Moving the Migration Frontier: A Chinese Qiaoxiang Migration Model?

The New Chinese Migration is frequently contrasted to the earlier 19^th century mass migrations in terms of its origins (urban vs rural), migrant types (students and professionals vs coolies) and destinations (developed vs developing countries). A significant component of this new migration from the PRC however, continues to originate from the qiaoxiang – the emigrant‐sending areas of the 19^th century migrations. Based on an extensive review of the literature on the old and new Chinese migration, as well as several years of fieldwork in the major rural sending areas or qiaoxiang of China, we examine the continuities between the new qiaoxiang migration and the old, and propose a qiaoxiang migration model of the entrepreneurial nature of the migration enterprise to account for the sustained and global character of the mobility generated.     

Found in Transliteration: Translanguaging and the Polyvocality of Xiqu Centre

This article illustrates how the linguistic‐anthropological notion of axes of differentiation can illuminate translanguaging practices. Through an analysis of media texts, it explores the ways in which multilingual Hongkongers draw on their semiotic repertoires to make sense of Xiqu Centre as the English name of the recently inaugurated center for traditional Chinese theater in their city. Against the backdrop of different axes of differentiation, supporters and detractors contrast the Putonghua word xìqǔ “traditional Chinese theater” with its equivalents in English and Cantonese respectively, thereby arriving at diametrically opposed interpretations of the name. While many detractors engage in interpretive practices that challenge the discreteness of linguistic systems, others who use their multilingual knowledge to criticize the name appeal to ideologies of linguistic purism. To fully understand multilinguals’ production and interpretation of signs, we need to examine not only communicative practices that disrupt language boundaries but also those practices that do not.     

稻壳膨化粉栽培毛木耳试验

试验和推广应用的结果表明，用膨化谷壳粉与棉籽壳、玉米芯、木屑作培养料，按10～20：20～30：20～30：20～30的比例混合栽培毛木耳，风干耳率达20．00％～24．85％，烘干耳生物学效率（BE％）为18．00％～19．86％，与棉籽壳、玉米芯、木屑按1：1：1的比例混合的常规配方的产量差异不显著，干耳产量高，优质耳片率高，料成本可降低0．10～0．20元／袋，经济效益提高0．15元／袋。表明可以选用膨化谷壳作为商业化栽培毛木耳的一种主要原料。商业化栽培毛木耳的培养料不需添加有机氮源，如玉米粉、麸皮、米糠等；亦可不加磷肥、石膏、碳酸钙等无机肥料。     

An Unfinished Reflexive Journey: Social Work Students' Reflection on their Placement Experiences

The fieldwork placement is recognized as one of the major componentsof social work education and a major determinant of its quality.A key aspect of the learning process in the fieldwork placementis the exposition of practice encounters to the students’critical reflection. Given the importance of the process of‘reflection’ or ‘reflective learning’,a qualitative study based on the reflective logs of social workstudents was conducted to explore the meaning of social workfield education and the learning experiences of social workstudents during their placement. The study findings revealedthat disturbing events experienced by students in their fieldworkwere a catalyst to their reflective process. Meanwhile, theirundue concern with knowledge and skills application within acircumscribed knowledge frame suggests the dominant influenceof scientism and competence-based practice in social work, inwhich learning outcomes and instrumental and technical reasoningare highly emphasized. Discovery of ‘self’ was alsothe major premise in the students’ reflection logs, inwhich a majority of them took their prevailing self-identityas a constant state to be verified in interaction with othersin the fieldwork placement. Reflexivity is manifested in askingfundamental questions about assumptions generated by formaland practice theories; it addresses the multiple interrelationsbetween power and knowledge, and acknowledges the inclusionof self in the process of knowledge creation in social workpractice. Its realization in social work education requiresthe social work educators’ reflexive examination of thedynamics that influence the construction of curriculum, whichin turn construct our prospective social workers.     

Subethnic interpersonal dynamic in diasporic community: a study on Chinese immigrants in Vancouver

ABSTRACT

Ethnicity is a social construct that can be conceptualised as a social classification delineating certain boundaries between an ethnic group and the dominant group. Members of an ethnic group are assumed to share similar cultural characteristics and to be homogenous among themselves. Many studies in ethnic organisations have indicated that subethnicity also exists within an ethnic group, but research on subethnicity is scant. Based on the findings of an exploratory study conducted in Vancouver, Canada, we examined how, at an interpersonal level, place of origin, language, mutual bias and discrimination and transnational politics divide the Chinese diasporic community subethnically. Meanwhile, being Chinese in the Canadian context and willingness to break the subethnic boundaries are noted as counterforces to the subethnic divide. We contend that interpersonal interaction is an imperative dimension for the understanding of the shaping of boundary between different subethnic groups.     

Transnationalism over the Life Course

The sociological research on transnational migration has blossomed over the past decade to become one of the most discussed ideas in the sociology of immigration and the discipline more generally. In this review, we draw attention to transnationalism research that includes elements of the life course perspective. We distinguish two ways that the life course approach can be integrated with research on transnationalism: Research that examines the unique transnational aspects of a single life stage, and research that considers transnational trajectories and transitions as individuals move through two or more life stages. We propose that more explicit attention to the life course in transnational research will lead to interesting and enlightening new research directions.     

Estimation Under the Lehmann Regression Model with Interval-Censored Data

We consider the estimation problem under the Lehmann model with interval-censored data, but focus on the computational issues. There are two methods for computing the semi-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (SMLE) under the Lehmann model (or called Cox model): the Newton-Raphson (NR) method and the profile likelihood (PL) method. We show that they often do not get close to the SMLE. We propose several approach to overcome the computational difficulty and apply our method to a breast cancer research data set.     

Integrated services in Australian early childhood education and care: what can we learn from our past?

Recent Australian interest in the integration of early childhood services is largely informed by international research and policy developments, particularly from the United Kingdom. Service integration is widely recognised as an effective means of holistically meeting the needs of children and families and ameliorating disadvantage. What is less well known is that Australia has a history of integrated early childhood services. This paper focuses on three points in 20th century Australia when advocacy for integrated early childhood service provision was evident: post‐World War I when the first Mother and Baby Welfare Clinic was established; during the late 1930s to mid 1940s with the advent of the Lady Gowrie Centres; and in the 1970s when several reports recommended the integration and co‐ordination of early years services. Attending to this history acknowledges this innovative Australian work, and provides potentially valuable, and somewhat cautionary, lessons for contemporary advocacy for integrated early childhood services.     

Perfect aggregation of Bayesian analysis on compositional data

Sufficiency is a widely used concept for reducing the dimensionality of a data set. Collecting data for a sufficient statistic is generally much easier and less expensive than collecting all of the available data. When the posterior distributions of a quantity of interest given the aggregate and disaggregate data are identical, perfect aggregation is said to hold, and in this case the aggregate data is a sufficient statistic for the quantity of interest. In this paper, the conditions for perfect aggregation are shown to depend on the functional form of the prior distribution. When the quantity of interest is the sum of some parameters in a vector having either a generalized Dirichlet or a Liouville distribution for analyzing compositional data, necessary and sufficient conditions for perfect aggregation are also established.     

On a mixture vector autoregressive model

The authors show how to extend univariate mixture autoregressive models to a multivariate time series context. Similar to the univariate case, the multivariate model consists of a mixture of stationary or nonstationary autoregressive components. The authors give the first and second order stationarity conditions for a multivariate case up to order 2. They also derive the second order stationarity condition for the univariate mixture model up to arbitrary order. They describe an EM algorithm for estimation, as well as a diagnostic checking procedure. They study the performance of their method via simulations and include a real application.