Examining The General Quality Of Early Childhood Education And Structural Variables In Support Of Early Childhood Inclusion In Beijing, China

The primary purpose of this study was to (a) explore the global quality of early childhood programs within the Chinese socio-cultural context, and (b) examine the effects of teachers\u27 years of experience, degree, major, and class size on teachers\u27 perceptions of developmentally appropriate practices, inclusion, and training needs in order to provide services for children with disabilities in regular classrooms. The researcher completed observations in 40 early childhood classrooms using the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale- Revised (ECERS-R). Results from classroom observations revealed that the global quality of the early childhood learning environment was between minimum and good. Areas that were in need of improvement included materials, time for free play, and provisions for children with disabilities. In addition, 276 teachers from 12 inclusion pilot kindergartens in Beijing completed 3 surveys. Teachers\u27 responses to the developmentally appropriate practices survey revealed a gap between teachers\u27 self-reported developmentally appropriate beliefs and activities. Further, MANOVA results indicated that both class size and years of teaching experience contributed to the differences between teachers. In surveying teachers\u27 inclusion perceptions, MANOVA results suggested that only class size contributed to the differences between teachers. A discriminant function analysis was performed as a follow-up procedure to determine which of the independent variables contributed most to group differences. Moreover, the researcher found that no variables made a difference to teachers\u27 perceived training needs for inclusion. Implications of current study findings for teacher preparation, future research, and policy formation will be discussed

Defense Expenditure and Economic Growth under External Predation

This paper develops a growth model of a country under a Hobbesian environment with international conflicts where national defense is the only way to prevent external predation. The long run growth path is determined by the equilibrium of a dynamic game with three players, the external predator, the government and the family. The equilibrium growth path has three phases, submissive equilibrium, tolerant equilibrium and full-protected equilibrium. Different defense strategies result in different growth prospects and sustainable growth will endogenously induce adjustment of defense strategies.economic growth; predate; defense expenditure

Bis[3-dimethyl­amino-1-(2-pyrid­yl)prop-2-en-1-one-κ2 N 2′,O]tris­(nitrato-κ2 O,O′)praseodymium(III)

In the title compound, [Pr(NO3)3(C10H12N2O)2], the PrIII ion is ten-coordinated by two N and two O atoms from two bidentate 3-(dimethyl­amino)-1-(2-pyrid­yl)prop-2-en-1-one ligands and by six O atoms from three nitrate anions in a distorted bicapped square-anti­prismatic geometry. An extensive three-dimensional network of weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds consolidates the crystal packing

VHE gamma ray absorption by galactic interstellar radiation field

Adopting a recent calculation of the Galactic interstellar radiation field, we calculate the attenuation of the very high energy gamma rays from the Galactic sources. The infra-red radiation background near the Galactic Center is very intense due to the new calculation and our result shows that a cutoff of high energy gamma ray spectrum begins at about 20 TeV and reaches about 10% for 50 TeV gamma rays.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, figure is changed, conclusion not change

Bis[3-dimethyl­amino-1-(pyridin-2-yl)prop-2-en-1-one-κ2 N 1,O]tris­(nitrato-κ2 O,O)gadolinium(III) ethanol disolvate

In the title compound, [Gd(NO3)3(C10H12N2O)2]·2C2H5OH, the GdIII ion and one nitrate anion are located on a twofold rotation axis. The GdIII ion is ten-coordinated by two N and two O atoms from two bidentate 3-(N,N-dimethyl­amino)-1-(2-pyrid­yl)prop-2-en-1-one) ligands and six O atoms from three nitrate anions in a distorted bicapped square-anti­prismatic geometry. In the crystal, the components are linked by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. The ethanol solvent mol­ecule is disordered over two positions in a ratio 0.615 (16):0.385 (16)

Automatic Article Commenting: the Task and Dataset

Comments of online articles provide extended views and improve user engagement. Automatically making comments thus become a valuable functionality for online forums, intelligent chatbots, etc. This paper proposes the new task of automatic article commenting, and introduces a large-scale Chinese dataset with millions of real comments and a human-annotated subset characterizing the comments' varying quality. Incorporating the human bias of comment quality, we further develop automatic metrics that generalize a broad set of popular reference-based metrics and exhibit greatly improved correlations with human evaluations.Comment: ACL2018; with supplements; Dataset link available in the pape