CHINESE IMMIGRANT FAMILIES’ EDUCATIONAL EXPECTATIONS: A MULTIPLE CASE STUDY

Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations are usually characterized as one of the most important reasons for Chinese students’ educational attainment and achievement. However, the understanding of the nature and formation of Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations is limited. It is important to examine Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations to gain a better understanding of their living and schooling experiences in Canada, in light of the fact that Chinese immigrants are one of the fastest growing ethnic minority group in Canada. This research is a qualitative multiple case study of twelve selected Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations. The research purposes include: to give detailed description and interpretation of Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations; to identify and analyze the factors affecting the formation of educational expectations in Chinese immigrant families; and to explore and summarize Chinese parents’ and children’s plans and strategies to fulfill their educational expectations. Semi-structured in-depth interviews was the main method to collect the data including the voices both from Chinese immigrant parents and children. I analyzed the data in three phases: refining and open coding, building categories and themes, and cross-case comparison and analytical generalization. The data were presented in six categories covering Chinese immigrant families’ experiences from the general living experiences of immigration to the detailed schooling experiences in Canada and then to their specific thoughts regarding educational expectations. The findings of this study revealed the complexity and variability in how educational expectations were constructed in Chinese immigrant families’ life course of immigration. There were two levels of meanings included in Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations: the specific expectations regarding children’s academic achievement and the general expectations regarding what kind of people children should become. Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations were affected by different factors: Chinese cultural values, acculturation gap, parents’ life experiences and perception of Canadian society, family’s social status, age of immigration, length of residence, immigrant status, gender, personalities, and peer influence. Different factors and different combinations of these factors would influence Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations in different ways. How Chinese immigrant parents transmitted their educational expectations to their children and actualized the expectations through parenting had an enormous impact on children’s eventual school performance and academic achievement. Chinese immigrant families’ cultural identification and acculturation were the most salient elements to explain how they formed their educational expectations and their practices to fulfill the expectations in Canada. Chinese immigrant families tried transplanting instead of uprooting Chinese culture, and acculturating instead of assimilating into Western culture. Chinese immigrant families chose to lean towards Chinese or Western culture according to specific situations and personal perceptions. Folk theory of Chinese immigrant families’ educational expectations was constructed in Chinese cultural model because the way Chinese immigrant parents and children “see” things and “do” things regarding educational issues in Canada were strongly influenced by Chinese cultural model. Implications for policy makers and educators were presented in the following aspects: improve the connections between parents and schools through multiple conversation channels and partnerships; promote a variety of occupation choices in different ethnic populations; pay more attention to Chinese immigrant students’ psychological health and well-being; and provide instructions that are meaningful and affirming to the cultural identities of students with diverse immigrant backgrounds. Future research directions were suggested concerning what might be done to continue improving the understanding of immigrants’ educational expectations in a wider and deeper sense

Effect of pyramiding Bt and CpTI genes on resistance of cotton to Helicoverpa armigera (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) under laboratory and field conditions

Transgenic cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) varieties, adapted to China, have been bred that express two genes for resistance to insects. the Cry1Ac gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Berliner) (Bt), and a trypsin inhibitor gene from cowpea (CpTI). Effectiveness of the double gene modification in conferring resistance to cotton bollworm, Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), was studied in laboratory and field experiments. In each experiment, performance of Bt+CpTI cotton was compared with Bt cotton and to a conventional nontransgenic variety. Larval survival was lower on both types of transgenic variety, compared with the conventional cotton. Survival of first-, second-, and third-stage larvae was lower on Bt+CpTI cotton than on Bt cotton. Plant structures differed in level of resistance, and these differences were similar on Bt and Bt+CpTI cotton. Likewise, seasonal trends in level of resistance in different plant structures were similar in Bt and Bt+CpTI cotton. Both types of transgenic cotton interfered with development of sixth-stage larvae to adults, and no offspring was produced by H. armigera that fed on Bt or Bt+CpTI cotton from the sixth stage onward. First-, second-, and third-stage larvae spent significantly less time feeding on transgenic cotton than on conventional cotton, and the reduction in feeding time was significantly greater on Bt+CpTI cotton than on Bt cotton. Food conversion efficiency was lower on transgenic varieties than on conventional cotton, but there was no significant difference between Bt and Bt+CpTI cotton. In 3-yr field experimentation, bollworm densities were greatly suppressed on transgenic as compared with conventional cotton, but no significant differences between Bt and Bt+CpTI cotton were found. Overall, the results from laboratory work indicate that introduction of the CpTI gene in Bt cotton raises some components of resistance in cotton against H. armigera, but enhanced control of H. armigera under field conditions, due to expression of the CpTI gene, was not demonstrate

A words-of-interest model of sketch representation for image retrieval

In this paper we propose a method for sketch-based image retrieval. Sketch is a magical medium which is capable of conveying semantic messages for user. It’s in accordance with user’s cognitive psychology to retrieve images with sketch. In order to narrow down the semantic gap between the user and the images in database, we preprocess all the images into sketches by the coherent line drawing algorithm. During the process of sketches extraction, saliency maps are used to filter out the redundant background information, while preserve the important semantic information. We use a variant of Words-of-Interest model to retrieve relevant images for the user according to the query. Words-of-Interest (WoI) model is based on Bag-ofvisual Words (BoW) model, which has been proven successfully for information retrieval. Bag-of-Words ignores the spatial relationships among visual words, which are important for sketch representation. Our method takes advantage of the spatial information of the query to select words of interest. Experimental results demonstrate that our sketch-based retrieval method achieves a good tradeoff between retrieval accuracy and semantic representation of users’ query

一体化手术室消毒供应中心灭菌监测管理

Objective: Explore the Sterilization Monitoring management of the integration of the operating room with CSSD. Methods: Compare sterilization process monitoring with biological monitoring and chemical monitoring. Results: The management in Biological monitoring, chemical monitoring and sterilization process monitoring is crucial. Conclusion: Sterilization monitoring is to ensure the safe use of sterile goods so as to protect the safety of surgical patients.目的  探讨一体化手术室消毒供应中心的灭菌监测管理。方法  比较灭菌监测管理的过程监测、生物监测、化学监测。结果  灭菌过程的生物监测、化学监测和过程监测对于灭菌管理是至关重要的。结论  灭菌监测工作能保证物品使用的安全性，最大限度地保障手术病人的安全

Decentralized Gradient-Free Methods for Stochastic Non-Smooth Non-Convex Optimization

We consider decentralized gradient-free optimization of minimizing Lipschitz continuous functions that satisfy neither smoothness nor convexity assumption. We propose two novel gradient-free algorithms, the Decentralized Gradient-Free Method (DGFM) and its variant, the Decentralized Gradient-Free Method$^+$ (DGFM$^{+}$). Based on the techniques of randomized smoothing and gradient tracking, DGFM requires the computation of the zeroth-order oracle of a single sample in each iteration, making it less demanding in terms of computational resources for individual computing nodes. Theoretically, DGFM achieves a complexity of $\mathcal O(d^{3/2}\delta^{-1}\varepsilon ^{-4})$ for obtaining an $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point. DGFM$^{+}$, an advanced version of DGFM, incorporates variance reduction to further improve the convergence behavior. It samples a mini-batch at each iteration and periodically draws a larger batch of data, which improves the complexity to $\mathcal O(d^{3/2}\delta^{-1} \varepsilon^{-3})$. Moreover, experimental results underscore the empirical advantages of our proposed algorithms when applied to real-world datasets