Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures

Stephen J. Caldas and his wife, Suzanne, wanted to rear their children, John, Stephanie, and Valerie, to be bilingual and biliterate in both English and French in order to move easily between two monolingual cultures— Louisiana, USA, their primary residence, and Québec, Canada, where the family usually spent summer vacations. This longitudinal study or “family project,” in the author’s words, lasted 19 years from the author’s children’s early childhood to their late adolescence and is documented in Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures. By elaborately recounting the strategies that he and his wife used in their children’s linguistic development, the author hopes to enlighten parents who also intend to bring up their children bilingually. Additionally, many findings are certainly appealing to both educators and researchers, including those related to the issues of peer influence on linguistic development during adolescence, the construction of bilingual identities, and the changes in accents and perceptions of accents that occur

Testing and selecting cosmological models with ultra-compact radio quasars

In this paper, we place constraints on four alternative cosmological models under the assumption of the spatial flatness of the Universe: CPL, EDE, GCG and MPC. A new compilation of 120 compact radio quasars observed by very-long-baseline interferometry, which represents a type of new cosmological standard rulers, are used to test these cosmological models. Our results show that the fits on CPL obtained from the quasar sample are well consistent with those obtained from BAO. For other cosmological models considered, quasars provide constraints in agreement with those derived with other standard probes at $1\sigma$ confidence level. Moreover, the results obtained from other statistical methods including Figure of Merit, $Om(z)$ and statefinder diagnostics indicate that: (1) Radio quasar standard ruler could provide better statistical constraints than BAO for all cosmological models considered, which suggests its potential to act as a powerful complementary probe to BAO and galaxy clusters. (2) Turning to $Om(z)$ diagnostics, CPL, GCG and EDE models can not be distinguished from each other at the present epoch. (3) In the framework of statefinder diagnostics, MPC and EDE will deviate from $\rm{\Lambda}$CDM model in the near future, while GCG model cannot be distinguished from $\rm{\Lambda}$CDM model unless much higher precision observations are available.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Release of alkali metals during biomass thermal conversion

Biomass has great potential to become an economic source of renewable energy; however, its high chlorine and alkali metal content may cause series problems (e.g. slagging and corrosion) thus limiting its utilization. This paper reviews the release of potassium during biomass thermal conversion. Organic potassium is released first when the temperature is relatively low, starting at about 473 K and slowing down at about 773 K; the release of inorganic potassium occurs with the increase of processing temperature. The potassium vapors are mainly in the form of KCl, KOH and K 2 SO 4 . In addition to the temperature, the properties of biomass feedstock, fuel-air ratio, pressure and heating rate also significantly influence the release rate of alkali metals. Future studies are required to develop accurate kinetic models of potassium release to address the ash related challenges when firing and co-firing biomass with high inherent alkali content

Progress and Development Trend of Space Intelligent Robot Technology

Since space intelligent robots are not restricted by physiological conditions, it is an attractive choice for the development of automation technology to use them for space exploration and utilization. It is currently the key development direction of the major space powers over the world. This paper first investigates the robotic manipulators and humanoid robot systems for space station applications and reviews theories and methods for robots to achieve large-range stable motion and intelligent dexterous manipulation. Then, the intelligent robot systems for on-orbit satellite maintenance are reviewed, and the related technologies of multirobot collaboration are analyzed. Finally, we investigate the intelligent robot systems for on-orbit assembly of large-scale spatial structures and summarize the technologies of modular assembly and on-orbit manufacture. Overall, this paper reviews the technological progress and development trends of space robots, which provides a good reference for further technical research in this field

New Public Key Authentication Frameworks with Lite Certification Authority

Two variants of CA-based public key authentication framework are proposed in this paper. The one is termed as public key cryptosystem without certificate management center (PKCwCMC) and the other is termed as proxy signature based authentication framework (PS-based AF). Moreover, we give an implementation of the former based on quadratic residue theory and an implementation of the latter from RSA. Both of the two variants can be looked as lite-CA based authentication frameworks since the workload and deployment of CAs in these systems are much lighter and easier than those of in the traditional CA-based PKC

A Generalization of Paillier\u27s Public-Key System With Fast Decryption

Paillier\u27s scheme is a homomorphic public key encryption scheme which is widely used in practical. For instance, Paillier\u27s scheme can be used in the data aggregation in smart grid. Damg$\mathring{a}$rd and Jurik generalized Paillier\u27s scheme to reduce the ciphertext expansion factor. However, the decryption scheme of Damg$\mathring{a}$rd and Jurik\u27s scheme is more complicated than Paillier\u27s original scheme. In this paper, we propose a new generalization of Paillier\u27s scheme and all the Paillier\u27s schemes to our knowledge are special cases of our scheme. We propose a very simple decryption algorithm which is more efficient than other generalization algorithms. We prove that our generalized Paillier\u27s scheme is IND-CPA secure. Our generalized Paillier\u27s scheme can be used in smart grid instead of Paillier\u27s scheme for higher flexibility