Activating Schemata in ESL Writing

My research aims at exploring the contribution of various types of schemata to leaners’ text comprehension and text production, especially ESL (English as a Second Language) writing, to better understand how ESL learners, especially Vietnamese graduate students, use diverse resources in schema activation to facilitate their processes of learning to write in the academic setting. To better understand these processes, the researcher synthesized previous studies together with conducting interviews with four Vietnamese graduate students and analyzing their writing samples to investigate the relationships among types of schemata: formal, content, and rhetorical schemata, which can be significant in ESL writing and composition pedagogy. Formal schemata refer to learners’ awareness and competence in technically linguistic expressions; content schemata refer to learners’ knowledge of reading and writing topics; and rhetorical schemata refer learners’ awareness of the contextual situations in which texts are created. The analyses in this research have found a substantial contribution of the three types of schemata to the reading and writing processes. The analyses in my research can possibly provide a better understanding of schemata to facilitate ESL learners’ reading and writing competence

Equity mispricing and the adjustment toward target leverage: Evidence from the UK

The objective of this paper is to provide an empirical analysis of the influence of equity misevaluation on the speed of adjustment toward target leverage in the UK market over the period of 1993-2016. The study introduces a set of better measures of equity mispricing and implements the standard partial adjustment model to estimate the speed at which firms revert to their target leverage. The average firm is expected to reduce the distance from its target level by 31-33% each year or it takes approximately three years for the firm to adjust back to its optimal capital structure after attempts to time the market in favorable conditions, equivalently. Especially, the study documents strong evidence for pronounced heterogeneity in the target leverage adjustment speed across the sample. For example, the firm which is above its target level (i.e. calls for equity issuance or debt repurchase) tends to revert more rapidly in the period of overvaluation relative to undervaluation. Correspondingly, looking at firms below target levels (i.e. needs to issue debt or repurchase equity), they adjust faster to target levels in the presence of undervaluation. The results are robust to different proxies for leverage in the partial adjustment model and alternate methods of measuring mispricing. While the study is highly consistent with Warr et al. (2012), it challenges the evidence of Baker and Wurgler (2002) about the permanent effect of market timing on capital structure

DEVELOPMENT OF A SIMPLE TECHNOLOGY TO REMOVE ARSENIC IN GROUND WATER BASED ON USING "LATERITE"-ADSORBENT, A COMMON NATURAL IRON ORE IN VIETNAM

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

doi:10.1155/2011/614571 Research Article MMSE Beamforming for SC-FDMA Transmission over

which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We consider transmit beamforming for single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) transmission over frequency-selective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The beamforming filters are optimized for minimization of the sum of the mean-squared errors (MSEs) of the transmitted data streams after MIMO minimum mean-squared error linear equalization (MMSE-LE), and for minimization of the product of the MSEs after MIMO MMSE decision-feedback equalization (MMSE-DFE), respectively. We prove that for SC-FDMA transmission in both cases eigenbeamforming, diagonalizing the overall channel, together with a nonuniform power distribution is the optimum beamforming strategy. The optimum power allocation derived for MMSE-LE is similar in spirit to classical results for the optimum continuous-time transmit filter for linear modulation formats obtained by Berger/Tufts and Yang/Roy, whereas for MMSE-DFE the capacity achieving waterfilling strategy well known from conventional single-carrier transmission schemes is obtained. Moreover, we present a modification of the beamformer design to mitigate an increase of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which is in general associated with beamforming. Simulation results demonstrate the high performance of the proposed beamforming algorithms. 1

Country uncertainty, power distance, and payment methods in acquisitions

This study examines the impact of country-specific uncertainty on the choice of payment method in international acquisitions. Our results show a negative correlation between the level of target country-specific uncertainty and cash transactions. Specifically, when the host country experiences a high level of country uncertainty, acquirers are more likely to choose non-cash transactions in which acquiring firms can issue their own equity to the target firm as part or all of the purchase consideration of the deal. The result is robust to alternative tests and analysis of subsamples. We also find that differences in uncertainty between host and home countries are informative in bidders’ payment decisions. Further, we find that the negative relation between target country-specific uncertainty and cash payment becomes weaker when there are larger differences in power distance between host and home countries. Our findings provide recommendations for policy-making bodies, and have implications for firm managers making corporate restructuring decisions

Rifamycin Resistance in Clostridium difficile Is Generally Associated with a Low Fitness Burden

