The impact of teaching about the nature of science in a senior high school in China

The purpose of this study was to observe the impact of a programme of teaching about the Nature of Science on high school students and teachers, and consider the implications of the findings for school science education in China. Since 2018, there has been a national requirement to teach the concept of Hexin Suyang (核心素养). By comparing Hexin Suyang in science with the concepts, widely adopted internationally, of scientific literacy and the nature of science, this research identifies significant conceptual commonalities. These commonalities were drawn upon to design and develop a Nature of Science course suitable for Chinese high school students. This practitioner research study employs mixed methods, a modified version of the Views on Science and Technology questionnaire (Aikenhead & Ryan, 1992) and phenomenography, to study the high school students' understandings of science before and after the course and to record the changes in students and teachers during the lessons. The study concludes that the new Nature of Science curriculum had a significant impact on students' scientific cognition, supported learning about Hexin Suyang and helped teachers develop interdisciplinary pedagogies. It identifies the differences between the Nature of Science approach and traditional Chinese science education and proposes further curriculum development and reform

Garlic Consumption and All-Cause Mortality among Chinese Oldest-Old Individuals: A Population-Based Cohort Study.

In vitro and in vivo experimental studies have shown garlic has protective effects on the aging process; however, there is no evidence that garlic consumption is associated with all-cause mortality among oldest-old individuals (≥80 years). From 1998 to 2011, 27,437 oldest-old participants (mean age: 92.9 years) were recruited from 23 provinces in China. The frequencies of garlic consumption at baseline and at age 60 were collected. Cox proportional hazards models adjusted for potential covariates were constructed to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) relating garlic consumption to all-cause mortality. Among 92,505 person-years of follow-up from baseline to September 1, 2014, 22,321 participants died. Participants who often (≥5 times/week) or occasionally (1-4 times/week) consumed garlic survived longer than those who rarely (less than once/week) consumed it (p < 0.001). Participants who consumed garlic occasionally or often had a lower risk for mortality than those who rarely consumed garlic at baseline; the adjusted HRs for mortality were 0.92(0.89-0.94) and 0.89(0.85-0.92), respectively. The inverse associations between garlic consumption and all-cause mortality were robust in sensitivity analyses and subgroup analyses. In this study, habitual consumption of garlic was associated with a lower all-cause mortality risk; this advocates further investigation into garlic consumption for promoting longevity

Energy input and output of a rural village in China - the cas of the "Beijing Man village" /District of Beijing

The rapid development of the economy has created an increasing demand for energy in China. The limited resources of fossil energy are a risk for the development of China. Sustainable agriculture like organic farming (Green AAA in China) with biomass energy - as done in developed countries like Germany - is an option to reduce these risks. In China, agriculture is not energy efficient, and the intensive farming is not sustainable. The scientific challenge is to develop sustainable farming systems which can fulfill national food security, food safety and considerable renewable energy production without harming the environment, and are acceptable to the people and the economy. The protection and intelligent utilization of resources is the core of rural village development. To explore the potential of recent Chinese agriculture for the development towards a multi-functional farm for food and energy production, a village in the adjacent area of Beijing has been selected: the “Beijing Man village”. About 1,900 people live in the village and 140 hectares of the 240 hectare total land are available for farming. The major agricultural activity is pork production (capacity of 10,000 pigs per year) and dairy farming (40 dairy cows). In 2004, the energy input and output of this village was evaluated and taken as a basis for a model of sustainable farming for food and biogas production. The study explored that the gross energy production from crops in the “Beijing man village” was about 19,103 GJ/year. It was obvious that the crop production was not sufficient for the feed demand of the animal husbandry (pigs and cows). 60% of the corn used as feed stuff was purchased on the market. The reason was, that the purchasing of corn was cheaper than the own production. The low competitive crop production due to the low efficiency resulted in the decrease of cultivated crop land from 140 ha to 80 ha in the past four years (two harvests per year). On the other hand, there was much more manure produced as suitable and applicable for crop production. Therefore manure was exposed in open air in a pond like waste. This is risky for public hazards like ground water contamination and zoonosis diseases. Therefore the farming system is not sustainable, risky and not efficient. There is a potential of the optimization of the cropping and animal husbandry interaction as well as the development of renewable energy production in the village. The main development chains are the improvement of the energy efficiency of crop production, the reduction of animal husbandry to a sustainable animal-land-ratio and the introduction of biogas production with manure and cropping by-products

Using explicit teaching of philosophy to promote understanding of the nature of science: a case study from a Chinese high school

Adopting an explicit and reflective approach to the teaching of the history and philosophy of science is useful in promoting high school students’ understanding of the nature of science. Whereas the history of science is usually signposted clearly in the school science curriculum, the philosophy of science is considered to be embedded in and integral to science education. This article argues that philosophical topics also need to be explicitly signposted and discussed in the teaching of the nature of science in high schools. This study investigates an interdisciplinary course on the nature of science in a Chinese senior high school. The course involved explicit teaching of philosophy of science topics with subject knowledge in each lesson. This mixed method design of the research included a modified version of the Views on Science, Technology and Society questionnaire as reported by Aikenhead and Ryan (Science Education, 76(5):477‑491, 1992) and phenomenographical analysis. Although the sample size is small, the results suggest that explicit teaching of philosophy of science topics helps students better understand both the nature of science and the relationship between science, technology and society

HYPRO: A Hybridly Normalized Probabilistic Model for Long-Horizon Prediction of Event Sequences

In this paper, we tackle the important yet under-investigated problem of making long-horizon prediction of event sequences. Existing state-of-the-art models do not perform well at this task due to their autoregressive structure. We propose HYPRO, a hybridly normalized probabilistic model that naturally fits this task: its first part is an autoregressive base model that learns to propose predictions; its second part is an energy function that learns to reweight the proposals such that more realistic predictions end up with higher probabilities. We also propose efficient training and inference algorithms for this model. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed HYPRO model can significantly outperform previous models at making long-horizon predictions of future events. We also conduct a range of ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of each component of our proposed methods.Comment: NeurIPS 2022 camera-read