WAR Metaphor’s Persistent Prevalence in Chinese Pandemic Coverage

The WAR metaphor pervades public discourse, offering a swift comprehension and eliciting urgency and rapid response. Universally, it emerges as the primary conceptualization for COVID-19 across nations. Nevertheless, certain Western media explore alternative metaphors, wary of potential adverse effects, while Chinese news media steadfastly embrace the WAR metaphor in pandemic coverage. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), this article qualitatively analyzes the phenomenon. Conclusively, the study reveals deep-seated historical, cultural, and social contextual motivations, evident in China's distinct war history, collectivist values, and the pandemic situation. This exploration sheds light on the unique discourse of Chinese media on pandemic response, aiding global understanding and contributing to metaphor in cultural and news discourse research

Affective factors in Foreign Language Teaching: Enlightenment From Dead Poets Society

The focus of foreign language teaching has been changed from the teacher-centered model to the student-centered model. The traditional duck-feeding model of teaching cannot meet the requirements of the new era for it fails to activate students’ affect in learning. Since students’ affective factors exert a great impact on foreign language teaching, how to effectively motivate students becomes our primary focus. This study aims to comprehensively investigate how affective factors may influence foreign language learning by taking American film Dead Poets Society as an example. Besides, it intends to provide some pedagogical implications for educators by analyzing Keating’s teaching mode in Dead Poets Society. In the film, Keating is dedicated to the cultivation of the students’ independent thinking and innovative ability over the teaching process. Through affective interaction with students, Keating finds a suitable way to achieve their self-actualization. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis, and non-intelligence theory, Keating’s teaching mode can effectively help students build up self-confidence and seek their self -actualization. As is generally recognized that affective factors like motivation, self-confidence, anxiety and inhibition play important roles in language learning. Keating’s success can have some enlightenment for foreign language teaching as well. We hold that foreign language teachers should motivate students to seek self-actualization, relieve their anxiety and build up their self-confidence, love and respect them, which can contribute to enhancing of teaching effects ultimately

Perception of social interaction compresses subjective duration in an oxytocin-dependent manner

Communication through body gestures permeates our daily life. Efficient perception of the message therein reflects one's social cognitive competency. Here we report that such competency is manifested temporally as shortened subjective duration of social interactions: motion sequences showing agents acting communicatively are perceived to be significantly shorter in duration as compared with those acting noncommunicatively. The strength of this effect is negatively correlated with one's autistic-like tendency. Critically, intranasal oxytocin administration restores the temporal compression effect in socially less proficient individuals, whereas the administration of atosiban, a competitive antagonist of oxytocin, diminishes the effect in socially proficient individuals. These findings indicate that perceived time, rather than being a faithful representation of physical time, is highly idiosyncratic and ingrained with one's personality trait. Moreover, they suggest that oxytocin is involved in mediating time perception of social interaction, further supporting the role of oxytocin in human social cognition

The weight distribution of a class of p-ary cyclic codes

AbstractFor an odd prime p and two positive integers n⩾3 and k with ngcd(n,k) being odd, the paper determines the weight distribution of a class of p-ary cyclic codes C over Fp with nonzeros α−1, α−(pk+1) and α−(p3k+1), where α is a primitive element of Fpn

The Explicit Identities for Spectral Norms of Circulant-Type Matrices Involving Binomial Coefficients and Harmonic Numbers

The explicit formulae of spectral norms for circulant-type matrices are investigated; the matrices are circulant matrix, skew-circulant matrix, and g-circulant matrix, respectively. The entries are products of binomial coefficients with harmonic numbers. Explicit identities for these spectral norms are obtained. Employing these approaches, some numerical tests are listed to verify the results

Preparation and imaging of intravascular high-frequency transducer

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging is by far the most favorable imaging modality for coronary artery evaluation. IVUS transducer design and fabrication, a key technology for intravascular ultrasound imaging, has a significant impact on the performance of the imaging results. Herein, a 35-MHz side-looking IVUS transducer probe was developed. With a small aperture of 0.40 mm × 0.40 mm, the transducer exhibited a very wide -6 dB bandwidth of 85% and a very low insertion loss of -12 dB. Further, the in vitro IVUS imaging of a porcine coronary artery was performed to clearly display the vessel wall structure while the corresponding color-coded graph was constructed successfully to distinguish necrotic core and fibrous plaque via image processing. The results demonstrated that the imaging performance of the optimized design transducer performs favorably

How Well Does the ERA5 Reanalysis Capture the Extreme Climate Events Over China? Part II: Extreme Temperature

The fifth-generation atmospheric reanalysis of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ERA5) is the latest reanalysis product. However, the reliability of ERA5 to capture extreme temperatures is still unclear over China. Hence, based on conventional meteorological station data, a new criterion (DISO) was used to validate the ERA5 capturing extreme temperature indices derived from the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) across the six subregions of China on different timescales. The conclusions are as follows: the original daily temperatures (mean temperature, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature) can be well reproduced by ERA5 reanalysis over China. ERA5 tends to exhibit more misdetection for the duration of extreme temperature events than extreme temperature intensity and frequency. In addition, ERA5 performed best in the summer and worst in the winter, respectively. The trend of absolute indices (e.g., TXx and TNx), percentile-based indices (e.g., TX90p, TX10p, TN90p, and TN10p), and duration indices (e.g., WSDI, CSDI, and GSL) can be captured by ERA5, but ERA5 failed to capture the tendency of the diurnal temperature range (DTR) over China. Spatially, ERA5 performs well in southeastern China. However, it remains challenging to accurately recreate the extreme temperature events in the Tibetan Plateau. The elevation difference between the station and ERA5 grid point contributes to the main bias of reanalysis temperatures. The accuracy of ERA5 decreases with the increase in elevation discrepancy

How Well Does the ERA5 Reanalysis Capture the Extreme Climate Events Over China? Part I: Extreme Precipitation

ERA5 is the fifth-generation atmospheric reanalysis of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with high spatiotemporal resolution and global coverage. However, the reliability of ERA5 for simulating extreme precipitation events is still unclear over China. In this study, 12 extreme precipitation indices and a comprehensive quantitative distance between indices of simulation and observation were used to evaluate ERA5 precipitation from three fundamental aspects: intensity, frequency, and duration. The geomorphological regionalization method was used to divide the subregions of China. The results showed that the ability of ERA5 to simulate annual total precipitation was better than that of daily precipitation. For the intensity indices, ERA5 performs well for simulating the PRCPTOT (annual total wet days precipitation) over China. ERA5 performs better on RX5day (max 5-days precipitation amount) and R95p (very wet days), especially in eastern China, than on RX1day (max 1-day precipitation amount) and R99p (extremely wet days). For the frequency indices, the ability of the ERA5 simulation increased as the amount of precipitation increased, except for northwestern China. However, the ability of ERA5 to simulate R50 mm (number of extreme heavy precipitation days) decreased. For the duration indices, ERA5 was better at simulating drought events than wet events in eastern China. Our results highlight the need for ERA5 to enhance the simulation of trend changes in extreme precipitation events