatively few attempts have been made from applied and socio-linguistics perspectives to understand what is going on within such families; how their transnational and multilingual experiences impact on the family dynamics and their everyday life; how they cope with the new and ever-changing environment, and how they construct their identities and build social relations. In this article we start from the premise that bilingualism and multilingualism mean different things to different generations and individuals within the same family. Additive Bilingualism, which is often celebrated for the positive benefits of adding a second language and culture without replacing or displacing the first, cannot be taken for granted as a common experience of the individuals in transnational families. Using data gathered from a sociolinguistic ethnography of three multilingual and transnational families from China in Britain, we discuss the experiences of different generations and individuals in dealing with bilingualism and multilingualism and how their experiences affect the way individual family members perceive social relations and social structures and construct and present their own identities. The key argument we wish to put forward is that more attention needs to be paid to the diverse experiences of the individuals and to the `strategies they use to deal with the challenges of multilingualism, rather than the overall patterns of language maintenance and language shift

Electroweak radiative corrections to triple photon production at the ILC

In this paper, we present the precision predictions for three photon production in the standard model (SM) at the ILC including the full next-to-leading (NLO) electroweak (EW) corrections, high order initial state radiation (h.o.ISR) contributions and beamstrahlung effects. We present the LO and the NLO EW+h.o.ISR+beamstrahlung corrected total cross sections for various colliding energy when $\sqrt s \ge 200 {\rm GeV}$ and the kinematic distributions of final photons with $\sqrt s = 500 {\rm GeV}$ at ILC, and find that the NLO EW corrections, the h.o.ISR contributions and the beamstrahlung effects are important in exploring the process $e^+e^- \to \gamma\gamma\gamma$.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Physics Letters