Benzyl (E)-3-(2-methyl­benzyl­idene)dithio­carbazate

The title compound, C16H16N2S2, was obtained from the condensation reaction of benzyl dithio­carbazate and 2-methyl­benzaldehyde. The asymmetric unit contains two independent mol­ecules. In both mol­ecules, the methyl­phenyl ring and the dithio­carbazate fragment are located on opposite sides of the C=N bond, showing an E conformation. In each mol­ecule, the dithio­carbazate fragment is approximately planar, the r.m.s deviations being 0.018 and 0.025 Å. The mean plane of dithio­carbazate group is oriented at dihedral angles of 7.9 (3) and 68.24 (12)°, respectively, to the methyl­phenyl and phenyl rings in one mol­ecule, while the corresponding angles in the other mol­ecule are 10.9 (3) and 69.76 (16)°. Inter­molecular N—H⋯S hydrogen bonding occurs in the crystal structure to generate inversion dimers for both molecules

Adopting French Names as Identity Markers among Second Foreign Language (L3) Learners in China

Using foreign names has become common practice for Chinese students who are learning a foreign language to develop a special identity in multilingual contexts. French is one of the most studied foreign languages in China. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the practices learners follow when adopting French names as their identity markers. The current study addresses this gap by investigating twenty-nine French names adopted by Chinese university students who are learning French as the second foreign language (L3) in a Chinese university. Drawing on data collected through interviews, the motivations, and features behind the respondents’ name choices were examined. The qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the practice of adopting French names for these L3 students was primarily motivated by phonetic features and the study participants’ positive associations. The L3 learners  deliberately selected a French name to create a multilingual and multicultural identity for themselves. The pedagogical implications regarding teachers’ development of  cultural instruction materials as well as teachers’ potential influence on French language instruction overall are also discussed

Marriage, Conflict, and Communication: Pragmatic Inquiry into Impoliteness in the Marital Relationship

The issue of impoliteness has long been a matter of interest in linguistic investigations. Considerable research has been conducted to uncover factors and features regarding the realizations of impoliteness in multiple social contexts. This study engages in a pragmatic inquiry into impoliteness in the marital relationship. The data of this study consisted of a TV episode from one famous on-site mediation reality program in China. Primarily drawing on Bousfield’s (2008) model of impoliteness realizations, this study used a qualitative approach to examine the means by which the couple in a marital relationship causes face-attacking effects and ultimately arouses conflicts. The primary findings of this study indicate that couples might struggle with various communicative challenges. A problematic marital relationship tends to be signaled in some practices of impoliteness. This study has identified thirteen realizations of impoliteness linguistically and behaviorally that indicate gender variations concerning the couple’s frequent impoliteness practices

Rotational motion deblurring of a rigid object from a single image

Most previous motion deblurring methods restore the degraded image assuming a shift-invariant linear blur filter. These methods are not applicable if the blur is caused by spatially variant motions. In this paper, we model the physical properties of a 2-D rigid body movement and propose a practical framework to deblur rotational motions from a single image. Our main observation is that the transparency cue of a blurred object, which represents the motion blur formation from an imaging perspective, provides sufficient information in determining the object movements. Comparatively, single image motion deblurring using pixel color/gradient information has large uncertainties in motion representation and computation. Our results are produced by minimizing a new energy function combining rotation, possible translations, and the transparency map using an iterative optimizing process. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated using challenging image examples. anteed since the convolution with a blur kernel is noninvertible. To tackle this problem, additional image priors, such as the global gradient distribution from clear images [7], are proposed. Some approaches use multiple images or additional visual cues [2, 20] to constrain the kernel estimation. (a) (b

Further study on heredity of liquid aluminum modified by electric pulse

The remarkable heredity of liquid aluminum modified by electric pulse (EP, EPM) has been uncovered. For better understanding from all aspects on the hereditary properties, the present research deals with the heredity destruction and the secondary EPM procedure. It is shown that the secondary EPM is capable of preventing the heredity reduction of EP-modified liquid aluminum, and that the final refining effect has a close relationship with technique parameters of the secondary EPM. Furthermore, at a certain superheated temperature depending on the initial EPM technique parameters, the heredity relationship of EP-modified liquid aluminum can be cut off during remelting. High temperature X-ray diffraction combining with the DSC tests also indicates that the EP-induced structure changes have almost disappeared at an elevated remelting temperature

Board structure, ownership concentration, and executive compensation in Chinese listed firms

This dissertation aims to examine the impact of board structure and ownership concentration on executive compensation in an emerging economic market, China. It also aims to offer the latest supplement on existing researches. By combining various perspectives of prior studies with Chinese market features as research background, this dissertation selects a sample of 912 non-financial firms listed at Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2015 to 2019. Based on these observations, this dissertation further develops a firm-fixed effect model and use descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis to test research hypotheses empirically. The empirical results indicate that board duality and ownership concentration are positively related to executive compensation, while board independence and board size are negatively correlated with executive compensation. The results all keep consistent with the views of agency theory and managerial power theory. These conclusions provide some new insights on the executive compensation researches; they also have some economic implications on Chinese government and firms to deal with the high executive compensation issue

GPA-Net:No-Reference Point Cloud Quality Assessment with Multi-task Graph Convolutional Network

With the rapid development of 3D vision, point cloud has become an increasingly popular 3D visual media content. Due to the irregular structure, point cloud has posed novel challenges to the related research, such as compression, transmission, rendering and quality assessment. In these latest researches, point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) has attracted wide attention due to its significant role in guiding practical applications, especially in many cases where the reference point cloud is unavailable. However, current no-reference metrics which based on prevalent deep neural network have apparent disadvantages. For example, to adapt to the irregular structure of point cloud, they require preprocessing such as voxelization and projection that introduce extra distortions, and the applied grid-kernel networks, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, fail to extract effective distortion-related features. Besides, they rarely consider the various distortion patterns and the philosophy that PCQA should exhibit shifting, scaling, and rotational invariance. In this paper, we propose a novel no-reference PCQA metric named the Graph convolutional PCQA network (GPA-Net). To extract effective features for PCQA, we propose a new graph convolution kernel, i.e., GPAConv, which attentively captures the perturbation of structure and texture. Then, we propose the multi-task framework consisting of one main task (quality regression) and two auxiliary tasks (distortion type and degree predictions). Finally, we propose a coordinate normalization module to stabilize the results of GPAConv under shift, scale and rotation transformations. Experimental results on two independent databases show that GPA-Net achieves the best performance compared to the state-of-the-art no-reference PCQA metrics, even better than some full-reference metrics in some cases