Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Education Division Competition 2010 Winner: The Organic Price Tag

Abstract: One of the core competencies in the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Education standards is for students to achieve competency in communication skills (that is, oral and written communication, listening, interviewing, and so on). According to the IFT guidelines, by the time students graduate, they should not only be able to search for and condense information, but also be able to “communicate technical information to a nontechnical audience.” The Education Division of IFT sponsors a writing competition for undergraduate students to bring attention to and promote the development of communication skills. It has been shown that employees/entry‐level scientists who can communicate technical and nontechnical concepts succinctly will be in a better position to achieve management status after entering the work force. Monetary prizes are awarded to the authors of the top three papers. A revised version of the winning entry is published in the Journal of Food Science Education for dissemination to a world‐wide audience.     

Experiential learning in doctoral training programmes: fostering personal epistemology through collaboration

There has been increasing recognition for the need to reform doctoral training practices to foster students’ personal epistemology. This study describes the design and evaluation of a learning experience designed to help students understand the scholarly publication process. Firstly, this study discusses the design of the learning experience, describing the collaborative process of writing an interdisciplinary publication using both online and face-to-face learning. Secondly, this study evaluates the effectiveness of the learning experience by examining students’ reflections. We show that participation in the learning experience helped students to develop their academic writing proficiency, collaboration and teamwork, intercultural competence, and ability to engage in reflective practice. Importantly, we show that each student also created more individualised knowledge, gaining insight into how they and others think. This study, therefore, demonstrates that personal epistemology can be fostered through collaboration in a doctoral writing group context.     

Globalization as Both Threat and Opportunity for the Hong Kong Teaching Profession

The paper examines the roles of theHong Kong government, schools and teachers inthe translation of global economic imperativesinto demands on education, and how suchtranslation affects the teaching profession.Two global imperatives are selected forillustration because of their peculiarforegrounding by the Hong Kong government:international (English) language proficiencyand competence in information technology. Thepaper argues that preparation for economicglobalization not only poses a threat, but alsocreates an opportunity for the development ofthe teaching profession, and that this dependsto a large extent on how the governmenttranslates these global imperatives intodemands on teachers. The government is theprincipal actor in the selection andtranslation of global imperatives. Schools arenot just brokers and enforcers of governmentpolicy, but can be an important buffer betweenthe government and teachers by helping themcope with the imposed imperatives at the schoollevel. Teachers can be key players in acceptingor rejecting such imperatives. Governmentstrategies that are insensitive to teachers'needs and practical concerns create moreproblems than solutions.     

H∞ tracking control for nonlinear multivariable systems using wavelet-type TSK fuzzy brain emotional learning with particle swarm optimization

This paper studies the ${\mathit{H}}_{\infty }$ tracking control for uncertain nonlinear multivariable systems. We propose a control strategy, which combines the adaptive wavelet-type Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy brain emotional learning controller (WTFBELC) and the $H_{\infty }$ robust tracking compensator. As for the adaptive WTFBELC, it is a main controller designed to mimic the ideal controller. The proposed WTFBELC is to obtain much better ability of handling nonlinearities and uncertainties, but the proposed $H_{\infty }$ robust tracking compensator is to compensate the residual error between the adaptive WTFBELC and the ideal controller. Furthermore, the optimal learning rates of the adaptive WTFBELC are searched quickly by using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, and the parameter updated laws are derived based on the steepest descent gradient method. The robust tracking performance of this novel control scheme is guaranteed based on Lyapunov stability theory. The mass-spring-damper mechanical system and the three-link robot manipulator, are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive PSO-WTFBELC $H_{\infty }$ control scheme.     

Building parallel corpora by automatic title alignment using length-based and text-based approaches

Cross-lingual semantic interoperability has drawn significant attention in recent digital library and World Wide Web research as the information in languages other than English has grown exponentially. Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) across different European languages, such as English, Spanish, and French, has been widely explored; however, CLIR across European languages and Oriental languages is still in the initial stage. To cross language boundary, corpus-based approach is promising to overcome the limitation of the knowledge-based and controlled vocabulary approaches but collecting parallel corpora between European language and Oriental language is not an easy task. Length-based and text-based approaches are two major approaches to align parallel documents. In this paper, we investigate several techniques using these approaches and compare their performances in aligning English and Chinese titles of parallel documents available on the Web.     

中职学生资助需求和资助影响因素分析

本文通过对我国甘肃、湖南和江苏三省9所中等职业学校586名在校生的分析,表明不同学生群体的资助需求不同;政府提供的资助低于学生的资助需求;正确的资助信息和申请行为在不同学生群体间的分布不均等;申请对资助的获得具有决定性的作用;农村学生获各类型资助的可能性高于其他学生,而家庭贫困程度对资助的获得无显著影响。此外,弱势群体学生获得了更多的学生资助。     

基于区块链技术的我国体育用品制造企业融资模式创新研究

采用文献资料、逻辑推理、案例解析等研究方法,对区块链技术在我国体育用品制造企业融资模式中的应用进行探析。结果表明:经济新常态下我国体育用品制造业的可持续健康发展是国家实施"供给侧改革"战略的重要环节,体育用品制造企业是我国体育产业发展的核心元素,但限于国内体育用品制造业的整体市场竞争力,我国体育用品制造企业融资难、融资成本高、融资结构单一、专业担保机构不足等问题仍非常突出。近年来,伴随区块链技术的迅猛发展,供应链金融已经成为破解中小企业融资困境的重要手段,也为我国体育用品制造企业融资提供了业务创新基础。通过对区块链技术的含义和主要特征进行介绍,阐释了区块链融资模型的基本构架及操作流程。区块链技术的分布式记账、共识机制、时间戳记等特征在我国体育用品制造企业融资模式中的应用具备较多优势,如确保数据信息真实可靠,实现信息互联互通等。最后,针对区块链技术在我国体育用品制造(销售)企业融资案例中的应用过程展开理论分析,并提出未来展望。