Chinese and Japanese: The Changing Values of "Flexible Capital"

Our project hinged on the ability of the undergraduate advanced Chinese and Japanese students at the UIUC to describe, during short interviews, the value of their respective languages in economic terms. We found that the undergraduate students involved in learning third-year Chinese and Japanese were very well aware of the changing economic reasons for learning their languages. Our hypothesis that Japanese students were more motivated by popular Japanese media while the Chinese students were more motivated by economic reasons was borne out by our findings, though to say that our hypothesis was perfect would be a gross generalization not cognizant of the outlying data and the limitations of our project.unpublishe

Pointwise Behavior of the Linearized Boltzmann Equation on Torus

We study the pointwise behavior of the linearized Boltzmann equation on torus for non-smooth initial perturbation. The result reveals both the fluid and kinetic aspects of this model. The fluid-like waves are constructed as part of the long-wave expansion in the spectrum of the Fourier mode for the space variable, the time decay rate of the fluid-like waves depends on the size of the domain. We design a Picard-type iteration for constructing the increasingly regular kinetic-like waves, which are carried by the transport equations and have exponential time decay rate. Moreover, the mixture lemma plays an important role in constructing the kinetic-like waves, we supply a new proof of this lemma to avoid constructing explicit solution of the damped transport equation

Consent, Rights, and Intellectual Property: Navigating Language Documentation, Archiving, and Research

Colang 2016 Workshop Syllabus Workshop Title: Consent, Rights, and Intellectual Property: Navigating Language Documentation, Archiving, and Research2015 NSF/BCS 1500841: CoLang 2016: Institute on Collaborative Language ResearchNon

Using appreciative inquiry to explore the professional practice of a lecturer in higher education: moving towards life-centric practice

This paper reports on a strategy for exploring the life-centric practice of a lecturer in Higher Education. The initiative for this inquiry arose out of the realisation that there did not appear to be positive, heart-lifting stories in a lecturer’s current teaching experiences. Using an appreciative eye and supported by a critical friend, life-giving experiences were ‘stalked’ from the past. The hope in this endeavour was to find greater meaning in the lecturer’s best professional practice. Using an Appreciative Inquiry approach, this endeavour rejuvenated the lecturer’s professional practice. As life-centric stories were recalled, provocative propositions were constructed that became the basis of a personalised action plan for future professional practice. This paper outlines the nature of the journey and the heartfelt discoveries

Congruence conditions, parcels, and Tutte polynomials of graphs and matroids

Let $G$ be a matrix and $M(G)$ be the matroid defined by linear dependence on the set $E$ of column vectors of $G.$ Roughly speaking, a parcel is a subset of pairs $(f,g)$ of functions defined on $E$ to an Abelian group $A$ satisfying a coboundary condition (that $f-g$ is a flow over $A$ relative to $G$) and a congruence condition (that the size of the supports of $f$ and $g$ satisfy some congruence condition modulo an integer). We prove several theorems of the form: a linear combination of sizes of parcels, with coefficients roots of unity, equals an evaluation of the Tutte polynomial of $M(G)$ at a point $(\lambda-1,x-1)$ on the complex hyperbola $(\lambda - 1)(x-1) = |A|.