Becoming school literate parents: an ESL perspective

Framed by literacy as social practice and social theory of learning, this paper provides a preliminary exploration of how an ESL parent developed a sense of school literate identity as her three children successively entered formal schooling. This case study is the beginning of a larger investigation in which we shall more fully explore the dynamic of literacy relationships between parents of ESL children and the schools their children attend. We take the opportunity in this paper to explore some emerging issues that, while preliminary, are worthy of teachers and schools consideration and point to the need for further research into the question of ESL parents literate identities at their children\u27s school

Characterizations of m-EP elements in rings

Let R be a ring with involution. In this paper, we extend the notions of m-EP matrices and m-EP operators to an arbitrary ring case. A number of new characterizations of m-EP elements in rings are presented. In particular, the existence criteria for 1-EP (i.e. EP) elements are obtained by means of the group inverse, Moore-Penrose inverse, and core inverse. Some properties of 2-EP are also given.This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11371089), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20141327), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Foundation of Graduate Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (No. KYZZ15-0049), the FEDER Funds through “Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade-COMPETE”, the Portuguese Funds through FCT-“Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia”, within the project UID-MAT-00013/2013

Reverse Order Law for the Core Inverse in Rings

In this paper, necessary and sufficient conditions of the onesided reverse order law (ab)((sic)) = b((sic))a((sic)) , the two-sided reverse order law (ab)((sic)) = b((sic))a((sic)) and (ba)((sic)) = a((sic))b((sic)) for the core inverse are given in rings with involution. In addition, the mixed-type reverse order laws, such as (ab)((sic)) = b((sic))(abb((sic)))((sic)) , a((sic)) = b(ab)((sic)) and (ab)((sic)) = b((sic)) a((sic)) , are also considered.- This research was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2018M632385), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11771076), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20141327), the Portuguese Funds through FCT-"Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia", within the project UID/MAT/00013/2013

Chinese EFL Teachers’ Cognition about the Effectiveness of Genre Pedagogy: A Case Study

Developing students’ communicative competence became the primary goal of the current College English Curriculum Requirements in 2004 in China. There has been increasing concern, however, that this goal has yet to be realized, particularly in relation to the teaching of writing. This study investigated the potential of a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL-) informed genre approach to enhance Chinese students’ communicative competence in writing. As teachers’ beliefs have a strong impact on the effectiveness of their teaching practice (Borg, 2003), the study examined six Chinese College English teachers’ shifts in their beliefs and practices after attending a training workshop in the genre-based approach to writing development. Using pre- and post- workshop interviews and classroom observations and drawing on the analytical frameworks of teacher cognition (Borg, 2003), teacher knowledge (Shulman, 1986) and interactional scaffolding (Hammond and Gibbon, 2005), the study found that professional training in SFL genre pedagogy had a positive impact on teachers’ cognition about writing instruction, albeit with one notable constraint; the teachers paid only partial attention to the social purpose of the targeted genre, thus limiting the successful implementation of the pedagogy to a certain extent

Targeted Demand Response: Formulation, LMP Implications, and Fast Algorithms

Demand response (DR) is regarded as a solution to the issue of high electricity prices in the wholesale market, as the flexibility of the demand can be harnessed to lower the demand level for price reductions. As an across-the-board DR in a system is impractical due to the enrollment budget for instance, it is necessary to select a small group of nodes for DR implementing. Current studies resort to intuitive yet naive approaches for DR targeting, as price is implicitly associated with demand, though optimality cannot be ensured. In this paper, we derive such a relationship in the security-constrained economic dispatch via the multi-parametric programming theory, based on which the DR targeting problem is rigorously formulated as a mixed-integer quadratic programming problem aiming at reducing the averaged price to a reference level by efficiently reducing targeted nodes' demand. A solution strategy is proposed to accelerate the computation. Numerical studies demonstrate compared with the benchmarking strategy, the proposed approach can reduce the price to the reference point with less efforts in demand reduction. Besides, we empirically show that the proposed approach is immune to inaccurate system parameters, and can be generalized to variants of DR targeting tasks.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Power System

Effects of Fiber Alignment and Coculture with Endothelial Cells on Osteogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stromal Cells

Impact statement This work demonstrates an effective method of enhancing osteogenesis of mesenchymal stromal cells on electrospun scaffolds through coculturing with endothelial cells. Furthermore, we provide the optimized conditions for cocultures on electrospun fibrous scaffolds and engineered bone tissues with oriented topography on aligned fibers. This study demonstrates promising findings for growing oriented tissue-engineered cocultures with significant increase in osteogenesis over monoculture conditions.Vascularization is a critical process during bone regeneration. The lack of vascular networks leads to insufficient oxygen and nutrients supply, which compromises the survival of regenerated bone. One strategy for improving the survival and osteogenesis of tissue-engineered bone grafts involves the coculture of endothelial cells (ECs) with mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs). Moreover, bone regeneration is especially challenging due to its unique structural properties with aligned topographical cues, with which stem cells can interact. Inspired by the aligned fibrillar nanostructures in human cancellous bone, we fabricated polycaprolactone (PCL) electrospun fibers with aligned and random morphology, cocultured human MSCs with human umbilical vein ECs (HUVECs), and finally investigated how these two factors modulate osteogenic differentiation of human MSCs (hMSCs). After optimizing cell ratio, a hMSCs/HUVECs ratio (90:10) was considered to be the best combination for osteogenic differentiation. Coculture results showed that hMSCs and HUVECs adhered to and proliferated well on both scaffolds. The aligned structure of PCL fibers strongly influenced the morphology and orientation of hMSCs and HUVECs; however, fiber alignment was observed to not affect alkaline phosphate (ALP) activity or mineralization of hMSCs compared with random scaffolds. More importantly, cocultured cells on both random and aligned scaffolds had significantly higher ALP activities than monoculture groups, which indicated that coculture with HUVECs provided a larger relative contribution to the osteogenesis of hMSCs compared with fiber alignment. Taken together, we conclude that coculture of hMSCs with ECs is an effective strategy to promote osteogenesis on electrospun scaffolds, and aligned fibers could be introduced to regenerate bone tissues with oriented topography without significant deleterious effects on hMSCs differentiation. This study shows the ability to grow oriented tissue-engineered cocultures with significant increases in osteogenesis over monoculture conditions.</p

Semi-Supervised First-Person Activity Recognition in Body-Worn Video

Body-worn cameras are now commonly used for logging daily life, sports, and law enforcement activities, creating a large volume of archived footage. This paper studies the problem of classifying frames of footage according to the activity of the camera-wearer with an emphasis on application to real-world police body-worn video. Real-world datasets pose a different set of challenges from existing egocentric vision datasets: the amount of footage of different activities is unbalanced, the data contains personally identifiable information, and in practice it is difficult to provide substantial training footage for a supervised approach. We address these challenges by extracting features based exclusively on motion information then segmenting the video footage using a semi-supervised classification algorithm. On publicly available datasets, our method achieves results comparable to, if not better than, supervised and/or deep learning methods using a fraction of the training data. It also shows promising results on real-world police body-worn video