Bicultural Social Identity: Do Biculturals Assess Workplace Deviance Differently Across Different Ethnicities?

Research on biculturals has informed us much regarding their cognition and identity integration, however little as to the bicultural perception of in- and out-groups, and whether it can be primed. I examined this question in a workplace setting using the black sheep framework, specifically: Given the activation of one of a bicultural\u27s specific cultural identities, will he or she allocate punishment to deviant employees of different cultural backgrounds differently based on whether he or she views them as an in-group or out-group member? In Study 1, I show that Asian-American biculturals do assess deviant employees of different cultural backgrounds differently depending on the cultural prime, and that this effect is moderated by their level of bicultural identity integration. In Study 2, I show that Hispanic-American biculturals exhibit a contrastive response to cultural primes, which still supports the main hypotheses (Study 2). The reason for this difference between the two study samples, implications for bicultural research, and organizational behavior research are discussed

Data fusion with artificial neural networks (ANN) for classification of earth surface from microwave satellite measurements

A data fusion system with artificial neural networks (ANN) is used for fast and accurate classification of five earth surface conditions and surface changes, based on seven SSMI multichannel microwave satellite measurements. The measurements include brightness temperatures at 19, 22, 37, and 85 GHz at both H and V polarizations (only V at 22 GHz). The seven channel measurements are processed through a convolution computation such that all measurements are located at same grid. Five surface classes including non-scattering surface, precipitation over land, over ocean, snow, and desert are identified from ground-truth observations. The system processes sensory data in three consecutive phases: (1) pre-processing to extract feature vectors and enhance separability among detected classes; (2) preliminary classification of Earth surface patterns using two separate and parallely acting classifiers: back-propagation neural network and binary decision tree classifiers; and (3) data fusion of results from preliminary classifiers to obtain the optimal performance in overall classification. Both the binary decision tree classifier and the fusion processing centers are implemented by neural network architectures. The fusion system configuration is a hierarchical neural network architecture, in which each functional neural net will handle different processing phases in a pipelined fashion. There is a total of around 13,500 samples for this analysis, of which 4 percent are used as the training set and 96 percent as the testing set. After training, this classification system is able to bring up the detection accuracy to 94 percent compared with 88 percent for back-propagation artificial neural networks and 80 percent for binary decision tree classifiers. The neural network data fusion classification is currently under progress to be integrated in an image processing system at NOAA and to be implemented in a prototype of a massively parallel and dynamically reconfigurable Modular Neural Ring (MNR)

Homologous Muscle Contraction during Unilateral Movement Does Not Show a Dominant Effect on Leg Representation of the Ipsilateral Primary Motor Cortex

Co-activation of homo- and heterotopic representations in the primary motor cortex (M1) ipsilateral to a unilateral motor task has been observed in neuroimaging studies. Further analysis showed that the ipsilateral M1 is involved in motor execution along with the contralateral M1 in humans. Additionally, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have revealed that the size of the co-activation in the ipsilateral M1 has a muscle-dominant effect in the upper limbs, with a prominent decline of inhibition within the ipsilateral M1 occurring when a homologous muscle contracts. However, the homologous muscle-dominant effect in the ipsilateral M1 is less clear in the lower limbs. The present study investigates the response of corticospinal output and intracortical inhibition in the leg representation of the ipsilateral M1 during a unilateral motor task, with homo- or heterogeneous muscles. We assessed functional changes within the ipsilateral M1 and in corticospinal outputs associated with different contracting muscles in 15 right-handed healthy subjects. Motor tasks were performed with the right-side limb, including movements of the upper and lower limbs. TMS paradigms were measured, consisting of short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI) and recruitment curves (RCs) of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) in the right M1, and responses were recorded from the left rectus femoris (RF) and left tibialis anterior (TA) muscles. TMS results showed that significant declines in SICI and prominent increases in MEPs of the left TA and left RF during unilateral movements. Cortical activations were associated with the muscles contracting during the movements. The present data demonstrate that activation of the ipsilateral M1 on leg representation could be increased during unilateral movement. However, no homologous muscle-dominant effect was evident in the leg muscles. The results may reflect that functional coupling of bilateral leg muscles is a reciprocal movement

Flexible Loyalties: How Malleable Are Bicultural Loyalties?

