17,417 research outputs found
Determinants of demand for private supplementary tutoring in China: findings from a national survey
Private tutoring has expanded and intensified in China. However, no government statistical data or other empirical studies fully capture its extent and characteristics. This paper analyses private tutoring received by students in Grades 1–12 as indicated by a nationwide representative survey entitled China Family Panel Studies. The paper employs a Hurdle model to examine determinants of demand for tutoring, focusing on factors related to students and their parents. The first step is concerned with the decision to receive tutoring or not; and the second step explores factors influencing expenditures on tutoring among those who decide to receive it.postprin
Strain- and Adsorption-Dependent Electronic States and Transport or Localization in Graphene
The chapter generalizes results on influence of uniaxial strain and
adsorption on the electron states and charge transport or localization in
graphene with different configurations of imperfections (point defects):
resonant (neutral) adsorbed atoms either oxygen- or hydrogen-containing
molecules or functional groups, vacancies or substitutional atoms, charged
impurity atoms or molecules, and distortions. To observe electronic properties
of graphene-admolecules system, we applied electron paramagnetic resonance
technique in a broad temperature range for graphene oxides as a good basis for
understanding the electrotransport properties of other active carbons. Applied
technique allowed observation of possible metal-insulator transition and
sorption pumping effect as well as discussion of results in relation to the
granular metal model. The electronic and transport properties are calculated
within the framework of the tight-binding model along with the Kubo-Greenwood
quantum-mechanical formalism. Depending on electron density and type of the
sites, the conductivity for correlated and ordered adsorbates is found to be
enhanced in dozens of times as compared to the cases of their random
distribution. In case of the uniaxially strained graphene, the presence of
point defects counteracts against or contributes to the band-gap opening
according to their configurations. The band-gap behaviour is found to be
nonmonotonic with strain in case of a simultaneous action of defect ordering
and zigzag deformation. The amount of localized charge carriers (spins) is
found to be correlated with the content of adsorbed centres responsible for the
formation of potential barriers and, in turn, for the localization effects.
Physical and chemical states of graphene edges, especially at a uniaxial strain
along one of them, play a crucial role in electrical transport phenomena in
graphene-based materials.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
The internal dynamics of privatised public education: Fee-charging supplementary tutoring provided by teachers in Cambodia
Much literature is available on private schools that operate alongside public schools, and on public schools that are encouraged to operate more like businesses in order to become more efficient and client-oriented. This paper, by contrast, focuses on privatisation by default behind a façade of fee-free education. It concerns supplementary private tutoring provided by government-employed teachers, in many cases to their own students in large classes and on the school premises. Drawing on questionnaire and interview data from secondary school students and teachers in one province of Cambodia, the paper examines interlinked factors that contribute to this process. These factors include low teachers’ salaries, lack of instructional time, large classes, and the possibility of different teacher-student relationships in supplementary lessons. The paper is contextualised within the wider literatures on privatisation and shadow education
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ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN MUSCLE STRENGTH AND CARTILAGE MORPHOLOGY: DATA FROM THE OSTEOARTHRITIS INITIATIVE
What factors increase the vulnerability of native birds to the impacts of alien birds?
Biodiversity impacts caused by alien species can be severe, including those caused by alien birds. In order to protect native birds, we aimed to identify factors that influence their vulnerability to the impacts of alien birds. We first reviewed the literature to identify native bird species sustaining such impacts. We then assigned impact severity scores to each native bird species, depending on the severity of the impacts sustained, and performed two types of analyses. First, we used contingency table tests to examine the distribution of impacts across their severity, type and location, and across native bird orders. Second, we used mixed‐effects models to test factors hypothesised to influence the vulnerability of native birds to the impacts of alien birds.
Ground‐nesting shorebirds and seabirds were more prone to impacts through predation, while cavity‐nesting woodpeckers and parrots were more prone to impacts through competition. Native bird species were more vulnerable when they occupied islands, warm regions, regions with climatic conditions similar to those in the native range of the invading alien species, and when they were physically smaller than the invading alien species. To a lesser extent, they were also vulnerable when they shared habitat preferences with the invading alien species.
