THE IMPACT OF TEACHER’S WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK ON EFL STUDENTS’ PARAGRAPH WRITING PERFORMANCE

Written Corrective Feedback (CF) is a contentious issue among L2 theorists and researchers. The current study intends to investigate the impact of written corrective feedback from teachers on the writing achievements of Vietnamese EFL university students. The current study’s sample included 60 students chosen at random from Nam Can Tho University’s Department of English. The students were split into two groups: experimental (n=30) and control (n=30). Data for comparable groups were collected over a 10-week period using a pre-/posttest method. The results showed that the students in the experiment group performed better on the measure than the students in the control group, demonstrating that the teacher’s written CF had a substantial beneficial influence on participants’ writing abilities. The study finishes with a discussion of the findings’ limits and implications, as well as recommendations for further research.  Article visualizations

Segmentation of pathology microscopic images

The light microscopic analysis of the number and shape of cells in pathology is important for the diagnosis and assessment of clinical behavior of disease conditions. The fundamental step of this work is to separate the cells from the background. To segment objects from such uneven background images, a fixed threshold is not suitable. The authors have proposed a new adaptive thresholding method using variational theory. In this paper, this method is introduced to segment pathological images under the light microscope. The comparison of the segmentation results of the authors' method and Otsu's (1979) thresholding method shows the advantage of the authors' method.published_or_final_versio

Comparing two-phase locking and optimistic concurrency control protocols in multiprocessor real-time databases

Previous studies (Haritsa et al., 1990) have shown that optimistic concurrency control (OCC) generally performs better than lock-based protocols in disk-based real-time database systems (RTDBS). We compare the two concurrency control protocols in both disk-based and memory-resident multiprocessor RTDBS. Based on their performance characteristics, a new lock-based protocol, called two phase locking-lock write all (2PL-LW), is proposed. The results of our performance evaluation experiments show that different characteristics of the two environments indeed have great impact on the protocols' performance. We identify such system characteristics and show that our new lock-based protocols, 2PL-LW, is better than OCC in meeting transaction deadlines in both disk-based and memory-resident RTDBS.published_or_final_versio

A semiparametric cure model for interval-censored data

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Langerhans' cell histiocytosis: Possible association with malignant germ cell tumour

A rare case of adult onset Langerhans' cell histiocytosis associated with dysgerminoma in a 35 year old Chinese woman is reported. The patient had a history of dysgerminoma of left ovary 15 years previously and had undergone surgery followed by radiotherapy and an uneventful recovery. She presented again in March 1994, this time with a left clavicular mass, which was shown histologically to be Langerhans' cell histiocytosis. The report illustrates the probable association between the two lesions, with some discussion on the underlying pathogenesis.published_or_final_versio

Five-year outcomes of western mental health training for Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners

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The clinicopathological features and importance of p53, Rb, and mdm2 expression in phaeochromocytomas and paragangliomas

Aims - Phaeochromocytomas and paragangliomas are uncommon. The aims of this study were to analyse the characteristics and the possible roles of p53, Rb, and mdm2 alterations in these tumours. Methods - The clinicopathological features of 65 patients (31 men, 34 women) with phaeochromocytomas or paragangliomas were analysed. The tumours were studied for the expression of p53, Rb, and mdm2 by immunohistochemical methods. Results - Thirty nine of the patients had phaeochromocytomas and 26 had paragangliomas. Bilateral tumours were noted in eight of the patients and malignant tumours were seen in 13. Paragangliomas were often small, non-functional, and presented incidentally, whereas phaeochromocytomas were usually large, functional, and symptomatic, p53 overexpression, loss of Rb expression, and mdm2 overexpression were seen in four, 43, and 37 of the patients, respectively. Three of the four patients with p53 overexpression had bilateral tumours. Loss of Rb expression was often found in phaeochromocytomas, whereas mdm2 overexpression was more frequently seen in paragangliomas. The 10 year survival rate of patients with malignant tumours was 45%. Two patients died of tumour metastases more than 10 years after resection of the primary tumours. Conclusions - Phaeochromocytomas and paragangliomas had distinctive clinical features and genetic alterations. The prognosis of patients with these tumours was related to the malignant potential, p53 overexpression, more common in bilateral phaeochromocytomas and paragangliomas, could be a marker for this tumour subgroup.published_or_final_versio

THE IMPACT OF USING INFOGRAPHICS TO TEACH GRAMMAR ON EFL STUDENTS’ LEARNING MOTIVATION

Infographics have increasingly been used in English language teaching. However, few studies have been conducted to explore the use of infographics in improving students’ motivation in learning grammar. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Infographics-based learning on students’ motivation on an English language grammar course. The study employed an experimental research design and the participation of sixty grade-11 students studying in a high school in Mekong Delta, Vietnam. There are two groups including one experimental group (n = 30) that used the Infographics-based learning; and the other a controlled group (n = 30) which was instructed using non- Infographics-based learning technique. A questionnaire was designed to measure students’ motivation after the treatment. Article visualizations

Clinical predictors of sputum microbiology in chronic Chinese bronchiectasis

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A statistics-based sensor selection scheme for continuous probabilistic queries in sensor networks

An approach to improve the reliability of query results based on error-prone sensors is to use redundant sensors. However, this approach is expensive; moreover, some sensors may malfunction and their readings need to be discarded. In this paper, we propose a statistical approach to decide which sensors to be used to answer a query. In particular, we propose to solve the problem with the aid of continuous probabilistic query (CPQ), which is originally used to manage uncertain data and is associated with a probabilistic guarantee on the query result. Based on the historical data values from the sensors, the query type, and the requirement on the query, we present methods to select an appropriate set of sensors and provide reliable answers for aggregate queries. Our algorithm is demonstrated in simulation experiments to provide accurate and robust query results. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 11th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA 2005), Hong Kong, China, 17-19 August 2005. In Proceedings of the 11th RTCSA, 2005, p. 331-33