A Three-year Longitudinal Study of In-class Sustained Silent Reading with Taiwanese Vocational College Students

This study examined the effects of three years of in-class sustained silent reading with a group of vocational college students in Taiwan. Readers outperformed comparisons on tests administered after one semester and increased their advantage on tests given at the end of the first year. The gap between the groups narrowed the second year, but readers maintained their superiority at the end of the second and third year. The initial gains were probably due, in part, to the Hawthorne Effect. It is likely that the progress made in the second and third year were more modest, because of external demands on students' time, which limited the amount of reading students could do outside of class. Overall, the results clearly support the practice of in-school self-selected reading

Spatiotemporal Patterns and Predictability of Cyberattacks

Y.C.L. was supported by Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under grant no. FA9550-10-1-0083 and Army Research Office (ARO) under grant no. W911NF-14-1-0504. S.X. was supported by Army Research Office (ARO) under grant no. W911NF-13-1-0141. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

How Likely Clinically Suspicious Looking Cervix is Cervical Cancer?

Clinically suspicious looking cervix does not always mean cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) or cervical cancer but it can be caused by other benign and inflammatory conditions. It was recommended that the patients should be initially seen urgently in the general gynaecology clinic rather than in the colposcopy unit because most of them will not have cancer. Consideration should be taken into account in those women who have risk factors for cervical cancer especially postcoidal bleeding (PCB)

Fully gapped superconducting state in Au2Pb: a natural candidate for topological superconductor

We measured the ultra-low-temperature specific heat and thermal conductivity of Au$_2$Pb single crystal, a possible three-dimensional Dirac semimetal with a superconducting transition temperature $T_c \approx$ 1.05 K. The electronic specific heat can be fitted by a two-band s-wave model, which gives the gap amplitudes $\Delta_1$(0)/$k_BT_c$ = 1.38 and $\Delta_2$(0)/$k_BT_c$ = 5.25. From the thermal conductivity measurements, a negligible residual linear term $\kappa_0/T$ in zero field and a slow field dependence of $\kappa_0/T$ at low field are obtained. These results suggest that Au$_2$Pb has a fully gapped superconducting state in the bulk, which is a necessary condition for topological superconductor if Au$_2$Pb is indeed one.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

LOCC distinguishability of unilaterally transformable quantum states

We consider the question of perfect local distinguishability of mutually orthogonal bipartite quantum states, with the property that every state can be specified by a unitary operator acting on the local Hilbert space of Bob. We show that if the states can be exactly discriminated by one-way LOCC where Alice goes first, then the unitary operators can also be perfectly distinguished by an orthogonal measurement on Bob's Hilbert space. We give examples of sets of N<=d maximally entangled states in $d \otimes d$ for d=4,5,6 that are not perfectly distinguishable by one-way LOCC. Interestingly for d=5,6 our examples consist of four and five states respectively. We conjecture that these states cannot be perfectly discriminated by two-way LOCC.Comment: Revised version, new proofs added; to appear in New Journal of Physic

Topological surface states in three-dimensional magnetic insulators

An electron moving in a magnetically ordered background feels an effective magnetic field that can be both stronger and more rapidly varying than typical externally applied fields. One consequence is that insulating magnetic materials in three dimensions can have topologically nontrivial properties of the effective band structure. For the simplest case of two bands, these "Hopf insulators" are characterized by a topological invariant as in quantum Hall states and Z_2 topological insulators, but instead of a Chern number or parity, the underlying invariant is the Hopf invariant that classifies maps from the 3-sphere to the 2-sphere. This paper gives an efficient algorithm to compute whether a given magnetic band structure has nontrivial Hopf invariant, a double-exchange-like tight-binding model that realizes the nontrivial case, and a numerical study of the surface states of this model.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; published versio

Symmetries and Lie algebra of the differential-difference Kadomstev-Petviashvili hierarchy

By introducing suitable non-isospectral flows we construct two sets of symmetries for the isospectral differential-difference Kadomstev-Petviashvili hierarchy. The symmetries form an infinite dimensional Lie algebra.Comment: 9 page

Hysteresis in the quantum Hall regimes in electron double quantum well structures

We present in this paper experimental results on the transport hysteresis in electron double quantum well structures. Exploring the measurement technique of fixing the magnetic field and sweeping a front gate voltage (Vg), we are able to study the hysteresis by varying the top layer Landau level fillings while maintaining a relatively constant filling factor in the bottom layer, allowing us to tackle the question of the sign of Rxx(up)-Rxx(down), where Rxx(up) is the magnetoresistance when Vg is swept up and Rxx(down) when Vg swept down. Furthermore, we observe that hysteresis is generally stronger in the even integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE) regime than in the odd-IQHE regime. This, we argue, is due to a larger energy gap for an even-IQHE state, determined by the Landau level separation, than that for an odd-IQHE state, determined by the Zeeman splitting