Evaluation in media texts: a cross-cultural linguistic investigation

A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies

Coherent spin rotation in the presence of a phonon-bottleneck effect

A characteristic of spin reversal in the presence of phonon-bottleneck is the deviation of the magnetization cycle from a reversible function into an opened hysterezis cycle. In recent experiments on molecular magnets (e.g. V$_{15}$ and Ru$_2$), the zero-field level repulsion was sufficiently large to ensure an otherwise adiabatic passage through zero-field and the magnetization curves can be described by using only a phonon-bottleneck model. Here, we generalize the phonon-bottleneck model into a model able to blend the non-adiabatic dynamics of spins with the presence of a non-equilibrium phonon bath. In this simple phenomenological model, Bloch equations are written in the eigenbasis of the effective spin Hamiltonian, considered to be a two-level system at low temperatures. The relaxation term is given by the phonon-bottleneck mechanism. To the expense of calculus time, the method can be generalized to multi-level systems, where the notion of Bloch sphere does not apply but the density matrix formalism is still applicable.Comment: as published in EuroPhys Letter

Did the market overreact to the mandatory switch to IFRS in Europe?

Despite studies which indicate that mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) reduced the cost of capital for adopting firms and improved analysts’ forecasts, the evidence supporting any improvement in accounting quality is mixed. In a European wide country study, we calculate a broadly based measure of earnings management defined as accruals which are unrelated to current activity or past-current-future cash flows. At the individual country level we find that accounting quality improved only in France, Germany and Netherland, which are categories as ‘legal origin countries’. Moreover, based on an equity valuation model adjusted for earnings quality, we find that, in most European countries, the market overreacted to the impact of mandatory IFRS adoption. Further test shows that investors do not seem to understand the exact components of the financial statements that IFRS will have impact on

Genetic iterative search-centre-shifting K-best sphere detection for rank-deficient SDM-OFDM systems

A generic sphere-detection (SD) scheme is proposed, which substantially reduces the detection complexity by decomposing it into two stages, namely the generic iterative search-centre-update phase and the reduced-complexity search around it. This two-stage philosophy circumvents the high complexity of channel-coded soft-decision aided SDs

A VLSI architecture of JPEG2000 encoder

Copyright @ 2004 IEEEThis paper proposes a VLSI architecture of JPEG2000 encoder, which functionally consists of two parts: discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and embedded block coding with optimized truncation (EBCOT). For DWT, a spatial combinative lifting algorithm (SCLA)-based scheme with both 5/3 reversible and 9/7 irreversible filters is adopted to reduce 50% and 42% multiplication computations, respectively, compared with the conventional lifting-based implementation (LBI). For EBCOT, a dynamic memory control (DMC) strategy of Tier-1 encoding is adopted to reduce 60% scale of the on-chip wavelet coefficient storage and a subband parallel-processing method is employed to speed up the EBCOT context formation (CF) process; an architecture of Tier-2 encoding is presented to reduce the scale of on-chip bitstream buffering from full-tile size down to three-code-block size and considerably eliminate the iterations of the rate-distortion (RD) truncation.This work was supported in part by the China National High Technologies Research Program (863) under Grant 2002AA1Z142