We characterized clinically occurring and novel mutations in the β subunit of RNA polymerase in Clostridium difficile (CdRpoB), conferring rifamycin (including rifaximin) resistance. The Arg(505)Lys substitution did not impose an in vitro fitness cost, which may be one reason for its dominance among rifamycin-resistant clinical isolates. These observations were supported through the structural modeling of CdRpoB. In general, most mutations lacked in vitro fitness costs, suggesting that rifamycin resistance may in some cases persist in the clinic

Synthesis and Investigation of the Physical Properties of Lead-Free BCZT Ceramics

This work presents the structure, microstructure, and physical properties of low sintering temperature lead-free ceramics 0.52(Ba0.7Ca0.3)TiO3-0.48Ba(Zr0.2Ti0.8)O3 doped with nano-sized ZnO particles (noted as BCZT/x, x is the content of ZnO nanoparticles in wt.%, x = 0.00, 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, and 0.25). The obtained results of Raman scattering and dielectric measurements have confirmed that Zn2+ has occupied B-site, to cause a deformation in the ABO3-type lattice of the BCZT/x specimens. The 0.15 wt.% ZnO-modified ceramic sintered at 1350°C exhibited excellent piezoelectric parameters: d33 = 420 pC/N, d31 = −174 pC/N, kp = 0.483, kt = 0.423, and k33 = 0.571. The obtained results indicate that the high-quality lead-free BCZT ceramic could be successfully synthesized at a low sintering temperature of 1350°C with an addition of appropriated amount of ZnO nanoparticles. This work also reports the influence of the sintering temperature on structure, microstructure, and piezoelectric properties of BCZT/0.15 compound. By rising sintering temperature, the piezoelectric behaviors were improved and rose up to the best parameters at a sintering temperature of 1450°C (d33 = 576 pC/N and kp = 0.55). The corresponding properties of undoped BCZT ceramics were investigated as a comparison. It also presented that the sintering behavior and piezo-parameters of doped BCZT samples are better than the undoped BCZT samples at each sintering temperature

Multitask Aspect_Based Sentiment Analysis with Integrated Bidirectional LSTM & CNN Model

International audienceSentiment analysis or opinion mining used to understand the community's opinions on a particular product. Sentiment analysis involves building the opinion collection and classification system. Aspect-based sentiment analysis focuses on the ability to extract and summarize opinions on specific aspects of entities within sentiment document. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning approach using deep learning techniques for multitask aspect-based opinion mining system that support four main subtasks: extract opinion target, classify aspect-entity (category), and estimate opinion polarity (positive, neutral, negative) on each extracted aspect of entity. Using extra POS layer to identify morphological features of words combines with stacking architecture of BiLSTM and CNN with word embeddings achieved by training GloVe on Restaurant domain reviews of the SemEval 2016 benchmark dataset in our proposed method is aimed at increasing the accuracy of the model. Experimental results showed that our multitask aspect-based sentiment analysis model has extracted and classified main above subtasks concurrently and achieved significantly better accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods

Lattice Anharmonicity of Stereochemically Active Lone Pairs Controls Thermochromic Band Gap Reduction of PbVO\u3csub\u3e3\u3c/sub\u3eCl

Copyright © 2020 American Chemical Society. Stereochemically active lone pairs of electrons play an important role in a diverse range of physical phenomena in many materials, ranging from semiconducting halide perovskites to thermochromic inorganic-organic hybrids. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of the 6s2 lone pair of Pb on the reversible thermochromic transition in the mixed-anion inorganic compound, PbVO3Cl. This 6s2 stereochemically active lone pair results in subtle structural distortions upon heating while maintaining its overall orthorhombic structure. These distortions result in competing interactions with the Pb 6s2 lone pair and ultimately, a pronounced change between yellow and red at ∼200 °C. X-ray diffraction analyses of PbVO3Cl demonstrate two-dimensional features in contrast to the three-dimensional network in isostructural BaVO3Cl. X-ray and neutron pair distribution function experiments reveal that Pb-O interatomic distances decrease upon heating, while Pb-Cl distances are only affected by thermal motion. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements provide experimental evidence of the presence of the 6s2 lone pair at the valence band maximum, which are corroborated by first-principles calculations. The results demonstrate a broadly generalizable mechanism for using repulsions between lone-pair electrons of p-block cations to drive discontinuous changes of local symmetry and electronic structure