Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Weakly-supervised Part-Attention and Mentored Networks for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve images with the same vehicle ID across different cameras. Current part-level feature learning methods typically detect vehicle parts via uniform division, outside tools, or attention modeling. However, such part features often require expensive additional annotations and cause sub-optimal performance in case of unreliable part mask predictions. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised Part-Attention Network (PANet) and Part-Mentored Network (PMNet) for Vehicle Re-ID. Firstly, PANet localizes vehicle parts via part-relevant channel recalibration and cluster-based mask generation without vehicle part supervisory information. Secondly, PMNet leverages teacher-student guided learning to distill vehicle part-specific features from PANet and performs multi-scale global-part feature extraction. During inference, PMNet can adaptively extract discriminative part features without part localization by PANet, preventing unstable part mask predictions. We address this Re-ID issue as a multi-task problem and adopt Homoscedastic Uncertainty to learn the optimal weighing of ID losses. Experiments are conducted on two public benchmarks, showing that our approach outperforms recent methods, which require no extra annotations by an average increase of 3.0% in CMC@5 on VehicleID and over 1.4% in mAP on VeRi776. Moreover, our method can extend to the occluded vehicle Re-ID task and exhibits good generalization ability.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE ENDOTHERAPY OF DIABETIC WOUNDS: A SCOPING REVIEW

In recent years, the incidence of diabetes has been increasing, and the diabetic foot is a complication of diabetes, which seriously affects the life and health of patients. The effect of Chinese medicine in the treatment of diabetes is more and more recognized. To search for the treatment of diabetic foot using Traditional Chinese medicine - Just to collect research literature on TCM treatment of diabetes in order to summarize the common syndrome types and medication rules in recent years, and to provide a new treatment. Common syndrome has syndrome of the dual deficiency of qi and yin、syndrome of dual deficiency of qi and yin, syndrome of meridian stasis-heat, syndrome of meridian stasis-heat and so on. Common endotherapy medicine is clear heat medicinal, tonify qi medicine, activate blood and resolve stasis and so on. Traditional Chinese medicine has certain advantages and effects in the treatment of diabetes, but there is still no uniform standard.                                          Peer Review History: Received 20 February 2019;   Revised 2 March; Accepted 11 March, Available online 15 March 2020 Academic Editor: Dr. Ali Abdullah Al-yahawi, Al-Razi university, Department of Pharmacy, Yemen, [email protected] Received file:                Reviewer's Comments: Average Peer review marks at initial stage: 5.5/10 Average Peer review marks at publication stage: 7.0/10 Reviewer(s) detail: Dr. Nuray Ari, Ankara University, Turkiye, [email protected] Dr. Asia Selman Abdullah, Al-Razi university, Department of Pharmacy, Yemen, [email protected] Similar Articles: EFFECTS OF EMODIN ON BLOOD GLUCOSE AND BODY WEIGHT IN TYPE 1 DIABETIC RATS PLASMA FERRITIN AND HEPCIDIN LEVELS IN PATIENTS WITH TYPE 2 DIABETES MELLITU

Distributed Optimization for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems with Dynamic Event-Triggered Communication

In this paper, we propose a fully distributed algorithm for second-order continuous-time multi-agent systems to solve the distributed optimization problem. The global objective function is a sum of private cost functions associated with the individual agents and the interaction between agents is described by a weighted undirected graph. We show the exponential convergence of the proposed algorithm if the underlying graph is connected, each private cost function is locally gradient-Lipschitz-continuous, and the global objective function is restricted strongly convex with respect to the global minimizer. Moreover, to reduce the overall need of communication, we then propose a dynamic event-triggered communication mechanism that is free of Zeno behavior. It is shown that the exponential convergence is achieved if the private cost functions are also globally gradient-Lipschitz-continuous. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results

Epileptic prediction using spatiotemporal information combined with optimal features strategy on EEG

ObjectiveEpilepsy is the second most common brain neurological disease after stroke, which has the characteristics of sudden and recurrence. Seizure prediction is seriously important for improving the quality of patients’ lives.MethodsFrom the perspective of multiple dimensions including time-frequency, entropy and brain network, this paper proposed a novel approach by constructing the optimal spatiotemporal feature set to predict seizures. Based on strong independence and large information capabilities, the two-dimensional feature screening algorithm is performed to eliminate unnecessary redundant features. In order to verify the effectiveness of the optimal feature set, support vector machine (SVM) was used to classify the preictal and interictal states on both the Kaggle intracranial EEG and CHB-MIT scalp EEG dataset.ResultsThis model achieved an average accuracy of 98.01%, AUC of 0.96, F-Score of 98.3% and FPR of 0.0383/h on the Kaggle dataset; On the CHB-MIT dataset, the average accuracy, AUC, F-score and FPR were 95.93%, 0.92, 94.97% and 0.0473/h, respectively. Further ablation experiments have confirmed that the temporal and spatial features fusion has better performance than the individual temporal or spatial features.ConclusionCompared to the state-of-the-art methods, our approach outperforms most of these existing techniques. The results show that our approach can effectively extract the spatiotemporal information of epileptic EEG signals to predict epileptic seizures with high performance

