Hierarchical Structure with Highly Ordered Macroporous-Mesoporous Metal-Organic Frameworks as Dual Function for CO2 Fixation.

As a major greenhouse gas, the continuous increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has caused serious environmental problems, although CO2 is also an abundant, inexpensive, and nontoxic carbon source. Here, we use metal-organic framework (MOF) with highly ordered hierarchical structure as adsorbent and catalyst for chemical fixation of CO2 at atmospheric pressure, and the CO2 can be converted to the formate in excellent yields. Meanwhile, we have successfully integrated highly ordered macroporous and mesoporous structures into MOFs, and the macro-, meso-, and microporous structures have all been presented in one framework. Based on the unique hierarchical pores, high surface area (592 m2/g), and high CO2 adsorption capacity (49.51 cm3/g), the ordered macroporous-mesoporous MOFs possess high activity for chemical fixation of CO2 (yield of 77%). These results provide a promising route of chemical CO2 fixation through MOF materials

Role of District Education Officials in Quality Education in Nanguan and Shikarpur Districts: A Comparative Study Between China and Pakistan

The purpose of the study is to understand the role of district educational official(s) in bringing quality in education in schools at district level with respect to the educational objectives at ministry of education level, provincial education department level and at local district level. Two districts; Nanguan district (China) and Shikarpur district (Pakistan) are studied and compared with each other because of the convenience for researcher and good friendship between these two countries. This is comparative study, which adopts descriptive type of research, and qualitative research design. Semi-structured interview and observation report; are used as research tools for data collection. Purposive sampling type is adopted as to make this study possible to complete and having strong relationship of district educational officials’ interventions with quality in education in variety of schools. District educational official(s) and four schools (primary, junior secondary, countryside and city) in each district are visited. Results of the study show that district educational officials of both districts are aware about the educational objectives at these three levels of educational administration. They perceive quality in education differently with respect to their local and contextual environment. Arranging different trainings for school heads and teachers and calling meetings are the only two similar interventions among these two district educational officials that they take to achieve quality in education; rest interventions are totally different. There seems more implication of the interventions of the Nanguan district education bureau official in the schools than the implication of the interventions of Shikarpur district educational officials in schools; as to achieve their perceived quality in education in their respective districts

Statistical Knowledge Assessment for Large Language Models

Given varying prompts regarding a factoid question, can a large language model (LLM) reliably generate factually correct answers? Existing LLMs may generate distinct responses for different prompts. In this paper, we study the problem of quantifying knowledge contained in an LLM regarding a given set of facts. We propose KaRR, a statistical approach to assess factual knowledge for LLMs. The main idea is to estimate the ratio of LLM generating text corresponding to the answer entity given diverse prompts of the subject and the querying relation, versus it generating by random chances. Our assessment suite contains a comprehensive set of 994,123 entities and 600 relations, with 1,395,905 text aliases. We use our method to evaluate 20 LLMs of various sizes, including LLaMA, Alpaca, OPT, etc. Experiments show that our results have a strong correlation (0.43 Kendall's $\tau$) with the results of human assessment on LLMs. Our results reveal that the knowledge in LLMs with the same backbone architecture adheres to the scaling law, while tuning on instruction-following data sometimes compromises the model's capability to generate factually correct text reliably.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

Estimation of liquid water path below the melting layer in stratiform precipitation systems using radar measurements during MC3E

In this study, the liquid water path (LWP) below the melting layer in stratiform precipitation systems is retrieved, which is a combination of rain liquid water path (RLWP) and cloud liquid water path (CLWP). The retrieval algorithm uses measurements from the vertically pointing radars (VPRs) at 35 and 3 GHz operated by the US Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) during the field campaign Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E). The measured radar reflectivity and mean Doppler velocity from both VPRs and spectrum width from the 35 GHz radar are utilized. With the aid of the cloud base detected by a ceilometer, the LWP in the liquid layer is retrieved under two different situations: (I) no cloud exists below the melting base, and (II) cloud exists below the melting base. In (I), LWP is primarily contributed from raindrops only, i.e., RLWP, which is estimated by analyzing the Doppler velocity differences between two VPRs. In (II), cloud particles and raindrops coexist below the melting base. The CLWP is estimated using a modified attenuation-based algorithm. Two stratiform precipitation cases (20 and 11 May 2011) during MC3E are illustrated for two situations, respectively. With a total of 13 h of samples during MC3E, statistical results show that the occurrence of cloud particles below the melting base is low (9 %); however, the mean CLWP value can be up to 0.56 kgm(2), which is much larger than the RLWP (0.10 kgm(2)). When only raindrops exist below the melting base, the average RLWP value is larger (0.32 kgm(2)) than the with-cloud situation. The overall mean LWP below the melting base is 0.34 kgm(2) for stratiform systems during MC3E.DOE CMDV project [DE-SC0017015]; NASA CERES project [NNX17AC52G]; DOE ASR project [DE-SC0014294]Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]