Teacher Educators\u27 Computer Technology Integration At Utah State University

The purpose of this research is to develop a deep understanding of Utah State University teacher educators\u27 perceptions and lived experience with computer technology integration. Ten methods course instructors in secondary education participated. Data were collected using the phenomenological research method: (1) conducting one-on-one in-depth interviews, (2) classroom observations of the four participants, and (3) examining artifacts, such as syllabi and presentation evaluation forms used by the participants. The findings of this research show that the subjects regard computer technology as a powerful instructional tool. They also realize it is important to prepare preservice teachers with computer technology for their future careers. The study analyzes the positive and negative aspects of using computer technology in teaching and personal experiences, and how these influence the participants\u27 computer technology integration. The results indicate four types of computer technology integration among the teacher educators: (1) Advanced Users, (2) Technical Users, (3) Reluctant Users, and (4) Resisters, as well as some advantages and disadvantages of using computer technology in educational settings. Based on the findings of the research, some strategies are suggested to improve the teacher educators\u27 computer technology integration at Utah State University. These suggestions include aspects such as amending training procedures and building a supportive environment in the teacher educators\u27 professional development. Future research perspectives are also proposed at the end of the dissertation

Is the Right to Vote Equal to Democracy? — An Analysis of Substantive and Procedural Democracy in the United States

In modern political society, democracy remains a universal concept. However, different ideologies still have their own views on the concrete realization form of democracy. Nowadays, the understandings of the concept of democracy in the United States and its democratic values have become the mainstream of Western society, and their historical value and role should not be ignored. However, the practice of this democratic system has differed from true democracy and has gradually manifested political confusion. Firstly, this paper introduces the development of democracy and electoral system, and explains that the initial meaning of Western democracy is institutional democracy, namely procedural democracy, which is not the same as what we think of popular sovereignty today, and that the development course of Western democracy is also the expansion process of procedural justice. Then, constructivism theory is used to discuss the proceduralized process of substantive democracy and to explain the relationship between procedural justice and substantive democracy. Finally, through a specific analysis of the evolution and practice of the democratic electoral system in the United States, it concludes that the development of American democracy focuses only on expanding the scope of procedural democracy, but neglects the development of substantive democracy. For this reason, it explores the problems existing in American democracy

More Management Is Needed to Improve the Effectiveness of Artificial Grassland in Vegetation and Soil Restoration on the Three-River Headwaters Region of China

Establishing an artificial grassland is a common measure employed to restore heavily degraded alpine grasslands for regional sustainability. The Three-River Headwaters Region in China has significant areas of black-soil-type grassland which is typified by heavy degradation; nearly 35% of the grassland regions in the Three-River Headwaters Region has degraded into this type. There are different plant community types of black-soil-type grasslands, however, it is not clear which restoration measures should be adopted for different kinds of black-soil-type grasslands. Here, we investigate the plant community characteristics and soil physicochemical properties of artificial grasslands, two types of black-soil-type grasslands, and native undegraded grassland in the Three-River Headwaters Region, then analyzed the direct and indirect interactions between the plant and soil properties by partial least squares path models (PLS-PM). Our results revealed that establishing artificial grassland significantly increased aboveground biomass and plant community coverage, and also decreased plant species richness and diversity and soil water content, soil organic carbon and total nitrogen in the 0-10 cm soil layer as compared with black-soil-type grasslands. Plant community diversity had a positive effect on plant community productivity, soil nutrient, and soil water content in native undegraded grassland. These results suggest that more management interventions are needed after establishing an artificial grassland, such as reducing dominant species in two types of black-soil-type grasslands, water regulation in th

Using International Videoconferencing to Extend the Global Reach of Community Health Nursing Education

Travel abroad provides college students with a unique learning experience. When plans to take undergraduate community health nursing students from the United States to Haiti were cancelled due to health and safety concerns, faculty piloted international videoconferencing with a nursing program in Haiti as an alternative. During this semester‐long course, students in both countries assessed a local community using the Community as Partner framework and compared findings during videoconferences with their international peers. Despite communication challenges such as language barriers and limited internet access in Haiti, evaluative data suggests that all students valued learning with their nursing student peers in another country. For future international videoconferencing endeavors, especially with under‐resourced communities, we provide recommendations in the following categories: 1) Building relationships with a partner school, 2) Technology, 3) Pedagogy, and 4) Facilitating interactions between students.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133614/1/phn12272_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133614/2/phn12272.pd

