Implementing the CSILE/KB Program of University of Toronto in English Teaching in China

This paper first proposes that Aims of English Teaching should go beyond communicative competence according to Bloom's taxonomy. Then it mainly analyzes that teaching English as a foreign language in China can learn from CSILE/KB Program of University of Toronto in terms of goal setting, active roles of thinking scaffolding and comprehensive English competence acquirement.To bring TEFL to a new stage,the integration of TEFL with KB and MOOCS is put forward and some suggestions are made in the end

BLIVA: A Simple Multimodal LLM for Better Handling of Text-Rich Visual Questions

Vision Language Models (VLMs), which extend Large Language Models (LLM) by incorporating visual understanding capability, have demonstrated significant advancements in addressing open-ended visual question-answering (VQA) tasks. However, these models cannot accurately interpret images infused with text, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios. Standard procedures for extracting information from images often involve learning a fixed set of query embeddings. These embeddings are designed to encapsulate image contexts and are later used as soft prompt inputs in LLMs. Yet, this process is limited to the token count, potentially curtailing the recognition of scenes with text-rich context. To improve upon them, the present study introduces BLIVA: an augmented version of InstructBLIP with Visual Assistant. BLIVA incorporates the query embeddings from InstructBLIP and also directly projects encoded patch embeddings into the LLM, a technique inspired by LLaVA. This approach assists the model to capture intricate details potentially missed during the query decoding process. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our model, BLIVA, significantly enhances performance in processing text-rich VQA benchmarks (up to 17.76% in OCR-VQA benchmark) and in undertaking general (not particularly text-rich) VQA benchmarks (up to 7.9% in Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark), and achieved 17.72% overall improvement in a comprehensive multimodal LLM benchmark (MME), comparing to our baseline InstructBLIP. BLIVA demonstrates significant capability in decoding real-world images, irrespective of text presence. To demonstrate the broad industry applications enabled by BLIVA, we evaluate the model using a new dataset comprising YouTube thumbnails paired with question-answer sets across 11 diverse categories. Our code and models are freely accessible at https://github.com/mlpc-ucsd/BLIVA.Comment: Accepted at AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24

Development of a news subscription motivation scale

As news organizations face accelerated loss in advertising revenue, increasing importance is placed on strategies to increase subscription sales. Although previous studies have found several predictors of paywall, willingness to pay, and paying for news research, these factors did not fit into one clear conceptual framework that links them together. In this dissertation, I aim to introduce a new construct, News Subscription Motivation, that provides theoretical linkages between different predictors of paying for news. Mixed method research was employed to conceptualize and operationalize this new construct. In Chapter 1, I discuss my thought process developing this study, the purpose of the study, and why this topic matters in the context of digital economy. Chapter 2 includes a review of previous research on what drives people to pay for news, and the literature on consumer decision-making processes, consumer decision-making styles, and consumer motivation in general. The need to develop a new construct and measurement tools that are specially designed for news consumption was also addressed. In Chapter 3, I conducted 22 in-depth interviews to generate possible dimensions of the construct, analyzed the qualitative data to propose a conceptual framework and definition. Study 1 results suggested nine possible dimensions: content utility, journalism quality, price, convenience, hitting the paywall, surveillance, being a good citizen, brand reputation, and journalism. Conceptual definitions of each dimension were also elaborated. Chapter 4 focuses on the operationalization of News Subscription Motivation. An initial items pool was generated based on Study 1. After the pilot test, I recruited two independent samples, and they were respectively subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The final scale included six dimensions with 19 items, and this scale demonstrated robust model fit and adequate convergent and discriminant validity. Six dimensions of News Subscription Motivation were identified: supporting journalism, journalism quality, triggered by the paywall, community attachment, price, and content utility. In Chapter 5, I aim to establish the nomological validity of News Subscription Motivation. Factors extracted from Chapter 4 demonstrated statistically significant relationships with numbers of news subscription people report paying for, types of subscriptions people get, and individuals' intention to maintain their primary subscriptions in the next 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months. Finally, I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the scale of News Subscription Motivation in Chapter 6.Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Information and Media, 2022Includes bibliographical reference

Retarded PDI diffusion and a reductive shift in poise of the calcium depleted endoplasmic reticulum

Background: Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) lumenal protein thiol redox balance resists dramatic variation in unfolded protein load imposed by diverse physiological challenges including compromise in the key upstream oxidases. Lumenal calcium depletion, incurred during normal cell signaling, stands out as a notable exception to this resilience, promoting a rapid and reversible shift towards a more reducing poise. Calcium depletion induced ER redox alterations are relevant to physiological conditions associated with calcium signaling, such as the response of pancreatic cells to secretagogues and neuronal activity. The core components of the ER redox machinery are well characterized; however, the molecular basis for the calcium-depletion induced shift in redox balance is presently obscure. Results: In vitro, the core machinery for generating disulfides, consisting of ERO1 and the oxidizing protein disulfide isomerase, PDI1A, was indifferent to variation in calcium concentration within the physiological range. However, ER calcium depletion in vivo led to a selective 2.5-fold decline in PDI1A mobility, whereas the mobility of the reducing PDI family member, ERdj5 was unaffected. In vivo, fluorescence resonance energy transfer measurements revealed that declining PDI1A mobility correlated with formation of a complex with the abundant ER chaperone calreticulin, whose mobility was also inhibited by calcium depletion and the calcium depletion-mediated reductive shift was attenuated in cells lacking calreticulin. Measurements with purified proteins confirmed that the PDI1A-calreticulin complex dissociated as Ca2+ concentrations approached those normally found in the ER lumen ([Ca2+] K-0.5max = 190 mu M). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that selective sequestration of PDI1A in a calcium depletion-mediated complex with the abundant chaperone calreticulin attenuates the effective concentration of this major lumenal thiol oxidant, providing a plausible and simple mechanism for the observed shift in ER lumenal redox poise upon physiological calcium depletion.Wellcome Trust [Wellcome 084812/Z/08/Z]; European Commission (EU FP7 Beta-Bat) [277713]; Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia, Portugal [PTDC/QUI-BIQ/119677/2010]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Meconium microbiome associates with the development of neonatal jaundice

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