Direct Training of Teachers in the Use of Praise: Implementation and Generalization

Praise has been shown to be an effective intervention for decreasing problem behaviors in the classroom when there is a hypothesized attention function. Unfortunately, studies have shown that teachers generally provide low rates of praise even after didactic instruction. Praise training consisting of didactic and direct training have been used to increase praise rates but few studies have examined the individual components within praise training to determine if didactic training is necessary. Additionally, while some studies have examined the maintenance of praise rate following praise training, few studies have focused on the generalization of praise towards other students. This study replicated and extended upon Dufrene et al. (2012) and Dufrene et al. (2014), by testing the efficacy of a direct teacher training procedure to increase praise while evaluating maintenance and generalization of praise. Four elementary school students and their teachers participated in the study due to referrals for problem behavior within the classroom with a hypothesized attention function. All teachers were trained to increase BSP through the use of a bug-in-the-ear radio. Praise directed towards the target student as well as other students in the classroom were recorded along with occurrence of problem behavior by the target student. Teachers who did not demonstrate maintenance and/or generalization were provided additional training. Results of this study showed that direct training resulted in increase in praise towards all target students but maintenance was not stable following withdrawal for all teachers. Of the four teachers, only one generalized praise towards other students. Additional training was required for three of the four teachers to generalize praise, which maintained during follow-up

Synthesis and Oxidation of Lignin-Carbohydrate Model Compounds

To decrease our dependence on foreign oil supply and in an effort to decrease the amount of green house gases into the atmosphere, researchers are focusing on ways of producing fuels and chemicals from renewable resources. A renewable source such as wood has great potential for the production of biofuels and biochemicals. An integrated biorefinery process that maximizes the usage of wood and complements existing pulp and paper technology was proposed to extract underutilize hemicelluloses and covert them into bioethanol. In this process, not only hemicelluloses are extracted; lignin, since it is covalently bonded to hemicelluloses is extracted as well. It is reported that lignin is an inhibitor for enzymes and yeast during the conversion of hemicelluloses into ethanol, which decreases the yield of ethanol and increases the cost of production. Therefore, lignin needs to be removed prior to the production of bioethanol from hemicelluloses. Based on previous work in our lab, my project focuses on investigating oxidative methods to cleave lignin from hemicelluloses. Two glycosidic lignin-carbohydrate compounds were synthesized for this study. Knowledge of the mechanisms will allow us to determine the potential for such processes in the production of biochemicals and biofuels. We want to apply the oxygen delignification process to study this mechanism. Due to the presence of many oxygen species during this process, the mechanism is complicated. These oxygen species can be generated using H2O2 and UV radiation at 254 nm. Oxidative mechanisms of lignin-carbohydrate compounds were studied with superoxide anion (pH 12) and hydroxyl radical (pH 9.5). We are able to cleave the glycosidic bond between carbohydrate and lignin. Further oxidation of aromatic and carbohydrate was occurred. Less than 50% of glucose is obtained after the majority of lignin-carbohydrate model compound is reacted and none of the lignin portion is obtained any point of the reaction. Hence, this technique is useful for the cleavage of the glycodic linkages between lignin and carbohydrate. In order for this process to be a useful technique to obtain sugar from hemicelluloses, a process that is able to stop the further oxidation of carbohydrate must be developed

An improved quadrilateral flat element with drilling degrees of freedom for shell structural analysis

This paper reports the development of a simple and efficient 4-node flat shell element with six degrees of freedom per node for the analysis of arbitrary shell structures. The element is developed by incorporating a strain smoothing technique into a flat shell finite element approach. The membrane part is formulated by applying the smoothing operation on a quadrilateral membrane element using Allman-type interpolation functions with drilling DOFs. The plate-bending component is established by a combination of the smoothed curvature and the substitute shear strain fields. As a result, the bending and a part of membrane stiffness matrices are computed on the boundaries of smoothing cells which leads to very accurate solutions, even with distorted meshes, and possible reduction in computational cost. The performance of the proposed element is validated and demonstrated through several numerical benchmark problems. Convergence studies and comparison with other existing solutions in the literature suggest that the present element is efficient, accurate and free of lockings

A smoothed four-node piezoelectric element for analysis of two-dimensional smart structures

This paper reports a study of linear elastic analysis of two-dimensional piezoelectric structures using a smoothed four-node piezoelectric element. The element is built by incorporating the strain smoothing method of mesh-free conforming nodal integration into the standard four-node quadrilateral piezoelectric finite element. The approximations of mechanical strains and electric potential fields are normalized using a constant smoothing function. This allows the field gradients to be directly computed from shape functions. No mapping or coordinate transformation is necessary so that the element can be used in arbitrary shapes. Through several examples, the simplicity, efficiency and reliability of the element are demonstrated. Numerical results and comparative studies with other existing solutions in the literature suggest that the present element is robust, computationally inexpensive and easy to implement