By considering the number and type of native bird species affected by alien birds, we demonstrate predation impacts to be more widespread than previously indicated, but also that damaging predation impacts may be underreported. We identify vulnerable orders of native birds, which may require conservation interventions; characteristics of native birds that increase their vulnerability, which may be used to inform risk assessments; and regions where native birds are most vulnerable, which may direct management interventions. The impacts sustained by native birds may be going unnoticed in many regions of the world: there is a clear need to identify and manage them
Dependence of nucleosome mechanical stability on DNA mismatches
The organization of nucleosomes into chromatin and their accessibility are shaped by local DNA mechanics. Conversely, nucleosome positions shape genetic variations, which may originate from mismatches during replication and chemical modification of DNA. To investigate how DNA mismatches affect the mechanical stability and the exposure of nucleosomal DNA, we used an optical trap combined with single-molecule FRET and a single-molecule FRET cyclization assay. We found that a single base-pair C-C mismatch enhances DNA bendability and nucleosome mechanical stability for the 601-nucleosome positioning sequence. An increase in force required for DNA unwrapping from the histone core is observed for single base-pair C-C mismatches placed at three tested positions: at the inner turn, at the outer turn, or at the junction of the inner and outer turn of the nucleosome. The results support a model where nucleosomal DNA accessibility is reduced by mismatches, potentially explaining the preferred accumulation of single-nucleotide substitutions in the nucleosome core and serving as the source of genetic variation during evolution and cancer progression. Mechanical stability of an intact nucleosome, that is mismatch-free, is also dependent on the species as we find that yeast nucleosomes are mechanically less stable and more symmetrical in the outer turn unwrapping compared to Xenopus nucleosomes
Sketch Me That Shoe
This project received support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement #640891, the Royal Society and Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) joint grant #IE141387 and #61511130081, and the China Scholarship Council (CSC). We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of the GPUs used for this research
Is It Time to Phase Out the Austin Moore Hemiarthroplasty? A Propensity Score Matched Case Control Comparison versus Cemented Hemiarthroplasty
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Actor-Critic Sequence Training for Image Captioning.
Generating natural language descriptions of images is an important capability
for a robot or other visual-intelligence driven AI agent that may need to
communicate with human users about what it is seeing. Such image captioning
methods are typically trained by maximising the likelihood of ground-truth
annotated caption given the image. While simple and easy to implement, this
approach does not directly maximise the language quality metrics we care about
such as CIDEr. In this paper we investigate training image captioning methods
based on actor-critic reinforcement learning in order to directly optimise
non-differentiable quality metrics of interest. By formulating a per-token
advantage and value computation strategy in this novel reinforcement learning
based captioning model, we show that it is possible to achieve the state of the
art performance on the widely used MSCOCO benchmark
A particle swarm optimization based memetic algorithm for dynamic optimization problems
Copyright @ Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2010.Recently, there has been an increasing concern from the evolutionary computation community on dynamic optimization problems since many real-world optimization problems are dynamic. This paper investigates a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based memetic algorithm that hybridizes PSO with a local search technique for dynamic optimization problems. Within the framework of the proposed algorithm, a local version of PSO with a ring-shape topology structure is used as the global search operator and a fuzzy cognition local search method is proposed as the local search technique. In addition, a self-organized random immigrants scheme is extended into our proposed algorithm in order to further enhance its exploration capacity for new peaks in the search space. Experimental study over the moving peaks benchmark problem shows that the proposed PSO-based memetic algorithm is robust and adaptable in dynamic environments.This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant No. 70431003 and Grant No. 70671020, the National Innovation Research Community Science Foundation of China under
Grant No. 60521003, the National Support Plan of China under Grant No. 2006BAH02A09 and the Ministry of Education, science, and Technology in Korea through the Second-Phase of Brain Korea 21 Project in 2009, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/01 and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Grants under Grant G-YH60
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