Conditional Attribute-Based Proxy Re-Encryption

Proxy re-encryption (PRE) is a cryptographic primitive that allows a semi-trusted proxy to transfer the decryption rights of ciphertexts in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. This versatile primitive has been extended to several powerful variants, leading to numerous applications, such as e-mail forwarding and content distribution. One such variant is attribute-based PRE (AB-PRE), which provides an expressible access control mechanism by allowing the proxy to switch the underlying policy of an attribute-based encryption (ABE) ciphertext. However, the function of AB-PRE is to convert the underlying policies of all ciphertexts indiscriminately, which lacks the flexibility of ciphertext transformation. Therefore, AB-PRE needs to support the property of conditional delegation. Among the other variants of PRE, there is a variant called conditional PRE (C-PRE), which allows fine-grained delegations by restricting the proxy to performing valid re-encryption only for a limited set of ciphertexts. Unfortunately, existing PRE schemes cannot simultaneously achieve expressible access control mechanisms and fine-grained delegations. Specifically, we require a PRE scheme, via which the proxy can convert the underlying policies of an ABE ciphertext only if this ciphertext is in the set of ciphertexts allowing the proxy to perform valid transformations. To address this problem, we formalize the notion of conditional attribute-based PRE (CAB-PRE) in the honest re-encryption attacks (HRA) model, which is more robust and implies chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) security, and propose the first CAB-PRE scheme. To construct such a scheme, we design as a building block, the first adaptively HRA-secure (ciphertext-policy) AB-PRE based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem. This scheme solves the open problem left by Susilo et al. in ESORICS\u2721 about how to construct an HRA-secure (ciphertext-policy) AB-PRE scheme, and it should be of independent interest. Then, we introduce a well-matched conditional delegation mechanism for this AB-PRE scheme to derive our adaptively HRA-secure CAB-PRE scheme

Allogeneic Mesenchymal Stem Cell Therapy for Bisphosphonate-Related Jaw Osteonecrosis in Swine

Bisphosphonates (BPs), which are used to treat a variety of clinical disorders, have the side effect of jawbone necrosis. Currently, there is no reliable treatment for BP-related osteonecrosis of the jaw (BRONJ) due to a lack of understanding of its pathogenesis. To investigate the pathogenesis of BRONJ and observe the treatment effect of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell (BMMSC) transplantation, we established a preclinical animal model of BRONJ in miniature pigs (minipigs). After treatment with zoledronic acid, the clinical and radiographic manifestations of BRONJ could be observed in minipigs after first premolar extraction. The biological and immunological properties of BMMSCs were impaired in the BP-treated minipigs. Moreover, the ratio of Foxp3-positive regulatory T-cells (Tregs) in peripheral blood decreased, and interleukin (IL)-17 increased in the serum of BP-treated minipigs. After allogeneic BMMSC transplantation via intravenous infusion, mucosal healing and bone reconstruction were observed; IL-17 levels were reduced; and Tregs were elevated. In summary, we established a clinically relevant BRONJ model in minipigs and tested a promising allogeneic BMMSC-based therapy, which may have potential clinical applications for treating BRONJ. © Copyright 2013, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 2013

SIRT5 promotes IDH2 desuccinylation and G6PD deglutarylation to enhance cellular antioxidant defense

Abstract Excess in mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS) is considered as a major cause of cellular oxidative stress. NADPH, the main intracellular reductant, has a key role in keeping glutathione in its reduced form GSH, which scavenges ROS and thus protects the cell from oxidative damage. Here, we report that SIRT5 desuccinylates and deglutarylates isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 (IDH2) and glucose‐6‐phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD), respectively, and thus activates both NADPH‐producing enzymes. Moreover, we show that knockdown or knockout of SIRT5 leads to high levels of cellular ROS. SIRT5 inactivation leads to the inhibition of IDH2 and G6PD, thereby decreasing NADPH production, lowering GSH, impairing the ability to scavenge ROS, and increasing cellular susceptibility to oxidative stress. Our study uncovers a SIRT5‐dependent mechanism that regulates cellular NADPH homeostasis and redox potential by promoting IDH2 desuccinylation and G6PD deglutarylation