Zooplankton from Can Giuoc River in Southern Vietnam

In this study, the variables of zooplankton and water quality were investigated in the Can Giuoc River, Southern Vietnam. Zooplankton was monitored in April and September 2015 at 5 sampling sites in the river. Some basic water quality parameters were also tested, including pH, total suspended solid (TSS), dissolved oxygen (DO), biological oxygen demand (BOD5), inorganic nitrogen (NH4+), dissolved phosphorus (PO43-), and coliform. The zooplankton biodiversity indices were applied for the water quality assessment. The results showed that pH ranged from 6.7 to 7.6 during the monitoring. The TSSs were between 34–117 mg/L. The DO and BOD5 were from 0.6 to 3.8 mg/L and from 6.3 to 13.2 mg/L, respectively. The NH4+ and PO43- concentrations ranged from 0.44 to 3.23 and from 0.08 to 1.85 mg/L, respectively. The coliform number was between 9.3x103–9.3x104 MPN/100 mL. The zooplankton analyses showed that there were 31 species of coelenterates, rotatoria, oligochaetes, cladocerans, copepods, ostracods, mysidacea, and 8 larval types. Thereof, the species of copepods were dominant in the species number. The zooplankton density ranged from 9 500 to 23 600 individuals/m3 with the main dominant species of Moina dubia (Cladocera), Thermocyclops hyalinus, Acartia clausi, Oithona similis (Copepoda), and nauplius copepods. The biodiversity index values during the monitoring were from 1.47 to 1.79 characteristic of mesotrophic conditions of the aquatic environment. Besides, the species richness positively correlated with pH, TSS, DO, BOD5, NH4+, PO43-, and coliform, while the zooplankton densities got a positive correlation with DO, BOD5, NH4+, PO43-, and coliform. The results confirmed the advantage of using zooplankton and its indices for water quality assessment

Factors Influencing the Households’ Adaptation under Natural Disaster Risk in the Coastal Areas of Giao Thien, Giao Thuy, Nam Dinh, Vietnam

This research is to identify the impacts of natural disaster risk on households of local residents and to identify the adaptation of households with natural disaster risk in Giao Thien commune, Giao Thuy district, Nam Dinh province, Vietnam. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in this study to assess the overall impact of disasters on the livelihood strategies of households in response to natural disaster.  The findings show that the risks of natural disasters affecting the livelihood of the local population in the study area are typhoons, floods, coastal erosion/ sea level rise, and saltwater intrusion. Currently, people in the researching area are not merely affected by one disaster but usually 2-3 or even 4 types of disasters in a short period of time. Therefore, this leads to economic losses, in the form of assets of the households. There are 6 solutions to cope with disaster risks that people often used to reduce the damage include: (1) regularly monitor information; (2)  Change season calendar; (3) Change crop varieties; (4) Buy insurance; (5) Save of fertilizer and pesticide inputs; (6) Save seed production

The Influence of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems on Entrepreneurs' Perceptions and Business Success

Entrepreneurship continues to grow and receives a great deal of interest from business researchers and practitioners for its importance in the modern economy. This study aims to contribute to the body of knowledge that the entrepreneurial ecosystem correlates with founders' perceptions and startup success. Data were gathered from surveys of 200 founders or CEOs of SMEs and startups in Tay Ninh City (Vietnam), who have operated their own companies for at least five years. The primary data analysis was performed using the partial least squares (PLS) technique. Five out of six ecosystem factors significantly affect entrepreneurs' perceptions and startups’ success, based on the results of the empirical data. Besides, the founders' perceptions also positively affect the success of a startup. The implications show the need to enhance entrepreneurship in a nation

LAPFormer: A Light and Accurate Polyp Segmentation Transformer

Polyp segmentation is still known as a difficult problem due to the large variety of polyp shapes, scanning and labeling modalities. This prevents deep learning model to generalize well on unseen data. However, Transformer-based approach recently has achieved some remarkable results on performance with the ability of extracting global context better than CNN-based architecture and yet lead to better generalization. To leverage this strength of Transformer, we propose a new model with encoder-decoder architecture named LAPFormer, which uses a hierarchical Transformer encoder to better extract global feature and combine with our novel CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) decoder for capturing local appearance of the polyps. Our proposed decoder contains a progressive feature fusion module designed for fusing feature from upper scales and lower scales and enable multi-scale features to be more correlative. Besides, we also use feature refinement module and feature selection module for processing feature. We test our model on five popular benchmark datasets for polyp segmentation, including Kvasir, CVC-Clinic DB, CVC-ColonDB, CVC-T, and ETIS-LaribComment: 7 pages, 7 figures, ACL 2023 underrevie