Ask One More Time: Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios

Although chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks, the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting usually causes the repetitiveness and local optimality. To address this shortcoming, ensemble-optimization tries to obtain multiple reasoning paths to get the final answer assembly. However, current ensemble-optimization methods either simply employ rule-based post-processing such as \textit{self-consistency}, or train an additional model based on several task-related human annotations to select the best one among multiple reasoning paths, yet fail to generalize to realistic settings where the type of input questions is unknown or the answer format of reasoning paths is unknown. To avoid their limitations, we propose \textbf{self-agreement}, a generalizable ensemble-optimization method applying in almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and the answer format of reasoning paths may be known or unknown. Self-agreement firstly samples from language model's decoder to generate a \textit{diverse} set of reasoning paths, and subsequently prompts the language model \textit{one more time} to determine the optimal answer by selecting the most \textit{agreed} answer among the sampled reasoning paths. Self-agreement simultaneously achieves remarkable performance on six public reasoning benchmarks and superior generalization capabilities.Comment: Work in progres

UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy

In this work, we tackle the problem of learning universal robotic dexterous grasping from a point cloud observation under a table-top setting. The goal is to grasp and lift up objects in high-quality and diverse ways and generalize across hundreds of categories and even the unseen. Inspired by successful pipelines used in parallel gripper grasping, we split the task into two stages: 1) grasp proposal (pose) generation and 2) goal-conditioned grasp execution. For the first stage, we propose a novel probabilistic model of grasp pose conditioned on the point cloud observation that factorizes rotation from translation and articulation. Trained on our synthesized large-scale dexterous grasp dataset, this model enables us to sample diverse and high-quality dexterous grasp poses for the object point cloud.For the second stage, we propose to replace the motion planning used in parallel gripper grasping with a goal-conditioned grasp policy, due to the complexity involved in dexterous grasping execution. Note that it is very challenging to learn this highly generalizable grasp policy that only takes realistic inputs without oracle states. We thus propose several important innovations, including state canonicalization, object curriculum, and teacher-student distillation. Integrating the two stages, our final pipeline becomes the first to achieve universal generalization for dexterous grasping, demonstrating an average success rate of more than 60\% on thousands of object instances, which significantly outperforms all baselines, meanwhile showing only a minimal generalization gap.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 202

Exercise Intervention Modulates Synaptic Plasticity by Inhibiting Excessive Microglial Activation via Exosomes

BackgroundExosomes can activate microglia to modulate neural activity and synaptic plasticity by phagocytosis of neural spines or synapses. Our previous research found that an early 4-week exercise intervention in middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) rats can promote the release of exosomes and protect the brain. This study intended to further explore the intrinsic mechanism of neuroprotection by exosome release after exercise.MethodsRats were randomly divided into four groups: the sham operation (SHAM), middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) with sedentary intervention (SED-MCAO), MCAO with exercise intervention (EX-MCAO), and MCAO with exercise intervention and exosome injection (EX-MCAO-EXO). Modified neurological severity score (mNSS), cerebral infarction volume ratio, microglial activation, dendritic complexity, and expression of synaptophysin (Syn) and postsynaptic density protein 95 (PSD-95) were detected after 28 days of intervention.Results(1) The exercise improved body weight and mNSS score, and the survival state of the rats after exosome infusion was better. (2) Compared with the SED-MCAO group, the EX-MCAO (P = 0.039) and EX-MCAO-EXO groups (P = 0.002) had significantly lower cerebral infarct volume ratios (P < 0.05), among which the EX-MCAO-EXO group had the lowest (P = 0.031). (3) Compared with the SED-MCAO group, the EX-MCAO and EX-MCAO-EXO groups had a significantly decreased number of microglia (P < 0.001) and significantly increased process length/cell (P < 0.01) and end point/cell (P < 0.01) values, with the EX-MCAO-EXO group having the lowest number of microglia (P = 0.036) and most significantly increased end point/cell value (P = 0.027). (4) Compared with the SED-MCAO group, the total number of intersections and branches of the apical and basal dendrites in the EX-MCAO and EX-MCAO-EXO groups was increased significantly (P < 0.05), and the increase was more significant in the EX-MCAO-EXO group (P < 0.05). (5) The expression levels of Syn and PSD-95 in the EX-MCAO (PSyn = 0.043, PPSD−95 = 0.047) and EX-MCAO-EXO groups were significantly higher than those in the SED-MCAO group (P < 0.05), and the expression levels in the EX-MCAO-EXO group were significantly higher than those in the EX-MCAO group (P < 0.05).ConclusionEarly exercise intervention after stroke can inhibit the excessive activation of microglia and regulate synaptic plasticity by exosome release

