The reciprocal relationship among Chinese senior secondary students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and cognitive engagement in learning mathematics : A three-wave longitudinal study

In the present longitudinal study, cross-lagged path models were applied to investigate the potential reciprocal relationships between senior secondary school students’ motivation and their cognitive engagement, using data from 623 Chinese senior secondary school students across 2 years. The 623 students completed self-reported measures of motivation and engagement at three time points within 2 years. The results suggest that the participants held a mixed type of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn mathematics and did not hold a deep level of cognitive engagement in mathematics learning. Compared with their extrinisic motivation, their intrinsic motivation to learn mathematics was more closely related to their cognitive engagement in mathematics learning, which points to a stronger reciprocal effect between their cognitive engagement and intrinsic motivation. The findings suggest that societal and cultural factors, such as the strong examination culture and high external expectations might be influential factors affecting the reciprocal relationships among students’ motivation and cognitive engagement

Contrasting Behavioral and Electrophysiological Responses of Eucryptorrhynchus scrobiculatus and E. brandti (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) to Volatiles Emitted from the Tree of Heaven, Ailanthus altissima

Eucryptorrhynchus scrobiculatus and E. brandti (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) are host-specific pests of Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle (Sapindales: Simaroubaceae), causing extensive damage to the host. There are no effective attractants available for pest management. The main aim of this study was to explore the role of host plant-derived volatiles in the behavioral response of both weevil species. In a field experiment, both weevil species showed positive response to phloem, and there was no preference for phloem associated with healthy or injured trees. Significantly more E. brandti adults responded to the olfactory treatments compared to E. scrobiculatus. In a large-arena experiment, both males and females of E. scrobiculatus significantly preferred phloem from the tree trunk while adults of E. brandti responded in significantly greater numbers to tree limbs than to any other parts of host. Females and males of E. scrobiculatus responded positively to all parts of host tested in the Y-tube bioassay, while E. brandti adults were only attracted by the phloem from healthy and injured trees. There were dissimilar electroantennographic responses to compounds such as 1-hexanol and (1S)-(−)-β-pinene between the two weevil species. This study represents the first report documenting behavioral and electrophysiological responses of E. scrobiculatus and E. brandti to volatiles from various parts of A. altissima and findings may aid efforts to develop attractants

Multi-Fields Modulation of Physical Properties of Oxide Thin Films

Oxide thin films exhibit versatile physical properties such as magnetism, ferroelectricity, piezoelectricity, metal-insulator transition (MIT), multiferroicity, colossal magnetoresistivity, switchable resistivity, etc. More importantly, the exhibited multifunctionality could be tuned by various external fields, which has enabled demonstration of novel electronic devices. In this article, recent studies of the multi-fields modulation of physical properties in oxide thin films have been reviewed. Some of the key issues and prospects about this field are also addressed.Comment: review article, 56 pages, 18 figure

A Novel Prognostic Biomarker of Luminal Breast Cancer: High CD39 Expression Is Related to Poor Survival

BackgroundCD39 is one of the functional surface markers for T regulatory cells, the prognostic role and immune-related effects of CD39 in luminal breast cancer (BC) patients has not been evaluated yet. The aim of the current study was to explore the association between CD39 expression and clinic pathological characteristics and the prognosis in luminal BC patients.MethodsClinical information and RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) expression data were extracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Patients were divided into a high or low CD39 expression group by the optimal cutoff value (4.18) identified from the receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. The relationships between CD39 expression and clinic pathological features were evaluated by the corresponding statistical tests. Survival analyses were applied to evaluate the overall survival between the high and low CD39 expression groups in luminal BC. Furthermore, Gene Expression Omnibus datasets were used for external data validation. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was also performed, and CIBERSORT was used to analyze the immune cell populations.ResultsAnalysis of 439 cases of tumor data showed that CD39 was overexpressed in luminal BC. The multivariable analysis suggested that CD39 expression was an independent prognostic factor for luminal BC patients. GSEA suggested that CD39 might play an important role in luminal BC progression through immune regulation. Analysis of immune cell patterns revealed high CD39 expression correlated to a higher proportion of CD8+ T cells and M2 macrophages.ConclusionThis study demonstrates that CD39 expression correlates with the prognosis of luminal BC through TCGA database mining. Further studies are warranted further to elucidate this potential novel therapeutic strategy for BC

Attribute-Based Conditional Proxy Re-Encryption in the Standard Model under LWE

Attribute-based conditional proxy re-encryption (AB-CPRE) allows delegators to carry out attribute-based control on the delegation of decryption by setting policies and attribute vectors. The fine-grained control of AB-CPRE makes it suitable for a variety of applications, such as cloud storage and distributed file systems. However, all existing AB-CPRE schemes are constructed under classical number-theoretic assumptions, which are vulnerable to quantum cryptoanalysis. Therefore, we propose the first AB-CPRE scheme based on the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. Constructed from fully key-homomorphic encryption (FKHE) and key-switching techniques, our scheme is unidirectional, single-hop, and enables a polynomial-deep boolean circuit as its policy. Furthermore, we split the ciphertext into two independent parts to avoid two-level or multi-level encryption/decryption mechanisms. Taking advantage of it, we then extend our single-hop AB-CPRE into an efficient and concise multi-hop one. No matter how many transformations are performed, the re-encrypted ciphertext is in constant size, and only one encryption/decryption algorithm is needed. Both of our schemes are proved to be selective secure against chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) in the standard model

GMHL: Generalized Multi-Hop Locks for Privacy-Preserving Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel network (PCN), not only improving the transaction throughput of blockchain but also realizing cross-chain payment, is a very promising solution to blockchain scalability problem. Most existing PCN constructions focus on either atomicity or privacy properties. Moreover, they are built on specific scripting features of the underlying blockchain such as HTLC or are tailored to several signature algorithms like ECDSA and Schnorr. In this work, we devise a Generalized Multi-Hop Locks (GMHL) based on adaptor signature and randomizable puzzle, which supports both atomicity and privacy preserving(unlinkability). We instantiate GMHL with a concrete design that relies on a Guillou-Quisquater-based adaptor signature and a novel designed RSA-based randomizable puzzle. Furthermore, we present a generic PCN construction based on GMHL, and formally prove its security in the universal composability framework. This construction only requires the underlying blockchain to perform signature verification, and thus can be applied to various (non-/Turing-complete) blockchains. Finally, we simulate the proposed GMHL instance and compare with other protocols. The results show that our construction is efficient comparable to other constructions while remaining the good functionalities