71 research outputs found
Teacher Educators\u27 Computer Technology Integration At Utah State University
The purpose of this research is to develop a deep understanding of Utah State University teacher educators\u27 perceptions and lived experience with computer technology integration. Ten methods course instructors in secondary education participated. Data were collected using the phenomenological research method: (1) conducting one-on-one in-depth interviews, (2) classroom observations of the four participants, and (3) examining artifacts, such as syllabi and presentation evaluation forms used by the participants. The findings of this research show that the subjects regard computer technology as a powerful instructional tool. They also realize it is important to prepare preservice teachers with computer technology for their future careers. The study analyzes the positive and negative aspects of using computer technology in teaching and personal experiences, and how these influence the participants\u27 computer technology integration. The results indicate four types of computer technology integration among the teacher educators: (1) Advanced Users, (2) Technical Users, (3) Reluctant Users, and (4) Resisters, as well as some advantages and disadvantages of using computer technology in educational settings. Based on the findings of the research, some strategies are suggested to improve the teacher educators\u27 computer technology integration at Utah State University. These suggestions include aspects such as amending training procedures and building a supportive environment in the teacher educators\u27 professional development. Future research perspectives are also proposed at the end of the dissertation
Is the Right to Vote Equal to Democracy? β An Analysis of Substantive and Procedural Democracy in the United States
In modern political society, democracy remains a universal concept. However, different ideologies still have their own views on the concrete realization form of democracy. Nowadays, the understandings of the concept of democracy in the United States and its democratic values have become the mainstream of Western society, and their historical value and role should not be ignored. However, the practice of this democratic system has differed from true democracy and has gradually manifested political confusion.
Firstly, this paper introduces the development of democracy and electoral system, and explains that the initial meaning of Western democracy is institutional democracy, namely procedural democracy, which is not the same as what we think of popular sovereignty today, and that the development course of Western democracy is also the expansion process of procedural justice. Then, constructivism theory is used to discuss the proceduralized process of substantive democracy and to explain the relationship between procedural justice and substantive democracy. Finally, through a specific analysis of the evolution and practice of the democratic electoral system in the United States, it concludes that the development of American democracy focuses only on expanding the scope of procedural democracy, but neglects the development of substantive democracy. For this reason, it explores the problems existing in American democracy
Using International Videoconferencing to Extend the Global Reach of Community Health Nursing Education
Travel abroad provides college students with a unique learning experience. When plans to take undergraduate community health nursing students from the United States to Haiti were cancelled due to health and safety concerns, faculty piloted international videoconferencing with a nursing program in Haiti as an alternative. During this semesterβlong course, students in both countries assessed a local community using the Community as Partner framework and compared findings during videoconferences with their international peers. Despite communication challenges such as language barriers and limited internet access in Haiti, evaluative data suggests that all students valued learning with their nursing student peers in another country. For future international videoconferencing endeavors, especially with underβresourced communities, we provide recommendations in the following categories: 1) Building relationships with a partner school, 2) Technology, 3) Pedagogy, and 4) Facilitating interactions between students.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133614/1/phn12272_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133614/2/phn12272.pd
Ask One More Time: Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios
Although chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with language models has
achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks, the naive greedy
decoding used in CoT prompting usually causes the repetitiveness and local
optimality. To address this shortcoming, ensemble-optimization tries to obtain
multiple reasoning paths to get the final answer assembly. However, current
ensemble-optimization methods either simply employ rule-based post-processing
such as \textit{self-consistency}, or train an additional model based on
several task-related human annotations to select the best one among multiple
reasoning paths, yet fail to generalize to realistic settings where the type of
input questions is unknown or the answer format of reasoning paths is unknown.
To avoid their limitations, we propose \textbf{self-agreement}, a generalizable
ensemble-optimization method applying in almost all scenarios where the type of
input questions and the answer format of reasoning paths may be known or
unknown. Self-agreement firstly samples from language model's decoder to
generate a \textit{diverse} set of reasoning paths, and subsequently prompts
the language model \textit{one more time} to determine the optimal answer by
selecting the most \textit{agreed} answer among the sampled reasoning paths.
