Gifted English language learners: the cultural and practical experiences of Chinese students learning English in Scotland and in China

This research investigates the potential influences of cultural aspects and contextual practical experiences in relation to the achievement of Chinese gifted English language learners (GELL) studying in China and Scotland. The proportion of English language learners (ELL) in state schools in China has experienced a rapid increase. In sharp contrast to this context, Chinese ELLs are often overlooked for their potential gifted ability in English language learning and are underrepresented within the field of gifted and talented education. However, it is plausible that a Chinese ELL could achieve excellence in English language learning, depending on the effectiveness of the learning, training and support provided. From a review of the literature, it is evident that the identification of, and support for, gifted learners has been subject to extensive investigation. However, there is a dearth of studies looking specifically at GELLs and taking into account the practical and cultural aspects which may influence their identification, learning experiences and achievement. Chinese ELL students studying abroad in English-speaking countries are likely to encounter a diversity of educational methods, cultures and learning environments. In this regard, the comparison of two groups of English-speaking Chinese students – one in Scotland and one in China – offers insights into the distinctions between teaching and learning methodologies experienced by gifted English-speaking Chinese students across these different contexts. This qualitative research used semi-structured in-depth interviews with twelve English language teachers, thirteen Chinese GELLs and nine parents in total in Scotland and China. A snowball-sampling method was implemented to recruit participants. The interviews were digitally-recorded and transcribed, and the transcripts analysed in accordance with thematic analysis under the technique of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is no agreed definition within the literature as to what constitutes a GELL. Current literature from the field of gifted education, alongside EEL literature relating to proficiency in English Language learning was used to examine the participants’ understandings of the characteristics of a GELL. Common characteristics were identified and ELL practices within the language learning classroom were explored to better understand how GELL interact with learning opportunities. The study highlights the complex interactions that take place between the selected method of teaching for ELL, the psychological aspects to language learning, such as motivation, attitude, self-concept (cognitive and affective) and cognition along with ii the sociocultural aspects of learning. The students’ demonstrated self-regulated learning strategies which in turn impacted on how the learning strategies within the class were used. How the teacher organises learning to allow these processes to interact is crucial. Findings from the study suggest that a communicative approach can offer optimal learning experiences for GELL. An important finding from this study is that while teachers in both China and Scotland could describe the characteristics of a GELL, and on the basis of this were willing to nominate GELL to participate in the study, they were not always sure how to best support them in the classroom, even when a communicative approach to language learning had been adopted. The primary implication of the findings of this study for professional practice is that English language instruction using the communicative approach can greatly enhance the learning experience for GELLs, but teachers need to actively think about GELL when planning learning opportunities. Where language learning instruction focuses on those who require support, GELLs risk being overlooked and their skills and abilities will remain unchallenged and undeveloped. Teachers’ understanding of GELL and how ELL practices can be harnessed to provide for, and identify, GELL is key to supporting this often over-looked group of learners

Initial Research on the Malfunctions of the Criminal Process

In recent years, as China’s legislature has placed the amendment of the Criminal Procedure Law on its legislative plan, more and more legal scholars are paying attention to the problem. Legal academics have produced a series of theses and books, and qualified scholars have even organized experts’ drafts of the Criminal Procedure Law, offering comprehensive and systematic theoretical works on how to revise the law. I participated in scholarly activities organized by the Criminal Affairs Committee of the All China Lawyers Federation, and drafted the first lawyers’ edition of the revised Criminal Procedure Law. Thus, the next revision of the Criminal Procedure Law will not be the product of legal research conducted solely by the legislative department, but will for the first time be influenced by the collective research of legal scholars

