An Analysis on the Symbolic Meaning of the Green Light in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is considered the finest achievement of Fitzgerald’s literary career. The novel is successful for its narrative skill, graceful and delicate prose style, and especially, the employment of symbolism which contributes most to the depth and broadness of its theme. There is an abundance of images which are full of symbolic meaning through the whole story, among which the most important one is unquestionably the employment of "the green light". This paper, through analyzing the skillful employment of symbolism in the term of "the green light" in the novel, discusses the deep connotation that is imparted by the novelist and explains the decisive role of the symbolism of this term in the novel in shaping the figures, developing the plot of the story, and deepening the themes of the work.     

My View on the CET Spoken English Test

With the deepening of China‘s reform and open-door pohcy, the ability to participate mrectly m oral interactions in English becomes more and more important, hence the focus of English language teaching on improving students‘ oral English proficiency. The CET Spoken English Test (CET-SET), which is a face-to-face oral proficiency test, is a component part of the CET test. Since its first administration on a national scale in November 1999, it has been receiving a growing amount of attention from teachers and students in universities in China. As the number of studen tstaking the CET-SET is growing rapidly year by year, it has become crucial to develop an alternative to the CET-SET that can be operationally more practical. My views on the CET-SET are expounded in this paper, which is structured as follows. First, I provide an overview of the CET-SET. Next, I identify several aspects of the test that are amenable to changes. Finally, I put forward some suggestions as to the development of an alternative approach for the CET-SET.     

Middle matching mining algorithm

1. Introduction With the increase in the amount of information, we feel the pressure from 搕he exploring information? and find that we are in a dilemma of having huge data but with little knowledge [1]. Data mining is an effective method to help us to get rid of the morass, and is a process of inferring knowledge from such huge data. A sequence is an ordered list of transactions (or itemsets), in which each transaction is a set of items. Typically there is a transaction-time associated with ea…     

A Comparative Study of Metonymy and Synecdoche

Among the modern rhetorical devices,metonymy and synecdoche are two important figures of speech,which are analogous to each other for both use the name of one thing for that of something else.That is to say,both of the rhetorical devices involve substitution.Thus the two concepts are confusing.Metonymy emphasizes on using the name of one thing for that of something else with which it is associated.Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part is used for a whole,an individual for a class,a material for a thing,or the reverse of any of these.By making a comparative study of these two through the connotation and category,the author summarizes that:they are two independent figures of speech.     

Quantifying social vulnerability for flood disasters of insurance company

Social vulnerability assessments are largely ignored when compared with biophysical vulnerability assessments. This is mainly due to the fact that there are more difficulties in quantifying them. Aiming at several pitfalls still existing in the Hoovering approach which is widely accepted, a suitable modified model is provided. In this modified model, the integrated vulnerability is made an analogy to the elasticity coefficient of a spring, and an objective evaluation criterion is established. With the evaluation criterion, the assessment indicators of social vulnerability are filtered and their weight assignments are accomplished. There is an application in the city of Changsha where floods occur often. With the relative data from the PICC Hunan Province Branch, a generalized regression neural network model is established in Matlab 7.0 and used to evaluate a company's flood social vulnerability index (SoVI). The results show that the average flood social vulnerability in Yuhua district is the highest, while Yuelu district is the lowest. It is good for disaster risk management and decision-making of insurance companies.     

VARIATIONAL INEQUALITY IN ELASTOPLASTIC PROBLEMS

In this paper,the incremental theory of an elastoplastic problem is trans-formed to a variational inequality.The existence and uniqueness of the variationalinequality are proved for the materials in which the Drucker postulate is satisfied.And theconvergence of the finite element solutions is also discussed.     

Types and Functions of Tea

The different types of tea depend upon the region in which it is grown,harvesting time and the procedure of processing.Basically,there are four major classes of tea:white,oolong,green and black tea. The white tea has very low content of caffeine and appears a light color,as the name also indicates and a mild flavor.Due to the presence of high amount of healthy chemicals,it is helpful in fighting skin-related health problems and in getting a fair color of skin.     

A non-canonical example to support P is not equal to NP

The more unambiguous statement of the P versus NP problem and the judgement of its hardness, are the key ways to find the full proof of the P versus NP problem. There are two sub-problems in the P versus NP problem. The first is the classifications of different mathematical problems (languages), and the second is the distinction between a non-deterministic Turing machine (NTM) and a deterministic Turing machine (DTM). The process of an NTM can be a power set of the corresponding DTM, which proves that the states of an NTM can be a power set of the corresponding DTM. If combining this viewpoint with Cantor’s theorem, it is shown that an NTM is not equipotent to a DTM. This means that "generating the power set P(A) of a set A" is a non-canonical example to support that P is not equal to NP.     