Self-agreement simultaneously achieves remarkable performance on six public
reasoning benchmarks and superior generalization capabilities.Comment: Work in progres
UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy
In this work, we tackle the problem of learning universal robotic dexterous
grasping from a point cloud observation under a table-top setting. The goal is
to grasp and lift up objects in high-quality and diverse ways and generalize
across hundreds of categories and even the unseen. Inspired by successful
pipelines used in parallel gripper grasping, we split the task into two stages:
1) grasp proposal (pose) generation and 2) goal-conditioned grasp execution.
For the first stage, we propose a novel probabilistic model of grasp pose
conditioned on the point cloud observation that factorizes rotation from
translation and articulation. Trained on our synthesized large-scale dexterous
grasp dataset, this model enables us to sample diverse and high-quality
dexterous grasp poses for the object point cloud.For the second stage, we
propose to replace the motion planning used in parallel gripper grasping with a
goal-conditioned grasp policy, due to the complexity involved in dexterous
grasping execution. Note that it is very challenging to learn this highly
generalizable grasp policy that only takes realistic inputs without oracle
states. We thus propose several important innovations, including state
canonicalization, object curriculum, and teacher-student distillation.
Integrating the two stages, our final pipeline becomes the first to achieve
universal generalization for dexterous grasping, demonstrating an average
success rate of more than 60\% on thousands of object instances, which
significantly outperforms all baselines, meanwhile showing only a minimal
generalization gap.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 202
Exercise Intervention Modulates Synaptic Plasticity by Inhibiting Excessive Microglial Activation via Exosomes
BackgroundExosomes can activate microglia to modulate neural activity and synaptic plasticity by phagocytosis of neural spines or synapses. Our previous research found that an early 4-week exercise intervention in middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) rats can promote the release of exosomes and protect the brain. This study intended to further explore the intrinsic mechanism of neuroprotection by exosome release after exercise.MethodsRats were randomly divided into four groups: the sham operation (SHAM), middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) with sedentary intervention (SED-MCAO), MCAO with exercise intervention (EX-MCAO), and MCAO with exercise intervention and exosome injection (EX-MCAO-EXO). Modified neurological severity score (mNSS), cerebral infarction volume ratio, microglial activation, dendritic complexity, and expression of synaptophysin (Syn) and postsynaptic density protein 95 (PSD-95) were detected after 28 days of intervention.Results(1) The exercise improved body weight and mNSS score, and the survival state of the rats after exosome infusion was better. (2) Compared with the SED-MCAO group, the EX-MCAO (P = 0.039) and EX-MCAO-EXO groups (P = 0.002) had significantly lower cerebral infarct volume ratios (P < 0.05), among which the EX-MCAO-EXO group had the lowest (P = 0.031). (3) Compared with the SED-MCAO group, the EX-MCAO and EX-MCAO-EXO groups had a significantly decreased number of microglia (P < 0.001) and significantly increased process length/cell (P < 0.01) and end point/cell (P < 0.01) values, with the EX-MCAO-EXO group having the lowest number of microglia (P = 0.036) and most significantly increased end point/cell value (P = 0.027). (4) Compared with the SED-MCAO group, the total number of intersections and branches of the apical and basal dendrites in the EX-MCAO and EX-MCAO-EXO groups was increased significantly (P < 0.05), and the increase was more significant in the EX-MCAO-EXO group (P < 0.05). (5) The expression levels of Syn and PSD-95 in the EX-MCAO (PSyn = 0.043, PPSDβ95 = 0.047) and EX-MCAO-EXO groups were significantly higher than those in the SED-MCAO group (P < 0.05), and the expression levels in the EX-MCAO-EXO group were significantly higher than those in the EX-MCAO group (P < 0.05).ConclusionEarly exercise intervention after stroke can inhibit the excessive activation of microglia and regulate synaptic plasticity by exosome release
Fabrication of Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Fiber Probes Using Ionic Self-Assembled Gold Nanoparticles
