Observation And Analysis Of Undergraduate Applied Piano Lessons And Individual Practice Sessions

The purpose of this study was to identify what practice strategies were presented by piano teachers in applied lessons and how their students practiced in subsequent practice sessions. Moreover, the study also attempted to identity what practice strategies and applications were associated with the students\u27 performance improvement. Five university piano professors participated in this study. Each participant professor recruited two piano-major (BA, BM, BME) undergraduate students from his or her piano studio, with one student in the first or second year of college (as the lower-level), and the other one in the third or fourth year (as the upper-level). A total of 15 (5 professors and 10 students) participated in this study. Each student participant completed: 1.) a 30-minute practice session on a selected piece prior to the applied lesson; 2.) a 30-minute applied lesson on the selected piece with his or her piano professor; and 3.) two subsequent 30-minute practice sessions after the lesson. A pre-test was conducted after the first practice session and a post-test was conducted after the last practice session. The pre- and post-tests were evaluated by three independent judges to determine performance improvement for each student participant. In addition, the participants (teachers and students) completed a brief survey about their educational background, piano experience, practice habits, and other questions related to this study. All practice sessions and applied lessons were video recorded and analyzed by the researcher. Results suggest that how teachers taught (modeling, talk, demonstrating, communication), and how students practiced (practice strategies, error identification, error correction, concentration) had the greatest impact on students\u27 performance improvement. However, students\u27 sight-reading abilities, years of piano study, practice routine, and practice priority had no effect on students\u27 performance improvement, nor did their teachers\u27 degrees and level of experience. Piano teachers are encouraged to evaluate how practice strategies are presented in their applied lessons and how their students apply the strategies in their practicing

Gender und Identitätskonstruktion quer Differenz : kulturelle Diskurse und Alltagspraxis bei den Sorben in Deutschland

This study addresses the situation of the Sorbs, an indigenous minority living in Lusatia, Germany. Under the overarching rubric of ethnic and nationalist projects, women are usually symbolized as the guardians of culture and language. Women’s experiences as subjects in everyday life and in multi-facetted social practices therefore become veiled. The main concern in this book is to discuss how the women who identify themselves as/with Sorbs studied here construct their identities in the modern world, how they approach a sense of self and how they position themselves in their everyday lives, what kind of processes they undergo in their identity construction, and which factors are implicated in the formation of these identities. Investigating the Sorbian minority as the research subject and focusing on the female gender primarily involves intersections of ethnicity and gender, which are the points of departure for this study. As the research progresses, women’s gradual active construction of gender and ethnicity while living their everyday lives reveals a construction of multifarious and complex identifications across differences of gender, ethnicity, culture, religion and class. The results of research create Sorbian culture anew, craft Sorbian identity afresh and render the notion of Sorbian women in new terms. New meanings encased in these conceptions actually contain an active and transformative impetus. This thrust forces these ideas to undergo a process of redefinition. It is the life experiences people have in everyday practices that impel us to envisage identity construction as a dynamic, never-ending and open-ended articulation of one’s positionings.Die vorgelegte Dissertation befasst sich mit der sorbischen Minderheit, die in der Lausitz ansässig ist. Die zentrale Fragestellung betrifft die gegenwärtige Identitätskonstruktion der sorbischen Frauen, die in der visuellen und diskursiven Darstellung der Sorben und der sorbischen Kultur auf eine repräsentative Position festgeschrieben worden sind. Damit wurden ihre subjektiven Erfahrungen im Alltagsleben und die vielfältige soziale Praxis ausgeblendet. Die Arbeit nimmt Bezug auf Prozesse, Praxis und Erfahrungen, mit denen die Sorbinnen ihre ethnische Positionierung und ihre Auffassungen von Identität abbilden. Damit ist der Fokus auf die Verflechtung von Ethnizität und Gender gerichtet. Die Verfasserin möchte einerseits aufzeigen, wie die vergeschlechtlichte Festschreibung der Kultur konstruiert wurde, und andererseits die Geschlechter- und Ethnizitätsdifferenzen beleuchten. Die Arbeit führt aus, dass die sorbischen Frauen ihre Identität durch die alltägliche Praxis und die Interaktion mit anderen aktiv konstruieren und sozial herstellen. Auf diese Weise wird die einheitliche Konzeption des Sorbentums sowie der sorbischen Weiblichkeit, Kultur und Identität revidiert und dynamisch neudefiniert. Die ursprünglich homogene, geschlossene, kohärente Vorstellung wird von Differenz, Vielfalt und Dynamik durchdrungen. Darüber hinaus wird deutlich, dass die Identität der untersuchten Frauen durch die Vernetzung und Überlagerung der verschiedenen Differenzformen zutage tritt, seien sie nun geschlechtlich, ethnisch, kulturell, religiös oder klassenspezifisch. Das Leben der Frauen, das in der kollektiven Geschichte, der kulturellen Erfahrung, der sozialen Interaktion und der politischen Entwicklung unterschiedlich kontextualisiert wird, veranschaulicht ihre multiplen Positionierungen im sozialen Leben und ihre wechselnde Identitätsverortung

