A Cross-Cultural Perspective to Creativity in Engineering Education in Problem-Based Learning (PBL) between Denmark and China

This paper takes a cross-cultural perspective to link a study on creativity development in engineering education in a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in Denmark and its implications for fostering creative engineers in China. The analysis of empircal data, drawn from a Ph.D. study (2008-2012), aims to answer the two research questions: (1) what are the advantages and disadvantages of PBL in fostering creative engineering students in the Danish context? and (2) what are the cross-cultural implications of fostering creativity in engineering education by PBL in Denmark for China? The results suggest that in the Danish context, PBL is helpful for creativity development by stimulating motivation, developing skills such as communication, critical thinking, leadership, etc. But disadvantages exist, such as students having poor conceptualization of creativity and poor confidence in being creative. This has an implication in China: PBL requires that the relationships between teachers and students and between students needs to be reconstructed. To break the Chinese culture's barriers to creativity is the key to reconstructing these relationships

Conflict Adaptation in 5-Year-Old Preschool Children: Evidence From Emotional Contexts

This research investigated the individual behavioral and electrophysiological differences during emotional conflict adaptation processes in preschool children. Thirty children (16 girls, mean age 5.44 ± 0.28 years) completed an emotional Flanker task (stimulus-stimulus cognitive control, S-S) and an emotional Simon task (stimulus-response cognitive control, S-R). Behaviorally, the 5-year-old preschool children exhibited reliable congruency sequence effects (CSEs) in the emotional contexts, with faster response times (RTs) and lower error rates in the incongruent trials preceded by an incongruent trial (iI trial) than in the incongruent trials preceded by a congruent trial (cI trial). Regarding electrophysiology, the children demonstrated longer N2 and P3 latencies in the incongruent trials than in the congruent trials during emotional conflict control processes. Importantly, the boys showed a reliable CSE of N2 amplitude when faced with fearful target expression. Moreover, 5-year-old children showed better emotional CSEs in response to happy targets than to fearful targets as demonstrated by the magnitude of CSEs in terms of the RT, error rate, N2 amplitude and P3 latency. In addition, the results demonstrated that 5-year-old children processed S-S emotional conflicts and S-R emotional conflicts differently and performed better on S-S emotional conflicts than on S-R emotional conflicts according to the comparison of the RT-CSE and P3 latency-CSE values. The current study provides insight into how emotionally salient stimuli affect cognitive processes among preschool children

Developmental Changes in Processing Speed: Influence of Accelerated Education for Gifted Children

There are two major hypotheses concerning the developmental trends of processing speeds. These hypotheses explore both local and global trends. The study presented here investigates the effects of people's different knowledge on the speed with which they are able to process information. The participants in this study are gifted children aged 9, 11, and 13 years. A total of 94 of the participants were members of gifted programs, whereas the other 93 children received standard education. They were required to finish two information-processing tasks: a Choice Reaction Time task and an Abstract Matching task. The results show that the reaction time of gifted children who received accelerated education in gifted programs was significantly faster than that of the children who received standard education at every age. These results seem to imply that the educational atmosphere in which a child is placed plays a significant role in the development of gifted children's speed of information processing

A comparison between the effectiveness of PBL and LBL on improving problem-solving abilities of medical students using questioning

In daily patient-history taking and diagnosis practice, doctors ask questions to gather information from patients and narrow down diagnostic hypotheses. Training medical students to be efficient problem solvers through the use of questioning is therefore important. In this study, the effectiveness of problem-based learning (PBL) and lecture-based learning in improving the questioning abilities of medical students (N=104) was assessed by a modified 20-question task. In this task, the participants were asked to identify target pictures by asking questions, the problem-solving process of which resembles that of the diagnosis scenario. Moreover, this task requires no medical knowledge, and therefore allows knowledge-irrelevant questioning abilities to be assessed independently. The results show that PBL students generally ask more efficient questions and use fewer questions to complete the task. This finding suggests that PBL curricula may help improve the questioning strategies of medical students and help them diagnose more efficiently in future diagnosis practice.</p

Effective Multi-Graph Neural Networks for Illicit Account Detection on Cryptocurrency Transaction Networks

We study illicit account detection on transaction networks of cryptocurrencies that are increasi_testngly important in online financial markets. The surge of illicit activities on cryptocurrencies has resulted in billions of losses from normal users. Existing solutions either rely on tedious feature engineering to get handcrafted features, or are inadequate to fully utilize the rich semantics of cryptocurrency transaction data, and consequently, yield sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we formulate the illicit account detection problem as a classification task over directed multigraphs with edge attributes, and present DIAM, a novel multi-graph neural network model to effectively detect illicit accounts on large transaction networks. First, DIAM includes an Edge2Seq module that automatically learns effective node representations preserving intrinsic transaction patterns of parallel edges, by considering both edge attributes and directed edge sequence dependencies. Then utilizing the multigraph topology, DIAM employs a new Multigraph Discrepancy (MGD) module with a well-designed message passing mechanism to capture the discrepant features between normal and illicit nodes, supported by an attention mechanism. Assembling all techniques, DIAM is trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments, comparing against 14 existing solutions on 4 large cryptocurrency datasets of Bitcoin and Ethereum, demonstrate that DIAM consistently achieves the best performance to accurately detect illicit accounts, while being efficient. For instance, on a Bitcoin dataset with 20 million nodes and 203 million edges, DIAM achieves F1 score 96.55%, significantly higher than the F1 score 83.92% of the best competitor

Controlled growth of atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides via chemical vapor deposition method

Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDC) have attracted great research interest due to their potential application in electronics, optoelectronics, electrocatalysis, and so on. To satisfy expectations, high-quality materials with designed structures are highly desired through the controlled growth of TMDC. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) offers facile control in synthesizing 2D TMDC as well as a high degree of freedom for tuning their structures and properties. In this review, we elaborate on recent advances in CVD techniques for synthesizing atomically thin TMDC. The novel techniques for achieving continuous uniform 2D films are provided along with insights into the growth mechanisms. Moreover, approaches toward high-quality materials by growing large single crystals and oriented domains are thoroughly summarized. The strategies for controlling the crystal thickness, phase, and doping condition are also discussed. Finally, we address the challenges in the field and prospective research directions