Chinese Marriage Traditions: Exploring Contemporary Changes

This thesis presents the transitions of Chinese people’s marriage concepts from before 1949 up to 1978 and explores the new marriage concepts now. The analysis part includes the high rates of divorce, left-over women and the bride price in China. I will mainly discuss why nowadays Chinese people have difficulties getting married, especially Chinese men. This analysis is based on two main theories; one is social exchange and another one is marriage squeeze. The analysis is based on the expensive bride price and how important it is for Chinese people especially for Chinese women

Integrated Expert System Development Environment With an Automatic Verification Feature: An Application To Grinding Process

The concerns of this Master degree project are the implementations of an expert system development environment and an application to manufacturing. The environment is given the name of IDEA (Integrated expert system Development Environment with Automatic verification feature), and it integrates an expert system shell with a rule base verification facility and a rule base builder into a single program. The interface of IDEA has the look of a general purpose computer language. The knowledge bases referenced by IDEA consist of LF-THEN rules with the syntax of Object-Attribute-Value (O-A-V) triples and confidence factors. An application is developed for grinding chattering diagnosis problems using the IDEA. The verification facility of IDEA realizes the main functions of CHECK, a verification tool, developed by T. Nguyen et al, 1987, so that it can identify some major problems of inconsistency and incompleteness. Different from CHECK, IDEA uses a unique approach based on rule tree algorithm to check for some logic problems in a rule base. IDEA also has the ability to draw the rule tree on a computer screen. This report discusses the problems of inconsistency and incompleteness in detail, including the influence of introducing confidence factors. Some problems identified in this report are not reported before. The rule base builder of IDEA uses some techniques that can greatly reduce errors in a rule base during its input phase and greatly speed up the input work. First, the builder uses templates for rule input to eliminate the possible syntax errors of rules. Second, it uses an O-AV file for declared O-A-V triples. By checking the O-A-V file and the O-A-V triples used in the rule base, the problems of illegal O-A-V triples and unreferenced O-A-V triples can be identified. Finally, it has the ability to automatically generate the ask-part of the rule base, so that no errors will exists in the ask-part and the input work can be efficient. Grinding chattering is a kind of abnormal phenomenon in a grinding process, which greatly degrades the surface quality of the workpiece ground. The grinding chattering diagnosis rule base gives complete answers for the causes of chattering for external cylindrical grinding. This report describes the rule base development work and its related grinding knowledge

Education for Migrant Children in Beijing

The purpose of this study is to examine how education policies directed towards migrant students are carried out in practice, using a school in Beijing as a case study. Equal education for all is a concept that has come late to China despite the progressive attitudes towards education put forth by Confucius over 3000 years ago. Along with the economic reforms of the 1970’s and China’s emergence into the global market, western concepts of The Universal Rights of Children, especially in regards to free and equal compulsory education, have become visible and challenging issues for the Chinese government. Despite government efforts, the findings show that education between migrant and urban students is not equal. Migrant students are still required to obtain a set of certifications and are not always treated equally in the classroom. Unequal practices are upheld through the government decentralization of education practices, putting decision making power in the hands of the local municipalities and the institutional hukou system that perpetuates a system of “a dual division of urban and rural residency, which forms a structural basis for the social welfare system in China” (Wu & Treiman, 2004:81). This thesis posits that more efforts are needed and suggests some policies recommendations that can improve the equality of education

Synergistic and antagonistic effects of frothers, collector and salt on the stability of bubbles under static and dynamic conditions

In the flotation process, frothers and non-frothing reagents (collectors and depressants) are commonly applied to separate valuable particles from unwanted minerals. The role of non-frothing reagents in modifying solid surfaces is well-established. There are indications in practice and the literature showing collectors such as xanthates that are specifically formulated for solid surfaces can alter the air–water interface and also interfere with frothers and salt under certain conditions, influencing the behaviour of bubbles and froth. This thesis examines the role of non-frothing reagents (collectors and depressants) in the stability of bubbles generated in various frother solutions and salt using a wide range of methodologies and surface sensitive techniques. Potassium amyl xanthate (PAX) and NaHS were selected as the collector and depressant, respectively. The synergistic and antagonistic impacts of frothers, PAX and NaCl were highlighted on the adsorption layers, bubble stability and froth formation behaviour. The results showed that both PAX and NaHS could reduce the size of the bubbles in a laboratory flotation cell by more than 25% compared to tap water. The presence of PAX promoted the absorption of frothers on the air–liquid interface which affected the bubble stability. The bubble lifetime was found to increase substantially in the mixed solutions of both MIBC (4-methyl-2-pentanol) and DPG (Di propylene glycol), highlighting an interaction between PAX and frothers. These findings correlated well with the thin film studies that created two tips of a double concave drop identical to the thin films between two bubbles. A higher stability level was observed in thin film studies than that of bubble lifetime under the same conditions. The foam generation, or foaminess, was also investigated to examine the interaction of PAX and frothers on the foaming behaviour. The presence of PAX improved the foam generation of DPG from low concentrations, while there was a negligible effect of PAX on the foaming ability of MIBC, implying the dynamic interaction and adsorption of PAX and frother on the air–liquid phase was also influenced by the hydrodynamic of the system. Salt (NaCl) was observed to enhance the frother adsorption from the surface tension switch point where the NaCl started to reduce the surface tension of frother. The degree of salt impact on various frothers was illustrated by the surface tension switch point of frother/NaCl. MIBC was found to be most influenced by the presence of salt which may be caused by an uneven and reduced adsorption of frother as supported by the results from a surface detecting technique (QCM–D). Foam generation of frother/NaCl was also observed to decline at higher frother concentration, presumably due to faster thinning process of the thin films as supported by the thin film study. In the ternary system, the frother/PAX/NaCl mixture, the surface tension switch point was found to vary from frother/NaCl, suggesting the interaction among these three components. The thin film stability of the ternary system was generally found to be depressed by the presence of NaCl compared to the frother/PAX mixtures, especially at high salt concentrations. Likewise, the PAX impact on the lifetime of bubbles created in different frothers was generally determined by the added salt. The increasing concentration of salt also affected the ternary system containing different frothers differently: negative with MIBC, positive for DPG and negligible with DPM (Di (propylene glycol) methyl ether). The foaminess results also suggested different frothers interacted with PAX and NaCl differently. For instance, with increasing frother concentration a negligible effect on foaminess was observed in MIBC while a negative influence was found in the DPM ternary solutions. The varying behaviours of the ternary system shown in static and dynamic conditions indicated the complicated interplay between the frothers, collector and salt. Overall, the thesis results strongly suggest that the non-frothing reagents alone could alter the air–liquid interface. More importantly, the interplay between xanthate species and frothers was affected by the structure of the frother and the presence of salt. Therefore, in industry practice it is important to take advantage of residual non-frothing reagents in the pulp to reduce operation costs but achieve desirable recovery

Logistics Service Level Improvement Research and Demonstration Based on Queuing Theory

The paper analyzes the problem of reducing Logistics service level caused by long waiting time in warehouse based on queuing theory and combined with cases. Then proposes three solutions: changing way of queuing, M/ M/1 model to optimize service speed, M/M/n model to optimize storage channel. The paper also puts forward some measures and suggestions to make up the shortage of lacking experience. Key words: Warehousing operations; Queuing theory; Service level

Many Ways to Be Lonely: Fine-Grained Characterization of Loneliness and Its Potential Changes in COVID-19

Loneliness has been associated with negative outcomes for physical and mental health. Understanding how people express and cope with various forms of loneliness is critical for early screening and targeted interventions to reduce loneliness, particularly among vulnerable groups such as young adults. To examine how different forms of loneliness and coping strategies manifest in loneliness self-disclosure, we built a dataset, FIG-Loneliness (FIne-Grained Loneliness) by using Reddit posts in two young adult-focused forums and two loneliness related forums consisting of a diverse age group. We provided annotations by trained human annotators for binary and fine-grained loneliness classifications of the posts. Trained on FIG-Loneliness, two BERT-based models were used to understand loneliness forms and authors' coping strategies in these forums. Our binary loneliness classification achieved an accuracy above 97%, and fine-grained loneliness category classification reached an average accuracy of 77% across all labeled categories. With FIG-Loneliness and model predictions, we found that loneliness expressions in the young adults related forums were distinct from other forums. Those in young adult-focused forums were more likely to express concerns pertaining to peer relationship, and were potentially more sensitive to geographical isolation impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Also, we showed that different forms of loneliness have differential use in coping strategies

Domain Adaptive Synapse Detection with Weak Point Annotations

The development of learning-based methods has greatly improved the detection of synapses from electron microscopy (EM) images. However, training a model for each dataset is time-consuming and requires extensive annotations. Additionally, it is difficult to apply a learned model to data from different brain regions due to variations in data distributions. In this paper, we present AdaSyn, a two-stage segmentation-based framework for domain adaptive synapse detection with weak point annotations. In the first stage, we address the detection problem by utilizing a segmentation-based pipeline to obtain synaptic instance masks. In the second stage, we improve model generalizability on target data by regenerating square masks to get high-quality pseudo labels. Benefiting from our high-accuracy detection results, we introduce the distance nearest principle to match paired pre-synapses and post-synapses. In the WASPSYN challenge at ISBI 2023, our method ranks the 1st place

Challenges and Social Supports of Chinese Parachute Kids in a Canadian Secondary School: A Case Study

This study investigates the experiences of Chinese parachute kids: secondary school international students who ‘parachuted’ to Canada without parental accompaniment, with a focus on the relationships between their faced challenges, social supports, and well-being. The researcher applied a qualitative case study by conducting face-to-face interviews with eight participants, aimed to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences through analyzing their narratives under the concept of Bourdieu’s capital theory. Compared to existing studies, the results indicate similar challenges faced by Chinese parachute kids. However, those who had participated in a higher standard ‘study abroad’ program enjoyed a higher degree of social support from peers and their school institutions compared to those that did not. Moreover, individual’s language skills, cultural competency, as well as social connection with peers and school were found to be positively related to their personal well-being. In the final section, suggestions for improving secondary school study-abroad programs are provided