"Musik ist meine Sprache" – Eine ethnographische Fallstudie über taiwanesische Musikstudierende in Deutschland

Der folgende Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die Hochschule als Raum für gelebte und gelehrte Diversität. Im Fokus steht eine Studierendengruppe, die insofern eine besondere Gruppe von Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund darstellt, als sie mit der dezidierten Absicht nach Deutschland kommt, sich kulturell zu bilden und zu betätigen: asiatische Studierende an deutschen Musikhochschulen. In einer ethnographischen Fallstudie beleuchtet die Autorin, was junge taiwanesische Musikerinnen und Musiker dazu bewegt, ein Musikstudium in Deutschland aufzunehmen, stellt deren Erwartungen und Erfahrungen dar und diskutiert Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Integration. (DIPF/Orig.

Particle Acceleration and Plasma Dynamics during Magnetic Reconnection in the Magnetically-dominated Regime

Magnetic reconnection is thought to be the driver for many explosive phenomena in the universe. The energy release and particle acceleration during reconnection have been proposed as a mechanism for producing high-energy emissions and cosmic rays. We carry out two- and three-dimensional kinetic simulations to investigate relativistic magnetic reconnection and the associated particle acceleration. The simulations focus on electron-positron plasmas starting with a magnetically dominated, force-free current sheet ($\sigma \equiv B^2/(4\pi n_e m_e c^2) \gg 1$). For this limit, we demonstrate that relativistic reconnection is highly efficient at accelerating particles through a first-order Fermi process accomplished by the curvature drift of particles along the electric field induced by the relativistic flows. This mechanism gives rise to the formation of hard power-law spectra $f \propto (\gamma-1)^{-p}$ and approaches $p = 1$ for sufficiently large $\sigma$ and system size. Eventually most of the available magnetic free energy is converted into nonthermal particle kinetic energy. An analytic model is presented to explain the key results and predict a general condition for the formation of power-law distributions. The development of reconnection in these regimes leads to relativistic inflow and outflow speeds and enhanced reconnection rates relative to non-relativistic regimes. In the three-dimensional simulation, the interplay between secondary kink and tearing instabilities leads to strong magnetic turbulence, but does not significantly change the energy conversion, reconnection rate, or particle acceleration. This study suggests that relativistic reconnection sites are strong sources of nonthermal particles, which may have important implications to a variety of high-energy astrophysical problems.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, slightly modified after submitted to Ap

A preliminary study to investigate the expressive syntactic ability of normal speakers

Grammatical problem was one of the most prominent characteristics of speech in persons with aphasia (Gordon, 2006) and progressive aphasic syndromes (Knibb, Woollams, Hodges, & Patterson, 2009). Measures used to investigate the grammatical deficits on the discourse performance of persons with aphasia could be roughly classified into to two categories, one related to the level of lexicon, the other concerned with the level of syntax. Most of the measures belonged to the former category used words to analysis the variation on the speech performance, such as correct information units (CIUs; Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993), type token ratio (TTR); while the measures applied in studies related to the syntactic ability was more varied. Such as proportion of sentences well formed, auxiliary scores, proportion of verbs inflected, proportion of obligatory determiners in quantitative production analysis (QPA) (Gordon, 2006), and the mean length of the syntactic units, the proportion of syntactic units suggested by Lind, Kristoffersen, Moen, and Simonsen (2009). However, the measures used to depict the syntactic ability of a person was separated, could not provide a profile to reveal a pattern of syntactic ability in a consecutive picture. In order to develop a syntactic scoring system that can capture the changes in the characteristics of narrative speech, we adopted the concept from studies in child language development (Hsu, 2003) and widen the category to encompass the imperfect parts in natural speech. The applicability of this scoring system was firstly tested by the normal population in order to examine if the range of the scope is suitable for reflecting the expressive syntactic ability of a normal speaker

A Study on the Growth and Formation of Single Person Households and Their Housing Decisions in Taiwan

The number of single person households has dramatically increased in Taiwan in the past several decades as it has elsewhere in the world, but this phenomenon has been largely neglected in the literature. This research explores the factors that affect the formation of single person households and their housing decisions. Taiwan¡¦s population census data for 1980, 1990 and 2000 are used. Some interesting trends can be found. First of all, people who are married or cohabiting have exhibited an increasing tendency to live alone census by census. This shows the increasing need in a modern society for the husband and wife to live separately due to employment or other reasons. Secondly, unmarried and widowed elderly persons have had an increasing probability of living alone over the decades. Thirdly, the number of female single person households has been increasing rapidly, and there is a higher probability that they are homeowners and also occupying a larger living space than their male counterparts. To sum up, the results of this study show that the demand for housing among single person households will continue to increase as their numbers increase. Their demand for homeownership and living space are also increasing.Single person household formation; Tenure choice; Living space; Binary probit model; Sample selection model