Behind classroom codeswitching : culture, curriculum and identity in a Chinese university English department

This is an exploratory mixed methods case study which investigates a number of critical issues regarding the teaching and learning of an English Language and Literature Department (henceforth the ELLD) in a Chinese university, including curriculum development, content-based instruction, and teachers’ cultural, professional and disciplinary identities etc. It originally aimed to examine three university teachers’ codeswitching behaviours. Classroom observation, interview and stimulated recall were employed to collect data for the Phase I of the study. However, analysis of codeswitching categories identified a predominance of extended expositions of Western and Chinese literature, culture and philosophy etc., which prompted the follow-up interviews (Phase II) further exploring the relevant issues concerning the disciplinary construction of ELLD in China. Findings from follow-up interviews suggested that teachers’ classroom practice was influenced by their cultural, professional and disciplinary identities. It also became clear that in the ELLD context, approaching literature, culture and philosophy from both the Chinese and Western perspectives reflected a cross-cultural view of the content-based teaching for the teachers. Moreover it highlighted the current lack of courses on liberal arts and excessive emphasis on English language skills in the national curriculum for the English majors. This study reveals a fundamental problem of the development of the ELLD in Chinese universities. It is suggested that awareness should be raised of target language use in both skills-based and content-based courses in the EFL context in China. In addition, it recommends further research to explore ways in which the national curriculum might be reformed to reflect the humanities characteristics of ELLD and universities should be given more space and freedom to address their specific requirements within the national curriculum

Quantifying Fluid Shear Stress in a Rocking Culture Dish

Fluid shear stress (FSS) is an important stimulus for cell functions. Compared with the well established parallel-plate and cone-and-plate systems, a rocking “see-saw” system offers some advantages such as easy operation, low cost, and high throughput. However, the FSS spatiotemporal pattern in the system has not been quantified. In the present study, we developed a lubrication-based model to analyze the FSS distributions in a rocking rectangular culture dish. We identified an important parameter (the critical flip angle) that dictates the overall FSS behaviors and suggested the right conditions to achieving temporally oscillating and spatially relatively uniform FSS. If the maximal rocking angle is kept smaller than the critical flip angle, which is defined as the angle when the fluid free surface intersects the outer edge of the dish bottom, the dish bottom remains covered with a thin layer of culture medium. The spatial variations of the peak FSS within the central 84% and 50% dish bottom are limited to 41% and 17%, respectively. The magnitude of FSS was found to be proportional to the fluid viscosity and the maximal rocking angle, and inversely proportional to the square of the fluid depth-to-length ratio and the rocking period. For a commercial rectangular dish (length of 37.6 mm) filled with ∼2 mL culture medium, the FSS at the center of the dish bottom is expected to be on the order of 0.9 dyn/cm2 when the dish is rocked +5° at 1 cycle/s. Our analysis suggests that a rocking “see-saw” system, if controlled well, can be used as an alternative method to provide low-magnitude, dynamic FSS to cultured cells

Las comedias de Lope de Vega ambientadas en Roma

Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Departamento de Filología Española. Fecha de Lectura: 08-07-202

Experimental and physical model of the melting zone in the interface of the explosive cladding bar

AbstractLocal melting zone encountered in sections of the cladding interface is a distinguished phenomenon of the explosive cladding technique. The thickness and morphology of the melting zone in the Ti/NiCr explosive cladding bar are investigated by means of optical microscopy. Results show that the distribution of the melting zone in the interface of the Ti/NiCr explosive cladding bar is uniform and axisymmetric, and boundaries of the melting zone are circular arcs, whose center points to the center of the NiCr bar. The bamboo-shaped cracks generate in the melting zone. The thickness of the melting zone decreases with reducing of the stand-off distance and the thickness of the explosive. A physical model of the melting zone in the interface of the explosive cladding bar is proposed

A molecular simulation analysis of producing monatomic carbon chains by stretching ultranarrow graphene nanoribbons

