Pedagogical Relationships in Short-Term Study Abroad Programmes: Exploring the Role of Consumer Identity in Collaborative Learning among Chinese Students in the UK

PurposeThe marketisation of higher education fosters the no/on of students asconsumers, highlighting the shi9ing dynamics of student–teacher relalaonships. This paper aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about students as consumers and their involvement in pedagogical practices. We explore students’ experiences in short-term study abroad (SA) programmes that involve collaborative learning, examining how a consumerism-oriented approach affects students’ perceptions of their pedagogical identities and student–teacher pedagogical relationships. MethodologyA qualitative exploratory study was conducted to capture students’ rich and subjective perceptions and experiences. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 15 Chinese undergraduate students who participated in a short-term SA programme at a UK university. Following data translation and transcription, a thematic analysis approach facilitated our exploration.Findings Chinese students engage in SA programmes as a strategic investment in personal growth and transformation, with their consumer-oriented identity fostering a mutually beneficial relationship with educators and group members. This consumer mindset appears to enhance active student engagement and, to some extent, create reciprocal student–teacher interactions through power sharing and collaborative involvement.OriginalityThis study presents empirical data exploring the impact of consumer identity on the dynamics of student–teacher relationships in the SA context. It provides recommendations for implementing pedagogical approaches designed to mediate the influence of consumerism on student engagement, particularly in shaping collaborative student–teacher relationships. This study offers insights for future research on the effects of consumerism in higher education within cross-cultural contexts

Chinese ESL writers' uses of the causative verb structure make: a corpus-based investigation

Previous research (Lee & Chen, 2009) indicates that Chinese-speaking ESL learners use MAKE constructions extremely frequently in their English academic writing, and this phenomenon echoes other findings that MAKE is a commonly used verb that most ESL learners globally tend to overuse. Altenberg and Granger (2001) categorize MAKE constructions into eight basic types of uses. In their corpus-based research, they found that Swedish and French ESL writers tend to use causative MAKE constructions most frequently in their writing compositions, but they use these constructions differently in terms of what complement follows the causative MAKE construction: causative MAKE + (1) Adj., (2) + V., and (3) + N. Neither in this research is any further investigation made. There is no corpus data to back up what extent is the MAKE construction used by L1 Chinese ESL writers, how well it is used, and in what contexts it appears. This thesis aims to use corpus-based method to investigate how L1 Chinese ESL writers use causative MAKE constructions in writing assignments. Results indicate that Chinese students use causative MAKE constructions second most frequently, fewer than delexical MAKE uses. This is inconsistent to previous research where causative MAKE is the most frequent. Results also indicate that among the three complement-structured causative MAKE constructions, Chinese writers use adjective complements more frequently than the other two, which is consistent to previous studies. In terms of quality and contexts of the use of causative MAKE, Chinese writers use fewer varieties of types. Compared to NSs, Chinese writers tend to make grammatical mistakes and some language seems awkward and unnatural. It is inferred that this might result from negative L1 transfer because learners mistaken the L1 correspondent constructions to causative MAKE in English. This may also because there is a strong preference or the lacking of causative MAKE constructions influenced by L1. Implications for pedagogy are stated at the end of this thesis, and suggestions are provided for future investigation

