This research examined longitudinally over one year attitudinal and motivational changes of 296 Japanese 7th-grade students learning English. Levels of student's interest and emotion, study habits, perceived utility of English and familiarity with English-speaking people, as well as degree of parental encouragement, and self-rated attainment all decreased from the beginning of the school year until the third or seventh month, being followed by a stabilizing trend after those periods. Student's goals became realistic after the learning for one year. Students with initially high English ability performed better and showed more positive attitudes and motivation than those with initially low ability, whereas the former were suggested to be more vulnerable to the junior high school environment than the latter. Girls had higher scores than boys in most attitudinal and motivational variables, although girls had a lower expectancy of their own performance than boys in the goal-setting area. Instrumental and integrative types of motivation in learning English were not differentiated in the students' perceptions at the beginning of their English education in the seventh grade.
Automatic emissivity compensating radiation thermometry based on polaradiometry was applied to in situ wafer surface temperature measurement on a flash lamp annealing prototype system. The developed temperature measurement system consists of a dual polarization radiation thermometer and a modulating reference light source, which were mounted on two opposing ports of the process chamber. The intense background radiation from the flash lamp was successfully suppressed by introducing a water flow layer beneath the flash lamp unit and measuring at the water absorption band of 1.95 µm. Millisecond heating and cooling of the wafer was measured for various operating conditions of the flash lamp and for various silicon wafers including wafers with microstructures. The peak temperature was compared with the sheet resistance after treatment and device properties after fabrication. Good correlation was confirmed between sheet resistance and measured peak temperature for various flash lamp intensities irrespective of the surface emissivity or heating conditions. Transistor threshold voltage showed similar correlation, which verifies the applicability of the developed thermometer system to in situ measurement during production.
The phenomenon of overheating in urban areas is an increasingly important issue as far as the quality of life and public health are concerned. This paper proposes a simple model, integrated with a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool, that can be used to analyze the microclimate of outdoor spaces, considering the relationship between the air temperature and the characteristics of an urban environment. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect was analyzed by assessing parameters that describe the urban context, such as the density of the population and of the buildings, and the urban morphology. Remote sensing data and satellite images were used to evaluate the presence of vegetation and the type of surfaces in the urban space. Through the construction of linear regression models, the main variables of influence were identified for a typical summer day. It has been found, from the results, that the UHI effect decreases proportionally with the presence of vegetation and with higher values of the albedo of urban surfaces, as well as of the altitude and the distance from the sea. The UHI effect instead increases proportionally for higher values of the canyon height-to-width ratio, the building density and the Land Surface Temperature. These models can be used to analyse the outdoor thermal comfort and the livability of an urban territory.
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