Improving Students’ Intensive Reading Ability by Using Survey-Question-Read-Review-Recite-Reflect Method

The current study is a classroom action research with the objective of analyzing the improvement of students’ intensive reading ability using Survey-Question-Read-Review-Recite-Reflect (SQ4R) method. This research was conducted at Ryulgok Secondary School, Pyongyang, by involving 32 the 3rd grade students as the research participants. Data collection techniques were interviews, observation, documentation, and tests. The data analysis method used in this study was divided into qualitative data analysis and quantitative data analysis. The results of the first cycle of the research showed that 58.4% of students were active, it meant that it was still less than the target 75% of the results of intensive reading, because only 53% of students achieved a score of 70 and above for reading ability. In the second cycle, it shows that 85% of students actively participated in learning and the percentage of students was 87% of the target 75% of students got a score of 70 and above for reading ability. This indicated that there was an increase in learning outcomes (reading ability) as a result of an increase in the learning process after using the SQ4R method

Hedge fund market runs during financial crises

Hedge funds exit financial markets simultaneously after enormous shocks, such as the global financial crisis. While previous studies highlight only fund investors’ synchronized withdrawals as the major driver of massive asset liquidations, we primarily focus on informed and rational fund managers and suggest a theoretical model that illustrates fund managers’ synchronized market runs. This study shows that the possibility of runs induces panic-based market runs not because of systematic risk itself but because of the fear of runs. We find that when the market regime changes from a normal to a ‘bad’ state in which runs are possible, hedge funds reduce their investments prior to runs. In addition, market runs are more likely to occur in markets in which hedge funds have greater market exposure and uninformed traders are more sensitive to past price movement

Bulk viscous effects on flow and dilepton radiation in a hybrid approach

Starting from IP-Glasma initial conditions, we investigate the effects of bulk pressure on low mass dilepton production at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies. Though thermal dilepton $v_2$ is affected by the presence of both bulk and shear viscosity, whether or not these effects can be measured depends on the dilepton "cocktail" contribution to the the low mass dilepton $v_2$. Combining the thermal and "cocktail" dileptons, the effects of bulk viscosity on total dilepton $v_2$ is investigated.Comment: Proceedings for the 26th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (Quark Matter 2017), February 5-11 2017, Chicago, Illinois, US

SECOM: A Novel Hash Seed and Community Detection Based-Approach for Genome-Scale Protein Domain Identification

With rapid advances in the development of DNA sequencing technologies, a plethora of high-throughput genome and proteome data from a diverse spectrum of organisms have been generated. The functional annotation and evolutionary history of proteins are usually inferred from domains predicted from the genome sequences. Traditional database-based domain prediction methods cannot identify novel domains, however, and alignment-based methods, which look for recurring segments in the proteome, are computationally demanding. Here, we propose a novel genome-wide domain prediction method, SECOM. Instead of conducting all-against-all sequence alignment, SECOM first indexes all the proteins in the genome by using a hash seed function. Local similarity can thus be detected and encoded into a graph structure, in which each node represents a protein sequence and each edge weight represents the shared hash seeds between the two nodes. SECOM then formulates the domain prediction problem as an overlapping community-finding problem in this graph. A backward graph percolation algorithm that efficiently identifies the domains is proposed. We tested SECOM on five recently sequenced genomes of aquatic animals. Our tests demonstrated that SECOM was able to identify most of the known domains identified by InterProScan. When compared with the alignment-based method, SECOM showed higher sensitivity in detecting putative novel domains, while it was also three orders of magnitude faster. For example, SECOM was able to predict a novel sponge-specific domain in nucleoside-triphosphatase (NTPases). Furthermore, SECOM discovered two novel domains, likely of bacterial origin, that are taxonomically restricted to sea anemone and hydra. SECOM is an open-source program and available at http://sfb.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Software.aspx

Are Controversial Issues in Cervical Total Disc Replacement Resolved or Unresolved?: A Review of Literature and Recent Updates

Since the launch of cervical total disc replacement (CTDR) in the early 2000s, many clinical studies have reported better outcomes of CTDR compared to those of anterior cervical discectomy and fusion. However, CTDR is still a new and innovative procedure with limited indications for clinical application in spinal surgery, particularly, for young patients presenting with soft disc herniation with radiculopathy and/or myelopathy. In addition, some controversial issues related to the assessment of clinical outcomes of CTDR remain unresolved. These issues, including surgical outcomes, adjacent segment degeneration (ASD), heterotopic ossification (HO), wear debris and tissue reaction, and multilevel total disc replacement (TDR) and hybrid surgeries are a common concern of spine surgeons and need to be resolved. Among them, the effect of CTDR on patient outcomes and ASD is theoretically and clinically important; however, this issue remains disputable. Additionally, HO, wear debris, multilevel TDR, and hybrid surgery tend to favor CTDR in terms of their effects on outcomes, but the potential of these factors for jeopardizing patients' safety postoperatively and/or to exert harmful effects on surgical outcomes in longer-term follow-up cannot be ignored. Consequently, it is too early to determine the therapeutic efficacy and cost-effectiveness of CTDR and will require considerable time and studies to provide appropriate answers regarding the same. For these reasons, CTDR requires longer-term follow-up data