Representing language, culture and citizenship to minoritised ethnic groups: the teaching of Mandarin Chinese to Mongolian learners as a second language in China since 1912

My PhD study investigates the under-researched history of teaching Mandarin Chinese as a second language to Mongolian learners within China since 1912, and its implications for the present day. This research makes a novel contribution to understanding how a national language and national identities are promulgated to a minoritised ethnic group over time. Mandarin teaching to Mongolian learners is revealed as a site where different representations of the Chinese nation contest and negotiate with one another, shaped by the power relations between Mongolian and Han. I employ critical discourse analysis to examine a wide range of Mandarin Chinese language textbooks for Mongolian learners issued by the Republican (1912-1949) and People’s Republic of China’s governments (1949-present) to explore the changes in expectations of Chinese cultural knowledge and values to be taught, in particular in terms of Chinese history and citizenship. The findings show that the Chinese cultural knowledge and values conveyed through the textbooks is given different emphases at different times, but it frequently serves as a tool serving the interests of the governments to reproduce official understandings of Chinese national identities, with Mongolian cultural features being often neutralised and/or made subservient to Han-dominant Chinese national values. In addition, to explore how the dominance of Han culture and values in the textbooks has been embraced and/or challenged by Mongolian elites in the early twentieth century and Mongolian teachers of Mandarin Chinese in the present, two approaches are adopted. First, a historical linguistic analysis of how Mandarin Chinese pronunciation is presented to Mongolians in a dictionary compiled by a Mongolian official named Khaisan in 1917 is conducted, when the basis for a standard Chinese was still being debated. This part of the study reveals that the diverse linguistic sources that Khaisan drew on challenge the monolingual Han native speakership ideology. Second, the historical textual analysis is augmented by data from two months’ field work in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia in 2018. There, I conducted semi-structured interviews, surveys and classroom observations of the Mongolians and Han who work in the field of Mandarin teaching to Mongolian learners to explore their understandings of the Mandarin language and views on what cultural knowledge and values to teach. The data highlight how different views of Mandarin Chinese teaching, as a communicative tool, as linguistic and cultural capital, and as an identity marker, are negotiated by Mongolians today. Looking into the past and present impact of Mandarin Chinese teaching on Mongolian ethnic identity, my work is the first to combine historical textbook analysis, historical linguistics, and ethnography. It makes an important contribution to the field of the History of Language Learning and Teaching, which has thus far been heavily skewed to the history of language education in Europe. Second, it addresses a gap in bilingual education studies, where little attention has been paid to the teaching of the majority language that Mongolians in the past and at present as the actors to define the knowledge of Chinese to teach. Third, my analysis of strategies for incorporating Mongolians into China are relevant to other non-Han studies such as Tibetans and Uyghurs and ethnic minority studies in different political and educational contexts

KV-match: A Subsequence Matching Approach Supporting Normalization and Time Warping [Extended Version]

The volume of time series data has exploded due to the popularity of new applications, such as data center management and IoT. Subsequence matching is a fundamental task in mining time series data. All index-based approaches only consider raw subsequence matching (RSM) and do not support subsequence normalization. UCR Suite can deal with normalized subsequence match problem (NSM), but it needs to scan full time series. In this paper, we propose a novel problem, named constrained normalized subsequence matching problem (cNSM), which adds some constraints to NSM problem. The cNSM problem provides a knob to flexibly control the degree of offset shifting and amplitude scaling, which enables users to build the index to process the query. We propose a new index structure, KV-index, and the matching algorithm, KV-match. With a single index, our approach can support both RSM and cNSM problems under either ED or DTW distance. KV-index is a key-value structure, which can be easily implemented on local files or HBase tables. To support the query of arbitrary lengths, we extend KV-match to KV-match$_{DP}$, which utilizes multiple varied-length indexes to process the query. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets. The results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.Comment: 13 page

Floor-SP: Inverse CAD for Floorplans by Sequential Room-wise Shortest Path

This paper proposes a new approach for automated floorplan reconstruction from RGBD scans, a major milestone in indoor mapping research. The approach, dubbed Floor-SP, formulates a novel optimization problem, where room-wise coordinate descent sequentially solves dynamic programming to optimize the floorplan graph structure. The objective function consists of data terms guided by deep neural networks, consistency terms encouraging adjacent rooms to share corners and walls, and the model complexity term. The approach does not require corner/edge detection with thresholds, unlike most other methods. We have evaluated our system on production-quality RGBD scans of 527 apartments or houses, including many units with non-Manhattan structures. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate a significant performance boost over the current state-of-the-art. Please refer to our project website http://jcchen.me/floor-sp/ for code and data.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, accepted to ICCV 201

Measured Albedo in the Wild: Filling the Gap in Intrinsics Evaluation

Intrinsic image decomposition and inverse rendering are long-standing problems in computer vision. To evaluate albedo recovery, most algorithms report their quantitative performance with a mean Weighted Human Disagreement Rate (WHDR) metric on the IIW dataset. However, WHDR focuses only on relative albedo values and often fails to capture overall quality of the albedo. In order to comprehensively evaluate albedo, we collect a new dataset, Measured Albedo in the Wild (MAW), and propose three new metrics that complement WHDR: intensity, chromaticity and texture metrics. We show that existing algorithms often improve WHDR metric but perform poorly on other metrics. We then finetune different algorithms on our MAW dataset to significantly improve the quality of the reconstructed albedo both quantitatively and qualitatively. Since the proposed intensity, chromaticity, and texture metrics and the WHDR are all complementary we further introduce a relative performance measure that captures average performance. By analysing existing algorithms we show that there is significant room for improvement. Our dataset and evaluation metrics will enable researchers to develop algorithms that improve albedo reconstruction. Code and Data available at: https://measuredalbedo.github.io/Comment: Accepted into ICCP202

Ion Selectivity and Stability Enhancement of SPEEK/Lignin Membrane for Vanadium Redox Flow Battery: The Degree of Sulfonation Effect

A membrane of high ion selectivity, high stability, and low cost is desirable for vanadium redox flow battery (VRB). In this study, a composite membrane is formed by blending the sulfonated poly (ether ether ketone) with lignin (SPEEK/lignin), and optimized by tailoring the degree of sulfonation. The incorporation of lignin into the SPEEK matrix provides more proton transport pathway and meanwhile adjusts the water channel to repulse vanadium ions. The VRB cells assembled with the composite membranes exhibit high coulombic efficiency (~99.27%) and impressive energy efficiency (~82.75%). The cells maintain a discharge capacity of ~95% after 100 cycles and ~85% after 200 cycles at 120 mA cm−2, much higher than the commercial Nafion 212. The SPEEK/lignin composite membranes are promising for application in VRB system

Three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics modeling of near-shore current flows over rough topographic surface

In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) numerical model based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) approach was developed to simulate the near-shore current flows over a rough topographic surface in the coastal area, where the flows are shallow and demonstrate strong turbulent characteristics. The numerical program is based on the open-source code SPHysics (http://www.sphysics.org), and two major improvements are made to treat the turbulence and rough boundary effects: A modified sub-particle-scale (SPS) eddy viscosity model is developed to address the turbulence transfer of flows, and a drag force equation is included in the momentum equations to account for the influence of roughness element on the bed and lateral boundaries. The computed results of flow velocity, shear stress, and free surface characteristics are compared with the laboratory measurements for a variety of test conditions. It has shown that the present SPH model can accurately simulate 3D-free surface near-shore current flows over a realistic topography with roughness

Production of cold-adapted cellulase by Verticillium sp. isolated from Antarctic soils

Background: Cellulose can be converted to ethanol by simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF). The difference between the optimal temperature of cellulase and microbial fermentation, however, has been identified as the critical problem with SSF. In this study, one fungal strain (AnsX1) with high cellulase activity at low temperature was isolated from Antarctic soils and identified as Verticillium sp. by morphological and molecular analyses. Results: The biochemical properties of crude AnsX1 cellulase samples were studied by filter paper cellulase assay. The maximum cellulase activity was achieved at low temperature in an acidic environment with addition of metal ions. Furthermore, AnsX1 cellulase demonstrated 54-63% enzymatic activity at ethanol concentrations of 5-10%. AnsX1 cellulase production was influenced by inoculum size, carbon and nitrogen sources, and elicitors. The optimal culture conditions for AnsX1 cellulase production were 5% inoculum, wheat bran as carbon source, (NH4)2SO4 as nitrogen source, and sorbitol added in the medium. Conclusions: Our present work has potential to enable the development of an economic and efficient cold-adapted cellulase system for bioconversion of lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels in future

Sorting nexin 12 interacts with BACE1 and regulates BACE1-mediated APP processing

Background: beta-site APP cleaving enzyme 1 (BACE1) cleaves beta-amyloid precursor protein (APP) to initiate the production of beta-amyloid (A beta), the prime culprit in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Dysregulation of the intracellular trafficking of BACE1 may affect A beta generation, contributing to AD pathology. In this study, we investigated whether BACE1 trafficking and BACE1-mediated APP processing/A beta generation are affected by sorting nexin 12 (SNX12), a member of the sorting nexin (SNX) family that is involved in protein trafficking regulation. Results: Herein, we find that SNX12 is widely expressed in brain tissues and is mainly localized in the early endosomes. Overexpression of SNX12 does not affect the steady-state levels of APP, BACE1 or gamma-secretase components, but dramatically reduces the levels of A beta, soluble APP beta and APP beta-carboxyl terminal fragments. Downregulation of SNX12 has the opposite effects. Modulation of SNX12 levels does not affect gamma-secretase activity or in vitro beta-secretase activity. Further studies reveal that SNX12 interacts with BACE1 and downregulation of SNX12 accelerates BACE1 endocytosis and decreases steady-state level of cell surface BACE1. Finally, we find that the SNX12 protein level is dramatically decreased in the brain of AD patients as compared to that of controls. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that SNX12 can regulate the endocytosis of BACE1 through their interaction, thereby affecting beta-processing of APP for A beta production. The reduced level of SNX12 in AD brains suggests that an alteration of SNX12 may contribute to AD pathology. Therefore, inhibition of BACE1-mediated beta-processing of APP by regulating SNX12 might serve as an alternative strategy in developing an AD intervention.Alzheimer's Association; National Natural Science Foundation of China [30973150, 81161120496, 81000540]; 973 Prophase Project [2010CB535004]; Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China [2009J06022, 2010J01235]; Program for New Century Excellent Talents in Universities (NCET); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities; Fok Ying Tung Education Foundatio