Teachers' Beliefs About the Nature and Malleability of Intelligence

This study examines teachers’ beliefs in the nature and malleability of intelligence, how these beliefs may vary in different academic domains, and whether those beliefs have any significant relationships with teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, epistemological beliefs, and proposed interventions for struggling students. Findings showed that teachers exhibited a more fixed view of the nature of intelligence when survey items were framed in terms of math, not language arts or domain-general items. There was also evidence suggesting that teachers’ beliefs in the fixed entity nature of intelligence are significantly correlated with holding a traditional unidimensional conception of intelligence. However, little evidence was found indicating a relationship between teachers’ various beliefs and their proposed strategies for struggling students. The results have implications for research on lay conceptions of intelligence, and for teacher education curricula

Interface dynamics of table tennis

The purpose of this study was to discussed the Interface Dynamics of Table Tennis. The experiment was conducted based on the imaging principle of hot air flowing. We adopted the imaging principle of hot air flowing through rotating ball to simulate the flow phenomenon generated by air flowing through table tennis after striking by different rackets. The conclusion and suggestion after analyzing and discussing are described below: (1) The rotation of table tennis ball and flow field will change based on the roughness of rackets, which making its own contribution to the existence of changes in the rotation of table tennis ball. (2) It can learn that angle should forward 30 degrees with flat strike, 25 degrees with short particles and 20 degrees with long particles at the rotational speed of 7500 rpm. All flow fields of different rackets are similar

Functional Improvement in Older Adults after a Falls Prevention Pilot Study

Falls are a costly, disabling, and life-threatening risk in the elderly. Improvements in physical function, balance, lower extremity strength, and health-related quality of life are hypothesized to help mitigate fall risk. In this pilot study, six women and men with an average age of 81 years participated in a 6-week exercise and education program created to reduce risk of falls. Evaluations were made at baseline and at 6 weeks on four tests: the Functional Status Questionnaire, the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), the Six-minute Walk Test, and the World Health Organization Quality of Life–BREF 26-question test. Scores indicated significant improvement in functional physical status (activities of daily living), balance, distance walked in 6 min, and quality of life in the physical health domain. The size of this study limits the generalizability of its findings, but its evidence warrants undertaking a larger trial

Team I2R-VI-FF Technical Report on EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Hand Object Segmentation Challenge 2023