Biculturals are individuals who are acculturated in two cultures and have dual identities. Due to this, many early discussions on biculturalism argued that biculturals may have divided loyalties between their two cultural backgrounds and the identities derived from these backgrounds. This view is further highlighted given historical and contemporary debate regarding immigrants in the European and American political arenas. These concerns illustrate two possibilities. First, that biculturals have a preference for their home or host culture, identifying one as the in-group to express loyalty toward and the other as the out-group. Second, biculturals may alternate between who they identify as their in-group depending upon the circumstances. In a particular cultural environment, a given bicultural may feel greater degrees of loyalty toward that culture, while feeling different loyalties when immersed in a different cultural environment. To-date, few empirical studies have examined these two questions in detail. We proposed two hypotheses: First, biculturals will express higher levels of loyalty for a specific culture if they have been exposed to a prime congruent with that culture than if they have been exposed to a prime associated with a different culture. Second, the magnitude of preferences expressed for the two cultures will differ depending on the cultural prime. We experimentally investigated this phenomenon in a sample of Chinese-Americans (N = 136) using a computer simulated soccer game between the United States and China. This simulation was selected in order to avoid the controversial nature of an immigration or cultural conflict scenario. Past research has shown that support for the sports team of a given country is a form of expressing loyalty. Participants were randomly exposed to one cultural priming condition (American, Neutral, Chinese) using commentaries recorded in different languages: English, no commentary, and Chinese. Participants were then asked to what degree they would cheer for each team. Participants expressed more likelihood to cheer for the Chinese team than for the American team. However, our results indicate that cultural priming does influence the degree to which the participants express loyalty for the Chinese team over the American team in the form of rooting behaviors

A Positioning Scheme Combining Location Tracking with Vision Assisting for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents the performance of an adaptive location-estimation technique combining Kalman filtering (KF)with vision assisting for wireless sensor networks. For improving the accuracy of a location estimator, a KF procedureis employed at a mobile terminal to filter variations of the location estimate. Furthermore, using a vision-assistedcalibration technique, the proposed approach based on the normalized cross-correlation scheme is an accuracyenhancement procedure that effectively removes system errors causing uncertainty in real dynamic environments.Namely, according to the vision-assisted approach to extract the locations of the reference nodes as landmarks, a KFbasedapproach with the landmark information can calibrate the location estimation and reduce the corner effect of alocation-estimation system. In terms of the location accuracy estimated from the proposed approach, the experimentalresults demonstrate that more than 60 percent of the location estimates have error distances less than 1.4 meters in aZigBee positioning platform. As compared with the non-tracking algorithm and non-vision-assisted approach, theproposed algorithm can achieve reasonably good performance

Feel-Good Giving: The Mythic Construction of Generosity in Millions

The question of what generosity is and how it is practiced in relation to the neoliberal contexts of late capitalism has emerged as a subject of interest across a variety of fields. Instead of placing emphasis on the recipient and the cause or structural inequalities contributing to the need for generosity, new practices of giving have appeared on a variety of media platforms and have been performed by a host of celebrities, sports figures, and politicians that emphasize the giver\u27s moral goodness. By using a critical cultural studies approach, this dissertation demonstrates that in the visual culture of humanitarianism representations of generosity in popular films articulate current neoliberal constraints on human dignity and presumed goodwill. These visions of generosity enforce a neoliberized idea of givers and takers. The dissertation argues that the film Millions (2004) proposes an intriguing counter-narrative to prevailing notions of neoliberal feel-good generosity by using Catholic and Marxian discourses. In its focus on two young boys who find and consider what to do with a bag of stolen money, it imagines generosity as relational, less calculated for personal gain and excessive in its indulgence. The movie identifies the need for collective giving and relational generosity rather than blaming the poor for their conditions. This dissertation therefore considers the film, Millions (2004) as a cultural forum (Newcomb and Hirsch 1983/1994) through which viewers are encouraged to analyze naturalized understandings of generosity by reflecting on calamities and conditions of inequality that challenge feel good giving and project of the self approaches to generosity. Millions explores the gap of disconnect between us and others and how money can mediate the desire for connection. This film therefore provides the cultural space for considering the unconscious lived relations regarding what a child learns about money and giving and how what he learns is taught and reproduced. I conclude that as films and cultural artifacts like Millions draw upon explicit religious themes and imagery, they further provide a contextual space for critical religio-political reflection, where viewers may uphold, maintain, or transform their understanding of how to be independently or collectively generous in relation to their religious traditions and larger system of beliefs