Causes and consequences of public and private acculturation preferences: views of minority and majority group members in three countries

This thesis explores antecedents and effects of public and private acculturation preferences of minority and majority group members. By differentiating between acculturation in public domains (outside one’s home) and private domains (at home), and by reporting experiments, longitudinal data, and qualitative data, this thesis provides fuller insights in the acculturation process than previous literature, which has predominantly been correlational and lacked domain specificity. Chapter one provides a critical overview of the acculturation literature. Chapter two describes the results of three experiments investigating domain specificity in meta-perceptions of acculturation. In Study 1, we manipulated how Muslims were perceived to acculturate in public domains, and investigated how this affected own acculturation preferences and affective reactions of British majority members. Study 2 was similar, but perceived private acculturation preferences were manipulated too. In Study 3, we examined how the public and private acculturation preferences which British majority members were perceived to have affected own acculturation preferences and affective reactions of Muslim minority members. Chapter three presents Studies 4 and 5 which experimentally investigated the effect of perceived ingroup norms about acculturation preferences for public and private life domains. Dependent variables were majority members’ own acculturation preferences for public and private domains, their investment in acculturation, and positive affect felt towards their own ingroup members. This was studied in both England and Chile. Chapter four looks into effects of public and private acculturation of Muslim minority members on their well-being and intergroup emotions. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data are presented from two samples: Muslims in England (Study 6) and Muslims in the Netherlands (Study 7). Chapter five reports interviews with fourteen Muslims living in England in which they explain their reasons for their public and private acculturation choices (Study 8). Chapter six summarises the findings, and discusses implications and directions for future research

The role of input on the development of coverb hai2 (at) locative construction in young Cantonese-speaking children

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.Also available in print.A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2005.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Enabling Additional Parallelism in Asynchronous JavaScript Applications (Artifact)

JavaScript is a single-threaded programming language, so asynchronous programming is practiced out of necessity to ensure that applications remain responsive in the presence of user input or interactions with file systems and networks. However, many JavaScript applications execute in environments that do exhibit concurrency by, e.g., interacting with multiple or concurrent servers, or by using file systems managed by operating systems that support concurrent I/O. In this paper, we demonstrate that JavaScript programmers often schedule asynchronous I/O operations suboptimally, and that reordering such operations may yield significant performance benefits. Concretely, we define a static side-effect analysis that can be used to determine how asynchronous I/O operations can be refactored so that asynchronous I/O-related requests are made as early as possible, and so that the results of these requests are awaited as late as possible. While our static analysis is potentially unsound, we have not encountered any situations where it suggested reorderings that change program behavior. We evaluate the refactoring on 20 applications that perform file- or network-related I/O. For these applications, we observe average speedups ranging between 0.99% and 53.6% for the tests that execute refactored code (8.1% on average)

Spectral Theory of Time Dispersive and Dissipative Systems

We study linear time dispersive and dissipative systems. Very often such systems are not conservative and the standard spectral theory can not be applied. We develop a mathematically consistent framework allowing (i) to constructively determine if a given time dispersive system can be extended to a conservative one; (ii) to construct that very conservative system -- which we show is essentially unique. We illustrate the method by applying it to the spectral analysis of time dispersive dielectrics and the damped oscillator with retarded friction. In particular, we obtain a conservative extension of the Maxwell equations which is equivalent to the original Maxwell equations for a dispersive and lossy dielectric medium.Comment: LaTeX, 57 Pages, incorporated revisions corresponding with published versio

Enabling Additional Parallelism in Asynchronous JavaScript Applications

JavaScript is a single-threaded programming language, so asynchronous programming is practiced out of necessity to ensure that applications remain responsive in the presence of user input or interactions with file systems and networks. However, many JavaScript applications execute in environments that do exhibit concurrency by, e.g., interacting with multiple or concurrent servers, or by using file systems managed by operating systems that support concurrent I/O. In this paper, we demonstrate that JavaScript programmers often schedule asynchronous I/O operations suboptimally, and that reordering such operations may yield significant performance benefits. Concretely, we define a static side-effect analysis that can be used to determine how asynchronous I/O operations can be refactored so that asynchronous I/O-related requests are made as early as possible, and so that the results of these requests are awaited as late as possible. While our static analysis is potentially unsound, we have not encountered any situations where it suggested reorderings that change program behavior. We evaluate the refactoring on 20 applications that perform file- or network-related I/O. For these applications, we observe average speedups ranging between 0.99% and 53.6% for the tests that execute refactored code (8.1% on average)