In this report, we present our approach to the EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Hand Object Segmentation Challenge, which focuses on the estimation of the relation between the hands and the objects given a single frame as input. The EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR dataset provides pixel-wise annotations and serves as a benchmark for hand and active object segmentation in egocentric video. Our approach combines the baseline method, i.e., Point-based Rendering (PointRend) and the Segment Anything Model (SAM), aiming to enhance the accuracy of hand and object segmentation outcomes, while also minimizing instances of missed detection. We leverage accurate hand segmentation maps obtained from the baseline method to extract more precise hand and in-contact object segments. We utilize the class-agnostic segmentation provided by SAM and apply specific hand-crafted constraints to enhance the results. In cases where the baseline model misses the detection of hands or objects, we re-train an object detector on the training set to enhance the detection accuracy. The detected hand and in-contact object bounding boxes are then used as prompts to extract their respective segments from the output of SAM. By effectively combining the strengths of existing methods and applying our refinements, our submission achieved the 1st place in terms of evaluation criteria in the VISOR HOS Challenge

A New Zn(II) Two-dimensional Coordination Polymer: Synthesis, Structure, Highly Efficient Fluorescence and DFT Study

A new two-dimensional coordinate polymer, {[Zn2(pbmpd)(H2O)4]·(H2O)}n (H4pbmpd = 1,1'-(1,4-phenylenebis(methylene))bis-(1H-pyrazole-3,5-dicarboxylic acid)), has been hydrothermally synthesized and characterized by IR spectrum, elemental analysis，TGA and X-ray single-crystal/powder diffraction. Structural analyses reveal that complex 1 exhibits a two-dimensional sheet structure in the crystal lattice. In complex 1, the carboxylic oxygen atoms and conjugated N atoms of pbmpd4- bridge zinc(II) ions form indefinitely zigzag shaped one-dimensional chains through p···p stacking interactions which are further connected by [ZnO6] units to form a novel two-dimensional structure. Finally, p···p stacking interactions and intermolecular hydrogen bonds assemble the two dimensional networks into a three-dimensional framework. Furthermore, the luminescent properties are also discussed. Interestingly, the solid state photoluminescence properties of the title polymer show the enhancement effect of spectrum. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were used to support the experimental data

MeInfoText: associated gene methylation and cancer information from text mining

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>DNA methylation is an important epigenetic modification of the genome. Abnormal DNA methylation may result in silencing of tumor suppressor genes and is common in a variety of human cancer cells. As more epigenetics research is published electronically, it is desirable to extract relevant information from biological literature. To facilitate epigenetics research, we have developed a database called MeInfoText to provide gene methylation information from text mining.</p> <p>Description</p> <p>MeInfoText presents comprehensive association information about gene methylation and cancer, the profile of gene methylation among human cancer types and the gene methylation profile of a specific cancer type, based on association mining from large amounts of literature. In addition, MeInfoText offers integrated protein-protein interaction and biological pathway information collected from the Internet. MeInfoText also provides pathway cluster information regarding to a set of genes which may contribute the development of cancer due to aberrant methylation. The extracted evidence with highlighted keywords and the gene names identified from each methylation-related abstract is also retrieved. The database is now available at <url>http://mit.lifescience.ntu.edu.tw/</url>.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>MeInfoText is a unique database that provides comprehensive gene methylation and cancer association information. It will complement existing DNA methylation information and will be useful in epigenetics research and the prevention of cancer.</p

PIWI-interacting RNAs: Mitochondria-based biogenesis and functions in cancer

PIWI-interacting RNA (piRNAs), once thought to be mainly functioning in germlines, are now known to play an essential role in somatic and cancerous tissues. Ping-pong cycle initiation and mitochondria-based phased production constitute the core of the piRNA biogenesis and these two processes are well conserved in mammals, including humans. By being involved in DNA methylation, histone marker deposition, mRNA degradation, and protein modification, piRNAs also contribute to carcinogenesis partly due to oncogenic stress-induced piRNA dysregulation. Also, piRNAs play important roles in cancer stemness, drug resistance, and tumor immunology. Results from liquid biopsy analysis of piRNA can be used in both cancer diagnoses and cancer prognoses. A combination of targeting piRNA with other therapeutic strategies could be groundbreaking cancer treatment