I Speak Chinese but I Am Teaching English: Exploring the Influence of Nonnative Speakership in the Construction of Language Teacher Identity

This research aims to explore how two Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers construct their professional identity as nonnative English teachers with the influence of the social factor – nonnativeness. It adopts a modern approach of identity that its formation is an ongoing process, and Wenger’s (1998) theory of identity that one acquires identity through the participation in various communities of practice. It is designed to be a qualitative study of two Chinese EFL teachers’ construction of teaching identity. The subjects negotiate the meaning of “teaching English” within various communities of practice. Findings suggest that the process of negotiation begins long before they enter their teaching career. And this process has been going through the whole process of identity construction. Findings also reveal a duel identity discursively constructed by the two subjects – both as an English teacher and learner. In addition, their nonnative speakership has played a significant role during the formation of teaching identity and has greatly influenced the way they teach. Finally, being nonnative can be advantageous in terms of language teaching

Combined administration of nicorandil and atorvastatin in patients with acute myocardial infarction after coronary intervention, and its effect on postoperative cardiac systolic function

Purpose: To study the effect of a combination of nicorandil and atorvastatin calcium in patients with acute myocardial infarction after coronary intervention, and its effect on postoperative cardiac systolic function of patients.Methods: Retrospective analysis was performed on 100 patients with acute myocardial infarctiontreated with coronary interventional therapy in The Third Affiliated Hospital of Qiqihaer MedicalUniversity from April 2019 to August 2020. The patients were randomised into control and study groups, with 50 patients in each group. The control group was treated with nicorandil, while the study group was treated with a combination of nicorandil and atorvastatin. Treatment response, cardiac structural indices, cardiac systolic function, blood lipid profiles, quality of life (QLI) score, Barthel Index (BI), Fugl- Meyer assessment (FMA), motor function score, incidence of adverse reactions, and blood pressure changes on days 1, 2, 3 and 4 after surgery, were compared between the two groups.Results: Treatment effectiveness, cardiac systolic function, QLI score, BI index and FMA motor function score in the study group were higher than the corresponding control values (p < 0.05). However, lower cardiac structure indices, blood lipid profiles and incidence of adverse reactions were greater in the study group than in the control group (p < 0.05). No significant disparity in blood pressure was found between the two groups on post-surgery days 1, 2, 3 and 4.Conclusion: The combination of nicorandil and atorvastatin calcium tablets produced better outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction after coronary intervention therapy; furthermore, the combination therapy significantly improved the cardiac systolic function of patients

Inline Text Entry On Portable Electronic Devices

This publication describes systems and techniques to provide inline text entry on portable electronic devices. Portable electronic devices, such as smartphones, generally include an on-screen keyboard to allow users to input alphanumeric characters. These keyboards generally provide several suggestions of the word that the user is currently typing or the next word to be input. Because the keyboard has a limited area on the graphical user interface (GUI) to display candidate words, the keyboard can only present a few suggestions (e.g., two or three candidates), which are generally single-word candidates. This publication describes a keyboard for portable electronic devices that displays inline candidate words, which can include multiple words, entire phrases, and complete sentences. The inline suggestions can be shown directly in the editor box of an application or a pop-up window. The inline suggestions allow users to type faster and reduce spelling and grammatical errors in applications on portable electronic devices

Federated Learning of Gboard Language Models with Differential Privacy

We train language models (LMs) with federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) in the Google Keyboard (Gboard). We apply the DP-Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (DP-FTRL)~\citep{kairouz21b} algorithm to achieve meaningfully formal DP guarantees without requiring uniform sampling of client devices. To provide favorable privacy-utility trade-offs, we introduce a new client participation criterion and discuss the implication of its configuration in large scale systems. We show how quantile-based clip estimation~\citep{andrew2019differentially} can be combined with DP-FTRL to adaptively choose the clip norm during training or reduce the hyperparameter tuning in preparation for training. With the help of pretraining on public data, we train and deploy more than twenty Gboard LMs that achieve high utility and $\rho-$zCDP privacy guarantees with $\rho \in (0.2, 2)$, with two models additionally trained with secure aggregation~\citep{bonawitz2017practical}. We are happy to announce that all the next word prediction neural network LMs in Gboard now have DP guarantees, and all future launches of Gboard neural network LMs will require DP guarantees. We summarize our experience and provide concrete suggestions on DP training for practitioners.Comment: ACL industry trac

A unified mechanism for intron and exon definition and back-splicing.

The molecular mechanisms of exon definition and back-splicing are fundamental unanswered questions in pre-mRNA splicing. Here we report cryo-electron microscopy structures of the yeast spliceosomal E complex assembled on introns, providing a view of the earliest event in the splicing cycle that commits pre-mRNAs to splicing. The E complex architecture suggests that the same spliceosome can assemble across an exon, and that it either remodels to span an intron for canonical linear splicing (typically on short exons) or catalyses back-splicing to generate circular RNA (on long exons). The model is supported by our experiments, which show that an E complex assembled on the middle exon of yeast EFM5 or HMRA1 can be chased into circular RNA when the exon is sufficiently long. This simple model unifies intron definition, exon definition, and back-splicing through the same spliceosome in all eukaryotes and should inspire experiments in many other systems to understand the mechanism and regulation of these processes