Fabrication of Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Fiber Probes Using Ionic Self-Assembled Gold Nanoparticles

An nm-thickness composite gold thin film consisting of gold nanoparticles and polyelectrolytes is fabricated through ionic self-assembled multilayers (ISAM) technique and is deposited on end-faces of optical fibers to construct localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) fiber probes. We demonstrate that the LSPR spectrum induced by ISAM gold films can be fine-tuned through the ISAM procedure. We investigate variations of reflection spectra of the probe with respect to the layer-by-layer adsorption of ISAMs onto end-faces of fibers, and study the spectral variation mechanism. Finally, we demonstrated using this fiber probe to detect the biotin-streptavidin bioconjugate pair. ISAM adsorbed on optical fibers potentially provides a simple, fast, robust, and low-cost, platform for LSPR biosensing applications

KwaiYiiMath: Technical Report

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in handling a variety of natural language processing (NLP) downstream tasks, even on mathematical tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. In this report, we introduce the KwaiYiiMath which enhances the mathematical reasoning abilities of KwaiYiiBase1, by applying Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), including on both English and Chinese mathematical tasks. Meanwhile, we also constructed a small-scale Chinese primary school mathematics test set (named KMath), consisting of 188 examples to evaluate the correctness of the problem-solving process generated by the models. Empirical studies demonstrate that KwaiYiiMath can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on GSM8k, CMath, and KMath compared with the similar size models, respectively.Comment: technical report. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2306.16636 by other author

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of BNT162b2 and CoronaVac in Hong Kong: A Target Trial Emulation

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the difference between BNT162b2 and CoronaVac in vaccine effectiveness and safety. METHODS: This target trial emulation study included individuals aged ≥ 12 during 2022. Propensity score matching was applied to ensure group balance. The Cox proportional hazard model was used to compare the effectiveness outcomes including COVID-19 infection, severity, 28-day hospitalization and 28-day mortality after infection. Poisson regression was used for safety outcomes including 32 adverse events of special interests between groups. RESULTS: 639,818 and 1,804,388 individuals were identified for the 2-dose and 3-dose comparison, respectively. In 2-dose and 3-dose comparison, the hazard ratios (HRs) (95% confidence intervals [CI]) were 0.844 [0.833-0.856] and 0.749 [0.743-0.755] for COVID-19 infection, 0.692 [0.656-0.731] and 0.582 [0.559-0.605] for hospitalization, 0.566 [0.417-0.769] and 0.590 [0.458-0.76] for severe COVID-19, and 0.563 [0.456-0.697] and 0.457 [0.372-0.561] for mortality for BNT162b2 recipients versus CoronaVac recipients, respectively. Regarding safety, 2-dose BNT162b2 recipients had a significantly higher incidence of myocarditis (Incidence rate ratio[IRR][95% CI]: 8.999 [1.14-71.017]) versus CoronaVac recipients, but the difference was insignificant in 3-dose comparison (IRR [95% CI]: 2.000 [0.500-7.996]). CONCLUSIONS: BNT162b2 has higher effectiveness among individuals aged ≥ 12 against COVID-19-related outcomes for SARS-CoV-2 omicron compared to CoronaVac, with almost 50% lower mortality risk. (200 words)