ECSTM Studies of the Electrocatalyst Stability for the AAEM Fuel Cell

poster abstractAlkaline fuel cells (AFC) have come to the forefront of fuel cell research due to the friendlier environment they provide to the cell’s components in comparison to acid-based Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cells. The AFC shows real world application of 60% efficiency, but suffers from long term degradation due to the formation of carbonate precipitates formed from carbon dioxide. A solid-state form of the AFC, the alkaline anion exchange membrane (AAEM) fuel cell, is under development to overcome the degradation, due to the usage of liquid potassium hydroxide (KOH) or sodium hydroxide (NaOH) electrolytes in the AFC. Also, the AFC are known to have a higher rate of contamination and therefore need higher purity fuel than their acidic counterparts. This problem is eliminated by the AAEM fuel cell. The cathode, which consists of the catalyst, ionomer and current supports in the AAEM fuel cell or the AFC, is the key component that determines the cell’s performance and stability. The material found to work best for the AAEM fuel cell is platinum (Pt). The issue with Pt as a catalyst material for these fuel cells is that is it very cost prohibitive for mass production. Therefore, other metals are being investigated to find a material with less cost, but perform as well as the Pt in AAEM fuel cells. Several theories have been proposed as to the cause of cathode degradation. It was found that an increase in current density, temperature and ligand (OH-) concentration accelerated corrosion of catalysts and carbon supports. Studies have been done on the catalyst material of Pt, as well as the highly oriented pytolytic graphite (HOPG). HOPG is a carbon-based material that Pt is deposited upon. So far, most of these studies were done in acid media. The objective of this work is to develop an in situ electrochemical scanning tunneling microcopy (ECSTM) method for characterizing stability of nano-Pt and HOPG substrate under operation conditions of an AFC. Future research will characterize the stability of other metal nanostructure in an attempt to find cheaper and effective alternatives to Platinum

ViCo: Engaging Video Comment Generation with Human Preference Rewards

Engaging video comments play an important role in video social media, as they are the carrier of feelings, thoughts, or humor of the audience. Preliminary works have made initial exploration for video comment generation by adopting caption-style encoder-decoder models. However, comment generation presents some unique challenges distinct from caption generation, which makes these methods somewhat less effective at generating engaging comments. In contrast to the objective and descriptive nature of captions, comments tend to be inherently subjective, making it hard to quantify and evaluate the engagement of comments. Furthermore, the scarcity of truly engaging comments brings difficulty to collecting enough high-quality training examples. In this paper, we propose ViCo with three novel designs to tackle the above challenges for generating engaging Video Comments. Firstly, to quantify the engagement of comments, we utilize the number of "likes" each comment receives as a proxy of human preference after an appropriate debiasing procedure. Secondly, to automatically evaluate the engagement of comments, we train a reward model to align its judgment to the above proxy. Our user studies indicate that this reward model effectively aligns with human judgments. Lastly, to alleviate the scarcity of high-quality comments, an initial generator is trained on readily available but noisy data to generate comments. Then the reward model is employed to offer feedback on the generated comments, thus optimizing the initial generator. To facilitate the research of video commenting, we collect a large video comment-dataset (ViCo-20k) with rich metadata from a popular video website. Experiments on ViCo-20k show that the comments generated by our ViCo model exhibit the best performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative results, particularly when engagement is considered

Locus coeruleus in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease: A systematic review.

The locus coeruleus (LC) is a nucleus in the brain stem producing noradrenaline. While cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has primarily been related to cholinergic depletion, evidence indicates extensive LC degeneration as its earliest pathological marker. The current study aimed to systematically evaluate current evidence investigating the role of the LC in the pathogenesis of AD. A systematic search of the literature was performed on electronic databases including PubMed and Web of Science. Twelve animal, human post mortem, and human imaging studies were included in this review. Screening, data extraction, and quality assessment were undertaken following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines for preferred reporting of systematic reviews. Significant associations were identified between LC changes and cognitive decline. Significant reductions in fiber density, neuronal number, and LC volume were seen to correlate with other pathological degenerative markers. Current evidence indicates an important role of the LC in pathogenesis of AD and suggests its potential in both diagnosis and treatment of AD. This systematic review advances our understanding of the role of the LC in AD by synthesizing available evidence, identifying research gaps, highlighting methodological challenges, and making recommendations for future work

Locus coeruleus in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease: A systematic review.