Evaluation of climate comfort based on the relationship between the structure and behavior of a block space in a winter city

This paper focuses on climate comfort degree evaluated from relationships between spatial characteristics and behaviors of a winter city.It is demonstrated that the influences of climatic factors on human comfort are remarkably different for different spatial characteristics and functions of the sites.An evaluation method of climatic comfort is propsed,in which attaining comfort is an adaptation process,and the dynamic changes in the process are according to the user’s subjective tendency to the variations of the spatial characteristics and functions of the space.The evaluation criteria are based on both physical and psychological hierarchy needs of a person,which include the spatial form for microclimatic conditions as well as the spatial social-economic characteristics of a site.To improve the local environment of a winter city by planning measurements,the Harbin Central Pedestrian Street is taken as an example in the application of the evaluation method,and different planning optimizing strategies are proposed accordingly.The results show that the pattern of climate comfort is characterized by reflecting the socialeconomic value and individual behavior characteristics.     

Dynamic Analysis of Structural Columns Subjected to Impulsive Loading

For a building structure subjected to impulsive loading, particularly shock and impact loading , the response of the critical columns is crucial to the behaviour of the entire system during and after the blast loading phase. Therefore, an appropriate evaluation of the column response and damage under short-duration impulsive loading is important in a comprehensive assessment of the performance of a building system. This paper reports a dynamic analysis approach for the response of RC columns subjected to impulsive loading. Considering that the dynamic response of a column in a frame structure can also be affected by the floor movement which relates to the global vibration of the frame system, a generic column-mass model is used, in which a concentrated mass is attached to the column top to simulate the effect of a global vibration. To take into account the high shear effect under impulsive load, the model is formulated using Timoshenko beam theory, and three main nonlinear mechanisms are considered. Two typical scenarios, one under a direct air blast loading, and another under a blast-induced ground excitation, are analyzed and the primary response features are highlighted.     

IT Project Evaluation and Investment Decision

There are many kinds of real options, which are valuable, in each phase of the lifetime of an information technology(IT) project. However, in the current IT investment decision theory, real options that embedded in IT projects are not considered. In this paper, the process of IT project decision and implementation is fully analyzed, the real options that may be embedded in an IT project are identified, and a real option analysis (ROA) method is proposed for evaluation of an IT project under uncertain business environment. ROA employs BlackScholes expansion model and cancels the assumption that the cost of project is certain. The numerical example manifests that the ROA can better evaluate IT project and select the IT investment alternative. Finally, a road map is provided to help selecting the suitable evaluation method to make IT investment decision.     

Dynamic Responses Analysis of a Building Structure Subjected to Ground Shock from a Tunnel Explosion

Dynamic responses of a multi-storey building without or with a sliding base-isolation device for ground shock induced by an in-tunnel explosion are numerically analyzed. The effect of an adjacent tunnel in between the building and the explosion tunnel, which affects ground shock propagation , is considered in the analysis. Different modeling methods, such as the eight-node equal-parametric finite element and mass-lumped system, are used to establish the coupling model consisting of the two adjacent tunnels, the surrounding soil medium with the Lysmer viscous boundary condition, and the multi-storey building with or without the sliding base-isolation device. In numerical calculations , a continuous friction model, which is different from the traditional Coulomb friction model, is adopted to improve the computational efficiency and reduce the accumulated errors. Some example analyses are subsequently performed to study the response characteristics of the building and the sliding base-isolation device to ground shock. The effect of the adjacent tunnel in between the building and the explosion tunnel on the ground shock wave propagation is also investigated. The final conclusions based on the numerical results will provide some guidance in engineering practice.     

A Discussion on the Relational Process of Business Negotiation

It is widely known that business negotiation is an indispensable part in international trade and probably the most common type of negotiation.Generally speaking,business negotiation is a process which business negotiators would make the interaction in order to get specific exchange goals.Because of the important role of business negotiations in business world,many Chinese researchers have engaged in study of business and achieved many useful findings.Although there are many researches in the field of business negotiation,focusing on the analysis of relational process of business negotiation is less,which is the main con cern of this thesis.The aim of this thesis is to find the language mechanism and characteristic of business negotiation.At the meantime,negotiators are more likely to attain the deep perception in choosing the better words and structure among the negotiation.     