TFormer: A throughout fusion transformer for multi-modal skin lesion diagnosis

Multi-modal skin lesion diagnosis (MSLD) has achieved remarkable success by modern computer-aided diagnosis technology based on deep convolutions. However, the information aggregation across modalities in MSLD remains challenging due to severity unaligned spatial resolution (dermoscopic image and clinical image) and heterogeneous data (dermoscopic image and patients' meta-data). Limited by the intrinsic local attention, most recent MSLD pipelines using pure convolutions struggle to capture representative features in shallow layers, thus the fusion across different modalities is usually done at the end of the pipelines, even at the last layer, leading to an insufficient information aggregation. To tackle the issue, we introduce a pure transformer-based method, which we refer to as ``Throughout Fusion Transformer (TFormer)", for sufficient information intergration in MSLD. Different from the existing approaches with convolutions, the proposed network leverages transformer as feature extraction backbone, bringing more representative shallow features. We then carefully design a stack of dual-branch hierarchical multi-modal transformer (HMT) blocks to fuse information across different image modalities in a stage-by-stage way. With the aggregated information of image modalities, a multi-modal transformer post-fusion (MTP) block is designed to integrate features across image and non-image data. Such a strategy that information of the image modalities is firstly fused then the heterogeneous ones enables us to better divide and conquer the two major challenges while ensuring inter-modality dynamics are effectively modeled. Experiments conducted on the public Derm7pt dataset validate the superiority of the proposed method. Our TFormer outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Ablation experiments also suggest the effectiveness of our designs

Item recommendations for cache and synchronization of application stores

To reduce the latency of rendering the page of an app in an application store (e.g., that provides access to downloads of apps to a mobile device), the application store app periodically synchronizes with its backend and caches on the user mobile device app pages that a user is likely to visit. This disclosure uses deep learning models to predict the next N apps that a user is likely to visit based on permitted user activity signals, e.g., demographic information, historical visits to deep links associated with the app, etc

Efficient One-Step Fusion PCR Based on Dual-Asymmetric Primers and Two-Step Annealing

Gene splicing by fusion PCR is a versatile and widely used methodology, especially in synthetic biology. We here describe a rapid method for splicing two fragments by one-round fusion PCR with a dual-asymmetric primers and two-step annealing (ODT) method. During the process, the asymmetric intermediate fragments were generated in the early stage. Thereafter, they were hybridized in the subsequent cycles to serve as template for the target full-length product. The process parameters such as primer ratio, elongation temperature and cycle numbers were optimized. In addition, the fusion products produced with this method were successfully applied in seamless genome editing. The fusion of two fragments by this method takes less than 0.5 day. The method is expected to facilitate various kinds of complex genetic engineering projects with enhanced efficiency

Photoactivatable nanogenerators of reactive species for cancer therapy

In recent years, reactive species-based cancer therapies have attracted tremendous attention due to their simplicity, controllability, and effectiveness. Herein, we overviewed the state-of-art advance for photo-controlled generation of highly reactive radical species with nanomaterials for cancer therapy. First, we summarized the most widely explored reactive species, such as singlet oxygen, superoxide radical anion (O2●), nitric oxide (●NO), carbon monoxide, alkyl radicals, and their corresponding secondary reactive species generated by interaction with other biological molecules. Then, we discussed the generating mechanisms of these highly reactive species stimulated by light irradiation, followed by their anticancer effect, and the synergetic principles with other therapeutic modalities. This review might unveil the advantages of reactive species-based therapeutic methodology and encourage the pre-clinical exploration of reactive species-mediated cancer treatments

A Rotation Meanout Network with Invariance for Dermoscopy Image Classification and Retrieval

The computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system can provide a reference basis for the clinical diagnosis of skin diseases. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can not only extract visual elements such as colors and shapes but also semantic features. As such they have made great improvements in many tasks of dermoscopy images. The imaging of dermoscopy has no principal orientation, indicating that there are a large number of skin lesion rotations in the datasets. However, CNNs lack rotation invariance, which is bound to affect the robustness of CNNs against rotations. To tackle this issue, we propose a rotation meanout (RM) network to extract rotation-invariant features from dermoscopy images. In RM, each set of rotated feature maps corresponds to a set of outputs of the weight-sharing convolutions and they are fused using meanout strategy to obtain the final feature maps. Through theoretical derivation, the proposed RM network is rotation-equivariant and can extract rotation-invariant features when followed by the global average pooling (GAP) operation. The extracted rotation-invariant features can better represent the original data in classification and retrieval tasks for dermoscopy images. The RM is a general operation, which does not change the network structure or increase any parameter, and can be flexibly embedded in any part of CNNs. Extensive experiments are conducted on a dermoscopy image dataset. The results show our method outperforms other anti-rotation methods and achieves great improvements in dermoscopy image classification and retrieval tasks, indicating the potential of rotation invariance in the field of dermoscopy images

A novel C-terminal protein degron identified in bacterial aldehyde decarbonylases using directed enzyme evolution

Metabolic engineers have successfully synthesized alkanes, the bulk component of gasoline, using microbial cell factories as a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based fuels. Aldehyde decarbonylases (AD), enzymes which transform acyl aldehydes into alkanes, have been identified as the bottleneck in these alkane producing pathways. Previous studies demonstrated degradation of AD in E. coli cells via unknown molecular mechanism. Here, we present the discovery of a degradation tag (degron) in AD from Prochlorococcus marinus. AD variants were generated by random mutation using error-prone PCR, transferred into E. coli, and grown in chemostat culture with 2g/L hexanal to select for positive mutations. A short C-terminal sequence of AD from P. marinus was proven to be an intact degron by fusing to fluorescent proteins. Statistical analysis of C-terminal sequences of 371 non-redundant ADs from bacteria revealed a conserved sequence in this region, which was proven to be an effective degron. We also showed that ATP-dependent proteases clpAP and lon are responsible for the degradation of AD degron tagged protein. Furthermore, our results indicate that the AD degron caused 91.4% of green fluorescent protein (GFP) degradation when fused to its C-terminus, whereas its elimination in AD enhanced alkane production in vivo. Thus, our work demonstrated the presence of a protein degron tag in bacterial ADs, thereby facilitating further improvements in AD-based alkane production pathways. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Numerical simulation of cooperative breaking rock by multi-cutter and research on the layout law of disc cutter on cutterhead

The cutterhead was one of the key parts of the Tunneling Boring Machine to achieve tunnel mining. Cutterhead’s continuous breaking rock was the rock destruction process under the cutter group. The cutter of cutterhead was used as a direct tool for rock breaking, and the arrangement of the cutter would directly affect the breaking performance such as the force of cutter and energy consumption. This paper mainly explores the influence of cutter installation parameters on the rock breaking force and specific energy in the multi-cutter collaborative rock breaking mode. Firstly, the characteristics of rock breaking during the cutter excavation and the way of multi-cutter collaborative effects created by the adjacent cutter during the rotation are analyzed. Using the motion characteristics of multi-cutter around the center of the cutterhead rotation and slow penetrating into the rock on the cutterhead, a rock constitutive model including the cutter’s displacement loading method and the form suitable for simulating the damage of rock element in the excavation was established, a finite element model of three cutters rotary rock breaking for techniques such as rock failure separation criteria was introduced. This paper simulates the rock breaking process of multiple cutters spiral intrusion rocks. Then, the single-factor influence of three main cutterhead arrangement parameters, cutter spacing, cutter installation polar angle difference and cutting sequence, on the rock breaking performance indicators such as rock breaking force of cutter and specific energy is analyzed by finite element simulation calculation. Finally, an orthogonal experiment is designed to analyze the influence of the above parameters on the total force of rock breaking under the interaction of multiple factors. The results show that the cutter spacing and installation polar angle difference have the most significant influence on the rock breaking performance of the cutter under the cooperative breaking rock conditions. The cutter spacing affects the penetration of lateral cracks between adjacent cutting paths. With the increase of the tool spacing, the lateral crack penetration between adjacent cutting paths is gradually difficult, and the weaker the effect of adjacent cutter radial collaborative rock breaking. The installation polar angle difference affects the penetration of lateral cracks and inclined free surface. With the increase of the installation polar angle difference, the lateral crack connected to the inclined free surface becomes longer, and the cooperative rock breaking effect of by adjacent cutter in the circumferential direction of the cutterhead has been enhanced.This work analyzes the relationship between the arrangement of the cutter and the rock breaking performance of the cutter in the multi-cutter collaborative breaking rock condition, which provides a reference for the reasonable layout of the cutterhead cutter