A comparative study of intercultural sensitivity among postgraduates majoring in International Chinese Education in China context

Based on a survey sample of 435 China postgraduates majoring in International Chinese Education with different undergraduate English learning experience, the research attempted to find out how five elements proposed by Chen & Starosta (2000), interacted or influenced with each other. Those five elements incorporated in Intercultural Communication Competence Scale (ICCS), developed by Chen & Starosta (2000), are interaction engagement, respect for cultural differences, interaction confidence, interaction enjoyment and interaction attentiveness. The survey results from the multiple regression charts demonstrated that the elements composed of intercultural sensitivity actually interacted or influenced interactants’ actual intercultural communication process

Guidance Law and Neural Control for Hypersonic Missile to Track Targets

Hypersonic technology plays an important role in prompt global strike. Because the flight dynamics of a hypersonic vehicle is nonlinear, uncertain, and highly coupled, the controller design is challenging, especially to design its guidance and control law during the attack of a maneuvering target. In this paper, the sliding mode control (SMC) method is used to develop the guidance law from which the desired flight path angle is derived. With the desired information as control command, the adaptive neural control in discrete time is investigated ingeniously for the longitudinal dynamics of the hypersonic missile. The proposed guidance and control laws are validated by simulation of a hypersonic missile against a maneuvering target. It is demonstrated that the scheme has good robustness and high accuracy to attack a maneuvering target in the presence of external disturbance and missile model uncertainty

COP: Customized Deep Model Compression via Regularized Correlation-Based Filter-Level Pruning

Neural network compression empowers the effective yet unwieldy deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to be deployed in resource-constrained scenarios. Most state-of-the-art approaches prune the model in filter-level according to the "importance" of filters. Despite their success, we notice they suffer from at least two of the following problems: 1) The redundancy among filters is not considered because the importance is evaluated independently. 2) Cross-layer filter comparison is unachievable since the importance is defined locally within each layer. Consequently, we must manually specify layer-wise pruning ratios. 3) They are prone to generate sub-optimal solutions because they neglect the inequality between reducing parameters and reducing computational cost. Reducing the same number of parameters in different positions in the network may reduce different computational cost. To address the above problems, we develop a novel algorithm named as COP (correlation-based pruning), which can detect the redundant filters efficiently. We enable the cross-layer filter comparison through global normalization. We add parameter-quantity and computational-cost regularization terms to the importance, which enables the users to customize the compression according to their preference (smaller or faster). Extensive experiments have shown COP outperforms the others significantly. The code is released at https://github.com/ZJULearning/COP.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, has been accepted by IJCAI201

Receiver Function Imaging of Mantle Transition Zone Discontinuities Beneath the Tanzania Craton and Adjacent Segments of the East African Rift System

The mantle transition zone (MTZ) discontinuities beneath the Tanzania Craton and the Eastern and Western Branches of the East African Rift System are imaged by stacking over 7,100 receiver functions. The mean thickness of the MTZ beneath the Western Branch and Tanzania Craton is about 252 km, which is comparable to the global average and is inconsistent with the existence of present-day thermal upwelling originating from the lower mantle. In contrast, beneath the Eastern Branch, an up to 30 km thinning of the MTZ is observed and is attributable to upwelling of higher temperature materials from either the upper MTZ or the lower mantle. The observations are in agreement with the hypothesis that rifting in Africa is primarily driven by gradients of gravitational potential energy and lateral variations of basal traction force along zones of significant changes of lithospheric thickness such as the edges of the Tanzania Craton

Disentangling the Effect of Shared Experience on Emotional Arousal in Entertainment Live Streaming

Live streaming platforms are promoting a novel format of entertainment called PK event where live streamers compete to solicit virtual gifts from viewers. Although the two live streamers in a PK event come across as rivals, they implicitly collaborate to emotionally arouse viewers and solicit virtual gifts. We advance a curvilinear moderated mediation model to disentangle the effects of streamers’ shared PK experience on revenue growth through enticing viewers’ emotional arousal, which is moderated by streamers’ within-team experience acquisition difference. Estimating a multilevel linear model on a sample of 118,323 PK records, we discovered that shared PK experience has an inverted-U-shape relationship with emotional arousal level, which is positively associated with revenue growth. We further attested to the moderating influence of experience acquisition difference in strengthening this curvilinear relationship. Our findings help platforms to improve team member recommendation systems and streamers to find the “right” teammates for optimizing PK performance

Fluorescent Probes for Molecular Imaging of ROS/RNS Species in Living Systems

Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) and Reactive Nitrogen Species (RNS) are highly reactive species which play crucial roles in many fundamental physiological processes including cellular signalling pathways. Over-production of these reactive species by various stimuli leads to cellular oxidative stress which is linked to various disease conditions. Therefore, the development of novel detection methods for ROS and RNS is of great interest and indispensable for monitoring the dynamic changes of ROS and RNS in cells and for elucidating their mechanisms of trafficking and connections to diseases. We have been recently developing various fluorescent sensors which can selectively detect metal ions, ROS or RNS species in live cells or animals. Our turn-on profluorescent sensors are capable of imaging oxidative stress promoted by metal and H2O2 (i.e. the Fenton Reaction conditions) in living cells (Chem Commun 2010); our highly selective and sensitive iron sensors can image the endogenous exchangeable iron pools and their dynamic changes with subcellular resolution in living neuronal cells (ChemBioChem 2012 and unpublished data), and so do our superoxide sensors (ChemBioChem 2012 and unpublished data). Moreover, we have recently developed nitric oxide (NO) sensors for molecular imaging of stimulated NO production in live cells with subcellular resolution as well as novel near infra red (NIR) sensors for NO imaging in live animals

Impacts of CO2-brine-rock interaction on sealing efficiency of sand caprock: A case study of Shihezi formation in Ordos basin

Large anthropogenic emission of CO2 causes earth temperature becoming higher and higher, which may lead to the melting of glaciers, the rising of sea levels, extreme weather and so on. An effective way of reducing emissions is to capture and sequestrate CO2 while not giving up the fossil fuels. Caprock seal is critical for CO2 long term storage. CO2-brine-rock interaction will change minerals composition and pore structure of both reservoir and caprock. This paper analyzes the variation trend of porosity and permeability due to CO2-brine-rock interaction in caprock of Shihezi formation in Ordos basin, where TOUGHREACT is used as simulation tool. Geological data of numerical model are acquired from core samples. Simulations show that minerals interaction plays an important role on sealing efficiency of caprock. Overall, porosity and permeability of caprock decrease with CO2 sequestration, which indicates that main mineral reaction in caprock is precipitation, and caprock sealing efficiency is enhanced.Cited as: Liu, B., Fu, X., Li, Z. Impacts of CO2-brine-rock interaction on sealing efficiency of sand caprock: A case study of Shihezi formation in Ordos basin. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2018, 2(4): 380-392, doi: 10.26804/ager.2018.04.0