Speaker adapted dynamic lexicons containing phonetic deviations of words

Speaker variability is an important source of speech variations which makes continuous speech recognition a difficult task. Adapting automatic speech recognition （ASR） models to the speaker variations is a well-known strategy to cope with the challenge, Almost all such techniques focus on developing adaptation solutions within the acoustic models of the ASR systems. Although variations of the acoustic features constitute an important portion of the inter-speaker variations, they do not cover variations at the phonetic level. Phonetic variations are known to form an important part of variations which are influenced by both micro-segmental and suprasegmental factors. Inter-speaker phonetic variations are influenced by the structure and anatomy of a speaker＇s articulatory system and also his/her speaking style which is driven by many speaker background characteristics such as accent, gender, age, socioeconomic and educational class. The effect of inter-speaker variations in the feature space may cause explicit phone recognition errors. These errors can be compensated later by having appropriate pronunciation variants for the lexicon entries which consider likely phone misclassifications besides pronunciation. In this paper, we introduce speaker adaptive dynamic pronunciation models, which generate different lexicons for various speaker clusters and different ranges of speech rate. The models are hybrids of speaker adapted contextual rules and dynamic generalized decision trees, which take into account word phonological structures, rate of speech, unigram probabilities and stress to generate pronunciation variants of words. Employing the set of speaker adapted dynamic lexicons in a Farsi （Persian） continuous speech recognition task results in word error rate reductions of as much as 10.1% in a speaker-dependent scenario and 7.4% in a speaker-independent scenario.     

A Glimpse of American Society through the American TV Drama Series "the Desperate Housewives"

The paper presents an analytical study on the American society through a popular American drama series "the Desperate House Wives". Typical American values can be found everywhere on the show as they have been ingrained in the soul of the American people. As a nation with not very long history but great achievements, its people are the one that should be highlighted. Unlike China, the nation of which have formed since thousands of years ago, so has its culture, America’s history is an immigration history. People started migrating from other parts of the world since the 17 thcentury and gathered at the land of America to build up their new homes and realize their dreams. They influence each other and fuse with each other. America is one of the countries in the world that plural cultures successfully mix together.The paper focuses on the American people’s daily life to explain to the readers the American traits and values prevailing in their society. Except the Foreword which is the general introduction to the paper, this paper is presented in five parts. The first part to the forth part are the emphasis of the paper which respectively analyze the American traits and values. A series of vivid examples are provided with a wide range of study objects, man and woman, kids to elders, in hope of making the paper understandable and persuasive. It is expected that the study can offer a general idea to the people who are interested in the American society and its people.     

Influences of Cultural Differences on Translation of Titles of Songs

A title is like an eye that reveals its character. A good title of great originality can concentrate on the main points and arouse readers’ interests. The title plays a significant part especially in the times of eyeball economy. However, though short as titles are, they always contain a lot of connotations which are quite difficult to translate. Translation is substantially kind of cross-cultural information communication, and translation of song titles is no exception. Due to different origins, Chinese and Western cultures possess their own characteristics in cultural images, ways of thinking, and historical allusions, which should be considered when translating song titles.     

A Review of Recent Research on Approaches and Methods in ESP Teaching in China

ESP,namely English for Specific Purposes,has become an integral part of English teaching in higher education.How ever,the majority of research on approaches in ESP teaching is focused on one specific method,which fails to generalize the de velopment of ESP teaching in China.In this thesis,recent Chinese research on approaches and methods in ESP teaching is re viewed,including those in established framework and an innovative one.The advantages and limitations of each methods are ana lyzed and the possible suggestions are made with a view to promoting the research on approaches and methods in ESP teaching in a more all-round way.     

Tracking multiple people under occlusion and across cameras using probabilistic models

Tracking multiple people under occlusion and across cameras is a challenging question for discussion. Furthermore, the cameras in this study are used to extend the field of view, which are distinguished from the same field of view. Such corre-spondence between multiple cameras is a burgeoning research subject in the area of computer vision. This paper effectively solves the problems of tracking multiple people who pass from one camera to another and segmenting people under occlusion using probabilistic models. The probabilistic models are composed ofblob model, motion model and color model, which make the most of the space, motion and color information. First, we present a color model that uses maximum likelihood estimation based on non-parametric kernel density estimation. Second, we introduce a blob model based on mean shift, which segments the body into many regions according to the color of each person in order to spatially localize the color features corresponding to the way people are dressed. Clothes can be any mixture of colors. Third, we bring forward a motion model based on statistical probability which indicates the movement position of the same person between two successive frames in a single camera. Finally, we effectively unify the three models into a general probabilistic model and attain a maximization likelihood probability image, which is used to segment the foreground region under occlusion and to match people across multiple cameras.     

Use of concept cartoons as an assessment tool in physics education

There are numerous studies in literature related to the use of cartoons in physics, chemistry and mathematics education. However the studies on the use of cartoons as an alternative assessment tool are highly limited. This study was concerned with the use of cartoons as an alternative assessment method. There were five cartoons prepared related to impulse, momentum, impulse-momentum equation, conservation of momentum and vector property of momentum. The study revealed that physics pre-service teachers failed to emphasize the fact that momentum is vector quantity. Also the fact that only 15% of the participants scored a full point for the caricature related to the conservation of momentum is an issue which should seriously be considered. This shows us that there are some problems in the application of the conservation of momentum to everyday examples.