BBR-induced Stark shifts and level broadening in helium atom

The precise calculations of blackbody radiation (BBR)-induced Stark shifts and depopulation rates for low-lying states of helium atom with the use of variational approach are presented. An effect of the BBR-induced induced Stark-mixing of energy levels is considered. It is shown that this effect leads to a significant reduction of lifetimes of helium excited states. As a consequence the influence of Stark-mixing effect on the decay rates of metastable states in helium is discussed in context of formation processes of the cosmic microwave background

Cash Demand and Financing Decisions

Recent literature starts to focus on the effects of the urgency of cash demand on the choice of financing sources. Extant studies use data from the U.S. and conclude that firms use debt financing to meet immediate cash demand and equity financing to meet longer-term cash demand. Using data from China, this paper uncovers opposite findings: Firms are more likely to use equity financing to meet immediate cash demand and debt financing to meet cash demand in longer terms. We discuss the possible mechanisms behind the pattern

An On-line Questionnaire Survey on Students’ Views and Teachers’ Practices in Corrective Feedback in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages

By conducting an on-line questionnaire survey, the article compared 97 international students’ views with 23 Chinese teachers’ practices on 8 issues in corrective feedback (CF) in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages (TCSOL). Results revealed that students’ views and teachers’ practices conformed to each other in cognition of committing verbal errors, and in whether to correct; that they were mostly incongruent with each other in what to correct; that they were congruent with each other in peer correction, but not in teachers’ correction or self-correction; that they coincided with each other in indirect correction, but not in direct one, nor in immediate correction or the maximum correction frequency in one class; and that CF mainly generated positive psychological effects and better learning on students, but its pedagogical efficacy was not evidently approved by the teachers. This research aimed at gaining a deeper insight into the effectiveness of CF in TCSOL to improve the quality of TCSOL