Implementing the Rabat Commitment: The Development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) as a Pedagogical Framework in a Chinese Educational Context.

Globalization has led to an increasingly interconnected and integrated world on a scale unparalleled in human history. The convergence of cultures and civilizations within this ever-shrinking world is contrasted with the emergence of entities and ideologies that seek to diverge from this common thread of humanity, to dam the tide of globalization in their aspirations to return to nostalgic perceptions of ways before; the world may have become smaller, but it has become ever more fractious. Developing intercultural education through ICC remains at the forefront of both international and national policy agendas: from the United Nations to the Chinese Government, the need to implement ICC within institutions and classrooms and the pressing need to produce interculturally-competent individuals have become key determinants in driving educational policies and guidelines, from the Sustainable Development Goals to the Education 2030 Agenda, from the Community of Shared Future for Mankind to the Belt and Road Initiative. This thesis aims to examine the potential of a Chinese University to develop and implement ICC within the context of English as a foreign language courses for Chinese undergraduate students primarily majoring in STEM fields. This research aims to establish understandings of the current state of intercultural education in China, including policy, theory, and practice – which would yield insights on how ICC is conceptualized and potentially implemented by stakeholders within the Chinese higher educational sector. Using an exploratory-triangulation design, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from one Chinese Double-First Class University. Findings were analyzed and triangulated to form a comprehensive picture of practical perspectives pertaining to intercultural education, which were subsequently compared with current political and theoretical conceptualizations of both ICC and the interculturally-competent learner. Findings and subsequent analysis show that within the Chinese context via College English courses, ICC development is both feasible and implementable, despite areas where Chinese understandings of intercultural competence have diverged substantially from established Anglophone models and assumptions. Realization of the potential for ICC within Chinese higher education requires adaptation of current models and assumptions of ICC to the realities of the Chinese higher educational context, including the transformation of prevailing models into actionable frameworks for real-world implementation in the College English classroom

A City-Scale ITS-G5 Network for Next-Generation Intelligent Transportation Systems: Design Insights and Challenges

As we move towards autonomous vehicles, a reliable Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication framework becomes of paramount importance. In this paper we present the development and the performance evaluation of a real-world vehicular networking testbed. Our testbed, deployed in the heart of the City of Bristol, UK, is able to exchange sensor data in a V2X manner. We will describe the testbed architecture and its operational modes. Then, we will provide some insight pertaining the firmware operating on the network devices. The system performance has been evaluated under a series of large-scale field trials, which have proven how our solution represents a low-cost high-quality framework for V2X communications. Our system managed to achieve high packet delivery ratios under different scenarios (urban, rural, highway) and for different locations around the city. We have also identified the instability of the packet transmission rate while using single-core devices, and we present some future directions that will address that.Comment: Accepted for publication to AdHoc-Now 201

Renewable electricity generation and transmission network developments in light of public opposition: Insights from Ireland. ESRI Working Paper No. 653 March 2020

This paper analyses how people’s attitudes towards onshore wind power and overhead transmission lines affect the costoptimal development of electricity generation mixes, under a high renewable energy policy. For that purpose, we use a power systems generation and transmission expansion planning model, combined with information on public attitudes towards energy infrastructure on the island of Ireland. Overall, households have a positive attitude towards onshore wind power but their willingness to accept wind farms near their homes tends to be low. Opposition to overhead transmission lines is even greater. This can lead to a substantial increase in the costs of expanding the power system. In the Irish case, costs escalate by more than 4.3% when public opposition is factored into the constrained optimisation of power generation and grid expansion planning across the island. This is mainly driven by the compounded effects of higher capacity investments in more expensive technologies such as offshore wind and solar photovoltaic to compensate for lower levels of onshore wind generation and grid reinforcements. The results also reveal the effect of public opposition on the value of onshore wind, via shadow prices. The higher the level of public opposition, the higher the shadow value of onshore wind. And, this starkly differs across regions: regions with more wind resource or closest to major demand centres have the highest shadow prices. The shadow costs can guide policy makers when designing incentive mechanisms to garner public support for onshore wind installations

Ultrafast response of surface electromagnetic waves in an aluminum film perforated with subwavelength hole arrays

The ultrafast dynamics of surface electromagnetic waves photogenerated on aluminum film perforated with subwavelength holes array was studied in the visible spectral range by the technique of transient photomodulation with 100 fs time resolution. We observed a pronounced blueshift of the resonant transmission band that reveals the important role of plasma attenuation in the optical response of nanohole arrays. The blueshift is inconsistent with plasmonic mechanism of extraordinary transmission and points to the crucial role of interference in the formation of transmission bands. The transient photomodulation spectra were successfully modeled within the Boltzmann equation approach for the electron-phonon relaxation dynamics, involving non-equilibrium hot electrons and quasi-equilibrium phonons.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure