A Study on Teaching Methods of Reading Comprehension Strategies by Comparison between TEM-4 Reading Comprehension and IELTS Academic Reading Comprehension

The ultimate purpose of Test for English Majors 4 (TEM-4) and International English Language Test System Academic (IELTS A) are to test students' English language application abilities. This paper made a comparative study between reading comprehension part in two tests. It points out that IELTS A, with its up-to-date and diversified types of writing, can reflect students’ real English level and ability to use English. IELTS reading requires that students adopt effective reading comprehension strategies to accurately and effectively extract the information and understand the meaning in the face of different types of English reading materials. Meanwhile, students can apply productive skills to use English language. It further puts forward 3 teaching methods of reading comprehension strategies: direct explanation, transactional method, interactive constructive method. It ends with factors teachers should take into consideration when teaching reading comprehension strategies. Three methods can be used in combination considering context of Chinese students’ English learning, teachers’ demonstration and effective group discussion and communication

Using nonlinear electret effects to design piezolectricity and magnetoelectricity in soft materials

Piezoelectricity and magnetoelectricity are contradictory properties with a rather limited set of natural (often hard) materials that exhibit both. Composite materials—almost always restricted to hard ones—provide a limited recourse with the attendant limitations of small strains, fabrication challenges among others. In this article, using the concept of electrets, we propose a simple scheme to design soft, highly deformable materials that simultaneously exhibit piezoelectricity and magnetoelectricity. We demonstrate that merely by embedding charges and ensuring elastic heterogeneity, the geometrically nonlinear behavior of soft materials leads to an emergent piezoelectric and magnetoelectric behavior. We find that an electret configuration made of sufficiently soft (nonpiezoelectric and nonmagnetic) polymer foams can exhibit simultaneous magnetoelectricity and piezoelectricity with large coupling constants that exceed the best-known ceramic composites

HOXC10 promotes nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell proliferation and migration by regulating PI3K/AKT pathway

Purpose: To evaluate the role of homeobox C10 (HOXC10) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Methods: Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) and colony formation assays were conducted to determine NPC cell proliferation. Cell migration and invasion were assessed using a Transwell assay, while western blot was used to investigate the mechanism of action involved in HOXC10- mediated NPC. Results: HOXC10 levels were significantly elevated in NPC cells (p < 0.001). Over-expression of HOXC10 significantly increased NPC cell viability (p < 0.05) and proliferation. However, silencing HOXC10 reduced NPC cell proliferation. HOXC10 knockdown suppressed NPC cell migration and invasion. NPC expression of phosphorylated phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) and protein kinase B (AKT) proteins were up-regulated after HOXC10 over-expression but were down-regulated upon silencing HOXC10 (p < 0.05). Conclusion: HOXC10 knockdown reduces NPC cell proliferation and metastasis by inactivating PI3K/AKT pathway, and therefore, can potentially be developed for the treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

MixDehazeNet : Mix Structure Block For Image Dehazing Network

Image dehazing is a typical task in the low-level vision field. Previous studies verified the effectiveness of the large convolutional kernel and attention mechanism in dehazing. However, there are two drawbacks: the multi-scale properties of an image are readily ignored when a large convolutional kernel is introduced, and the standard series connection of an attention module does not sufficiently consider an uneven hazy distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Mix Structure Image Dehazing Network (MixDehazeNet), which solves two issues mentioned above. Specifically, it mainly consists of two parts: the multi-scale parallel large convolution kernel module and the enhanced parallel attention module. Compared with a single large kernel, parallel large kernels with multi-scale are more capable of taking partial texture into account during the dehazing phase. In addition, an enhanced parallel attention module is developed, in which parallel connections of attention perform better at dehazing uneven hazy distribution. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. For example, compared with the previous state-of-the-art methods, MixDehazeNet achieves a significant improvement (42.62dB PSNR) on the SOTS indoor dataset. The code is released in https://github.com/AmeryXiong/MixDehazeNet

Low CPNE3 expression is associated with risk of acute myocardial infarction: A feasible genetic marker of acute myocardial infarction in patients with stable coronary artery disease

Background: Gene COPINE III may be related to a phosphoprotein with intrinsic kinase activity and  belongs to an unconventional kinase family. The CPNE3 gene may be used as a biomarker for assess- ment of occurrence and prognosis of various tumors. Methods: Peripheral blood was collected from 87 stable coronary artery disease (CAD) patients and 91 acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction test and the western blot method were adopted to measure expression quantity of CPNE3 gene at the mRNA level and the protein level.  Results: The expression of the CPNE3 gene in peripheral blood of AMI patients was significantly lower than those in peripheral blood of stable CAD patients. Low expression of CPNE3 gene was found to be unrelated to level of fasting blood glucose and serum blood lipid of patients, quantity of cardiac troponin and time of onset but was found to be correlated to the Gensini score for coronary artery. When the ex- pression of CPNE3 gene at the mRNA level in peripheral blood was used as the criterion for diagnosing AMI, its sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value were 69%, 64.8%, 68.6% and 65.2%, respectively.  Conclusions: Compared to stable CAD patients, AMI patients have a lower expression of CPNE3 gene in their peripheral blood. Patients who have low CPNE3 expression in peripheral blood are more likely to suffer from AMI than those with stable CAD. Low expression of CPNE3 gene serves as an potential independent risk factor of AMI.