The Effect of Storytelling on Iranian EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Retention

This paper presents the results of a study on utilizing two storytelling techniques, summarizing and strip story arrangement, in an EFL context. It focused on exploring which type of storytelling technique was more effective and thus could help EFL learners master the new words better. In was carried out in a private language school in Tehran, Iran. The participants were 105 learners who were selected from 160 elementary learners based on their performance on Oxford Placement Test as the test of homogenization. Three groups were formed, two experimental and one control group with 35 subjects in each. The learners in the summarizing group used the new words to summarize the stories in their written and spoken tasks and the learners in the other experimental group, strip story arrangement group, were asked to arrange some split sentences in their personal drafts. After thirty treatment sessions, the learners were given the posttest. The three groups’ performances on the posttest were compared by one way ANOVA. The results showed that the learners in summarizing group performed better than strip story arrangement group and both groups outperformed the control group

(2,9-Dimethyl-4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phen­anthroline-κ2 N,N′)bis­(thio­cyanato-κS)mercury(II)

In the mol­ecule of the title compound, [Hg(NCS)2(C26H20N2)], the HgII atom is four-coordinated in a distorted tetra­hedral configuration by two N atoms from a chelating 2,9-dimethyl-4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline ligand and by two S atoms from two thio­cyanate anions. The ligand ring system is not planar. The dihedral angle between the phenyl rings is 53.20 (3)° . In the crystal structure, π–π contacts between phenanthroline rings [centroid–centroid distance = 3.981 (1) Å] may stabilize the structure

Tripotassium bis­(acetato-κ2 O,O′)(thio­cyanato-κN)plumbate(II) dithio­cyanate

In the crystal structure of the title salt, K3[Pb(CH3COO)2(NCS)](NCS)2, the [Pb(CH3COO)2(NCS)]− anion exists as a covalently bonded entity in which the acetate anions chelate in an anisobidentate manner. The Pb atom shows a distorted ψ-octa­hedral coordination to four acetate O atoms and one isocyanate N atom, with the stereochemically active lone pair occupying one of the six sites. When the three longer Pb⋯S inter­actions are considered, the eight-coordinate geometry is based on a dodeca­hedron. The Pb(CH3COO)2(NCS)]− anion has mirror symmetry. The potassium cations connect the other constituents into a three-dimensional network through electrostatic K⋯N and K⋯S inter­actions

Dichlorido(2,9-dimethyl-4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline-κ2 N,N′)mercury(II) acetonitrile hemisolvate

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, [HgCl2(C26H20N2)]·0.5CH3CN, contains two crystallographic­ally independent [HgCl2(C26H20N2)] mol­ecules and one acetonitrile solvent mol­ecule. The HgII atoms are four-coordin­ated in distorted tetra­hedral configurations by two N atoms from 2,9-dimethyl-4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline ligands and two Cl atoms. The ligand ring systems are not planar. The phenyl rings are oriented at dihedral angles of 74.61 (3) and 66.00 (3)° in the two molecules. In the crystal structure, π–π contacts between phenanthroline rings [centroid–centroid distances = 3.809 (1), 3.686 (1), 3.986 (1), 3.877 (1), 3.697 (1), 3.789 (1), 3.745 (1), 3.797 (1) and 3.638 (1) Å] may stabilize the structure

Selenium-capped cyclic peptide nanoparticles for penicillamine drug delivery: A DFT Study

43-50Using a model for performance of penicillamine (PCA) anti-cancer drug on selenium-cyclic peptide nanoparticle (CPSeNP), 11 noncovalent configurations have been investigated. Se8 ring model and cyclooctaglycine have been used for selenium nanoparticle (SeNP) and cyclic peptide (CP), respectively. Binding energies, quantum molecular descriptors and solvation energies have been studied in gas phase and water at M06-2X /6-31G** level of theory. The calculated energies represent the high-energy stability of CPSeNP/PCA 1-11 configurations. Solvation energies showed that drug solubility increases, which is a major factor for their use in drug delivery. Regarding to quantum molecular descriptors such as hardness and electrophilic power, the drug reactivity increases in the vicinity of SeNP. The QTAIM analysis revealed that intramolecular interaction Se-L (L =O, H , S, C , N) plays an important role in the system. Se-L interaction in all configurations is relevant to weak interactions. The configurations that PCA drug is located in parallel with the carrier (CPSeNP) are more stable than penicillamine-CP or penicillamine-SeNP systems

DiffGANPaint: Fast Inpainting Using Denoising Diffusion GANs

Free-form image inpainting is the task of reconstructing parts of an image specified by an arbitrary binary mask. In this task, it is typically desired to generalize model capabilities to unseen mask types, rather than learning certain mask distributions. Capitalizing on the advances in diffusion models, in this paper, we propose a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) based model capable of filling missing pixels fast as it models the backward diffusion process using the generator of a generative adversarial network (GAN) network to reduce sampling cost in diffusion models. Experiments on general-purpose image inpainting datasets verify that our approach performs superior or on par with most contemporary works