Friendships and Networks in Chinese Adolescents: Academic Achievement and Academic Engagement

This longitudinal study examined the associations between Chinese adolescents’ academic adjustment (i.e., academic achievement and academic engagement) and network affiliates and friends’ academic adjustment. Seven hundred and twenty seventh grade students (Mean age= 13.24, 382 boys and 338 girls) participated in the study. They were followed into the eighth grade (Mean Age = 14.26, 343 boys and 312 girls). Adolescents’ academic achievement was highly correlated with that of their friends and network affiliates at both grades. Adolescents’ academic engagement was not, however, correlated with their friends and network affiliates’ academic engagement. First year friends’ academic achievement significantly predicted second year adolescents’ academic achievement after controlling gender and first year adolescents’ academic achievement

A Continuously Growing Dataset of Sentential Paraphrases

A major challenge in paraphrase research is the lack of parallel corpora. In this paper, we present a new method to collect large-scale sentential paraphrases from Twitter by linking tweets through shared URLs. The main advantage of our method is its simplicity, as it gets rid of the classifier or human in the loop needed to select data before annotation and subsequent application of paraphrase identification algorithms in the previous work. We present the largest human-labeled paraphrase corpus to date of 51,524 sentence pairs and the first cross-domain benchmarking for automatic paraphrase identification. In addition, we show that more than 30,000 new sentential paraphrases can be easily and continuously captured every month at ~70% precision, and demonstrate their utility for downstream NLP tasks through phrasal paraphrase extraction. We make our code and data freely available.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to EMNLP 201

“I” vs “me”: the urbanization of “post-80s” and “post-90s” Chinese migrant workers

The difference in self-identity among migrant workers of the new generation leads them towards different desires regarding urbanization. In this regard, it is imperative to explore the influence of self-identity on the migrant workers’ willingness to stay. To explore the phenomenon empirically, the current study used data sourced from the China Migrants Dynamics Survey (CMDS), during the year, 2017. The study employed the Heckman two-stage selection model to explore the study objective. Further, the study also employed the machine learning methods for robustness check. The outcome showed that the “I” identity has a more significant impact on the urbanization by migrant workers belonging to the “post-90s”. In comparison, the identity of “Me” has a more significant impact on the urbanization by migrant workers belonging to the era of the 1980s. And it is clear that if “post- 80s” and “post-90s” migrant workers are uniformly divided into the union of new generation, the differences and characteristics within them may conceal. The overall findings proposes that based on the differences in migrant workers’ self-identity, both born in the 1980s and 1990s, there is a need to formulate related policies to promote their residence and boost urbanization

Motion Planning for Mobile Robots

This chapter introduces two kinds of motion path planning algorithms for mobile robots or unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). First, we present an approach of trajectory planning for UGV or mobile robot under the existence of moving obstacles by using improved artificial potential field method. Then, we propose an I-RRT* algorithm for motion planning, which combines the environment with obstacle constraints, vehicle constraints, and kinematic constraints. All the simulation results and the experiments show that two kinds of algorithm are effective for practical use

The νR\nu_{R}-philic scalar dark matter

Right-handed neutrinos ($\nu_{R}$) offer an intriguing portal to new physics in hidden sectors where dark matter (DM) may reside. In this work, we delve into the simplest hidden sector involving only a real scalar exclusively coupled to $\nu_{R}$, referred to as the $\nu_{R}$-philic scalar. We investigate the viability of the $\nu_{R}$-philic scalar to serve as a DM candidate, under the constraint that the coupling of $\nu_{R}$ to the standard model is determined by the seesaw relation and is responsible for the observed DM abundance. By analyzing the DM decay channels and solving Boltzmann equations, we identify the viable parameter space. In particular, our study reveals a lower bound ($\sim10^{4}$ GeV) on the mass of $\nu_{R}$ for the $\nu_{R}$-philic scalar to be DM. The DM mass may vary from sub-keV to sub-GeV. Within the viable parameter space, monochromatic neutrino lines from DM decay can be an important signal for DM indirect detection.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure