The Effect of Pinyin in Chinese Vocabulary Acquisition with English-Chinese Bilingual Learners

This study investigates Chinese vocabulary acquisition of Chinese language learners in English-Chinese bilingual contexts; the 20 participants in this study were English native speakers, who were enrolled in a Chinese immersion program in central Minnesota. The study used a matching test, and the test contains seven sets of test items. In each set, there were six Chinese vocabulary words and the English translations of three of them. The six words are listed in one column on the left, and the three translations were in another column on the right. All six Chinese vocabulary words were from the vocabulary list. According to students’ Chinese vocabulary accuracy, I hypothesized Pinyin, which means Chinese phonetic systems, could help English-Chinese bilingual learners acquire Chinese vocabulary. In addition, this study was conducted to investigate if there were correlations between their Chinese proficiency test scores (HSK, Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi,), the immediate test scores, and the delayed test scores. Results were exported and analyzed with statistical tests. A paired-samples t-test was used to compare the scores with Pinyin condition and without Pinyin condition. The results showed that Pinyin did help in both the immediate test and the delayed test. A person correlation test was used to compare the HSK scores and vocabulary test scores; it showed only one correlation, between the HSK score and the test score of without Pinyin condition on the immediate test. Thus, Pinyin was possibly more helpful to the students who were at a lower level. Based on the study’s results, Pinyin was helpful in Chinese acquisition, especially for beginning learners of Chinese

Formation Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Directed and Switching Topologies

Formation control problems for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm systems with directed and switching topologies are investigated. A general formation control protocol is proposed firstly. Then, by variable transformation, the formation problem is transformed into a consensus problem, which can be solved by a novel matrix decomposition method. Sufficient conditions to achieve formation with directed and switching topologies are provided and an explicit expression of the formation reference function is given. Furthermore, an algorithm to design the gain matrices of the protocol is presented. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results

Enseñanza remota de emergencia del inglés como lengua extranjera durante el COVID-19: perspectivas desde una universidad en China

Given the circumstances of the global pandemic, universities around China and across the globe have suspended face to face (F2F) classes and transitioned to emergency remote teaching (ERT). University students in China have been the first to go through the whole semester's ERT including College English, a compulsory language course for almost all the first- and second-year students of non-English majors. This article adopted a mixed-methods design, a survey followed by a qualitative visual method, gathered data on students' experience about ERT of College English and presented an investigation into detailed interactive process of the classes. The data analysis on the learners' engagement and the feedback from the learners provided a summary of the key threads of ERT classes. This study demonstrated that students held an extrinsic goal orientation, which did not differ from their face-to-face learning experience. ERT granted students more opportunities for interaction with their instructor and peers, while collaboration among students were limited. The research results can be connected to the larger fabric of global language teaching in crisis context, provide empirical lessons to educators, and help instructors with their future decision-making about technology-supported activities.Dadas las circunstancias de la pandemia mundial, las universidades de China y de todo el mundo han suspendido las clases presenciales (F2F) y han pasado a la enseñanza remota de emergencia (ERT). Los estudiantes universitarios en China han sido los primeros en pasar por el ERT de todo el semestre, incluido el inglés universitario, un curso de idioma obligatorio para casi todos los estudiantes de primer y segundo año de especializaciones no inglesas. Este artículo adoptó un diseño de métodos mixtos, una encuesta seguida de un método visual cualitativo, recopiló datos sobre la experiencia de los estudiantes sobre ERT de inglés universitario y presentó una investigación sobre el proceso interactivo detallado de las clases. El análisis de datos sobre el compromiso de los alumnos y los comentarios de los alumnos proporcionaron un resumen de los hilos clave de las clases de ERT. Este estudio demostró que los estudiantes tenían una orientación de metas extrínseca, que no difería de su experiencia de aprendizaje cara a cara. ERT otorgó a los estudiantes más oportunidades de interacción con su instructor y compañeros, mientras que la colaboración entre los estudiantes fue limitada. Los resultados de la investigación se pueden conectar con el tejido más amplio de la enseñanza de idiomas global en un contexto de crisis, proporcionar lecciones empíricas a los educadores y ayudar a los instructores con su futura toma de decisiones sobre actividades apoyadas por la tecnología.Universidad Pablo de Olavid

Facile sand enhanced electro-flocculation for cost-efficient harvesting of Dunaliella salina

通讯作者地址: Jia, LSEnergy consumption and water resource in the cultivation and harvesting steps still need to be minimized for the popularization of the microalgae-based products. An efficient electro-flocculation method for harvesting Dunaliella Salina integrated with local sand has been successfully applied. Sand was effective for speeding up the processes of flocculation and sedimentation of algal flocs and the electrolytic hydroxides was essential to bridge the sand and small flocs into large dense flocs. The maximal recovery effective improved from 95.13% in 6 min to 98.09% in 4.5 min and the optimal electrical energy consumption decreased 51.03% compared to conventional electro-flocculation in a laboratory ambient condition. Furthermore, reusing the flocculated medium in cultivation of the D. Salina with nitrogen supplemented performed no worse than using fresh medium. This sand enhanced electro-flocculation (SEF) technology provides a great potential for saving time and energy associated with improving microalgae harvesting.Xiamen Southern Oceanographic Center of Fujian Province of China 14CZP046HJ20 talents introduction project of Shenzhen City Science and Technology R&D funds recruit research of China ZYD201111080010

Multi-colour light emission based on pixel-array phosphor layer in LEDs

Phosphor layers are of vital importance for the development of advanced phosphor-converted light-emitting diodes (LEDs). However, owing to the fixed ratio of red-green-blue (RGB) phosphors, it has been difficult for the RGB phosphor layers with conventional structure to tune light emission colours. Herein, we have experimentally fabricated nine types of phosphor layers with patterned RGB pixel array, which consist of tuneable RGB ratio in a planar configuration. Moreover, we carried out optical simulation based on Monte-Carlo theory to assist in adjusting the light-emission colours and the corresponding chromaticity coordinates. The simulations were further verified by the experimental results via samples fabricated by the stencil printing technique. In accordance with the nine types of phosphor layers with patterned pixel arrays in various RGB ratios, we have finally obtained corresponding nine light-emission colours for the applications of LED light emission decoration. These designed advanced pixel-array phosphor layers demonstrate great potential for applications in decorated light emission and display devices with significant implications for industrial improvement in these research areas

Towards Less Generic Responses in Neural Conversation Models: A Statistical Re-weighting Method

Sequence-to-sequence neural generation models have achieved promising performance on short text conversation tasks. However, they tend to generate generic/dull responses, leading to unsatisfying dialogue experience. We observe that in the conversation tasks, each query could have multiple responses, which forms a 1-to-n or m-to-n relationship in the view of the total corpus. The objective function used in standard sequence-to-sequence models will be dominated by loss terms with generic patterns. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a statistical re-weighting method that assigns different weights for the multiple responses of the same query, and trains the common neural generation model with the weights. Experimental results on a large Chinese dialogue corpus show that our method improves the acceptance rate of generated responses compared with several baseline models and significantly reduces the number of generated generic responses