Intercultural Communication between Home Students and International Students

Research has consistently shown that international students have reported experiencing difficulties socializing with home students, feeling alienated and lonely, and wanting to have more local friends. A substantial body of research has studied international students’ intercultural communication experience with home students. However, since host society and social interaction with home nationals are important factors influencing international students’ acculturation, it is important to study intercultural communication from home students’s perspective. This literature review aims to discuss the limitations and gaps in intercultural communication literature and provide an overview of research pertaining to anxiety-uncertainty, ethnocentrism, intercultural communication competence, and intercultural contact

East Asian International Students\u27 Interdependent Happiness: The Role of Acculturative Stress, Dialectical Thinking, and Collectivistic Coping

The purpose of this study was to understand the relationships among East Asian international students cultural construals of stress (i.e., acculturative stress), psychological wellbeing (i.e., interdependence happiness), cognitive appraisal (i.e., dialectical thinking), and coping skills (i.e., collectivistic coping: seeking social support and forbearance) using Chun, Moos, and Cronkite’s (2006) stress and coping model as the theoretical framework. This study was the first attempt to propose a theoretical framework elucidating the possible relationships among these variables through a cultural lens. A total of 313 self-identified East Asian international students participated in the online-based survey. Using a hierarchical regression, the results revealed that acculturative stress demonstrated the largest effect size among all the independent variables in explaining interdependent happiness among East Asian international students. Additionally, seeking social support as East Asian international students’ collectivistic coping style was found to be a positive contributor; whereas, dialectical thinking contributed negatively to interdependent happiness among East Asian international students. Finally, the higher levels of dialectical thinking, the stronger the negative association was between acculturative stress and interdependent happiness among East Asian international students. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are presented. Implications for counseling psychology practice with East Asian international students are also discussed

Object Discovery From a Single Unlabeled Image by Mining Frequent Itemset With Multi-scale Features

TThe goal of our work is to discover dominant objects in a very general setting where only a single unlabeled image is given. This is far more challenge than typical co-localization or weakly-supervised localization tasks. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective pattern mining-based method, called Object Location Mining (OLM), which exploits the advantages of data mining and feature representation of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we first convert the feature maps from a pre-trained CNN model into a set of transactions, and then discovers frequent patterns from transaction database through pattern mining techniques. We observe that those discovered patterns, i.e., co-occurrence highlighted regions, typically hold appearance and spatial consistency. Motivated by this observation, we can easily discover and localize possible objects by merging relevant meaningful patterns. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks demonstrate that OLM achieves competitive localization performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our approach compared with unsupervised saliency detection methods and achieves competitive results on seven benchmark datasets. Moreover, we conduct experiments on fine-grained classification to show that our proposed method can locate the entire object and parts accurately, which can benefit to improving the classification results significantly

Characterization of Laser-Resistant Port Wine Stain Blood Vessels Using In Vivo Reflectance Confocal Microscopy.

Background and objectivesPort wine stain (PWS) is a congenital vascular malformation of the human skin. Laser is the treatment of choice for PWS. Laser-resistant PWS is one crucial factor accounting for inadequate treatment outcome, which needs to be fully characterized. This study aims to quantitatively characterize the morphology of laser-resistant PWS blood vessels in the upper papillary dermis using in vivo reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM).Study design/materials and methodsA total of 42 PWS subjects receiving laser treatment from August 2016 through July 2018 were enrolled into this study. Thirty-three subjects had facial PWS; nine had extremity PWS. All subject's PWS received multiplex 585/1,064 nm laser treatment. RCM images were taken before and after treatment. The density, diameter, blood flow, and depth of PWS blood vessels were analyzed.ResultsWe found 44.4% PWS on the extremities (four out of nine subjects) were laser-resistant, which was significantly higher (P < 0.001) when compared with those PWS on the face (15.2%, 5 out of 33 subjects). The laser-resistant facial PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow (1.35 ± 0.26 U vs. 0.89 ± 0.22 U, P < 0.001), larger blood vessel diameters (109.60 ± 18.24 µm vs. 84.36 ± 24.04 µm, P = 0.033) and were located deeper in the skin (106.01 ± 13.87 µm vs. 87.82 ± 12.57 µm, P < 0.001) in the skin when compared with laser-responsive PWS on the face. The average PWS blood vessel density (17.01 ± 4.63/mm2 vs. 16.61 ± 4.44/mm2 , P = 0.857) was not correlated to the laser resistance.ConclusionsLaser-resistant PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow, larger diameters, and were located deeper in the skin. RCM can be a valuable tool for a prognostic evaluation on laser-resistant lesions before treatment, thereby providing guidance for tailored laser treatment protocols, which may improve the therapeutic outcome. The limitations for this study include relative small sample size and acquisitions of different blood vessels before and after 2 months of treatment. Lasers Surg. Med. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Analysis and hardware implementation of synchronization methods for stream ciphers

In this thesis, we investigate two synchronization methods for stream ciphers. The first is statistical cipher feedback (SCFB) mode, which is a recently proposed mode of operation for block ciphers. The other is the marker-based mode, which is the synchronous stream cipher using "marker" to regain synchronization. SCFB mode is a hybrid of OFB mode and CFB mode; hence, it has a high throughput and the capability of self-synchronizing. The marker-based synchronous stream cipher is also able to obtain synchronization under limited circumstances. -- In this thesis, SCFB mode and the marker-based mode are both implemented in digital hardware targeting the FPGA technology. The device we have used is the Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA. Commonly, SCFB mode is implemented by using the block cipher, AES, as the keystream generator; however, in our research, we use the stream cipher, Grain-128, as the keystream generator for SCFB mode implementation. The designed system structure and synthesis results of the two modes are given in this thesis. Throughout our research, VHDL code and Modelsim PE Student Edition 6.5d are used to design and simulate the functionality of our systems. The behavior level description is synthesized by using Xilinx ISE Webpack 10.1 tool and the .bit stream which is used to configure FPGA board is generated. The designed system is run on the Digilent Nexys II FPGA board and tested. To download the .bit stream on to the FPGA board and transfer data between the computer and FPGA, the Digilent Adept Suite tool is used. -- Through the FPGA hardware implementation, we obtain that SCFB mode configured for a stream cipher, Grain-128, can run at the speed of 89Mbps on a real FPGA and an efficiency of SCFB mode is 100%. The marker-based mode can reach the speed of 113 Mbps and has an efficiency of 94%. Although the system of marker-based mode is a little faster and has less hardware complexity than SCFB mode, it is limited in its synchronization recovery. In contrast, SCFB mode can regain synchronization for any number of bit slips. Hence, SCFB mode is more suitable for high speed physical layer security. -- The performance analysis of SCFB mode and marker-based mode is also provided with respect to characteristics of synchronization recovery delay (SRD) and error propagation factor (EPF). In particular, through the simulation of SRD and EPF versus varying sync patterns, we have found the best sync pattern format for SCFB mode. The best sync patterns are uncorrelated, that is, the shifted version of the sync pattern do not match the bits from the original sync pattern. In our research, we have used the sequence "10000000" as the sync pattern for SCFB mode implementation and as the marker for marker-based synchronous stream cipher implementation