An nm-thickness composite gold thin film consisting of gold nanoparticles and polyelectrolytes is fabricated through ionic self-assembled multilayers (ISAM) technique and is deposited on end-faces of optical fibers to construct localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) fiber probes. We demonstrate that the LSPR spectrum induced by ISAM gold films can be fine-tuned through the ISAM procedure. We investigate variations of reflection spectra of the probe with respect to the layer-by-layer adsorption of ISAMs onto end-faces of fibers, and study the spectral variation mechanism. Finally, we demonstrated using this fiber probe to detect the biotin-streptavidin bioconjugate pair. ISAM adsorbed on optical fibers potentially provides a simple, fast, robust, and low-cost, platform for LSPR biosensing applications
KwaiYiiMath: Technical Report
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated
remarkable abilities in handling a variety of natural language processing (NLP)
downstream tasks, even on mathematical tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. In
this report, we introduce the KwaiYiiMath which enhances the mathematical
reasoning abilities of KwaiYiiBase1, by applying Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)
and Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), including on both English
and Chinese mathematical tasks. Meanwhile, we also constructed a small-scale
Chinese primary school mathematics test set (named KMath), consisting of 188
examples to evaluate the correctness of the problem-solving process generated
by the models. Empirical studies demonstrate that KwaiYiiMath can achieve
state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on GSM8k, CMath, and KMath compared with
the similar size models, respectively.Comment: technical report. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:2306.16636 by other author
The Thermal Infrared Visual Object Tracking VOT-TIR2015 challenge results
The Thermal Infrared Visual Object Tracking challenge 2015, VOT-TIR2015, aims at comparing short-term single-object visual trackers that work on thermal infrared (TIR) sequences and do not apply pre-learned models of object appearance. VOT-TIR2015 is the first benchmark on short-term tracking in TIR sequences. Results of 24 trackers are presented. For each participating tracker, a short description is provided in the appendix. The VOT-TIR2015 challenge is based on the VOT2013 challenge, but introduces the following novelties: (i) the newly collected LTIR (Link - ping TIR) dataset is used, (ii) the VOT2013 attributes are adapted to TIR data, (iii) the evaluation is performed using insights gained during VOT2013 and VOT2014 and is similar to VOT2015
Retinoic Acids Potentiate BMP9-Induced Osteogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Progenitor Cells
As one of the least studied bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), BMP9 is one of the most osteogenic BMPs. Retinoic acid (RA) signaling is known to play an important role in development, differentiation and bone metabolism. In this study, we investigate the effect of RA signaling on BMP9-induced osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal progenitor cells (MPCs).Both primary MPCs and MPC line are used for BMP9 and RA stimulation. Recombinant adenoviruses are used to deliver BMP9, RARalpha and RXRalpha into MPCs. The in vitro osteogenic differentiation is monitored by determining the early and late osteogenic markers and matrix mineralization. Mouse perinatal limb explants and in vivo MPC implantation experiments are carried out to assess bone formation. We find that both 9CRA and ATRA effectively induce early osteogenic marker, such as alkaline phosphatase (ALP), and late osteogenic markers, such as osteopontin (OPN) and osteocalcin (OC). BMP9-induced osteogenic differentiation and mineralization is synergistically enhanced by 9CRA and ATRA in vitro. 9CRA and ATRA are shown to induce BMP9 expression and activate BMPR Smad-mediated transcription activity. Using mouse perinatal limb explants, we find that BMP9 and RAs act together to promote the expansion of hypertrophic chondrocyte zone at growth plate. Progenitor cell implantation studies reveal that co-expression of BMP9 and RXRalpha or RARalpha significantly increases trabecular bone and osteoid matrix formation.Our results strongly suggest that retinoid signaling may synergize with BMP9 activity in promoting osteogenic differentiation of MPCs. This knowledge should expand our understanding about how BMP9 cross-talks with other signaling pathways. Furthermore, a combination of BMP9 and retinoic acid (or its agonists) may be explored as effective bone regeneration therapeutics to treat large segmental bony defects, non-union fracture, and/or osteoporotic fracture
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