THE EFFECTS OF MIND MAPPING AT WHILE-READING STAGE ON EFL STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION AT A LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL IN KIEN GIANG PROVINCE, VIETNAM

There is an increased attention to research into the use of mind mapping as a useful tool for enhancing students’ reading comprehension. However, few studies have been conducted to examine the effects of mind mapping at the reading stage on students’ reading comprehension within the Vietnamese context. This paper therefore investigates the effects of mind mapping on 11th graders’ reading comprehension and their attitudes towards this strategy. Participants in this study include 60 students at a local school in Kien Giang province. The data discussed in this paper include tests and interviews. The findings reveal that using mind mapping in the teaching process of reading texts had a moderate impact. Pedagogical implications for teachers and school administrators are presented.  Article visualizations

Can Agents Run Relay Race with Strangers? Generalization of RL to Out-of-Distribution Trajectories

In this paper, we define, evaluate, and improve the ``relay-generalization'' performance of reinforcement learning (RL) agents on the out-of-distribution ``controllable'' states. Ideally, an RL agent that generally masters a task should reach its goal starting from any controllable state of the environment instead of memorizing a small set of trajectories. For example, a self-driving system should be able to take over the control from humans in the middle of driving and must continue to drive the car safely. To practically evaluate this type of generalization, we start the test agent from the middle of other independently well-trained \emph{stranger} agents' trajectories. With extensive experimental evaluation, we show the prevalence of \emph{generalization failure} on controllable states from stranger agents. For example, in the Humanoid environment, we observed that a well-trained Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent, with only 3.9\% failure rate during regular testing, failed on 81.6\% of the states generated by well-trained stranger PPO agents. To improve "relay generalization," we propose a novel method called Self-Trajectory Augmentation (STA), which will reset the environment to the agent's old states according to the Q function during training. After applying STA to the Soft Actor Critic's (SAC) training procedure, we reduced the failure rate of SAC under relay-evaluation by more than three times in most settings without impacting agent performance and increasing the needed number of environment interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/lan-lc/STA.Comment: ICRL 202

Effects of Cooking Methods on the Changes of Total Anthocyanins, Phenolics Content and Physical Characteristics of Purple-Fleshed Sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) Grown in Vietnam

Total anthocyanin content (TAC) and total phenolics in “Nhật tím” purple-fleshed sweet potato (PFSP) variety were analyzed as affected by four cooking methods: steaming, baking, roasting, and frying. Moisture content (%), core flesh temperature (oC) and color characteristics of cooked PFSP were evaluated. TAC in steamed, fried (skin-on), roasted, baked, and fried (skin-off) PFSP were 234.18; 217.14; 208.11; 195.25; 173.68 mg/100g dry weight (DW), respectively. Under the same cooking time, steaming was good for the retention of total phenolics and anthocyanins as compared with baking. Cooking by steaming, roasting, baking, skin-on or skin-off frying produced significant increase (P ≤ 0.05) of TAC and total phenolics as compared to the respective fresh samples. Steaming resulted in the greatest increase of TAC whereas skin-on frying showed a good cooking method to retain high total phenolics (826.47 mg GAE/100g DW) in shred PFSP

Metal-organic framework derived hierarchical porous TiO2 nanopills as a super stable anode for Na-ion batteries

Hierarchical porous TiO2 nanopills were synthesized using a titanium metal-organic framework MIL-125(Ti) as precursor. The as-synthesized TiO2 nanopills owned a large specific surface area of 102 m2/g and unique porous structure. Furthermore, the obtained TiO2 nanopills were applied as anode materials for Na-ion batteries for the first time. The as-synthesized TiO2 nanopills achieved a high discharge capacity of 196.4 mAh/g at a current density of 0.1 A/g. A discharge capacity of 115.9 mAh/g was obtained at a high current density of 0.5 A/g and the capacity retention was remained as high as 90% even after 3000 cycles. The excellent electrochemical performance can be attributed to its unique hierarchical porous feature

L-carnosine reduces telomere damage and shortening rate in cultured normal fibroblasts

Abstract Telomere is the repetitive DNA sequence at the end of chromosomes, which shortens progressively with cell division and limits the replicative potential of normal human somatic cells. L L-Carnosine, a naturally occurring dipeptide, has been reported to delay the replicative senescence, and extend the lifespan of cultured human diploid fibroblasts. In this work, we studied the effect of carnosine on the telomeric DNA of cultured human fetal lung fibroblast cells. Cells continuously grown in 20 mM carnosine exhibited a slower telomere shortening rate and extended lifespan in population doublings. When kept in a long-term nonproliferating state, they accumulated much less damages in the telomeric DNA when cultured in the presence of carnosine. We suggest that the reduction in telomere shortening rate and damages in telomeric DNA made an important contribution to the life-extension effect of carnosine. Telomere is the repetitive DNA sequence that caps each end of a chromosome. Telomere plays important roles in maintaining chromosome stability by protecting chromosome ends from degradation and end-to-end fusion is a naturally occurring dipeptide and abundant in muscle and nervous tissues in many animals, especially long-lived species In this work, we studied the effect of carnosine on a human fetal lung fibroblast strain (HPF), which was either kept in a continuously proliferating or proliferation-inhibited state. Our results indicate that carnosine can reduce telomere shortening rate possibly by protectin

ANALISIS PERBEDAAN HEDGING KAKAO FUTURES DENGAN CROSS HEDGING KOPI ROBUSTA FUTURES YANG DIPERDAGANGAN DI BURSA BERJANGKA JAKARTA PERIODE: 2012-2016

Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk menganalisis perbedaan antara hedging kakao futures dengan cross hedging kopi robusta futures dalam meminimalkan risiko di pasar fisik komoditi kakao dengan membandingkan nilai varians return yang dihasilkan dari kedua kontrak futures. Data yang digunakan pada penelitian ini adalah data harian kakao spot, kakao futures, dan kopi robusta futures yang diperdagangkan di Bursa Berjangka Jakarta (BBJ) pada periode 2012-2016. Alat analisis yang digunakan adalah uji korelasi pearson yang bertujuan untuk menguji hubungan antara harga spot dengan futures pada saat melakukan hedging ataupun cross hedging; uji akar unit digunakan untuk melihat kestasioneritas data sebelum dilakukan uji beda; uji regresi sederhana digunakan untuk menghitung nilai ratio hedged dan ratio cross hedged; uji independent sample t-test digunakan untuk membandingkan nilai varians return yang dihasilkan dari kedua kontrak futures tersebut. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa tidak terdapat perbedaan varian returns yang dihasilkan dari keduanya. Dalam hal ini, penanganan risiko pada komoditi kakao di pasar fisiknya pada saat melakukan hedging ataupun cross hedging memiliki tingkat risiko yang sama, sehingga hedging kakao futures dan cross hedging kopi robusta futures sama-sama dapat digunakan untuk meminimalkan risiko pada pasar fisik kakao