Strategies for Chinese international students to overcome the challenges of studying in the United States

Master's Project (M.Ed.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015Using current research and literature, this project discusses the challenges that Chinese international students may have while they experience cultural adjustment in the United States. In addition, this project also examines strategies for Chinese international students to smooth the cultural transition during their stay in the United States. There is research about Chinese immigrants' cultural transition and international students' transitional periods. However, there is a very limited amount of research specifically on Chinese international students' cultural adjustment in the United States. Educating the Chinese international students, educators and counselors in international institutions about the challenges of cultural transition and the strategies to overcome the challenges may potentially help these students when they arrive in the United States. The application of this project is a presentation to international office personnel, counselors who work at university counseling centers and faculty members who have a large population of Chinese international students in their classrooms. The project also offers recommendations for any professionals who work to help Chinese international students to succeed in their study in a new educational system and a new culture

Scheduling for Service Stability and Supply Chain Coordination

This dissertation studies scheduling for service stability and for supply chain coordination as well. The scheduling problems for service stability are studied from the single perspective of a firm itself, while the scheduling problems for supply chain coordination are investigated from the perspective of a supply chain. Both the studies have broad applications in real life. In the first study, several job scheduling problems are addressed, with the measure of performance being job completion time variance (CTV). CTV minimization is used to represent service stability, since it means that jobs are completed in a relative concentrated period of time. CTV minimization also conforms to the Just-in-time philosophy. Two scheduling problems are studied on multiple identical parallel machines. The one problem does not restrict the idle times of machines before their job processing, while the other does. For these two scheduling problems, desirable properties are explored and heuristic algorithms are proposed. Computational results show the excellent performances of the proposed algorithms. The third scheduling problem in the first study is considered on a single machine and from the users’ perspective rather than the system’s perspective. The performance measure is thus class-based completion time variance (CB-CTV). This problem is shown to be able to be transformed into multiple CTV problems. Therefore, the well-developed desirable properties of the CTV problem can be applied to solve the CB-CTV problem. The tradeoff between the CB-CTV problem and the CTV problem is also investigated. The second study deals with scheduling coordination in a supply chain, since supply chain coordination is increasingly critical in recent years. Usually, different standpoints prevent decision makers in a supply chain from having agreement on a certain scheduling decision. Therefore conflicts arise. In pursuit of excellent performance of the whole supply chain, coordination among decision makers is needed. In this study, the scheduling conflicts are measured and analyzed from different perspectives of decision makers, and cooperation mechanisms are proposed based on different scenarios of the relative bargaining power among decision makers. The cooperation savings are examined as well

Sorting with Robots: where to drop off the parcel?

This paper presents a method for assigning destinations to drop off points in robotic sorting systems, taking into account robot congestion

Maximizing Metapopulation Growth Rate and Biomass in Stream Networks

We consider the logistic metapopulation model over a stream network and use the metapopulation growth rate and the total biomass (of the positive equilibrium) as metrics for different aspects of population persistence. Our objective is to find distributions of resources that maximize these persistence measures. We begin our study by considering stream networks consisting of three nodes and prove that the strategy to maximize the total biomass is to concentrate all the resources in the most upstream locations. In contrast, when the diffusion rates are sufficiently small, the metapopulation growth rate is maximized when all resources are concentrated in one of the most downstream locations. These two main results are generalized to stream networks with any number of patches.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

Towards sustainability: An assessment of an urbanisation bubble in China using a hierarchical - stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis - Choquet integral method

Urbanisation bubbles have become an increasingly serious problem. Attention has been paid to the speed of urbanisation; however, the issue of quality has been neglected, particularly in the case of China. Therefore, the aim of this research is to evaluate China’s urbanisation bubbles by employing a hierarchical - stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA) - Choquet integral method. In order to highlight regional disparities, we measure the urbanisation bubbles at a provincial level. Our study aggregates the urbanisation bubble indices using the Choquet integral preference model, and considers the interactions between various indicators. Furthermore, robust ordinal regression and SMAA are applied to resolve the robustness issues associated with the entire set of weights assigned to the urbanisation bubble composite indicator. In addition, by employing a multiple criteria hierarchy process, the study aggregates urbanisation bubble indices not only at the comprehensive level, but also at the intermediate levels of the hierarchy. Our findings suggest that the ranking of urbanisation bubbles is positively related to the level of regional development. This study contributes to the evaluation of regional urbanisation and sustainable development

Impacts of supply disruptions and customer differentiation in a partial-backordering inventory system

In this paper, we study a single-product inventory system which involves a supplier, a retailer, and differentiated customers. The supplier provides products to the retailer which in turn sells products to its customers. The supplier is unreliable and is subject to random disruptions. The retailer adopts a periodic-review inventory policy, under which the retailer reviews its inventory position every a fixed period of time and decides whether a replenishment is needed or not. Partial backordering is applied when a stockout occurs. That is, under the situations of stockouts, customers can choose either to backorder products or to abandon the purchase. Customers are segmented into two classes according to their backordering probabilities. The customer class with high backordering probability is provided with high priority to receive backorders. In this paper we allow more than one outstanding orders to exist, which is not the case in the previous literature. We develop a simulation model for such an inventory system and investigate the impacts of supply disruptions and customer differentiation on this inventory system

Existence of Three Positive Solutions for m-Point Discrete Boundary Value Problems with p-Laplacian

We consider the multi-point discrete boundary value problem with one-dimensional p-Laplacian operator Δ(ϕp(Δu(t−1))+q(t)f(t,u(t),Δu(t))=0, t∈{1,…,n−1} subject to the boundary conditions: u(0)=0, u(n)=∑i=1m−2aiu(ξi), where ϕp(s)=|s|p−2s,p>1,ξi∈{2,…,n−2} with 1<ξ1<⋯<ξm−2<n−1 and ai∈(0,1),0<∑i=1m−2ai<1. Using a new fixed point theorem due to Avery and Peterson, we study the existence of at least three positive solutions to the above boundary value problem