The locus coeruleus (LC) is a nucleus in the brain stem producing noradrenaline. While cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has primarily been related to cholinergic depletion, evidence indicates extensive LC degeneration as its earliest pathological marker. The current study aimed to systematically evaluate current evidence investigating the role of the LC in the pathogenesis of AD. A systematic search of the literature was performed on electronic databases including PubMed and Web of Science. Twelve animal, human post mortem, and human imaging studies were included in this review. Screening, data extraction, and quality assessment were undertaken following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines for preferred reporting of systematic reviews. Significant associations were identified between LC changes and cognitive decline. Significant reductions in fiber density, neuronal number, and LC volume were seen to correlate with other pathological degenerative markers. Current evidence indicates an important role of the LC in pathogenesis of AD and suggests its potential in both diagnosis and treatment of AD. This systematic review advances our understanding of the role of the LC in AD by synthesizing available evidence, identifying research gaps, highlighting methodological challenges, and making recommendations for future work

Adaptive Environment Modeling Based Reinforcement Learning for Collision Avoidance in Complex Scenes

The major challenges of collision avoidance for robot navigation in crowded scenes lie in accurate environment modeling, fast perceptions, and trustworthy motion planning policies. This paper presents a novel adaptive environment model based collision avoidance reinforcement learning (i.e., AEMCARL) framework for an unmanned robot to achieve collision-free motions in challenging navigation scenarios. The novelty of this work is threefold: (1) developing a hierarchical network of gated-recurrent-unit (GRU) for environment modeling; (2) developing an adaptive perception mechanism with an attention module; (3) developing an adaptive reward function for the reinforcement learning (RL) framework to jointly train the environment model, perception function and motion planning policy. The proposed method is tested with the Gym-Gazebo simulator and a group of robots (Husky and Turtlebot) under various crowded scenes. Both simulation and experimental results have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed method over baseline methods.Comment: accepted by IROS202

Endovascular revascularization vs. open surgical revascularization for patients with lower extremity artery disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundCurrently, the main treatment for lower extremity artery disease (LEAD) is revascularization, including endovascular revascularization (EVR) and open surgical revascularization (OSR), but the specific revascularization strategy for LEAD is controversial. This review provided the comprehensive and recent evidence for the treatment of LEAD.MethodsMedline, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases were searched for relevant articles. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and cohort studies comparing the short-term or long-term outcomes between EVR and OSR of LEAD were identified. Short-term outcomes were 30-day mortality, major amputation, wound complication, major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs), and length of hospital stay (LOS), while long-term outcomes included overall survival (OS), amputation-free survival (AFS), freedom from re-intervention (FFR), primary patency (PP), and secondary patency (SP).Results11 RCTs and 105 cohorts involving 750,134 patients were included in this analysis. For the pooled results of cohort studies, EVR markedly decreased the risk of 30-day mortality, wound complication, MACEs, LOS, but increased the risk of OS, FFR, PP, and SP. For the pooled outcomes of RCTs, EVR was associated with obviously lower 30-day mortality, less wound complication and shorter LOS, but higher risk of PP, and SP. However, both RCTs and cohorts did not show obvious difference in 30-day major amputation and AFS.ConclusionsBoth the pooled results of cohorts and RCTs indicated that EVR was associated with a lower short-term risk for LEAD, while OSR was accompanied by a substantially lower long-term risk. Therefore, the life expectancy of LEAD should be strictly considered when choosing the revascularization modality. As the current findings mainly based on data of retrospective cohort studies, additional high-quality studies are essential to substantiate these results.Systematic Review Registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/#recordDetails, identifier CRD42022317239

LLaSM: Large Language and Speech Model

Multi-modal large language models have garnered significant interest recently. Though, most of the works focus on vision-language multi-modal models providing strong capabilities in following vision-and-language instructions. However, we claim that speech is also an important modality through which humans interact with the world. Hence, it is crucial for a general-purpose assistant to be able to follow multi-modal speech-and-language instructions. In this work, we propose Large Language and Speech Model (LLaSM). LLaSM is an end-to-end trained large multi-modal speech-language model with cross-modal conversational abilities, capable of following speech-and-language instructions. Our early experiments show that LLaSM demonstrates a more convenient and natural way for humans to interact with artificial intelligence. Specifically, we also release a large Speech Instruction Following dataset LLaSM-Audio-Instructions. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/LinkSoul-AI/LLaSM and https://huggingface.co/spaces/LinkSoul/LLaSM. The LLaSM-Audio-Instructions dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LinkSoul/LLaSM-Audio-Instructions