Atomistic simulations were utilized to develop fundamental insights regarding the elongation process starting from ultranarrow graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and resulting in monatomic carbon chains (MACCs). There are three key findings. First, we demonstrate that complete, elongated, and stable MACCs with fracture strains exceeding 100% can be formed from both ultranarrow armchair and zigzag GNRs. Second, we demonstrate that the deformation processes leading to the MACCs have strong chirality dependence. Specifically, armchair GNRs first form DNA-like chains, then develop into monatomic chains by passing through an intermediate configuration in which monatomic chain sections are separated by two-atom attachments. In contrast, zigzag GNRs form rope-ladder-like chains through a process in which the carbon hexagons are first elongated into rectangles; these rectangles eventually coalesce into monatomic chains through a novel triangle-pentagon deformation structure under further tensile deformation. Finally, we show that the width of GNRs plays an important role in the formation of MACCs, and that the ultranarrow GNRs facilitate the formation of full MACCs. The present work should be of considerable interest due to the experimentally demonstrated feasibility of using narrow GNRs to fabricate novel nanoelectronic components based upon monatomic chains of carbon atoms.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, Nanotechnology accepted versio

Reconstruction and fast prediction of a 3D flow field based on a variational autoencoder

Reconstruction and fast prediction of flow fields are important for the improvement of data center operations and energy savings. In this study, an artificial neural network (ANN) and variational autoencoder (VAE) composite model is proposed for the reconstruction and prediction of 3D flowfields with high accuracy and efficiency. The VAE model is trained to extract features of the problem and to realize 3D physical field reconstruction. The ANN is employed to achieve the constructability of the extracted features. A dataset of steady temperature/velocity fields is acquired by computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer (CFD/HT) and fed to train the deep learning model. The proposed ANN-VAE model is experimentally proven to achieve promising field prediction accuracy with a significantly reduced computational cost. Compared to the CFD/HT method, the ANN-VAE method speeds up the physical field prediction by approximately 380,000 times, with mean accuracies of 97.3% for temperature field prediction and 97.9% for velocity field prediction, making it feasible for real-time physical field acquisition.Comment: 43 pages, 23 figure

Liquidity-adjusted Intraday Value at Risk Modeling and Risk Management: an Application to Data from Deutsche Börse

This paper develops a high-frequency risk measure, the Liquidity-adjusted Intraday Value at Risk (LIVaR). Our objective is to explicitly consider the endogenous liquidity dimension associated with order size. Taking liquidity into consideration when using intraday data is important because significant position changes over very short horizons may have large impacts on stock returns. By reconstructing the open Limit Order Book (LOB) of Deutsche Börse, the changes of tick-by-tick ex-ante frictionless return and actual return are modeled jointly using a Log-ACD-VARMA-MGARCH structure. This modeling helps to identify the dynamics of frictionless and actual returns, and to quantify the risk related to the liquidity premium. From a practical perspective, our model can be used not only to identify the impact of ex-ante liquidity risk on total risk, but also to provide an estimation of VaR for the actual return at a point in time. In particular, there will be considerable time saved in constructing the risk measure for the waiting cost because once the models have been identified and estimated, the risk measure over any time horizon can be obtained by simulation without re-sampling the data and re-estimating the model

Effects of the Limit Order Book on Price Dynamics

In this paper, we analyze whether the state of the limit order book affects future price movements in line with what recent theoretical models predict. We do this in a linear vector autoregressive system which includes midquote return, trade direction and variables that are theoretically motivated and capture different dimensions of the information embedded in the limit order book. We find that different measures of depth and slope of bid and ask sides as well as their ratios cause returns to change in the next transaction period in line with the predictions of Goettler, Parlour, and Rajan (2009) and Kalay and Wohl (2009). Limit order book variables also have significant long term cumulative effects on midquote return, which is stronger and takes longer to be fully realized for variables based on higher levels of the book. In a simple high frequency trading exercise, we show that it is possible in some cases to obtain economic gains from the statistical relation between limit order book variables and midquote return

Translanguaging in a Chinese university CLIL classroom : teacher strategies and student attitudes

Pedagogical translanguaging has been extensively researched over the past decade. Yet, little is known about the attitudes of students towards this practice. Students constitute an integral part of classroom interactions and their learning process is significantly affected by teachers’ classroom discourse. This action research (AR) study, situated in a Chinese university Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) reading classroom and aided by lesson recordings and two sets of questionnaires, explores the translanguaging strategies employed by the teacher as well as the students’ attitudes to such strategies. Through incorporating feedback collected from students regarding the teacher’s modifications of language use, the study has demonstrated how the teacher mobilizes her full linguistic resources, in the form of translanguaging, to achieve pedagogical outcomes, which eventually leads to the establishment of a mutually beneficial classroom ecology. The study also indicates that advanced EFL learners, highly motivated to improve language proficiency and acquire subject content unanimously reject the traditional monolingual approach to teaching. The findings call for further research into the impact of pedagogical translanguaging on students’ learning process in multilingual classrooms