Search

The few studies on Family Language Policy in Singapore (FLP) have generally focused on FLP in local and immigrant Chinese families. This article explores language policies that seem to undergird Singaporean-Japanese families' language practices. In-depth interviews and observations with five such families showed that Japanese only functions as the language of communication between the Japanese parents and their children if parents have invoked particular language policies to support its transmission and use at home. For most families, English was the main medium of communication among family members. Language policies and practices in these families were heavily influenced by the value emplaced on each language within the parents' linguistic repertoire and their beliefs regarding language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not only does Singapore have a unique ethnic and multilingual makeup, it also boasts unique language policies, especially with regard to the learning of the official languages. Previous studies of Singaporean youths have largely focused on the differences in attitudes and code-switching between linguistic varieties (e.g. Colloquial Singapore English [Singlish] and Standard Singapore English) as well as looking at the specific languages of Singapore's multilingual community. This paper seeks to examine how Chinese-Singaporean youths differ in their perception of the benefits (general, communicative, cognitive and pragmatic) and disadvantages associated with Mandarin-English bilingualism and their Chinese-Singaporean identity. 165 Chinese-English bilingual youths from secondary schools, Polytechnics/Junior Colleges, University undergraduates and young working adults were stratified based their gender, socio-economic status and self-rated language proficiency. Our findings suggest that bilinguals' self-rated proficiency is generally the best indicator of local Chinese youths' attitudes towards Chinese-English bilingualism and identity, regardless of their current occupation, gender or socio-economic status.

Graphite matrix/copper composites have found significant potential uses in numerous areas. Until now, a high ambient gas pressure has to be applied to overcome the non-wettability between the copper melt and graphite matrix, which has restricted the technological and economic efficiencies, as well as the composite performance. In this paper, we have proposed a pressureless infiltration strategy to realize the preparation of highly conductive graphite matrix/copper composites. A tungsten carbide network is first in situ constructed in the graphite matrix, transforming the capillary force from the resistance mode to the impetus mode. Results show that the contact angle of graphite/copper decreased from 138.5° to 23° due to the constructed tungsten carbide network. The composites exhibit good interfacial bonding, and the electrical conductivity reaches 15.1 × 105 S/m, far higher than the requirement of the industry standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, CoFe2 O4/biomass carbon composts were prepared by one-pot hydrothermal and high- temperature calcination methods. The microscopic morphology, crystal structure and electromagnetic parame¬ters of the material indicate that CoF2 O4can be uniformly dispersed in the carbon base, and the presence of CoFe2 O4 is conducive to the defective polarization of the biomass during the carbonization process, which is ben racial to the enhancement of the wave absorption properties of the material. Effective regulation of the electro¬magnetic parameters of the composite material by adjusting the content of CoFe2 O4 to optimize tots impedance match mg performance. Experimental results show that the minimum reflection loss (reflection loss, RL) value of-48.0 dB and effective absorption bandwidth (effective absorption bandwidth, EAB) of 5.5 GHz were ob. turned at 2.0 mm thickness of Co2 O4O4/C-3.0 composite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-automatic extraction of roads is greatly needed to accelerate the acquisition and updating of road maps. However, road surfaces are frequently disturbed on very high spatial resolution (VHSR) remotely sensed satellite imagery, which bothers the road trackers using least-squares-based template matching. This paper presents a novel semi-automatic framework for road tracking from VHSR satellite imagery. First, a human operator inputs three seed points. Second, the computer automatically tracks the road by the template matching using Kullback–Leibler divergence as a similarity measure. At the same time, a human operator is retained in the tracking process to supervise the extracted results, to response to the program's prompts. Once the failure or error happens, the human operator will correct the results and restart the automatic tracking. The above procedure is repeated until a whole road is tracked. Four satellite images with different complexities are used to perform experiments. The results show that our proposed road trackers is capable of automatically, accurately and fast extracting the long and high-level roads from the VHSR satellite images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between executive functions (EF) and bilingualism has dominated debate in the field. This debate was characterised by optimism for a bilingual advantage until the last decade, when a steady stream of articles reported failure to find a consistently positive effect for bilingualism. In addition to addressing concerns about study quality, this turn of events has spurred research into other variables that may explain the conflicting findings. While recent studies have focused on sociodemographic variables and interactional contexts such as age, code-switching frequency, and socioeconomic class to account for various group and individual differences, the impact of culture is seldom scrutinised. This paper examines the possible effect of culture among bilingual studies on EF by first contextualising how bilingual EF are studied and outlining the absence of culture as a macro variable, followed by a discussion on how culture and language are often conflated. This paper directs attention to the small but emerging research that tracks the importance of culture as a separate variable from language. This review discusses why macro culture and individual monoculturalism or biculturalism need to be carefully elucidated as a factor that can interact with the bilingual experience in shaping EF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how bicultural switching could influence cognitive performance on Executive Functions tasks among bicultural-bilinguals.Study 1 (n = 233) integrates self-report questionnaire data on cultural and language behaviour with a priming experiment, providing empirical evidence of young adult bilinguals’ ability to shift between multiple cultures.Study 2 (n = 48) explores the effect of cultural switching frequency on young adult bicultural bilinguals’ performance on tests for interference and inhibition control, set-shifting ability, and attention.Study 1: A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to determine the effect of different primes on participant’s ratings. We ran a two-way mixed ANOVA to ascertain the effect of interlocutors (Grandparents/relatives, Parents, Siblings, Peers/co-workers, Social media) on behaviour (Cultural, Language). Study 2: A one-way ANOVA was conducted on Simon, Flanker, and Wisconsin Card Sort tasks (WCST). Each of the three attention network components was analysed using a 2 (trial-type, within-subjects) × 2 (Switching Group, between-groups) mixed-ANOVA for the Attention Network task.Study 1: Participants who alternate frequently between cultural frames made a clearer distinction between Western primes than those who switched between cultural frames less, suggesting that the frequency of cultural switching could impact cognition. Study 2: Bicultural bilinguals who switched between cultural frames frequently resolved stimulus-response conflict significantly faster in the Flanker task, made fewer mistakes within each sorting block in the WCST, and had a smaller conflict effect compared to infrequent switchers in the Attention Network Task.This study examines the effects of bicultural switching on Executive Functions of highly proficient bicultural bilinguals, highlighting it as a potential confound in bilingual research. Bicultural switching effects on interference and inhibition-control persist even in participants at the developmental peak of their cognitive processing capabilities after controlling for a plethora of socio-linguistic variables. Our research highlights how this understudied aspect of multiculturalism may have broad implications for bilingual research in Executive Functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) applications, filtering is a necessary step. In this paper, a segmentation-based filtering method is proposed for MLS point cloud, where a segment rather than an individual point is the basic processing unit. In particular, the MLS point clouds in some blocks are clustered into segments by a surface growing algorithm, and then the object segments are detected and removed. A segment-based filtering method is employed to detect the ground segments. The experiment in this paper uses two MLS point cloud datasets to evaluate the proposed method. Experiments indicate that, compared with the classic progressive TIN (Triangulated Irregular Network) densification algorithm, the proposed method is capable of reducing the omission error, the commission error and total error by 3.62%, 7.87% and 5.54% on average, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for creating orthoimage in the urban area of extremely high buildings. The proposed method in this paper is different from the traditional methods, which improved the accuracy by increasing the number and/or improved the geometric distribution of ground control points. This proposed method first established a mathematical model of constraint condition on the building edges, such as perpendicularity, and then the established constraint conditions are merged into the orthorectification model. A test field located in downtown of Denver, CO, has been used to evaluate our methods. The experiments of comparing the accuracy achieved by our method and other methods are conducted. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of 2-5 ft for those buildings of over 100 m high and even 5-7 ft for those buildings over 100 m high in the margin of imagery. Index Terms--Image orientation analysis, image registration, orthogonal functions, rectifiers.

