Improving Academic English Proficiency of Chinese International Students

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) focuses on how an English for academic purposes (EAP) program launched by Vancouver Urban College (VUC; a pseudonym) can assist Chinese international students (CISs) in meeting their acculturation challenges and closing the achievement gap for studying in the Canadian academic context. This change initiative is in response to the external student demographic change in Canada and the internal context, including the organization’s vision, its mission, and the strategic plan with a joint focus on building a culturally responsive and inclusive school. A tripod of culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL), transformational leadership, and transformative leadership, grounded in equity and social justice and targeted at the unique learning needs of CISs, provides a guide to shaping the school and classroom education to live up to the school’s vision, which is reflected in its mission statement as ‘we think, we share, we change’ (Strategic Planning of VUC, 2019). The proposed solution is to develop an EAP curriculum focusing on content-based instruction (CBI) as an approach to improving the academic English literacy and intercultural competence (IC) of learners. In implementing the change, a combined framework of Cawsey et al.’s (2016) change path model and Kotter’s (1996) eight stage model of organizational change is applied to guide the process. Finally, a monitoring and evaluation plan based on Deming’s (1993) plan-do-study-act (PDSA) model will be utilized to assess the change implementation and how it can be used to strategically close the achievement gaps of CISs and immigrant students of Chinese origin

Fluid Approximation of a Call Center Model with Redials and Reconnects

In many call centers, callers may call multiple times. Some of the calls are re-attempts after abandonments (redials), and some are re-attempts after connected calls (reconnects). The combination of redials and reconnects has not been considered when making staffing decisions, while ignoring them will inevitably lead to under- or overestimation of call volumes, which results in improper and hence costly staffing decisions. Motivated by this, in this paper we study call centers where customers can abandon, and abandoned customers may redial, and when a customer finishes his conversation with an agent, he may reconnect. We use a fluid model to derive first order approximations for the number of customers in the redial and reconnect orbits in the heavy traffic. We show that the fluid limit of such a model is the unique solution to a system of three differential equations. Furthermore, we use the fluid limit to calculate the expected total arrival rate, which is then given as an input to the Erlang A model for the purpose of calculating service levels and abandonment rates. The performance of such a procedure is validated in the case of single intervals as well as multiple intervals with changing parameters

Sympathy and Punishment: Evolution of Cooperation in Public Goods Game

An important way to maintain human cooperation is punishing defection. However, since punishment is costly, how can it arise and evolve given that individuals who contribute but do not punish fare better than the punishers? This leads to a violation of causality, since the evolution of punishment is prior to the one of cooperation behaviour in evolutionary dynamics. Our public goods game computer simulations based on generalized Moran Process, show that, if there exists a \'behaviour-based sympathy\' that compensates those who punish at a personal cost, the way for the emergence and establishment of punishing behaviour is paved. In this way, the causality violation dissipates. Among humans sympathy can be expressed in many ways such as care, praise, solace, ethical support, admiration, and sometimes even adoration; in our computer simulations, we use a small amount of transfer payment to express \'behaviour-based sympathy\'. Our conclusions indicate that, there exists co-evolution of sympathy, punishment and cooperation. According to classical philosophy literature, sympathy is a key factor in morality and justice is embodied by punishment; in modern societies, both the moral norms and the judicial system, the representations of sympathy and punishment, play an essential role in stable social cooperation.Public Goods Game, Cooperation, Social Dilemma, Co-Evolution, Sympathy, Punishment

Personality Traits and Investment Styles

We collected detailed personality traits data and preferred investment styles of participants from the German population. We find a significant relationship between personality traits and styles. Then we established a personality-based style profiler based on a least-distance algorithm. We tested its out-of-sample performance. The results of AB testing show that the style profiler provides significantly better fitting style recommendations than a random recommendation. Moreover, including socio-economic characteristics increases the fit. Our results suggest that further research on wealth management could benefit from including the personality of individual investors as a crucial factor, contributing to more satisfying recommendations helping people to invest consistently over time

Critical Constructability Principles for Girder Bridge Construction in Malaysia

Implementing constructability concepts in a project can bring many benefits such as reduced project cost & duration, enhanced project quality, and improved site management. There were numerous research on the constructability concept since its introduction in late 1970. However, there are limited studies that identified the critical constructability principles for infrastructure projects. This study identified the critical design stage constructability principles for girder type river bridge construction in Malaysia. Based on extensive literature review and unstructured interviews with the experts in bridge construction, 54 constructability principles were identified. Questionnaires were distributed to professional engineers and G6 & G7 contractors in Malaysia to rate the 54 constructability principles in term of their importance or impact in enhancing the constructability of bridge construction based on 5-point Likert scale. The received 143 responses were analysed using factor analysis which is a data reduction tool of SPSS. Varimax method of orthogonal approach was adopted for factor rotation. Factor analysis had helped to generate 11 principal components or critical constructability principles. Cronbach’s Alpha reliability test also indicated good reliability of the questionnaire scale. The identified critical constructability principles can provide guidelines to the construction practitioners at the design stage to enhance the performance of bridge construction

Constructability Research Trends: A Review and Future Directions

Implementing constructability concepts in a project can bring many benefits such as reduced project cost & duration, enhanced project quality, and improved site management. There were numerous research on constructability concepts since its introduction in late 1970. However, there are limited contemporary literature to review the research on constructability in a structured way. Therefore, this paper aims to review the literature with respective to the constructability concepts. The trend of constructability development, limitations of current research, research gaps and future direction will be briefly presented. Constructability development internationally will be discussed first before the limitation of the constructability research conducted in Malaysia are presented. The literature review reveals that the constructability research in Malaysia are still limited. Apart from building projects, there is a need for more constructability studies with respect to infrastructure projects. The trend of constructability development had moved towards the use of quantitative models. For future direction, quantitative models related to infrastructure projects in Malaysia can be developed. There is a potential of the quantitative models to be embedded with Building Information Modelling (BIM) so that automated assessment is made possible