Review of My Research Work on Ferroelectric Films and Si-Based Device Applications: Opportunity and Challenge

Ferroelectric materials have many interesting physical properties such as ferroelectricity, pyroelectricity, piezoelectricity, and opto-electricity, and applying ferroelectric materials in the forms of thin and thick films and integrating them on the silicon substrate as electronic and MEMS devices is a very attractive research area and challenging. In this paper, we report our research works on ferroelectric MEMS and ferroelectric films for electronic device applications. Pyroelectric thin film infrared sensors have been made, characterized, and a 32×32 array with its size of 1cm×1cm has been obtained on Si membrane. Ferroelectric thin films in amorphous phase have been applied to make silicon based hydrogen gas sensors with the metal/amorphous ferroelectric film/metal device structure, and its turn-on voltage of about 4.5V at ～1000 ppm in air is about 7 times of the best value reported in the literature. For the application of electron emission flat panel display, ferroelectric BST thin films with excess Ti concentrations have been coated on Si tips, the threshold voltage of those ferroelectric film coated tips has been reduced about one order from ～70 V/μm to 4～10 V/μm for different Ti concentrations, and however, the electron emission current density has been increased at least 3～4 order for those coated tips compared to that of the bare Si tips. To fulfill in the thickness gap between thin film of typical ～1 μm made by PVD/CVD and polished ceramic wafer of ～50 μm from the bulk, piezoelectric films with thickness in a range of 1～30 μm have been successfully deposited on Si substrate at a low temperature of 650oC by a novel hybridized deposition technique, and piezoelectric MEMS ultrasonic arrays have been very recently obtained with the sound pressure level up to ～120 dB. More detailed results will be presented and mechanisms will be discussed.

Journal News: Hartman and Spit’s Research Work, Published in American Journal of Climate Change, Has Been Cited by Top Journal Nature Geoscience

Capacity building is a key issue for the implementation of climate adaptation measures in urban planning processes. For successful capacity building, it is important to define the relevant stakeholders and tailor the adaptation strategies first to (the position of) these stakeholders and next to the specific urban conditions and issues. In addition, scientific insights and tools can be of assistance, and the use of climate maps can help to create a common language. Thomas Hartmann and Tejo Spit’s research work on capacity building was published in American Journal of Climate Change, 3, 245-252, 2014 [1]. In June 2015, Thomas Hartmann and Tejo Spit’s research work [1] was cited by Nature Geoscience as one of six important papers in the field of capacity building [2], in detail, please see: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n7/full/ngeo2465.html.

Next Higher Transmisson Voltage for Northwest Power Grid in China──Progess of And Some Comments on the Research Work

The situation and status of the research work on the next higher transmission voltage for Northwest Power Grid in China are briefly presented in this paper. It has been preliminarily determined that 750 kV will be adopted as the next higher transmission voltage to the 330 kV being used. In consideration of the temporary slowing down of the growth of electric power industry in Northwest China and the advance of the.research work on nation--wide interconnection, the authors put forward their views on this problem.

Empirical Human Rights Studies Contribute to Building a Society Under the Rule of Law——Summary of the Fifth National Meeting for the Exchange of Work Experience Among Human Rights Research Institutions

From Nov. 5 to 6, 2013, the China Society for Human Rights Studies （CSHRS）held the Fifth National Meeting for the Exchange of Work Experience Among Human Rights Research Institutions at Wuhan University. More than 100 experts and scholars, focusing on empirical human rights studies and their contribution to building a society based on the rule of law, shared their work experience and discussed effective strategies. CSHRS President Luo Haocai, who served as vice chairman of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People＇s Political Consultative Conference,

Appraisal of the Production-Oriented Approach： An Introduction

The production-oriented approach （POA） has been developed over a decade. It is driven by the need to improve English classroom instruction for university students in China （Wen, 2016）. It is also motivated by the aspiration to enhance the quality of foreign language education in other similar pedagogical contexts outside China. A volume of research has been done by Wen Qiufang and her research team, to formulate the theory of POA and to test its effectiveness in classroom pedagogy （e.g. Wen, 2016, 2015; Yang, 2015; Zhang, 2015）. At the moment, the POA is still at an early stage of theory building and almost all empirical research is done in the Chinese context. In order to improve the quality of this theory and to make it intelligible to the international academic community, a one-day symposium was held in Beijing Foreign Studies University on May 15, 2017. The symposium was entitled ＇The first international forum on innovative foreign language education in China： Appraisal of the POA＇. In the forum, leading experts in applied linguistics were invited to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the POA and the directions for its future development. The symposium was the first attempt for the POA research team to discuss its latest work with international scholars. This Viewpoint section collects the responses of four experts who participated in the symposium, listed in alphabetical order. The collection of articles covers three topics related to the POA： its pedagogical application, its use for teacher training, and its research. Alister Cumming is Professor Emeritus and the former Head of the Centre for Educational Research on Languages and Literacies, University of Toronto, Canada. His article focuses primarily on POA research as an exemplary case of design-based research. Rod Ellis is Research Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia. He discusses POA in terms of pedagogy, teacher training and research, with both critiques and constructive suggestions. Paul Kei Matsuda is Professor of English and Director of Second Language Writing at Arizona State University, the writed states. He responds to POA from the perspective of an expert researcher and teacher of L2 writing. Charlene Polio is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics ＆ Germanic, Slavic, Asian ＆ African Languages atMichigan State University, the writed states. She conceptualises POA as a useful method to address some issues in pre-service teacher development. Overall, the articles in this section are insightful and reader-friendly. They are not only useful for the development of POA in particular, but may also be valuable to a broad range of researchers as they touch upon pertaining issues, as well as emerging topics, in the field of applied linguistics. We therefore find it necessary to make them accessible to a wide readership.