An Exploration of the Identities and Gender Discourses of a Taiwanese Woman: A Case Study of a Working Mother

This exploratory study sets out to examine the identities of a Taiwanese woman in the 21st century. Adopting the case study as a research strategy, I probe into a working mother’s life story to understand firstly a Taiwanese working mother’s perspectives on her family roles as a wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Secondly, I investigate how social institutions, which transmit different and often-conflicting Confucian and non-Confucian “gender discourses” influence her identities. This thesis adopts narrative interviews as the major method to probe into the life story of a Taiwanese working mother. The dimensions of domestic work and childcare, verbal communication, marital sex and looking after parents-in-law are examined in order to understand how she has taken on gender discourses and developed identities through her contact with different social institutions. Informed by post-structuralism and feminist theories, I consider the Taiwanese working mother as an individual who has “agency”, meaning she recognizes and values her ability to use and integrate gender discourses into her sense of self through the process of self-attribution. My research results found that “differentiation” “reflection” and “reflexivity” are themes that play important roles in affecting how a Taiwanese working mother perceives herself as an individual and defines her social and family roles. The findings also show that a working mother is able to negotiate different gender discourses. Despite the influence of the Taiwanese Confucian gendered binary, her interactions with different social institutions, especially her native family, counselling services and women’s self-help groups, enable her to develop a sense of “who I am”. She is able to reflect on her life experiences and perceive gender discourses in a critical manner and thus take on gender discourses that she identifies with to develop her own identities

The Effect of Advertainment toward The Affective Motivations of Online Customer Brand Engagement

In the marketing environment with fierce competition, the development of the social networking sites (SNS) leads to the customers’ willing to actively engage with the brands they like. The improving on customer brand engagement might cause the positive long-term relationship between customers and the brands. For attracting the awareness from customers, many organisations provide a myriad of advertainment campaign, which including images, music, stories, and interactive activities. Therefore, in order to discuss the topics of CBE and advertainment, the purpose of this research is discovering whether or not the affective motivations of online CBE will be affected by advertainment content, and explore what factors from advertainment contents could cause the affective motivations of online CBE. Moreover, this study decided to conduct qualitative research method, via in-depth semi-structured interview process to find out the key issues. The research discoveries that the entertainment and social interaction needs present positively influence on the affective motivations of online CBE. The entertainment related factors show more influence than the factors of social interaction. From the entertainment perspective, the advertainment content includes the characteristics of incongruity and superiority is more likely to meet the entertainment needs of customers. From the social interaction point of view, although the convenient social connection leads to positive CBE, the social identity and privacy issue are serious factors need to be concerned whilst the companies want to satisfy the social interaction needs. Keywords: customer brand engagement, advertainment, social networking site

Conformally Invariant Brans-Dicke Loop Quantum Cosmology: A Quantum Geometric Model of Linking Theory

The loop quantization of the conformal Brans-Dicke cosmology is explored in the spatially flat and Bianchi-I setting. The scalar and conformal constraints governing the canonical model are quantized using the loop techniques. The physical Hilbert space of quantum spacetimes satisfying both quantum constraints is then obtained by incorporating the quantum geometric features. The Schr\"odinger cosmic evolutions are derived with the relational Heisenberg observables describing the dynamical degrees of freedom with respect to the chosen reference degrees of freedom, with the latter providing the physical coordinates for the spatial hypersurfaces and the conformal scales. We show that the emerging Schr\"odinger theories contain not only the loop quantum cosmology of GR, but also that of the so-called shape dynamics. The exact dictionary between the two theories is achieved via the underlying physical Hilbert space possessing the additional (loop-corrected) conformal symmetry.Comment: 16 page

Signs of outflow feedback from a nearby young stellar object on the protostellar envelope around HL Tau

HL Tau is a Class I-II protostar embedded in an infalling and rotating envelope and possibly associated with a planet forming disk, and it is co-located in a 0.1 pc molecular cloud with two nearby young stellar objects. Our ALMA observations revealed two arc-like structures on a 1000 au scale connected to the disk, and their kinematics could not be explained with any conventional model of infalling and rotational motions. In this work, we investigate the nature of these arc-like structures connected to the HL Tau disk. We conducted new observations in the 13CO and C18O (3-2; 2-1) lines with JCMT and IRAM 30m, and obtained the ACA data with the 7-m array. With the single-dish, ACA, and ALMA data, we analyzed the gas motions on both 0.1 pc and 1000 au scales in the HL Tau region. We constructed new kinematical models of an infalling and rotating envelope with the consideration of relative motion between HL Tau and the envelope. By including the relative motion between HL Tau and its protostellar envelope, our kinematical model can explain the observed velocity features in the arc-like structures. The morphologies of the arc-like structures can also be explained with an asymmetric initial density distribution in our model envelope. In addition, our single-dish results support that HL Tau is located at the edge of a large-scale (0.1 pc) expanding shell driven by the wind or outflow from XZ Tau, as suggested in the literature. The estimated expanding velocity of the shell is comparable to the relative velocity between HL Tau and its envelope in our kinematical model. These results hints that the large-scale expanding motion likely impacts the protostellar envelope around HL Tau and affects its gas kinematics. We found that the mass infalling rate from the envelope onto the HL Tau disk can be decreased by a factor of two due to this impact by the large-scale expanding shell.Comment: Accepted by A&

Coordinate Ascent for Off-Policy RL with Global Convergence Guarantees

We revisit the domain of off-policy policy optimization in RL from the perspective of coordinate ascent. One commonly-used approach is to leverage the off-policy policy gradient to optimize a surrogate objective -- the total discounted in expectation return of the target policy with respect to the state distribution of the behavior policy. However, this approach has been shown to suffer from the distribution mismatch issue, and therefore significant efforts are needed for correcting this mismatch either via state distribution correction or a counterfactual method. In this paper, we rethink off-policy learning via Coordinate Ascent Policy Optimization (CAPO), an off-policy actor-critic algorithm that decouples policy improvement from the state distribution of the behavior policy without using the policy gradient. This design obviates the need for distribution correction or importance sampling in the policy improvement step of off-policy policy gradient. We establish the global convergence of CAPO with general coordinate selection and then further quantify the convergence rates of several instances of CAPO with popular coordinate selection rules, including the cyclic and the randomized variants of CAPO. We then extend CAPO to neural policies for a more practical implementation. Through experiments, we demonstrate that CAPO provides a competitive approach to RL in practice.Comment: 47 pages, 4 figure