Ecological restoration has been risen to a national strategic project for China and become an significant way to realize ecological civilization construction. As an important way to measure the effectiveness of ecological restoration engineering, the corresponding evaluation provides a reliable basis for ecological restoration decision-making and ecosystem management. Based on remote sensing technology with the advantages of short revisit time, large monitoring range, high spatial resolution, this paper proposes a remote sensing evaluation method of watershed ecological restoration effect, so as to monitor the implementation effect of ecological restoration engineering in the watershed and technically check whether the expected goals set before the restoration are achieved. The comprehensive ecological restoration engineering of Yongding River has been implemented since 2016, and it was the first focus of the coordinated development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to make advances in ecology. In this paper, year 2015 and 2020 were selected as the before and the after the ecological restoration engineering of Yongding River. The research object was the riparian zone from Luopoling Reservoir to Daning Reservoir in Yongding River Watershed. After obtaining and processing remote sensing images, ZY-3 images were used to obtain land cover data by means of human-computer interactive interpretation, and Landsat images were used to retrieve NDVI data. Based on these data, the changes of the eight indicators of water resources, water ecology and ecological function in the study area were calculated to evaluate the ecological restoration engineering effect. The results showed that the study area has basically realized the maintenance of ecological water quantity, formed the ecological corridor of Yongding River, and effectively enhanced the ecological function and improved the water environment. By verifying the feasibility of remote sensing evaluation method, this paper could provide relevant decision makers and planners with an effective evaluation method for the ecological restoration engineering effect based on remote sensing data and technology. • Remote sensing images and land cover data were utilized to calculate the indicators before and after ecological restoration. • Ecological restoration engineering effect was evaluated from water resources, water environment and ecological function. • Based on the proposed method, the ecological restoration effect in the study area was proved to be satisfactory overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]