Videotaped fonnatted test: usefulness for measuring academic lecture listening ability of learners of English as a second language

ESL teachers, curriculum writers, and test developers of recent decades have been enthusiastic to reflect authentic \u27target language use\u27 (TLU) situations in the materials they produce. The recent trend of language testing is also towards testing language use in a wider communicative sense. In second language (L2) listening comprehension testing, in contrast, there has been very little empirical work carried out to investigate the value of the authentic factors such as kinesics. schemata or speech modifications. Instead, audiotape formatted multiple choice listening tests (e.g., in the TOEFL, 1993) have been widely used for selection and placement purposes to determine whether new international students have sufficient listening abilities to study at academic settings in the North America. The lack of authentic factors in such norm-referenced tests (NRTs) raises the question of how test performance is affected by listening tasks which lack the variety of clues that normally help U listeners to infer meanings, for example, contextual information related to nonverbal and environmental clues

Thermal Property Evolution of Metal-Based Thermal Barrier Coatings with Heat Treatments

Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Make Prompts Adaptable: Bayesian Modeling for Vision-Language Prompt Learning with Data-Dependent Prior

Recent Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models have become the backbone for many downstream tasks, but they are utilized as frozen model without learning. Prompt learning is a method to improve the pre-trained VLP model by adding a learnable context vector to the inputs of the text encoder. In a few-shot learning scenario of the downstream task, MLE training can lead the context vector to over-fit dominant image features in the training data. This overfitting can potentially harm the generalization ability, especially in the presence of a distribution shift between the training and test dataset. This paper presents a Bayesian-based framework of prompt learning, which could alleviate the overfitting issues on few-shot learning application and increase the adaptability of prompts on unseen instances. Specifically, modeling data-dependent prior enhances the adaptability of text features for both seen and unseen image features without the trade-off of performance between them. Based on the Bayesian framework, we utilize the Wasserstein Gradient Flow in the estimation of our target posterior distribution, which enables our prompt to be flexible in capturing the complex modes of image features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on benchmark datasets for several experiments by showing statistically significant improvements on performance compared to existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/youngjae-cho/APP.Comment: Accepted to AAAI-202

Quality characteristics of rice inoculated with Inonotus obliquus mycelia and incubated under different cultivating conditions

This study was performed to investigate the quality characteristics of Inonotus obliquus mycelia rice incubated with I. obliquus (KCTC 256152). Different volumes of mycelial culture of I. obliquus were used for production of I. obliquus mycelia rice. Twenty percent of the mycelial culture was added to rice and designated as IOR-20, 30% as IOR-30 and 40% as IOR-40. Using the I. obliquus mycelia rice, the contents of β-1,3-glucan, betulin, total polyphenol and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazol (DPPH) radical scavenging activity, Hunter`s color values, free amino acid content, and mineral content were investigated. The β-1,3-glucan content in I. obliquus mycelia rice were in the order of IOR-30(729.7 μg/g) > IOR-20(716.0 μg/g) > IOR-40(690.5 μg/g) and those of betulin content were OR-30(1273.7 μg/g) > IOR-40 (1247.81 μg/g) > IOR-20 (1209.82 μg/g). The highest content of total polyphenols (353.6 μg/g) and activity of DPPH radical scavenging were observed in the IOR-30. The higher contents for β-1,3-glucan, betulin, polyphenol, and DPPH radical scavenging were found in 30% mycelial culture treatment, showing the best condition for the production of I. obliquus mycelia. Aspartic acid (10.28 to 29.44 μg/100 g), threonine (5.43 to 11.00 μg/100 g), serine (8.84 to 14.53 μg/100 g), glutamic acid (31.01 to 53.61 μg/100 g), glycine (4.77 to 10.26 μg/100 g), valine (2.93 to 6.57 μg/100 g), and lysine (5.20 to 14.41 μg/100 g) contents were determined in the I. obliquus mycelia rice and the order was as follows; IOR-20>IOR-30>IOR-40. The IOR-30 sample exhibited the highest levels of K(899.1±8.1 mg/kg), Mg(427.3±9.3 mg/kg), Ca(480.2±6.9 mg/kg), Na(296.1±9.2 mg/kg).Keywords: Rice, Inonotus obliquus (KCTC 256152), β-1,3-glucan, betulin, quality characteristicsAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(33), pp. 5131-513

The Expression of AGO2 and DGCR8 in Idiopathic Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss

ObjectivesThe microRNAs have been implicated in the development and function of the inner ear, especially in contribution to hearing. However, the impact of idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) on expression of miRNA biogenesis-related components has not been established. To investigate the regulations of microRNA (miRNA) biogenesis-related components, argonaute 2 (AGO2) and DiGeorge syndrome critical region gene 8 (DGCR8) mRNA expression in SSNHL and to evaluate the value of clinical parameters on their expression.MethodsThirty-seven patients diagnosed with SSNHL and fifty-one healthy volunteers were included in this study. We measured mRNA expression levels of AGO2 and DGCR8 in whole blood cells but erythrocytes of patients with SSNHL and controls, using reverse transcription and real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis.ResultsThe mRNA expression level of AGO2 is upregulated in SSNHL. The expression level of AGO2 was significantly correlated with that of DGCR8 in both patients with SSNHL and controls. Expression level of AGO2 in SSNHL was correlated with white blood cell counts.ConclusionThis study demonstrated for the first time that the AGO2 mRNA expression level was upregulated in SSNHL, suggesting its important role in pathobiology of SSNHL development

Experimental study on the measurement of effective themal conductivity for VHTR fuel block geometry

Papers presented to the 11th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 20-23 July 2015.Effective thermal conductivity models which can be used to analyze the heat transfer phenomena of a prismatic fuel block were evaluated by the experiments. In the accident condition of VHTR when forced convection is lost, the heat flows in radial direction through the hexagonal fuel blocks that contain the large number of coolant holes and fuel compacts. Due to the complex geometry of fuel block and radiation heat transfer, the detail computation of heat transfer on the fuel block needs excessive computation resources. Therefore, the detail computation isn't appropriate for the lumped parameter code and a system code such as GAMMA+ adopts effective thermal conductivity model. Despite the complexity in heat transfer modes, the accurate analysis on the heat transfer in fuel block is necessary since it is directly relevant to the integrity of nuclear fuel embedded in fuel block. To satisfy the accurate analysis of complex heat transfer modes with limited computing sources, the credible effective thermal conductivity (ETC) models in which the effects of all of heat transfer modes are lumped is necessary. In this study, various ETC models were evaluated with the experiment result. Experiments for measuring the ETC values of the VHTR fuel block geometry were conducted with IG-11 graphite block. And four probable models compared to the experiment result showed good agreement with them, and thus they could be a candidate ETC model for VHTR fuel block.This research was supported by the National Nuclear R&D Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by MSIP; Ministry of Science ICT & Future Planning (No. NRF-2014M2A8A2074314)am201

High-Performance Screen-Printed Thermoelectric Films on Fabrics.

Printing techniques could offer a scalable approach to fabricate thermoelectric (TE) devices on flexible substrates for power generation used in wearable devices and personalized thermo-regulation. However, typical printing processes need a large concentration of binder additives, which often render a detrimental effect on electrical transport of the printed TE layers. Here, we report scalable screen-printing of TE layers on flexible fiber glass fabrics, by rationally optimizing the printing inks consisting of TE particles (p-type Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3 or n-type Bi2Te2.7Se0.3), binders, and organic solvents. We identified a suitable binder additive, methyl cellulose, which offers suitable viscosity for printability at a very small concentration (0.45-0.60 wt.%), thus minimizing its negative impact on electrical transport. Following printing, the binders were subsequently burnt off via sintering and hot pressing. We found that the nanoscale defects left behind after the binder burnt off became effective phonon scattering centers, leading to low lattice thermal conductivity in the printed n-type material. With the high electrical conductivity and low thermal conductivity, the screen-printed TE layers showed high room-temperature ZT values of 0.65 and 0.81 for p-type and n-type, respectively

Low-Power Complementary Inverter Based on Graphene/Carbon-Nanotube and Graphene/MoS₂ Barristors

The recent report of a p-type graphene(Gr)/carbon-nanotube(CNT) barristor facilitates the application of graphene barristors in the fabrication of complementary logic devices. Here, a complementary inverter is presented that combines a p-type Gr/CNT barristor with a n-type Gr/MoS2 barristor, and its characteristics are reported. A sub-nW (~0.2 nW) low-power inverter is demonstrated with a moderate gain of 2.5 at an equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) of ~15 nm. Compared to inverters based on field-effect transistors, the sub-nW power consumption was achieved at a much larger EOT, which was attributed to the excellent switching characteristics of Gr barristors